Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/25

 "Hi, good-looking," a girl's voice rang out.

Gaylord spun around in unbelieving happiness at the tones but the greeting was not for him. He dropped his head quickly. He knew they had seen him … he could feel eyes looking at him, laughing, like a hungry man at the sight of a chicken leg, and his face turned a deep crimson. This embarrassed him even more. He had a sudden flooding sense, that is, he tried to imagine, that all this was just a dream in Looking Glass Land. But this crowd of nonsense impinged very strongly on the real thing. It meant that now his living body, instead of being safe in his bed, breathing deeply of fresh air, would be carted across the porch, bathed in perspiration. This fact disturbed him violently.

Gosh, it was hot. He wished Wanda was by his side. He looked around at the coatless boys and was glad he had not worn one either. He hoped urgently that the powder on his face didn't show too much. His forehead felt so hot. Was his hair all right?

Gaylord put his hands in his pockets, looked at the golden amber peering from the small broken window panes, giving life again to the paint-craving windowsills. The soft beams fell on the moving figures on the dance floor, and now shone on Gaylord's earnest face and handsome physique. He smiled at those he knew, and his movements, without being clumsy, lacked the assurance and grace the others around him possessed. His stomach was still churning inside him and his head was spinning. He shifted again uneasily and glanced over the heads and through the low hanging trees to the line of ugly one-story commercial buildings that faced the park. He felt a quiet sadness reaching into him as he looked at them; so common; so ordinary; so bare of any distinction. Irregular lines of dusty paned windows dingy and deserted in the grey light, topped with tin and wooden awnings, moved before him. They had been built years ago and forgotten. There were one or two that could boast new paint, a lighted window, but the others … nothing more than the inevitable corrugated tin, rusted and fallen apart.

He was unhappy and ill at ease here after all these years, and his thoughts moved idly as he looked at his home town of Cotton. He who dreamed of the Champs Elysées was here among walls of careless time and deserted hands. Tomorrow, many tomorrows, he would still 15