have one stamp left, and no more till next month.”
“What kind of ration card do you have?” Prosper asked.
The fellow looked up at him as though surprised, maybe, that some-
one like him would know to ask this question, which could hardly be
of much interest to him. “The miserable A,” he said. “My employer
was unable even to get me a B. He was told salesmen could take the
train. I think not.”
Prosper said nothing. A salesman.
“And yourself?” the man said. “Alone and palely loitering?”
Not knowing why he should do so, Prosper decided not to pass this
by. “I was going to take the El downtown,” he said. “But those stairs
are a little beyond me.”
The man looked at the stairs, the iron framework of the El, as
though seeing them for the first time. “Inconvenient,” he said. He indi-
cated the knapsack. “You are prepared for a journey.”
“I was going west to look for work.”
The salesman didn’t look surprised or amused by this ambition,
though Prosper’d expected the one or the other. “So a ride downtown
wouldn’t take you far. I see that now.”
“And there’d go your gas, though I appreciate the offer.”
For a moment they stood together, Prosper and the salesman, both
feeling (they’d confess it later to each other) that there was another
remark to make, that Destiny had put them in speaking relation and
they hadn’t yet said the thing Destiny wanted them to say.
“The name’s Notzing,” said the salesman then, and put out his
hand—a little tentatively, thinking perhaps that such a one as Prosper
might not take hands, or not be able to—Prosper saw those thoughts
also, also not unfamiliar to him. “Call me Pancho.” The way he said it,
the first syllable sounded like ranch and not like launch.
42 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Prosper Olander,” Prosper returned, and took the salesman’s hand
before it retreated. Then he took from inside his coat a small paper
booklet. “This might help you out,” he said.
Pancho Notzing reached for the thing, a look of baffled wonder-
ment beginning to break on his face that he struggled to conceal. The
booklet was a C gasoline ration booklet, the most generous ranking,
reserved for doctors, ministers, railroad workers, people on whom we
all depended (that anyway was the idea). It was chock-full of coupons.
It was unsigned.
“A man could go far on this,” he said.
Prosper said nothing.
“I wonder how you came by it,” he said. “Issued to you perhaps in
error?”
“Not exactly.” The book remained in Pancho’s hand, as though still
in passage between them. “Where were you driving to, anyway?”
“I don’t really have a destination. I have my route, of course, and my
territory. But to tell you the truth I have been thinking of quitting.”
“Really.”
“I don’t suppose you’re offering those to me for sale.”
“That would be a crime,” Prosper said.
For a moment neither of them said anything more, the conclusion
evident to each of them already, only the question of who was to broach
it remaining. Barter was a thing we all in those times resorted to; Mr.
Black was a man we knew.
“I have been to the West,” Pancho said then. “The Mission country.
The land of Ramona. The hacienda at sunset. The primrose blooming
in the desert.”
“There’s a windshield sticker that goes with it,” Prosper said, reach-
ing again into his pocket. “I have that too.”
“I understand all the big plants are hiring. Everyone can do his
part.”
“They say.”
Pancho straightened, and with a final glance at the C booklet, he
put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. “You shouldn’t be made to
suffer indignities, if you’re headed out to help build ships or airplanes.
Ride with me, and we’ll make our way. I’m in the way of changing jobs
myself.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 43
“You don’t say.”
So sporting the new C sticker on the windshield, the Zephyr set off
in the direction of the sunset; when it ran out of gas just yards from
the next pump, Prosper took the wheel as the old man pushed, and
together they rolled it to the pump, Prosper pulling up gently on the
hand brake lever as instructed to bring it to a stop. The attendant, a
plump young woman in a billed cap and leather bow tie—there were
lots of women manning the pumps now, with the male pump jockeys
off at war—watched as Prosper pulled his crutches from the back seat
and got out to stand next to Pancho, who was panting with effort and
pressing a hand to his breast. They presented their C booklet, which
Pancho had signed, and the girl tore out a stamp, then expertly unlim-
bered the hose and wound the handle of the counter to put in their
allotted gas. No one spoke. The pump bell rang off the gallons. Above
them the red Flying Horse beat skyward. When she was done she
cheerfully washed the windshield with a sponge, her rump in the trou-
sers of her brown coverall moving with her motions. She took Pros-
per’s money and went to make change while the two men stood not
speaking by the car.
“All set,” she said, returning with the change.
“Thanks,” said Prosper.
“Thanks,” said Pancho.
“Oil change?” she asked. “Check those belts?”
“No, no thanks.”
The car started with a cough, dry throat needing a moment to
recover.
