Boys & Girls Together (6 page)

“What’re you laughing at?” P.T. managed, though he might just as easily have hit her a good one.

“You eating lobster.”

The honesty of her reply embarrassed him still further, so for a while all he could say was “Oh.”

“It really is funny,” she assured him.

“It is, huh?” He watched her a moment. “I never would have ordered the damn thing except you insisted.”

“I know that. That’s why I insisted. Of course, it was an outside chance at best, that you might not be familiar with the niceties of lobster demolition, but I had to take it.”

“I don’t like being laughed at,” P.T. said.

“Neither do I, Mr. Kirkaby.”

“P.T.”

“P.T.”

“I never laughed at you.”

“Oh, come now. When we met, and you just looked at me. You were laughing then. And when you asked me to dinner you were practically standing behind me, you were so close. And that was cause for laughter too. Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
”

“Maybe.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“All right.” They looked at each other across the table and he was surprised by the brightness in her eyes. “We’re all trying to survive, aren’t we, P.T.? You do it your way, I’ll do it mine. Don’t you mock me. I won’t mock you. Fair?” Then, without waiting for a reply, she smiled and reached out to take his hand. “You poor man, you must be famished. Order yourself a steak.”

P.T. held her hand and laughed and snapped his strong fingers clear and loud and three waiters scurried out, converging around him, nodding while he ordered a sirloin. When the steak came, P.T. released Emily’s hand. But not before.

At ten-thirty he drove her home, walking her up the great stone steps to the great stone house. Thirty-five rooms. He believed it now.

“I enjoyed myself,” P.T. said.

“I’m glad.”

“You too?”

“Does it matter?”

“Goddam right.”

She flushed at that, opening the front door, moving inside, turning. “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 in a robbery or a mugging, P.T. would have likely gone along, and from there, who knows? But luck was with him (luck was always with him, only he did not know it yet), for at precisely four-fifteen on that April afternoon of nineteen and seventeen, P. T. Kirkaby stumbled (quite literally) into his salvation.

It was a toaster.

Someone had left a toaster on the sidewalk, and P.T., blind, had stumbled over it. For a moment he was tempted to kick it to bits with his fiat feet, but he didn’t. Instead he stared at it—it didn’t look all that old—eventually stooping, picking it up, tucking it under a strong arm. Then he began to wander again. At half past five he paused on the sidewalk in front of Kindall’s Garage.

“Hey, P.T.” P.T. turned at the sound of George Kindall’s voice. George had been a friend, more or less, in high school, until he quit at the age of sixteen to tend his father’s garage.

“Hey, George.”

“Watchagot?”

“Toaster.”

“Looks broke.”

“Is.”

“Hey, you enlisting today?”

“Flat feet.”

“Oh. Sorry, P.T.”

“Can I use the toolroom?”

“Why not.”

P.T. nodded and walked to the toolroom in the rear of the garage, closing the door tight behind him. Setting the toaster on a workbench, he examined it a while. He had no actual knowledge of its workings, but soon he started taking it apart, confident that he could get it back together without much trouble; he had faith in his fingers. And wires and bolts and plugs never bothered him much; he understood them somehow. This part just had to fit into that one, and the two of them together went snugly over this dingus here. Like that. He understood. Concentrating fully on the toaster left no room in his mind for the beaten captain. First making certain that the door to the toolroom was still shut, P.T. began to sing.

The sound was surprising. It seemed to have no connection with his speaking voice, which was ordinary. The singing voice was sweet and pure and most at home with Irish ballads. “The Last Rose of Summer” or poor, fat “Molly Malone.” It was his father’s voice—theirs were so similar as to be identical—and on occasional evenings when the monkey was still, they would sing old songs, sitting close together in the oblong room, harmonizing tenderly until the crazy lady living downstairs banged her broom into her cracked ceiling, quieting them.

At a few minutes after six, P.T. left the toolroom, toaster in hand. “George?” he called.

“All finished?” P.T. looked around, finally locating the feet extending from below the running board of a black Chevrolet. P.T. waited, and in a moment George Kindall rolled out into view. “Fix it?”

P.T. held out the toaster. “Better ’n new.”

“Buy it from you?” P.T. was about to say “You can have it,” but again luck was with him (luck was always with him), because before he could speak George Kindall said, “A buck,” and he reached into his overall pocket, pulling out the money.

“Done,” P.T. said, and they swapped.

“If it don’t work, I get my money back.”

“Yeah-yeah-yeah.”

“O.K. See you, P.T.”

