wipe. That was just joking, but Fred, late one night with half a bottle
gone between them, gave Prosper a lot of corrective information he’d
maybe soon need to know—Fred had ascertained, interested in the
topic, that Prosper’s weakness only reached a ways above his knees, so
though it was maybe unlikely for someone like him, the Scout’s motto
was Be Prepared. But how, Prosper asked—hilariously muzzy-mouthed,
and not sure what had brought this forth—how, when his own part
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 169
rose at that specific angle so purposefully, was he supposed to get it
into a girl, whose slot or cleft (he was thinking of Canova, of Mary
Wilma) ran, well, sort of the other way or seemed to, crosswise, opening
inward and running through toward the back? Didn’t it? So how was
he supposed to, was he supposed to bend, or? No no no, Fred said, you
got it wrong, the thing you see when you look at her, the slot or slit
there, that ain’t the thing at all, no kid, that’s just what shows. The
thing you need’s down underneath, see—and here Fred lifted his own
big knees and thighs to his chest to illustrate, poking at a spot amid the
creases of his trousers. There, just ahead of the other hole, and it runs
up up up, just right, trust Mother Nature, she ain’t going to make it
hard to get into. You got that? You need another drink?
He learned just as much, or at least heard as much and remembered
it, listening to his uncles talk during the day at business as he sat at a
desk they’d rigged for him and did work they thought up for him.
“You speak to that woman on Wentworth?” Mert said. “The new
tenant, the bakery?”
“Funny story,” Fred said grinning. “Yeah, I talked to her. Single
woman. She was real jittery about the health department inspector
coming. I says, It’s nothing. You wait for him to make his inspection,
be nice, keep a ten in your hand. He might find a couple things, so you
say—I told her—you say Well all that’s going to be hard to fix, isn’t
there some other way we can handle this? And he might say no, or he
might say Well, maybe, and you say Oh swell, and you shake hands,
and the ten passes. Okay?”
Mert pushed back in his swivel chair, listening, already grinning as
though he expected what would come next.
“So she had the inspection, and I asked her how did it go, and she
says not so good. I ask her, did she do what I said? What did she tell
him? And turns out what she said was, Well this is going to be expen-
sive, isn’t there something I can do for you? Jesus, she says it took her
a half hour to get rid of the guy after that, and he was so pissed off he
wouldn’t take her ten.”
“Send her over to Bill and Eddy,” Mert said. “They’ll fix it for
her.” Bill and Eddy, attorneys-at-law, did a certain amount of work
for the icehouse gang; Mert often got his own stories from meetings
with the two.
170 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Attorney Bill,” he told them with mock gravity, “defending a man
charged with verbally molesting a woman. So Bill’s known this fellow
a while, he’s not surprised. Tells me how he’ll be in a tavern at the bar
with him, they see a nice skirt go by outside; this fellow pops out, has
a few words with the woman, she turns away, he comes back in. Did he
know her? Nah—just liked her looks. So what did he say to her? He
asked her if she’d like to have a lay with him. She said no. Bill tells me
he does that a lot. Always nice and polite, and a tip of the hat for a No.
I said no wonder he’s got in trouble—he must get his face slapped a lot
at least. Oh, Bill says, he does—and he gets laid a lot too.”
“So this time he asked the wrong dame,” said Fred. He put his hand
by his mouth: “Call for Bill and Eddy.”
“Turns out there was a beat cop twirling his nightstick just about
within earshot. Never mind. They’ll get him out of it. Told me the
lady’s already looking sorry she brought the charges. Who knows,
maybe this guy’ll get her in the end.”
The firm of Bill and Eddy (it was George Bill and Eustace Eddy,
Prosper would learn in time) set up the papers that created and dis-
solved a number of enterprises operated out of the icehouse—Prosper’s
ment business they’d begun. The uncles had also got into the vending
machine business, which besides a string of Vendorlators dispensing
candy and smokes and Pepsi-Cola around the West Side included a few
semilegal “payout” pinball machines as well. Prosper was sent out on
the truck that filled and serviced the machines. Mostly it was his job to
sit in the big doorless truck and see that nobody stole the cartons of
cigarettes and boxes of Collie bars and Zagnuts. Now and then he was
allowed out to have a coffee in a diner while Roy the serviceman broke
open the big machines to show their complex insides, the valves and
springs and levers, to oil them and refill the long slots.
At Honey and Joe’s Diner the cigarette machine was on the fritz, and
Roy settled in to work. Prosper stood at the counter (easier than seating
himself on the roll-around stools) and asked the redheaded woman for
a coffee. It was midafternoon, the place was empty. He’d watched her
watching him as he came in, how he took his stand, reached for a dime
for the mug of pale liquid. She waved away his money.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 171
She came to push a glass ashtray to where he sat.