“Bye,” said the girl, and gave them a smart two-finger salute. “Drive
under thirty-five.”
“Bye,” said Prosper.
“Bye,” said Pancho.
The two of them didn’t speak again for some time after that, con-
scious of having done a wrong, not quite knowing whether to con-
gratulate themselves or shake their heads over the ways of the world
that had forced them to it, or just shut up; Pancho never would ask
Prosper, in all their journey together, where he had come up with those
stamps, and Prosper didn’t volunteer the information.
Pancho had a couple of last calls to make, he’d told Prosper, and
44 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
then a stop at the home office in the next city, where he’d leave his
sample cases, his last orders, and his resignation. He roomed with his
widowed sister, he said, when not on the road, which he was most of
the time; he’d wire her about his plans. Then they’d head for the south
and then the Coast.
“What was it you sell, or sold I guess?” said Prosper when the Mobil
station was far behind them and his city growing thin and passing
too.
“Fabrics,” Pancho said. “Commercial mostly. To the trade. Dam-
asks, matelassés, shantungs, broadcloths, velours. Specialty silks.
Done it for thirty years, a traveler in fabrics.”
“Why don’t you want to do it anymore?”
For a time Pancho seemed to be choosing among various answers
he might give, opening his mout
h and making introductory sounds,
then shutting it again. “Ah, for one thing,” he said, “the business is
changing. I’m getting too old to keep up. All these new man-made
wonder fabrics. Nylon, rayon, spray-on, pee-on, who the hell can keep
them straight or pitch them in any way that’d be useful, well whoever
can, I can’t. Then this war, the big companies supplying the war depart-
ment are taking all the business, sucking up all the supplies, the cotton,
the silk, all of it, if you’re not selling to the government forget it.
Rationing: how are you going to sell fine fabrics to manufacturers who
are cutting back every day? When the women are wearing unlined suits
and the men are leaving the pocket flaps off their jackets and the cuffs
off their trousers? You tell me.”
Prosper could not tell him.
“More than that and above it all,” Pancho said, “I violate my own
best sense of how a man should live. I have done the same work for
decades, never changing, never learning, without friends beside me,
without associates, without the refreshment of change, without
delight.” He turned to Prosper. “Not that this makes me in any way
different from millions.”
“I shouldn’t say so,” Prosper said.
“Well and you?” the salesman asked him.
“Ah. Well I was privately employed.”
“Ah.”
They said no more for a long time. Prosper studied the places they
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 45
passed, that seemed to come into being merely by his entering them, and
then to persist behind him as he and Pancho and the Zephyr made more.
Fields and farms appearing, then after a time the outskirts of a town,
sometimes announced with a proud sign (greenfield—a friendly
town) and the totem pole of the local lodges and clubs, Masons, Lions,
Odd Fellows. The last and least farms passed, then the more decrepit
and dirtier businesses, the ice-and-coal supplier and the lumberyard,
then the first paved streets of houses and neighborhood shops, maybe a
mill with its strings of joined workers’ houses like city streets displaced.
The better neighborhoods, a white church or a stone one, big houses
with wide yards and tended shrubbery, but the biggest one an undertak-
ers’. Then downtown, brick buildings of three and four stories, hero on
a plinth, the larger churches, a domed granite courthouse on Court-
house Square.
“Well take a good look,” said Pancho a little bitterly when Prosper
noted these trim towns, each different but all alike. “These places
won’t last. They’ll be drained of population. They’re the past, these old
mills. People’ll go where the work is, and that’s the big plants in the big
cities or the new cities now a-building. That’s the future.”
“I’d like to see the future,” Prosper said. “All the wonders.”
“You are a Candide,” Pancho said. “You think this is the best of all
possible worlds. Or will be.”
“I can’t be a Candide,” said Prosper.
“And why not?”
“Because I’ve read the book.”
Esso station, five-and-dime, A & P. Pancho contemned the big chain
stores, displacing local businesses, substituting standardized needs and
ways of meeting them for individual taste and satisfaction.
“They say that this new finance capitalism’s efficient. Actually it’s
inefficient, and the more the owners are divorced from the operations
of it the more inefficient it can get. They claim ‘efficiency of scale’—
they don’t know that when you scale something up it doesn’t always
work the same. It’s just as when a great corporation claims the same
right as an individual to the freedoms guaranteed by our forefathers in
1776. A nice piece of sophistry. As if Nabisco was not different from a
man running his own bakeshop here in this town.”
