Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

She didn’t even expect to go as far as Crystal Lake, where the kids in the neighborhood would be coasting. Though it wasn’t much, as coasting went, since her own father had said it was hardly fifty vertical feet from the street to the lake. Green Prairie wasn’t noteworthy for hills.

Nora walked, rather rapidly and looking back frequently, down Walnut, across Sedmon to River Avenue. Crystal Lake lay beyond, quite a distance, beyond Arkansas and Dumond and Lake View; and a block south besides. Nora thought she better not go that far. Moreover, she had eighteen cents, and there were stores on River Avenue. Not many and not big, but stores, including the Greek’s.

She turned north on River Avenue.

Harry and Everett, the two boys who lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, and went to parochial school, were standing on the corner, at Maple Street. A police car had just gone by, its siren loud, and now another was screaming in the distance. Nora stood at the corner to watch the second cruise car approach, pass and vanish. Only then was she recognized. Harry said, “Hi, Nora.”

“’Lo.”

“Musta been a robbery, or somethin’!”

“Probably just going out to get beers.”

Both boys looked doubtful. “Sure were tearing,” Everett said.

“I know a man—he goes with Lenore Bailey—that has a Jaguar and he goes about three times as fast as any old cops. That’s a hundred and fifty miles an hour, I guess.”

“You got any money on you?” Harry asked.

“Eighteen cents.”

“Want to pitch?”

Nora looked south on River Avenue, toward parallel rows of frame houses, and north toward a patch of “business” district, of small shops and service stations—a tailor and a florist, the Greek candy store and a used-car lot on which the autos stood in solid ranks with six-inch snow roofs. “I’m supposed to be slaving for old lady Bailey,” she said. “If she misses me, she’ll probably come out like a posse.”

“We could go down to the alley,” Harry suggested. “There’s some swept brick walk. And we’ll watch out for the old fizoo.”

To her surprise, Nora had increased her assets by nine cents when she saw the Bailey car come around the corner. Mrs. Bailey, a coat on and a scarf over her head, the Chloropack wiped away, was driving with one hand and leaning out to peer every which way, yelling, “Nora! Nora Conner!”

Harry grabbed the two pennies on the brick pavement. “Brother! Is she ever mad!”

Everett merely took an appalled look and ran.

The swift defection gave Nora a somewhat exaggerated idea of her predicament. If she had thought the matter over, she would have realized that Mrs. Bailey was—to be sure—annoyed at having her charge vanish. But Mrs. Bailey would not rend her limb from limb. Nora would, at worst, have suffered a severe scolding and perhaps certain deprivations at lunch.

But the sound of Mrs. Bailey’s calling and the sight of her driving one-handed, together with her own sense of guilt, plus the unnerving effect of the Right of her companions, set Nora in motion. She darted from store front to store front on River Avenue. The car approached, inexorably.

Then, just as Nora felt sure she would be overtaken, the car pulled up. Mrs. Bailey went into the fruit store. For Mrs. Bailey was combining two tasks: hunting for her escaped ward and running an errand she had planned for later in the day. Mrs. Bailey was not much concerned about Nora, in fact merely vexed. For when Netta herself had been eleven years old, the streets were her home.

In something like panic, Nora fled across the Pine Street intersection and saw, beyond, a possible refuge. It was one she had seen under construction in the summer and investigated, with several nervous schoolmates, in the fall. She had not known it was still accessible.

What she saw was an open manhole, protected by portable iron guardrails and marked with red flags and a red lantern. The manhole was an entrance to the nearly finished, but not yet used sewer under River Avenue. Watching while great sections of concrete pipe were lowered into the trench had been one of Nora’s occasional occupations on the way home from school. No longer ago than Columbus Day, with five other sixth-graders, Nora had taken advantage of the absence of the laborers and descended the ladder.

They had found a vast, endless tunnel stretching ahead, with gray light seeping in, at Spruce Street and Oak, at Plum and Hickory and presumably at West Broad. The sepulchral echo of their voices had soon caused all but Bill Fennley to scramble back up the ladder. Bill, however, had actually walked through, clear to Hickory. It was generally conceded to be the most remarkable example of daring in the school year.

Nora went down the ladder like a shot.

Underground, it didn’t seem quite so cold. Traffic on the broad thoroughfare rumbled oddly. The great, whitish tunnel led away to infinity, with blurs of light in the distance, just as it had been on Columbus Day. There was a little water in the very bottom of the huge pipe, now, but not much. Old lady Bailey, Nora realized, would never find her now.

The fact restored some of the girl’s aplomb. If she wanted to, she thought, she could stay right there until her family came home. It would be a long wait and she didn’t have a watch but maybe she could tell by the sun, though the sun, she realized, was beginning to get weaker as the clouds thickened.

Another idea occurred to Nora.

She had heard much talk about this new sewer. She had even read about it, accidentally, in the Transcript. It was costing zillions of dollars. It was going to be opened next summer. A new disposal plant was being built for it, on the river, above the bluff, beside the Swan Island Bridge. An “absolutely pure effluent” would be dumped into the Green Prairie River from the plant, though the river was already so muddy and dirty, most of the time, that Nora felt it foolish to clean up the sewage. The line had been completed all the way from Decatur Road to Jefferson, in the heart of the downtown area, and the existing lines would be hooked up with the main sewer in the spring, diverting them from the over-taxed sewer under Arkansas Avenue.

The idea that came to Nora took into account her knowledge of the sewer, Bill Fennley’s safe passage from Maple to Hickory and, in particular, the plain fact that the line furnished an enclosed, secret, presumably direct and simple passageway to Jefferson. True, the way was pretty dark, but mere were no hazards along it. One could walk easily, even run, if a person didn’t mind a little splashing, in the darkish stretches between the manholes and the light they shed into the dim tunnel. Jefferson Avenue went straight past Simmons Park, where the giant mechanical Santa Claus gave out presents to children who drew lucky numbers, and every child could draw, free.

It occurred to Nora that, if she had the nerve, she could progress unobserved and securely from where she stood, dear to Jefferson, where she could emerge, cross the seasonally thronged shopping area, and see the big, red-coated, jolly figure. Maybe even win a prize. She could come back the usual way, on sidewalks, because if she once managed to see the Simmons Park Santa, thus thwarting her parents and evading the worst part of her punishment, it wouldn’t matter to Nora what happened.

Resolutely, she marched away from the brightness that fell from the round hole in the street, toward gloom and a distant ray of light. By the time she had passed beneath the Oak Street intersection, she was a veteran trespasser of sewers and already beginning to wonder if there was any way by which she could assure herself of drawing a lucky number. When you did, the big Santa moved his immense arm and held out a wrapped package to you—candy, mostly—and a mechanical voice said through a loud-speaker inside him behind his moving beard, “Merry Christmas!” He was forty-three feet tall, so making him “work” was an unforgettable marvel. In between, he played music.