“Where’s Joe?” Prosper asked, and she leaned in confidentially to
him.
“There’s no Joe,” she said. “There was, but no more.”
“Just Honey,” he said. An odd silence fell that he was conscious of
having caused. He drew out a smoke and a match, which he lit with a
snap of his thumbnail. She smiled and moved away.
“All done here,” Roy said and clapped shut the steel machine.
“Red hair,” Fred said to Prosper, back at the icehouse. “That your
type? Hot tempered, they say.”
“Fighters,” Mert said. “She and Joe used to go at it hammer and
tongs.”
“Not Prosper,” Fred said. “He’s a lover not a fighter. She’s out of
your league, my boy.”
Fred thought that any single man constituted as Prosper was needed
two things: he needed a line he could use to break the ice and then go
on with, and he needed a type that he was interested in so he could
simplify the chase. Fred’s own type depended on blond curls, chubby
cheeks, and a poitrine approaching Mae West’s; his line started off
with Scuse me, but do you happen to have a cousin named Carruthers?
No? Gosh my mistake. So anyways tell me . . . Prosper though could
not tell if he had a type, and Fred’s attempts to delimit the field weren’t
convincing to him. As for a line, he hardly needed an icebreaker—he
found himself looked at plenty and had only to say hello, and then
keep the starer from rushing
off embarrassed. Beyond that he thought
he now knew what to do, though not yet when to do it.
That cigarette machine at Honey and Joe’s seemed to malfunction
with surprising regularity, a lemon maybe, though when Fred said they
ought to pull it and get it replaced, Roy said oh he’d get it going. Roy’s
difficulties weren’t with machines but numbers, he hadn’t a head for
them, and if Prosper was willing to tot up his figures and fill in his
book, Roy was happy to return him to the little diner now and then,
and go read the paper in the truck.
“So does that hurt much?” Honey asked Prosper gently. It was May,
and the air was full of the tiny blown green buds of some opening tree,
even the floor of Honey and Joe’s was littered with them. She picked
one from Prosper’s shoulder.
172 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Doesn’t hurt a bit,” Prosper said. “The other way around. I can’t
feel much.”
“Oh.”
“I mean from the knees down.”
“Oh.”
He cleaned up the last of the plate of goulash she’d put in front of
him. She had a way of looking at him that reminded him of the way the
women looked at themselves in the Mayflower’s mirrors: a kind of
dreamy questioning. He didn’t yet know how to interpret it, but he was
coming to notice it. Somehow a look to the outside and the inside at
once. No man ever had it, not that he’d seen.
“So you get around good,” she said, as though weighing his case.
“Oh sure.”
She considered him or herself some more. Her hair was not only
deep red, a color for an animal’s fur more than a woman’s hair, it was
thick, tense, it strove to burst from her hairnet: it was as though he
could feel it. She bent and pulled from under the counter a bottle of
whiskey, put down a glass before him with a bang, and poured a shot
for him. He took a taste, then a swallow.
“So, Honey,” he said then. “Can I ask you a question?”
Honey lived behind the diner, through a door in the back. She sent
Prosper to turn over the sign in the door that told people the diner was
open or closed. It was now closed. He clicked the switch that turned
off the neon sign above the door (diner), and its red glow faded. He
opened the door and waved to Roy, go on, good-bye, see you later; Roy
didn’t ask him how he’d get back to the icehouse or downtown, just
shrugged and rolled the toothpick he was never without from one side
of his grin to the other and started the truck.
“Now we’re getting someplace,” Vi Harbison said to Prosper in
Henryville. “This is good.”
“Okay,” Prosper said.
“So was she a natural redhead?”
“What?”
“You know. You found out, I’m guessing.”
“Oh,” Prosper said.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 173
What Honey’d learned about Prosper was that he lived with two old
never-married aunts, had never gone to high school or taken a girl out
on a date or been to a dance. That interested her. Not that she hadn’t
known some wallflowers and some deadwood, oh she had, but Prosper
wasn’t that. He’d grown to be good-looking—calm light wide-spaced
eyes; teeth white and even, never a toothache; fine hands like a glove
model’s. Visible beneath the silk shirt he wore were the broad shoul-
ders and back he’d built by using them to walk. All that contrasting so
strangely with the sway back and the legs that had not grown as the
rest of him had. It didn’t assort: man and boy, weak and strong. Honey
liked it: it was the taste of tart and sweet together, the sensation of hot
and cold, it made you think. She mightn’t have liked it though if he
hadn’t been so open and ardent and willing—ignorant as a puppy, but
his grip strong and oddly sure. After they’d gone through the rubbers
Joe’d left behind he still wouldn’t quit, not until late in the night when
she pushed him away laughing, leave me alone, I have to start the range
in about four hours, who taught you that anyway?