The bakeshop Pancho pointed to looked welcoming. It was called
46 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Mom’s and had red-and-white calico curtains in the window, and Pros-
per thought of calling a halt to buy some supplies, but Pancho hunched
over the wheel seemed unlikely to hear, and then Mom’s was gone, and
the Ball Building, and the fire station. The railroad tracks, after which
the houses grew poorer and fewer, some streets of Negroes, then
scarcer, with vacant lots and abandonment (the hard times hardly
gone) until once more fields and farms began, much like the earlier
ones but not them. Tractors plowing in contour lines like marcelled
brown hair, because spring was rushing upward toward them as they
went down.
Sometime after dark they came upon a long low establishment
roofed in Spanish tile (so Pancho said it was) with a floodlit sign in
front that commanded that they dine-dance and offered them steaks
chops chicken, though it was unlikely that it’d have much of that
these days, or much of anything to drink either, but by then the
Zephyr’d been traveling a long time; the road had been bare of other
choices, and didn’t look to be getting better.
“It’s a law of life,” Pancho said. “Turn down the pretty-good place
and you’ll wander for hours and find nothing as good, end up in a
greasy spoon just closing its doors. Trust me. Years on the road.”
string of red-painted doors, each with a wicker chair beside it and a
window with a calico curtain like Mom’s bakery. Prosper thought that
calico curtains were perhaps to be a feature of travel, and made a note
to watch for more. He had never left the city of his birth before.
“Mo-tel,” Pancho said. “Motor-hotel. A hotel, but one without
bellhops, a cigar stand, newspapers, a front desk, room service, a West-
ern Union office, or any other of the common amenities.”
“Two dollars a night,” Prosper said, pointing to a sign.
“You have an endless capacity to be pleased,” Pancho said gravely.
“That is an enviable quality in youth, and a good thing for a traveler to
have.”
The room that the key given to Pancho let them into was small and
spare, and clad in honey-colored knotty pine, a thing that Prosper had
never seen or smelled before—like living in a hollow tree, he thought.
A single lamp between the two beds was shaped to resemble a large
cactus and a sleeping Mexican. The beds were narrow and the pillows
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 47
ungenerous; there was a shower but no tub. A rag rug on the linoleum
floor nearly caught a crutch and spilled him: Prosper was opposed to
linoleum floors, and to rag rugs. But still he loved the place immedi-
ately, and would come to love all motels, with but one shallow stair up
to the little cloister that protected the doors, sometimes not even that,
out of the car and in, and there you were.
He deposited his knapsack and Pancho lugged in a suitcase and his
sample cases, washed his hands, and they went to eat in the wide build-
ing fronting the motel. Prosper had never been in one of these either,
though he knew right aw
ay what name to call it: the air of weary gaiety,
glow of the cigarette machine, couple drinking over there with another
male whose role was unguessable, blond waitress with challenging eyes
and bitter mouth— “ A roadhouse,” he said to Pancho. “Just like in
True Story.”
“Just like in what true story?” Pancho asked.
Prosper told him to never mind.
There were, amid the items crossed off on the menu, enough to
make a meal, and whiskey, a surprise. They each ordered one. Pancho,
having rapidly downed his, described to Prosper the principles of Besto-
pianism, which he claimed were in fact not different from the principles
of natural life and common sense. “This isn’t hard,” he said. “You ask:
What makes a person happy? Not one thing that will make all men
everywhere happy, but this person here and now. And next question,
How’s he going to get it? That’s all. Answer those questions. Let every
person answer the first. Society should answer the second.”
“Uh-huh,” Prosper said. “So what’s the answer?”
Pancho regarded him with a penetrating look, and for the first time
Prosper discerned the penetration might be due to a slight cast in one
of his close-set wide-open eyes. It made for a furious or accusatory
look Prosper didn’t think he meant.
“The answer,” he said, “is the wholesale reorganization of human
society so that the natural impulses of humankind are allowed free
development.”
“Aha.” It was clear to Prosper that he was not saying this for the
first time. “And what are these impulses, would you say?”
Pancho placed his hands on the table in oracular fashion. “You
know. Think a minute, you’ll be able to make a list. We are made by
48 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
Nature with these desires, yet every political system and moral system
is bent on repressing or extinguishing them—either by force or by con-
vincing us our natures are evil and must be repressed. As if that were
possible. As if the industrial society could crush our desires for variety,
for pleasure, for worth, for interest, for satisfaction. As if two incom-
patible people locked in the legal institution of marriage could force
themselves to love, when their deep, true, innocent passions remain
unfulfilled.”
“You mean,” Prosper asked, “free love?”
“Free love, truly free, isn’t possible now. In a society rotten with