Boys & Girls Together by William Goldman Read Free Book Online Page B

“Then I did.”
    “I’m glad.”
    “Yes.” She hesitated in the doorway.
    “Tomorrow night?”
    “Was there ever any doubt?” she said, smiling her sweet smile, closing the door behind her.
    P.T. cackled as he hurried down the steps to his Packard. He gunned the motor in farewell, then drove by memory to East St. Louis, parking on a side street. He didn’t bother locking his car; he was known in East St. Louis and nobody was going to tamper with it—nobody had yet and nobody was about to. P.T. walked quickly up the street. As he moved along people called to him, “Hiya, P.T.” and he winked back at them or nodded, as the fancy took him. He paused outside Randy’s for just a moment, feeling an unaccustomed twinge of what he did not know was guilt. Then he went inside. Randy goosed him, bellowing her laughter as he swore. His favorite girl was busy, and, impatient, he did not wait for her but took another, another nameless one with no chest but with good strong legs and a supple body, and when they were upstairs behind the locked door she moaned entirely to his satisfaction.
    P.T. had been a customer at Randy’s since long before he could afford it, and he had been aware of the place’s existence, and what it was, since he was a child. He was born and brought up right around the corner, and one of his early games had been simply to hoot at the rich men from St. Louis as they hurried out of Randy’s at two or three o’clock on a summer morning. P.T.’s home was an oblong room—fifth floor, 71 steps—with a single dark window where he lived (lived?) with his father and his father’s monkey, a surly brown bundle of hair named Belinda. P.T. had never known his mother; either she had died or the oblong room had proved too much for her to bear. When he was young he had been afraid to ask his father for the truth, and when he was old enough to shame his fear his father’s mind had started playing tricks so the answer was unreliable.
    Since home was someplace you didn’t go, P.T. spent his life on the streets. They were dangerous streets, but not to him; he was big and he was strong and he was fast and he was smart so he was safe. He roamed, scavenged, stole, alone or with a pack, by day or by night, and it seemed only inevitable that he would, according to the countless fat housewives who screamed it at his fleeing form after he had tipped their garbage cans for laughs, “rot in the jailhouse with the other scum.”
    P.T. had no intention of rotting. And there were signs. School, for example. He liked school. Not the work, not the studying, but the building itself. He liked being inside it, warm on cool days, cool on hot. He was never absent or tardy, and although his grades were indifferent, there were occasional flashes of a mind operating behind the darting eyes. More than one teacher took him aside, urging hopefully, whispering, “Now, Phineas, if you would just apply yourself, if you would only try , Phineas ...” So the mind was capable of survival and certainly the body was strong, but what gave P.T. his confidence was that he had dreams. Great sun-drenched dreams.
    He was going to be a soldier.
    A general someday, but before that a captain, a decorated captain, chest bursting with ribbons and stars, a stern captain, hard, but beloved by his men. He attempted enlistment when he and the century were both twelve, but although they were kind to him he knew he had made himself a fool. Two years later, when the Great War broke, P.T. used to pray at night that it would wait for him. Thoughtfully, it did. Within the week after St. Louis and the rest of the country declared war, P.T. marched with tears in his eyes to meet his glory.
    He had flat feet.
    The shock of being rejected was too great to cause pain. P.T. wandered dumbly along the streets of East St. Louis, the ribbons and stars withering, falling from his chest row by row. If, during this mute journey, some intimate had seen him and asked him to join