Midnight Cowboy (17 page)

Joe said, “I’m awful damn sorry, kid, I can’t help it if it makes you sick. You gonna have to gimme that money like we said.” And the kid answered, “I don’t have it, I was lying, what’re you going to do to me?”

Joe looked at him hard, restraining an impulse to hit him across the face. “Turn your pockets inside out,” he demanded.

The boy turned his pockets out, cooperating with a kind of frenzied eagerness that was obviously more pleasurable to him than the earlier act had been. But there was nothing of value in his pockets: a worn-out dime-store billfold with photographs of his family, a dirty handkerchief, two subway tokens; that was all. But he was wearing a wrist watch.

“How much is that thing worth?” Joe pointed at the watch.

The question put the boy into a panic. He began to whimper. “I can’t go home without my watch, my mother gave it to me, she gave it to me for confirmation. She’d die, she’d just die, and she’d kill me!” He got to his knees. “Please, not the watch, please I Take my books, take my books.”

Joe walked away, and even from the stairs he could hear the child saying over and over again how sorry he was,
so sorry, really so sorry, honestly I am
.

Joe believed him.

He walked for a long time with no particular aim, but hoping to come upon a place where there would be no other people, not an easy thing to come by in New York City—unless you have money to pay for it.

Eventually he headed west, remembering that there was a river over there somewhere, a river connected to other rivers and other waterways, probably even to the old Rio Grande. He thought he might sit on the edge of it, dangle his feet over the water. But when he’d walked as far west as you could go, it became clear that the river was barricaded by the buildings of the steamship companies: You couldn’t get at the water. So he walked south under the West Side Highway, and pretty soon he came upon a parking lot nearly full of big trailer trucks. He went into this maze of trucks and, finding one with an open tailgate, he hoisted himself up and sat with his feet dangling over the edge, imagining it in motion. Then he decided to lie down and look up at the sky. After a while he took off his boots and sniffed them: They’d begun to smell bad. Joe realized he wouldn’t be able to take proper care of his boots for some time to come.

And while he thought about such things as the condition of his feet and the color of the sky and wondered idly how dirty the floor of the truck was, there was an awareness entering him too momentous to acknowledge: he was a nothing person, a person of no time and no place and no worth to anyone at all. This knowledge, too terrible to be accommodated in his mind, found other corners and crevices of his being to fit itself into, and while it did so, Joe went on with his musings, wondering for instance if anyone had ever counted the stars or considered the possibility that they were made of solid silver to explain that shimmering; shimmering silver; and who were those three silver-headed women anyway, those long- ago blondes of his childhood before Sally Buck: Were they just a houseful of whores, is that what they were?

The little radio, resting on his chest and rocking slightly with each ta-bloomp ta-bloomp ta-bloomp of his heart, suddenly claimed his attention. Thank God they didn’t get his radio, he thought, the sonsabitches didn’t get that, no-sir-goddam-ree-bob, it was right here. But feeling it necessary to conserve the battery, he couldn’t turn it on. He did, however, sniff the leather casing around it, and then he crossed his arms over it.

For a while, lying there looking at the stars and at the moon, he lost his sense of things as they are. He was wide awake but it was as if he were merely dreaming of himself and this truck.

The truck wasn’t quite real, it could have been any remote midnight place, a cave on the dark side of an unheard-of satellite, and he, lying in it, was nameless and not a person at all, just some elemental being with no actual kinship to anything.

The yellow globe out there in space seemed to be the earth, so that the scene as he saw it now was like the one in which his old dream took place, the dream of all the people marching in a ring around the world.

But it was different in one respect: There were no people to be seen anywhere at all.

Having no sense at all of where he might be headed, Joe Buck simply meandered deeper and deeper into September.