But nobody had. He didn’t tell her she was the first woman he’d
been with, but he didn’t need to.
“Mind if I stay till later? I’m afraid I can’t get home from here. Not
in the middle of the night.”
“Hell yes I mind. Think I want you stumbling out of here into my
breakfast crowd? How’d that look?”
“Well.”
She touched him gently, not quite sorry for him. “You got a dollar? Go
into the front and use the phone. Call a cab. The number’s right there.”
She rolled away and pretended to sleep, thinking he wouldn’t want
her to watch him put on his equipment; he did it sitting on the floor
(she could hear it) and then apparently hoisted himself upright on his
crutches. Then she was sorry she hadn’t watched, just to see. Then she
slept, suddenly and profoundly.
Aglow, as though he could find his way in the dark by his own light,
Prosper went out of the little rooms where she lived, wanting to touch
everything he saw or sensed there, the harsh fabric of the armchair, the
cold of the mirror, ashy weightless lace of the curtains through which
the streetlight shone. Careful of the rag rug at the doorway. His arms
were trembly from his exertions, who knew they’d have so much work
174 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to do, he laughed aloud as though joy bubbled up beneath his heart
and out his throat. Long afterward in another city he’d share a reefer
with a woman and only then feel again this wondrous hilarity. He did
it, he’d done it, he was made now of a different and better stuff and
ever after would be, he hadn’t known that would be so and now he did.
Ever after.
In the altogether transformed night, its odors sweet in the liquid air,
silence of the city, he leaned against the lamppost to wait. He said to
himself I will always remember this night and this moment, and he
would, though not always with the rich First Communion solemnity he
felt then, felt until the laughter rose again.
The cab was tiger yellow in the dawn, the rear door wide and the
backseat generous, excellent. The scraggy elder driving it asked Where
to, and Prosper caught him grinning in the rearview. Grinning at him.
“Takin’ French lessons, huh, kid?”
“What?” Prosper at first thought the driver had mistaken him
maybe for someone he knew. French lessons?
“I said taking French lessons?” the old fellow said more distinctly.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Prosper said, leaning forward.
“I mean, you been eatin’ pussy?” the driver practically shouted. “Be
surprised if you hadn’t! Ha! Whew! Better wash up before you get
home to Mom! My advice!”
Prosper got it then, and almost lifted his hands to his face to smell
the smell still on them and on his face and mustache, but didn’t, retired
to the back of the seat in silence as the driver laughed.
French lessons. Because why, something about the French? He’d
heard it called French kissing, that kiss with
tongues entwined, imagine
what his mother with her fear of germs would have thought of that.
How had he even thought of doing it, eating or virtually eating it,
where had he got the idea, apparently not his alone anyway, so usual
that even this guy could know it and joke about it. Did it just happen to
everyone, he guessed it must, that you discovered that certain body
parts you’d known and used in one way had a set of other functions
and uses you hadn’t been told about, unexpected but just as important
and constant—mouths and tongues for more than tasting and eating,
hands for using and manipulating, the hidden excreting parts able and
even meant to go together with the other workaday parts, you might
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 175
not think so but it turned out to be so and you somehow knew to use
them so even if you hadn’t thought of it before—couldn’t have thought
of it, it was so unlikely. Like those paperback novels where you read
one story going one way and then turn the book over and upside down
to read another going the other way: as you read you might finger open
the pages that you’d discover later and see them upside down and back-
ward but they wouldn’t be when you went to read them. You’d just dive
in. And he had, and she had known why he would want to and why she
would want him to, even if at first she refused him.
And the sounds they’d made too, that she’ d made, sounds borrowed
from the other side, where they meant a different thing—Bea’s coos as
she handled a length of silk velvet, May’s high whimper at the sight of
a dead cat in the street, Mert’s grunts of satisfaction at stool, or Fred’s
as he lifted a full shot of rye to his mouth, the same.
So he knew, and he would go on knowing that this was possible,
knowing also that everybody else or almost everybody else (Bea and
May, surely not, but how could you be sure?) knew it for a thing to do,
a thing that could be done and was done. A thing you could practice
even, as the grunting discus flinger or fungo slugger practices, driven
to enact it over and over. As he would seek to do thereafter whenever
and wherever he was welcome. He’d follow that Little Man in his boat
up dark rivers into the interior, that limbless eyeless ongoing Little
Man, parting the dense vegetation and hearing cries as of great birds,
nearly forgetting over time how weird a thing it was, really.