Tomorrow! by Philip Wylie Page A

had killed the fish and the airport was so close to the gorges (which once had been mysterious and remote-seeming) that nobody in his right mind would pitch a tent there. He reflected that no good places were left where boys on rafts could play Lewis and Clark, or Mark Twain steamboating. Subdivisions had replaced those primordial pockets on the river—or factories, or golf courses, or parallel highways, or airports. Something.

    The bus plugged for half a mile, noisily, through a run-down section, competing with trolley cars, trucks, jalopies driven by Negroes and hordes of pedestrians. At last, turning on Willowgrove from Mechanic Street, it made better time and soon covered the distance between the slums and Ferndale, River City’s oldest suburb. Charles walked the short way to his aunt’s house.

    He was sighted in the distance by twelve-year-old Marie. In a moment, four of the young Williamses came down the sidewalk under the catalpas, yelling, he thought affectionately, like Indians. (He found out presently, however, that they were yelling like inhabitants of Venus.) As the youngsters caught his hands and poured forth questions about his family, about the armed forces, about life on other planets as he walked toward the too-small frame house where they lived, Charles lost some of his feeling of forlornness.

    He loved kids. He had liked being one, through all the wonderful epochs of childhood from the day of his first sled to the day his father had given him a fly-casting rod and thence to the magical evening when his dad had said, “Well, Chuck, looks like the ducks might be coming in around dawn tomorrow. Sam Phelps has that sprained ankle, and if you look in the broom closet, you may discover something resembling a brand-new, sixteen-gauge, over-and-under. . .
    .”

    What in the hell, Chuck thought, turning into the Williams’s walk, was life all for—if not this: kids to pass on kinship to?

    When dinner was over, the plenteous dinner his aunt provided, in part from the big vegetable garden in the empty lot behind the house, they “relaxed in the parlor.” He had played with Irma, the new baby, blonder than the others, he’d said, practically silver-haired. He had thrilled the youngsters and their parents with an eyewitness account of the take-off of a guided missile. He’d shown Don the right way to hold his bow and arrow—and shot a hole through a diaper on the clothesline, accidentally. He’d arbitrated a quarrel between Marie and Tom and admired Sarah’s kindergarten art work.

    Now, with a tumbler of elderberry wine, he sat with Ruth and Jim. Fireflies winked above the lawn and sounds of play told where the older kids were. The young ones already slept. It was peaceful.

    His aunt and uncle asked, diffidently, about service. Did he hate it? Was it really rugged?
    Jim, who had been deferred in the Second War because of his family, seemed to hide under the question a mixture of guilt and romantic expectation.

    “It’s just dull,” Charles said. “Lord, the kids are growing! Marie’s really a young woman!”

    Jim hitched a suspender and rubbed his Adam’s apple. “That’s what she tells us daily,”
    he laughed. “She’s a year and a half older than Nora.”

    “Nora,” said Charles, “is getting the same idea. She cut her own hair the other day. . . .”
    They laughed at the story.

    “We haven’t seen much of Beth and Henry.” Ruth sounded apologetic. “Time was when Ferndale seemed practically next door to Walnut Street. But now”—she sighed—“by the time I get the kids organized, or a few hours of an afternoon, it seems a million miles off.”

    “I know,” Chuck nodded. “Took me an hour and a quarter to get over here.”

    “Mercy!”

    “Both cities,” Jim said, speaking with professional assurance, “were horse-and-buggy designed. I read the other day in my drafting magazine that cities are strangling themselves.

    Green Prairie and River City sure are!” Jim