Midnight Cowboy (16 page)

Joe made a fist and drove it into the air. Then he threw his hands up in a gesture that meant: What more can I tell you?

Now Mr. O’Daniel was smiling, too. “You’re a wonderful boy,” he said. “And I think you and me’s gonna have us some fun, dammit! It don’t have to be joyless, you know, not atall. Now!” He put his hands up, like a politician waiting for attention. Then, speaking almost in a whisper, he said: “Why don’t we git right down on our knees? How does that strike you?”

There followed a moment in which no word was spoken, no motion was made, no breath was taken. Joe knew now what he had begun to know at the moment the door of the room had been opened to him.

The knowledge had been like something sickly green trickling slowly, irrevocably, into his bloodstream, too deadly to acknowledge. And now, even though he knew—and knew for certain—it was still too soon to act as if he knew.

Therefore, after this long moment, he said, “Get down—where?” His lips were dry, his voice small and puny.

Mr. O’Daniel said, “Right here. Why not? This is a church, isn’t it? Every square
inch
of this earth of ours is a church. I’ve prayed in saloons, I’ve prayed in the streets. I’m not ashamed to pray anywhere. You want to know something?”

“What, sir?”

“I’ve prayed on the toilet!
He
don’t care where. What He wants is that prayer!”

Joe nodded, and not knowing what else to do, he decided to get down on his knees and pray awhile. But he couldn’t concentrate on it.

He reviewed in his mind the swindle that had taken place. It didn’t seem believable to him, so he went through it all again, and a third time. Then he heard Mr. O’Daniel’s words about getting Jesus into his heart and suddenly the reality of what had happened got through to him.

He rose without a word and ran from the room, determined to right the situation. He didn’t even look back when Mr. O’Daniel called down the hallway after him: “Boy? Boy? Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened, boy!” He didn’t wait for the elevator either, but ran down the stairs two at a time, and out onto 42nd Street, all the way over to Sixth Avenue and back again to Eighth, knowing even as he searched that the odds against finding Rizzo were overwhelming. Even as he was trying to remember the name of Rizzo’s hotel, he knew it was useless to do so. Joe didn’t want his twenty dollars back, not any more; what he wanted now was some kind of revenge that would make him feel less of a fool. Standing on Times Square, looking up Broadway toward Duffy Square, he had this fantasy:

A grotesque little form wheels around the corner and slips into the doorway of a cigar store. Joe runs across the street and traps him there. Rizzo has no contrition whatever; instead he sneers at the man he has bilked. Joe takes out a knife and holds it up to Rizzo’s throat, intending to perform a neat, fatal slitting operation. But even in fantasy he cannot get the knife to penetrate the boy’s skin. He drops the knife and chokes Rizzo to death with his bare hands. The murder draws a crowd, the police come and—

At this point the fantasy ended: Joe saw a photograph of himself on the front page of a newspaper. He stopped and blinked his eyes and looked at it again. He wasn’t imagining the newspaper, it was as real as his own boots, and there was the newsdealer with his little green shed and the stacks of newspapers. On the front page of one of the tabloids was a photograph of a young man being led away between two policemen. Joe thought,
“It can’t be me, I didn’t kill nobody!”

But there was the photograph.

He bought a copy of the newspaper and hurried into the pizza place with it. Examining the photograph in this light he discovered that the young man, while close enough to himself in appearance to pass as a double, was in actuality someone else: a West Virginia mass murderer who had done in eleven members of his own family with a shotgun in a falling-out over a harmonica.

Joe was considerably shaken by this experience of seeing his own likeness led away by the police in such an official-looking document as a newspaper. He left the restaurant in search of a mirror and found one on the front of the place.

“Didn’t kill nobody,” he said to it. “Not gonna kill nobody.”

He shook his head gravely at the image in the mirror, and then he walked away from it, hearing the clicking of his own heels: a distant sound now, and one without much meaning to him.

A few minutes later, in his room, he looked into another mirror, the one over the bureau, and he studied his face as if he had just now met himself for the first time.

Not the kind of person’t kills people, he thought. But in his eyes there was a question being asked. He saw the question, but he thought, no sir, not even rats. Not even Ratso. That’s what them fags called him, Ratso. Ratso Rizzo. To hell with Ratso Rizzo. That night he fell asleep with all the lights on.

The next morning Joe experienced several awakenings from sleep, putting off the final one until afternoon. Even then he lay for a while in an imitation of sleep, unable to fool himself into thinking it was real.

But that day and for the next several days he did enjoy a kind of somnambulism: walked and talked and performed all the ordinary creature functions—scratching, eating, going to the bathroom, etc., without actually using his head much at all. He knew his money was running out at a rate that made the matter urgent, but he did not truly feel the urgency at all, not even at the end of the following week when he received from the manager of the hotel a special note on the subject of his bill.

In bed at night he dreamed of every form of peril imaginable: He was a passenger in cars gone berserk, an object of monstrous pursuits, a dweller in high, dangerous places, an exhausted swimmer in endless oceans. But in his waking hours he went about in this numb state, insulated from his own situation by layers and layers of unrelated thoughts and fantasies and tiny preoccupations.

He wandered endlessly in and out of the side streets of Broadway, his head tilted toward the little transistor radio he held at his shoulder, feeling himself contained in some fragile safety by his participation in the unseen worlds of broadcasting. He liked talk stations best, and he often entered into the conversation.

“Are you telling
me,”
he one day heard asked by a person of indeterminate gender and a very full nose, “that everything was simply falling off everything?” “No no no!” answered a petulant, pompous old man, “everything was
not
falling off everything. That would have been an earthquake syndrome! I’m talking about poltergeists,
poltergeists!”

