like a tiger, looking at nothing there, wrapped in her plaid robe, her
feet bare. “We’ll get out of here. We’ll go out west. That’s where the
jobs are, everybody says, sixty cents an hour, closed shops, they can’t
push you around.”
“I’ll get money,” Prosper said. “I know I can.”
“You get money,” she said, coming to look furiously into his face.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 197
“I’ve got a little. I’m sick of that theater. I’m sick of this town. We’ll go
together.”
All decided, no questions, whatever stood in the way of it of no
account, not her family or his, not his handicap, not distance or fear or
difficulty. Her rageful resolve had caught fire from his like a hot can-
dlewick catching fire from a lit candle brought close. She wrapped his
scarf around his throat as though arming him.
“Tell me you love me,” she said, hands pulling tight the scarf. The
last thing necessary.
“I love you, Elaine.”
She said nothing in return.
From the cigar store Prosper called the icehouse. A new voice
answered, female, blond (how could he tell?). When Mert came to the
phone Prosper said he’d been thinking and that if they still needed that
job done they’d talked about, he would probably be able to do it. If the
money was good.
“The money’s good,” Mert said.
“So when, where will I.”
“Where are you now?”
Prosper named the streets.
“Wait there,” Mert said. “Fred’ll pick you up.”
It wasn’t hard to do. The coupons themselves were crude things. The
Ditto machine in the icehouse office could be adapted to print in red
instead of its usual purple. Prosper went with Fred to a warehouse in
the city filled with paper, paper in high stacks, newsprint in rolls, dis-
count paper in fallen slides like avalanches. Fred distracted the sales-
man while Prosper took a sheet of stamps from his pocket and sought
for a paper like it. The big investment was in spirit masters for the
machine; Prosper spoiled several before he perfected a way to make a
sheetful of stamps rather than a single one. As he drew he had to press
hard enough to transfer the colored wax on the bottom sheet of the
two-ply master to the back of the sheet he was drawing on, like the
wrong-way writing that a piece of carbon paper puts on your typed
sheet if you insert the carbon backward. Then he separated the two
sheets of the master and fastened the top sheet to the drum of the Ditto.
198 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
As he turned the handle of the drum, a solvent with the intoxicating
smell of some sublime liquor was washed over the sheets of paper
drawn in to be printed; the solvent would dissolve just enough of the
colored wax on the master to transfer the backward image right-way-
around to the paper. It worked. Mert said it wouldn’t fool everybody
for long but it’d fool anybody long enough.
How to perforate the printed sheets was a different problem, not
put to Prosper; Mert knew a guy. Prosper’s problem was that the origi-
nal could only print fifty copies or so before it grew dim, and he’d have
to start a new master.
The C book cover was easier; it was just like making documents for
the Sabine Free State. He drew down the lamp over his desk at May
and Bea’s and worked with a magnifying glass, reproducing by hand
every letter and line of type with his pens and India ink, the red bits in
red. Eagle, badge, warning of jail time. He could do two a day, and got
three dollars apiece; the money piled up. He had finished his first one
of the day, stapled it to the coupons, all ready but the signature, when
the doorbell rang.
It was Elaine.
“Here,” she said. She handed him a shapeless lump of brown canvas.
“Let’s go.”
It was her idea: he’d said he had no way to carry a suitcase and walk
at the same time, and after she’d thought about this for a day she’d said
that he could carry a knapsack on his back, like hikers and soldiers,
she’d just seen one in a movie and then realized she knew where to get
one, the Army and Navy Store just then replete with stuff from previ-
ous war eras as useless now as flintlocks and sabers. She’d bring him
one. Here it was. It was time.
Last thing, just before he slung the lumpy kit bag over his shoulders,
filled with his clothes and belongings gathered somewhat at random,
he picked up the fresh C ration book and put it into an inside pocket of
his jacket. And Elaine fixed his hat on his head. The El stop was twenty
blocks away.
“So she left you standing there?” Vi Harbison asked Prosper in Henryville.
They were upright now and dressed, Vi ready for the Swing Shift, she
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 199
was doing double. Pancho Notzing in the parlor listening to the radio
in a straightback chair as though in church. He knew this part of Pros-
per’s story.
“We got there and I couldn’t get up the stairs,” Prosper said. “I
guess we hadn’t thought of that. I mean I think I’d thought of it, but.”
“What did she say? ‘So long, sucker’?”
“She didn’t say anything. I said I’d go around and look to see if
there was another way up. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He
could remember her face when he’d said this to her, as though now
everything that her face had always seemed to express and yet maybe
didn’t—the questions with bad answers, the dissatisfaction—it did
express now for real. “When I came back to tell her, she was gone.”
“She took that train.”
Prosper said nothing.
“So that didn’t change your mind about women?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean liking them better. Thinking they’re better. After she did
that to you, leaving you flat. Did it?”
“Well I guess not,” he said, actually never having wondered this
before, or considered that it should have changed his mind; maybe it
should have. “I guess she had her reasons. I mean it wasn’t going to be
easy.”
Vi regarded him in what seemed to Prosper a kind of tender disgust,
the look you might give a bad puppy.
“I thought,” he said, “that she’d given up on me, but that if I could
go out there and find her I could show her she didn’t need to. That she
shouldn’t have.”
“But you came here instead.”
“Well, yes, in the end.”
“You know what I think?” Vi said. “I think your heart got broken.
Right then on that day.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And you know, when your heart gets broken it can’t feel the
same way afterward.”
“Oh?”
She put her elbows on the oilcloth to look into Prosper’s eyes. Out-
side the window, troops of people were passing, headed for work,
200 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
marching together, some yellow bicycles moving faster than the crowd.
“I think that after your heart is broken you maybe still want to have
love affairs. Still want to make love, still want to marry even. But
people don’t stir your heart the same.”
“Oh.”
“Your heart,” she said, touching her own. “It can’t be heated up the
same as before.”
“That’s not good, I guess.”
“Depends,” Vi said. “It can keep you from being hurt again. It can
keep you from being jealous. ’Cause you don’t care so much.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t get that stab to the heart,” Vi said.
“Oh.”
“For instance me,” Vi said. “It doesn’t make me jealous that you’re