Pancho’s was the place to wander to at day’s end. Pancho’d piled up
stones he’d found around the place left over from construction and
built a barbecue grill, topped with a rack of steel that had served some
function at the plant, airplane part, something, but that nobody seemed
to need or to miss when Pancho appropriated it. He burned branches
of blackjack oak, winter-broken and gnarly, that he picked up from the
roadsides, and lumber scavenged from the building sites. People
brought their meat rations, steaks and chickens and the odd out-of-
ration local rabbit, and Pancho slathered them with stuff he claimed
he’d learned to make on a hacienda in Old California long ago. Wear-
ing his hat and an apron over his gabardine pants, he flipped and slath-
ered and plopped the meats on platters and talked.
“Happiness,” he was saying to those waiting for meat. Cooking and
serving didn’t interfere with Pancho’s talk; nothing did. “I am a person
who knows people. I think I can say that. I’ve worked all my life. I take
man as he is: a creature of his needs and his desires. Nothing wrong
with it—I take no exception to it, even if I could. It seems to me that we
have no business telling people what they should or shouldn’t want.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 9
Happiness means meeting the desires a person has, not suppressing
them.”
“Happiness is a plate of ribs, Mr. Notzing,” said a young fellow,
raising his plate, sucking a greasy thumb.
“Have more,” said Pancho, flipping a rack and watching the happy
flames leap up. “Nobody in this present world has enough pleasure.
They feel it, too. The poor man never gets enough, and he hates the
rich man because the rich man supposedly gets his fill—but he doesn’t.
The rich are eternally afraid that the poor will take away what plea-
sures they have, they indulge themselves constantly but never feel
filled—they feel guilty. Meanwhile they hoard the wealth, more than
they can ever spend or use or eat or drink.”
“Are you saying,” Sal Mass chirped up, “Mr. Notzing, sir, are you
saying money don’t buy happiness?”
Pancho Notzing was immune to sarcasm. Those close enough to
hear her odd chirpy voice laughed. Old Sal.
Sal was the only one of the Teenie Weenies (except for her husband,
Al Mass) who really was one, and not only in the sense that she was an
actual midget. Ten years before she had played one of the little charac-
ters in a promotion for a canned food company; she’d flown, she said,
ten thousand miles and into three hundred airports, dressed as the
Lady of Fashion, her husband, Al, as the Cook, inviting people aboard
the Ford Trimotor they traveled in to look over the cans and packages
of food, the Pepper Pickles, the Chipped Beef, the Hearts of Wheat, the
Succotash, the Harvard Beets, the Soda Crackers. Handing out free
samples and little cookbooks. She knew she disappointed the children
who came, because the Teenie Weenies in the funny papers were really
teeny, no larger than your thumb, and she and Al were small but not
that small, and now and again she’d get a kick in the shins from some
kid who wanted her to be at least smaller than he was, which is what
all kids wanted she decided, though it didn’t explain why grown-ups
came and clambered into their plane and made much of them. What
Sal wanted was to fly the Ford herself, but no amount of solicitude, or
pleading, or showing off, or anything could get the pilot to do more
than laugh at her. Hell with him. Al just read the paper and smoked his
cigar and snorted. Hey, Hon, here we are in the funnies—see, this
week I try to figure out how to cut up a grape with a saw—Jesus. A
10 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
little later that food company fired them and from then on used a
couple of little kids instead for half the price. That was 1941, and Sal
and Al got hired by Van Damme Aero’s West Coast plant to work on
their A-21 Sword bombers, getting into the small spaces no one else
could get into and riveting. And their selling job went on too, as Sal
showed up again and again in company promotions, in the newsreels,
in Horse Offen’s stories, wearing her bandanna and miniature over-
alls. Al stayed just as mad as ever, midget mad—well, he was one of
those angry midgets she knew so well, he had a right, she paid no
attention. When Van Damme built this plant in the middle of nowhere
(Al’s characterization) and started on the B-30 there seemed at first no
need for midgets, the whole plane was open from end to end and no
space too small for a normal-size worker. But they accepted Sal and Al
anyway when they applied to go out to the new plant, which Sal
thought was white of them; Al just snorted.
“Well,” she said to Pancho, though not for him alone to hear, “I
guess happiness is overrated. Not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’m no Utopian,” Pancho said. “I would never say so. I am a modest
fellow. I know better than to demand too much of this world. Noth-
ing’s perfect. You try to build the best world, the best society you can.
I am not a u topian but a best opian.”
All this time the moon had been rising into the cloudless air over
Henryville, nearly full and melon-shaped, huge and gold and then
whiter and smaller as it climbed. The sounds of the banjo, the radio
music, and the people’s voices moved with the sluggish air block to
block and reached into the bedroom where Prosper Olander sat on the
edge of Connie Wrobleski’s bed with a Lucky Lager of her husband’s
growing warm in his hand. He was listening to Connie, who was tell-
ing her story, which was in a way the story of how she happened to be
here in bed with Prosper. She’d stop often to say things like Oh jeez I
don’t know or I never expected this, that meant she was giving up
trying to explain herself, and at the same time keeping the door open
to going on, which in time after a sigh she did, only to stop again to
question herself or the world or Fate. Prosper listened—he did listen,
because what she had to say was new to him, the part that was proving
hard for her to say, and he liked her and wanted to know what she
thought—but always as he sat his eyes went to the pair of new crutches
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 11
now propped in the corner. Boy were they something beautiful, he
couldn’t get enough of an eyeful, they leaned together there gleaming
new, preening, proud. They had been built at the plant just for him by
machinists on their breaks, and they were, as far as Prosper knew, the
only pair like them in the world: slim strong light aluminum tubes with
hinged aluminum cuffs covered in leather to go around his forearms
and posts for his hands to grip, clad in hard rubber. They weighed
nothing. His poor underarms, eternally chafed from the tops of the old
wooden ones he had used for years—the parts of himself he felt most
sorry for, while everybody else felt sorry about his ski-jump spine and
marionette’s legs—the skin there was healing already.
“Oh if I don’t shut up I’m going to start crying,” Connie said. Con-
nie’s husband was in basic training a long way away, and he’d be off to
war most likely soon thereafter, and here was Prosper beside his wife
in his house, in nothing but his skivvies too; but there was no doubt in
Prosper’s mind that they two weren’t the only ones in Henryville, or