“Know what I’m talkin’ about, genulman?” said Joe Buck. “I’m sayin’
shee-it!
And I’m the boss.” Click. He switched stations.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” said a singsong, thin, ancient voice, “next time you feel rheumatic or sciatic or any of the symptoms of old age, don’t complain. Just think of all those who do not have the privilege of growing old in this wonderful world.” “Well!” said a candy-voiced man, “that’s a pretty doggone grand recipe for better living! What d’you say, folks, is that pretty doggone good for a great-grandmother?”

“Oh yeah, hell yeah,” Joe said, speaking through the applause, “but don’t go ‘way, Granny, I want you to answer me somethin’ else. I heard a rumor about you, and I’ze wonderin’ if it’s any truth to it: Can you really take it standin’ up, honey? Is that so?
Well
, I’d say
that
was pretty doggone good for a great-gramaw, yesir-goddamree-bob.”

And so on.

One day at Riker’s a glob of catsup spilled onto his beige leather jacket and left an ugly stain. Joe set about developing certain ways of standing and walking that would conceal this flaw in his grooming. Then he conceived the notion of getting some more catsup and painting what would appear to be a deliberate design over the stain. He got as far as stealing some catsup and taking it into the men’s room of a cafeteria, but he was unable to decide upon a pattern. This indecision consumed the better part of an afternoon. It was typical of the kind of paralysis into which his mind had fallen.

One evening early in September something happened that jarred him into a keen state of alarm: He came back to his hotel and found he had been locked out of his room.

“Oh, we keep your things all nice and safe for you in the basement,” said the clerk, in answer to Joe’s inquiry about his black-and-white horsehide suitcase. “And when you pay your bill, we hand them right over to you.”

Joe tried to bargain with the man, even offered him all of his belongings if he could just keep the suitcase itself and the packet of letters Sally had written him in the army.

“Oh no,” the man told him, “we keep it all, yes, we keep the whole thing, that’s the way we do.”

Now Joe had the worrisome problem of finding a place to sleep. But that wasn’t the worst of it. They had kept his horsehide suitcase.

He went into the subway arcade under Times Square, where there were many mirrors on the vending machines. He had to look into his own face to discover whether or not this new turn of events was actual or imagined. One glance told him what he needed to know.

“All right, cowboy,” he said to the dazed young man in the glass. “Enough of this shee-it. You know what you got to do?”

He nodded at himself.

“But do I
got
to?”

“Want your suitcase?”

He nodded again.

“Then go do it.”

All the streetboys on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street got looked at often enough. That wasn’t the trick. The trick was adjusting your mind and therefore your entire attitude, physical movements, eyes, etc., to just the right degree of interest-disinterest that would make them come up and talk to you: give them the nerve to, and yet not cause them to lose interest. At that point another skill entered into it: what to say, what not to say, when to close the deal, when to hold out for more.

Joe was inexperienced in these arts and had no special gift for them to begin with. Also, he was unable to give the thing his full concentration: The sadness of what he was doing had gotten through to him, a sense of what this night was the first phase of, a leaden, paralyzing knowledge that in this pursuit success was in a way even worse than failure. But then there was the suitcase to be redeemed.

Standing there leaning on the window of the drugstore he tried to think about the suitcase and the letters in a new way, tried to see them as valueless objects. With the letters, he succeeded. He knew them by heart anyway and had long since drawn all the value off of them; in so many times of reading and feeling them, they’d actually gone fairly dead on him.

But the suitcase was another matter. It had become worth a king’s ransom the moment the hotel locked its door on it. He tried to think why he cared about it so. In his mind he opened it and looked inside and though he found nothing there but darkness, this was the very thing that gave it its inestimable value, some special quality of darkness, sweet and warm and elusive. Most of all, perhaps, the suitcase was somehow a place to be: he kept slipping inside of it, in his mind, and pulling the lid down over himself. Gradually he thought he recognized certain smells in it: horsehide to start with, and then manure and all the ranch smells of boyhood Sundays, chocolate candy too and chewing tobacco, the Rio Grande, Sally Bucks pocketbook, somebody’s ‘36 Ford. There was no telling how this suitcase, purchased in Houston a few months ago, could have trapped all that sweetness and value, but it had. And so there was nothing in the world more important than getting his hands on it again.

In two and a half hours of waiting, Joe talked with only two prospects. He found himself telling them about his suitcase, and this seemed to cause in them a certain alarm that made them lose interest. Or perhaps twenty-seven dollars—the amount the hotel people claimed he: owed them—was too large a sum to ask.

By the time he spoke with a third person, a fat, bespectacled, frightened college student who looked no more than seventeen, Joe was ready to accept a compromise amount, but the student surprised him by offering the entire sum. Joe was both sickened and relieved to have come to some terms at last. Having by this time learned suspicion, he said, “Where’d a kid like you get that kind of money?” “From my mother,” was the answer.

There followed a quarter hour in which this youngster with his schoolbooks led the tall cowboy through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, where he claimed to know of
a place
. On a side street beyond Tenth Avenue, the student turned and entered a tenement building.

The lower halls stunk so dreadfully one would swear demented old women boiled cat pee behind every closed door. But as they rose to the fifth floor, and then to the sixth and finally to the roof itself, all that stink was gradually replaced by good air, soft and September-sweet. And here on this roof, on perhaps the most beautiful night of the year, under the pretty amber light of a harvest moon, an urgent and sorrowful labor took place while Joe Buck stood and waited, trying to concentrate on other matters. And then the tall, fat child vomited at his feet while the cowboy held his head for him.