“See you, George.” He left the garage and started slowly toward the oblong room. Halfway there he stopped dead. Jerking the grease-stained bill from his pocket, he stared at it. A
dollar
! And for what? Just a little tinkering. Hell, at that rate he could be a millionaire in no time.

It was almost that simple.

The next morning he was up by dawn, scavenging from the streets. By noon he had found an iron and several coffeepots and by nightfall he had fixed and sold them, “Better ’n new.” Profit: six dollars. By the end of the first week he had made nineteen dollars. The following week he entered into negotiations with a small junk shop on the South Side, so after that he didn’t have to scavenge anymore. He worked all day every day in the toolroom of the garage, paying George Kindall five dollars per week for rent. When he had a group of appliances in working order, he would wander the streets shouting “Better ’n new! Better ’n new!” until he had customers enough to go around. Inside of three months the junk shop he had dealt with could not supply him sufficiently, so he struck a bargain with another, then another. By January the toolroom in the garage was too small, so he rented a loft and set to work there, working nights now, straining his brute’s body to the limit. “ ... if you would only apply yourself, Phineas ... if you would only
try
...”

Phineas tried.

The brain that lurked behind the darting eyes grew tired of sleeping; day and night it burned. P.T. slaved sixteen hours a day, and in November 1918, when the war was over, the image of the soldier was dead. He watched the returning heroes as they marched the streets of St. Louis and he felt neither envy nor pain. Because he had money now. And he was going to have more. By his twentieth birthday he could afford the highest-priced girls at Randy’s on a biweekly basis, and how many who were twenty could do that? Damn few. Damn few. He had a staff now, three mechanics working under him, and they worked, not as hard as he did, of course, but he was P.T. Kirkaby and look out up there. Before he was twenty-two he opened his first store, on a side street in East St. Louis. (He wasn’t ready to make the move across the Mississippi yet; not quite yet.) Painted across the entirety of the store front, in great white letters, was his name—K I R K A B Y—and underneath that, in letters slightly smaller,
BETTER ’N NEW.
The store did surprisingly well, but not well enough for P.T., and, several months later, when a sales representative thought to interest him in buying new appliances in large lots and selling them for less than standard price, P.T. was way ahead of him. But he feigned doubt, got a better deal, and from then on there was no stopping him. He sold decent stuff and he sold cheap, so the housewives loved him. He had three stores before another year went by, and the week of his twenty-fifth birthday P. T. Kirkaby rented a suite in the Park Plaza Hotel, where the rich people lived. It was a glorious day for him, the only difficult moments being caused by his father, who did not understand much of what was going on and who was deathly afraid of elevators. The old man tried fleeing across the lobby, and P.T. had to grab him and lift him into the elevator, where his father trembled, eyes closed, until the journey to the eleventh floor was safely over. P.T. had six stores by that time, half of them in St. Louis proper (he had crossed the Mississippi now), the largest of all being right on Maryland Avenue in the midst of the most expensive shops in town. He never failed to smile when he saw, at night, his name—KI R K A B Y—flashing red on Maryland Avenue.

On their second date P.T. took Emily Harding to watch the Cardinals play the Giants. He bought peanuts and hot dogs and when the game was about to begin he nudged her, gesturing toward the Giant manager. “There he is,” P.T. said, awed. “There’s McGraw.”

“Yes,” Emily said. “Of course.”

“You never heard of John McGraw?” P.T. was stunned. McGraw was one of his special heroes, along with Fairbanks and (privately) John McCormack. Shaking his head, he handed her some peanuts.

“Thank you,” she said, but it was immediately evident that she did not know what to do with them. She glanced several times at P.T.’s big hands, at the way his fingers pressed sharply on the proper seam, making the shell split. Then she tried it herself, suddenly talking very fast. “I had no idea baseball could be so much fun. I really never thought it. I’m not much of an athlete, I’m afraid. Of course I played field hockey at school, but then everyone played field hockey at school.”

“Like this.” P.T. demonstrated his peanut technique.

“Oh yes, I see now,” but she still could not do it. Finally she dropped the peanuts to the concrete. “I know I must look silly, but my father was very strict. He would never let me come to this kind of thing. You understand that.”

But the game had started and P.T. was not aware of her talking until she pulled several times at his arm. “What?”

“I was just asking about your father.”

“What about my father?”

“Nothing. It’s just that you never mentioned him. So I wondered ...” She shrugged.

Dead. That was what she was asking. “Yes.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

P.T. nodded and turned back to the game. They sat in silence through the rest of the inning, and when the Cardinals took the field P.T. said, “He’s alive.”