Tomorrow! (12 page)

Kit Sloan.

When Charles entered his house and his mother called, “You’re back pretty early!” he concealed an emptiness. “Yeah. Got in a bicker with Ruth about the world situation. Jim politely threw me out. Remind me to phone and make up in the morning.”

He started upstairs.

His mother, in the second-floor sitting room, spread a gingham dress on the sofa. “Poor Ruth! As if she didn’t have worries enough, with six kids and only thirty-two hundred!”

“Guess I’ll turn in.” But not to dream, he thought; not even to sleep. Kit Sloan.

Across the lawns, on the second floor of the Bailey house, Beau was daubing cotton soaked in ice water on his cuts and talking to his wife, who sat fully dressed, as if she expected a cocktail party to begin any minute, on the toilet seat, holding a basin.

“That’s what happened,” Beau repeated shakily. “I asked Jake for thirty days more and he told Toledo to ‘impress’ me with the situation.” He didn’t seem even aggrieved, merely resigned.

“I-I don’t understand, Beau.” She did—only too well.

“Look at me, then you will. Toledo slugged me. I tried to hold myself together, Netta, I really did. I told him nobody could assault an officer of the Sloan Bank and get away with it—”

“What’d he say?” Netta had to know every detail.

“He said he only wanted his five thousand. He said I wouldn’t
be
a bank officer—any day he wanted to lift a finger!”

“Don’t talk so loud, Beau! Kit might hear you.”

“I feel like going down and telling him—and be damned.”

“
Telling Kit
!”
The horror of that overpowered Netta for a moment. “Don’t you realize . . .

?”

“Oh, sure!
Sure,”
Beau said, spitting a little blood. “I also realize 1 can’t go on being beaten up by hoods forever.” “I thought you had
plans,
Beau. I thought you were going to speak to Henry Conner—”

“I did.” Beau spat more scarlet in the porcelain wash bowl. “Yesterday. That’s why I saw Jake tonight. I thought old Hank would come through.”

“What happened?”

Beau’s face, pale save where blood reddened it, turned toward her piteously. “He offered me five
hundred.
Said, with taxes the way they are, it was all he could spare.”

“Skinflint!”

“Maybe it was the truth.”

“Henry Conner,” Netta said, with more rage than veracity, “probably still has the first dollar he ever made! Look at the cheap way they live. I bet he has a tidy sum stashed away.”

“Well—we haven’t. And Hank’s not parting with it. And I went to ask Jake for more time-and—” He shuddered. “Look at me! What’ll I say at the bank?”

Netta was bitter. “Oh,
heavens.
Say you fell down the cellar stairs. Say a mouse pushed you. We’ve got to
plan,
Beau!”

“How in hell can
planning
materialize five thousand?”

“Shhhh!” she whispered. “He’ll hear you!” She changed moods briefly. Her eyes became exultant. “They’re together on the big divan looking at TV—and necking. I peeked.” Her mood shifted back. “Go lie down in your bed. Take a towel, so you won’t stain anything. I’ll get you a drink. Thank God, you had the sense to sneak home the back way! If Kit Sloan had caught sight of the mess you’ve made of yourself—”

“
I’ve
made—of myself?”

“You lost the money, didn’t you?”

It was not that he had
bet.

It was that he had
lost.

When she entered the beige and scarlet bedroom, the
moderne
creation of the best interior decorator in both cities, she carried a strong highball and a weak one. Beau was handed the latter.

He at once noticed the marked difference in color and, as his wife had anticipated, was too broken to protest. He flopped back on the pillow, spattering a little new blood on the leather bed-head.

“Now
look
!”
Netta began, and he knew it was the peroration of something that would go on half the night, “we’re at the point where everything depends on playing our cards right. I couldn’t believe our luck when I learned Kit was interested in Lenore again.”

“He’s just interested in pretty girls. Some of the guys at the bank that play around with him tell tales that’d make your eyes stick out.”

She waved that fact away. “Lenore won’t be able to accomplish anything fast enough to help you in this Jake business—”

“She doesn’t even much
like
the guy.”

“That’s neither here nor there!” Mrs. Bailey talked on, persuasively. “A woman
learns
to like a man, Beau. Most women at first hate the men they marry, for a while. Though for a girl with all her looks and education to remain so innocent is something I don’t get!”

