Read Online Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan - Free Book Online Page B

half from the bookie’s and asked the man to fill the tank and check the oil and water. He told the kids he was going to get a package of cigarettes and would be back in a minute, and not to move. He went up to the bookie’s and chatted with the boys a few minutes and then Leo looked into his book and said, ‘Eighteen eighty, right?’ and counted the money out and thanked him.
    He took the money and put it in his pocket and chatted with the boys some more, and then he got up and went back to the car.
    The kids were laughing together about something.
    He paid the man and drove out Geary to the ocean, along the ocean four or five miles, and then he stopped where some new houses were being built and he and the boy piled scraps of lumber in the back of the car for the fireplace because doing that made the boy happier than anything else he knew how to do. He drove home and left the car out front and took the kids for a walk to a drugstore and got them each and himself an ice-cream soda.
    It wouldn’t be so bad if he could get hold of money that way any time he needed it.

Chapter 13
    He was clean and calm sitting with the kids in the booth in the ice-cream-parlour part of the drugstore and that’s what a man wanted, that’s what he always wanted, to be clean and calm, his kids across a table from him with their new eyes, new voices, hands and fingers, hair and lips, teeth and nostrils and ears, moisture and skin, their new beating hearts and working lungs, that’s all any man ever wanted, just to be decently at peace with himself and his woman and to have his kids around and happy about vanilla and chocolate and soda, the long spoon and the straws, and the drama of other people around, the druggist, the girl who brought the stuff, the boy who made it, and the other people having other stuff.
    All any man ever wanted was peace and the only way he could have it was to have money, and now he had a little. Betting the races was the best way toget money if you had to get it that way at all. You never hurt anybody by winning on the races because whatever you got you got anonymously and whoever lost because he had picked another horse in the same race was unknown to you. It was a dirty business, but if you won, it certainly made a lot of difference.
    He asked the kids if they would like to go to the notion store across the street and have a look at the junk, and they said they did, so they went there and he let them have one thing each because having too much, or being free to have too much, made them unhappy, confused them, so the girl had a blown-up balloon that was red on a stick, and the boy had a gyroscope in a square paste-board box. They stepped out into the street and began to move homeward, but the man noticed that the old North Carolina barber, whose shop had only one chair, had nobody in it, so he asked the kids if they would sit nicely while he got a haircut and they said they would, so he got a haircut. Then he stepped into the Safeway, to the butcher’s, and bought four thick sirloins and six French lamb chops, but didn’t buy anything else because you had to stand in line to pay and have your stuff wrapped everywhere except at the butcher’s. In the delicatessen next door that the lady who loved her big ugly cat and was always making rugs out of rags and listening to the radio owned he bought six cans of chili with beans, and that was enough to carry, so they walked home. He and the boy unloaded thepieces of lumber from the car to the basement. He took up an armful, put them in the fireplace and lighted the fire because they all liked to see a fire.
    The red balloon popped and the little girl looked astonished, as she always did when a balloon popped.
    â€˜It was my balloon,’ the girl said. ‘I want my balloon.’
    She held what was left of it, the thin limp absurd-looking rubber and the skinny stick, and she didn’t like it. The man examined the wreckage, got a