Tomorrow! by Philip Wylie Read Free Book Online Page B

this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No. That would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”

    “Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”

    “I could lose my joh—”

    “Lose your job, my eye! Jake has put men in the Green Prairie River in a barrel of cement for less. That’s the only way he can keep his books in the black: making his collections tough.”

    “Maybe Hank Conner. . . ?”

    “Look, Beau. You borrowed five hundred from Hank last year. Remember? And eight hundred, two . . . three years before that.”

    “Sure. But—”

    “But what? Hank’s generous. He’s a damned good neighbor in a lot of ways. He’s come to your rescue five or six times. And you never paid him back a cent.”

    “Sure, but he knows I’m good for it. Someday I’ll—”

    “Someday you’ll—nothing! You don’t even know how much you’ve borrowed, over the years. Okay, go to Hank. If you get the twenty-five hundred, I’ll really think he’s crazy. If you don’t. . . .” She broke off. She had already said enough about his access to inactive portfolios.
    Enough for the moment. To Netta, raised in the wrongest part of that wretched territory on the wrong side of every track, being in trouble with Jake Tanetti was far more dangerous than lifting a few bonds from a bank—especially when one way or another you would make sure to get the bonds back before their absence was checked.

    Beau drew a long breath, exhaled, picked up the bottle, saw that Netta was not going to forbid him, and poured a highball. He breathed again and said relievedly, casting the whole burden away from himself and toward the woman, “Brother! Are we in a mess!”

    In the hall, the front door dosed with a click. Lenore came in, tiredly, her coverall over her arm. She set down the Geiger counter. “Is there anything unusual about the Baileys being in a mess?”

    “This time,” her mother said, “it’s a real one. Beau. . . !”

    His eyes implored. “Don’ t—Mother! Not to Len!”

    Netta brought to an end her state of uncompromising sympathy. Beau deserved to be punished. And so, for that matter, did Lenore. Just for being intractable. Just for passing up her opportunities. Just for refusing to do what a daughter should in behalf of parents who had sacrificed everything. Netta thought that if Lenore had any sense of obligation they wouldn’t be sweating now over any measly five thousand dollars.

    She said, “Your father, Lenore, has at last succeeded in making the priceless kind of horse’s behind of himself I always expected.”

    The girl dropped on the end of the divan near her parents and ran her fingers into her hair, pulling out pins, letting it fall. “Now what?”

    Netta told her in a few flat sentences.

    Lenore said nothing. Her eyes filled and overflowed. She didn’t look at her mother or her father. She just sat still, crying silently. Her anguish was a source of satisfaction to her mother, an intolerable spectacle for her father.

    “ Don’t baby.” he kept saying. “ Don’t cry. Net and I will find a way out of it. We always have.” But she kept on crying. After a while she rose and went to her room and left her parents sitting together, not talking. Beau had a drink.

3
    The Green Prairie Civil Defense “practice alert” had repercussions.

    These repercussions had long heralded their approach, in complaints and criticisms, gripes and threatened suits. To be sure, Green Prairie took pride in its Civil Defense outfit for the reason that its state was one of the “top-ranking five” in the “National Ready Contest”—and the Green Prairie organization was the best in the state. The perpetual competition between the Sister Cities, like every eternal war between siblings, furnished a further motive for local pride