“You shouldn’t judge everybody by—”

“My background,” she cut in, “is something we do not discuss. Now, Beau—you’ve got—you’ve absolutely
got
to do something
yourself
about this gambling debt. We can’t possibly afford to have Lenore’s chances—with Kit Sloan, for Lord’s sake—
ruined
, because some petty racketeer disgraces you! All you need to do is something
temporary.
Something that would hold the fort, until Lenore could get—”

“Get
what
exactly? Disgraced herself?”

“Now,
Beau.
This is the
twentieth century,
not the Victorian Age. You’ve got to be
realistic
.”

“Listen, Net. I’m not going to let my daughter haul me out of this by making herself into a tramp.”

“What I’m asking is, are you going to
stand in her way
of making what might be a brilliant—and happy—marriage? A marriage that would move you into a real house in, maybe, the Cold Spring section, with
five
cars and half a dozen
servants,
able”—she was perfectly aware of his desires and weaknesses—” to run down to Miami in the winter, to take in the New Orleans Mardi Gras, to join the boys at every good convention, instead of going once in five years—”

“Fat chance!” he replied peevishly. “The last time I came home from a convention and you found that lipstick on my—That was my last convention!”

“Why, Beau? Ask yourself
why?
Because we can’t
afford
that sort of thing. We can’t
afford
luxury living. You can’t
afford
to date blondes! Your social position can’t
stand
it! Your
job
is endangered by it. Don’t you realize
everything
would be utterly different, if the Sloans and the Baileys had a hyphen between the two names, owing to Lenore?”

He was smiling a little. “Maybe it would at that!”

“I’ll get you another highball.”

“Yeah,” he said, absently. He returned from his day-dream. “Oh. Yes. Please do. My face hurts like hell.” He called after her, “And make it stronger than iced tea.”

It was going to go on all night.

But Beau began to think, began for the first time to let himself think, that life might not forever be a round of hard work, of figures and facts and statements, of miles of tape from adding machines, of coming and going in traffic that kept you on the verge of insanity, of the aching anxiety of home finance and stretched funds, of eternal self-sacrifice for a wife and daughter three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with only an hour snatched here and there for personal pleasures or recreation—a redhead kissed in the dim Cyclone Bar, a bet made on a pay telephone.

Things could be better. He deserved them better.

And a man, a self-respecting man, couldn’t take a slugging lying down.

X-Day Minus Sixty

It was a peculiar farewell. Chuck thought it was probably like thousands of farewells said by soldiers.

He had been raking leaves, the day before. . . .

He raked and thought, Ted ought to be doing this. I’m going back to the base. Back to Texas. Tomorrow I’m
going.
I ought not to be raking up the yard. Officers don’t rake leaves.

It was a cold day—October. The wind came all the way from Canada, from Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta, with polar cold and the raw smell of muskeg, of permafrost, of something arctic. He’d heard the Alaska-based people talk about that weather.

And it came down from the north to U.S.A., making the prairie states chilly in October.

He wondered why he pushed up the pungent leaf-heaps with the wooden rake and shoved them to the gutter, and he knew. To burn them. To make a sweet-smelling pile and add to the good ozone of Green Prairie his own private incense, his somber contribution. Maybe, also, as a symbol. Burning autumn leaves, like burning bridges.

He fished in a pocket of his slacks, thinking how unfamiliar some pockets became when you wore mufti, how unfamiliar the uniform would feel for a day or so. He lit a match and it blew out, so he found a piece of paper, cupped his hands, got the newsprint going, watched words about “strike threatened in River City plant” blacken and vanish. He thrust the paper into the middle of the breast-high pile, on the windward side, and there was streaming smoke, then a bright blaze and soon a soul-satisfying conflagration. It ate gray holes in the leaf pile and sent a soft-looking, slanted fountain of smoke down Walnut Street. Cars had to slow but the people in them came through the smoke laughing and they waved because they, too, would soon be burning their leaves, stopping cars—mulching roses, getting out storm windows, nailing weather stripping around doors, taking coal into their cellars.

She came.

Wearing an orange-red knitted suit. With her large beautiful eyes and with her black hair done up under a knitted hat. He could see her hips move and her breasts and the immobile “V” in front of her and feel his nerves jump.

“You’re going tomorrow, aren’t you, Chuck?”

“So Uncle says.”

She looked at the fire as if it were a work of art like a sand castle on a beach. “Nice and warm,” she said. “I’ve been over in Coverton, watching State play Wesleyan.”

“Who won?”

“We didn’t stay to see the end. State was ahead—thirty points—at the half. And Kit wanted a drink.”

“He didn’t bring you home,” Chuck said.

“We had a fight.” She kicked a spruce cone into the fire. “About you.”

“Me?” He leaned on the rake, slender, dark, smiling.

“I said—you and I had a date for tonight.”

“Do we?”

“Heck, Charles! You’re going
back
tomorrow. I sort of assumed we’d spend the evening together. Or with your family.”

“Swell.”

“And, anyhow, he doesn’t
own
me.”

The fight, then, had been a mere declaration of independence, not of special loyalty. “I’ll borrow Dad’s car.”

“
Don’t
bother! I’ve got my Ford. And your old man needs his these days. Running around . . .”

Chuck nodded. “
He’s
working hard. And to darn little purpose. People are deserting his organization like . . .”

“I know. Well, what time shall I call for you?” She laughed.

“Say, eight? Mother’s made a special dinner. Maybe. . . ?”

She knew she was going to be invited. She didn’t want to be exposed to the calm, collective scrutiny of the Conners during a long meal. “Eight. I’ll be there.”

They drove down to Lee’s Chinese Inn and danced a while. But the place, in spite of the gloom in the booths, the oriental lighting, the orchestra and the waitresses in Chinese costumes, didn’t have the necromancy that had invested it when they had been high school kids, and then undergraduates. They were both restless.

“Let’s go,” she suggested, in the middle of a fox trot, “
on
out the river, the way we used to, and park in that spot where the mill used to be.”

It was crisp and cool out there and bright with moonlight. The heater had warmed the car.

They pointed its nose so they could see the water shimmering in the ruined flume.

“Remember when we came here after the basketball game?” she asked. He said,

“Remember the night you and I—and Wally and Sylvia—went swimming?”

“If Dad had seen us down there, skinny, he’d have skinned me alive!”

The recollections bubbled up, glimmered, broke.

“How long will you be gone this time?” she asked.

His shoulders shrugged a little; she felt it, on the seat. “No telling. Six more months—but I’ll be out, all things equal, in eight more.”

“It seems a long time!” She picked up his hand. “A long, long time. Chuck. It is a long time, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish you weren’t going away.”

“See any beggars riding, these days?”

“If wishes were horses?” Lenore shook her head. “You know what I’m thinking about.”

“Guess I usually do, Lenore.”

“I guess you do. It’s Kit—of course. Partly.”

“And partly you?” Her head shook, and the small motion seemed to diffuse in the night an additional quantity of the perfume she wore. It came from her hair, he thought, her midnight, wavy hair. “Not me, exactly,” she said in a speculative tone, and added defensively, “Kit’s a lot of fun.”

“Why not? He’s never had experience in much else.”

“He has so! He was a star in lots of sports—”

“That isn’t fun?”

“I mean, he does plenty of difficult things. Climbs mountains. Flies. He was a war pilot.

He has a pound of medals.”

“Shall I try to get wounded?”

“No,” she smiled, uninjured by his sarcasm, familiar with it. “Not even—emotionally, Chuck. What I wanted to do, hoped to do, what I suggested we leave that Chink spot to do, was talk.”

“So okay. Talk.”

“Do you think you could put yourself in my place for a few minutes?”

Charles laughed. “I could come mighty close!”

“You sit still. I mean—look.
You
tell
me
what the score is. I’m twenty-four. Right?”

“Practically senile. Right.”

“You’re the same. You’ve got nearly another army year. Then, some architectural office, and maybe-maybe in ten years-you’d have enough to—”

“To what? I’ve got Dad and Mom. In a year, Lenore, I could have a house in Edgeplains, maybe, and enough money for a kid or two. And if I didn’t, the folks would see to things till I got started.”