Soon there would be a question of cold weather and even sooner a question of money running out. Meanwhile he was warm enough, and as for money, he doled out to himself in bits that remaining seven dollars, cautious as a widow, allowing himself only necessities and denying himself many of these. He learned cheap ways to eat: the Automat gave you baked beans or macaroni and cheese for only twenty cents, you could go to the A & P and fill your pockets with raisins and carrots for a quarter, apples could be stolen on Ninth Avenue—plums and peaches too—and there were Jewish bakers not at all jealous of their onion rolls and bagels. Lean to start with, Joe lost only a few pounds and remained fit enough in body. But blue began to show under the skin surrounding his eyes, and the eyes seemed to sit deeper in his head; this was a result of sleeping poorly in uncomfortable places, trucks or movie theaters, or on benches at Pennsylvania Station or at the Port Authority bus terminal. There was about his face now a quality of almost saintly sadness. He avoided himself in the mirror: Such a look seemed to him the sign of a shameful kind of failing. But he worked as hard as ever at his grooming and kept himself even cleaner than before. Carrying soap and a disassembled razor in his pocket and a toothbrush in his sock, he used the public facilities of the cafeterias and saloons. He washed his private parts regularly too, and almost every day he found an opportunity to take off his boots and lift his feet into a wash bowl. When other men happened upon him using the rest rooms in these ways, Joe bore his embarrassment by concentrating even harder on the need to be clean. For somehow he had come to see his survival in terms of soap and water.

All in all, he was busy as a gypsy. He would seem to be squandering a good deal of time—hanging around a ten-cent store, say, admiring the mountains of clean socks and contemplating the theft of a pair, or leaning on a barber pole weighing the need for a haircut against other possible expenditures. But nearly always he was engaged upon some small pursuit that had become important to him.

Thoughts of going to work visited his head, but having nothing much in common with their host they left quickly without making a very favorable impression. And yet Joe did have some interest in work, perhaps even his own kind of longing for it. In his walks the one thing that would never fail to catch his interest would be the sight of other men at their labor. He would watch the pizza making in a Broadway window as if it were some intricate form of entertainment whose meaning he could not quite grasp. Why did a man work? For money. What did he spend it on? Rent, food, a family. It was as simple as could be. And therefore all the more baffling. For the fact was that Joe’s mind had fallen into that state of wondering in which all the usual kinds of sense are rendered hollow. Always, beyond the answers he could give himself, there seemed to be another more important one hiding in some corner of his mind. And this, if ever it would show itself, would prove to be like a light that made everything else truly worth while.

One rainy night—which would prove to be his last night of solitude for some time to come—Joe allowed himself sixty-five cents for a place to sleep: a 42nd Street movie theater. It was showing a science fantasy picture in which certain people of the earth found themselves on a distant planet under the control of A Voice. A Voice from nowhere at all. This film played over and over again through the night, and Joe’s dreaming always accommodated perfectly the action on the screen.

For instance, at certain intervals, The Voice would call out
earthling! earthling!
and Joe would always awaken as surely as if it had said
Joe Buck! Joe Buck!
When he’d had all the sleep he could get, he stayed on to see who The Voice belonged to, half hoping its identity might make something else come clear to him. But of course it turned out to be nothing but some outlandish machine they’d put together to show in a moving picture.

But that day in his wanderings he had some strange and enjoyable new view of the way in which people, even himself, were connected to the planet earth, the way they had come from it and were part of it and peculiar to it and lived off of it and busied themselves upon it, so that when his attention was drawn to anyone, an old woman in the street, for instance, or some running child or a jeweler in his window, he would say under his breath
earthling, earthling
, and doing so he saw their features, their limbs and their skin and their hair through this wondersome new faculty developed in the night.

Once, in this same mood—and quite by surprise, since he hadn’t been looking for a mirror at all—he came upon himself. This took place in a building entrance on Eighth Avenue. A big-eyed, handsome person, tall as a scarecrow and with the dark, purposeful look of a tireless hunter, was coming at him. In seconds, of course, he knew the image to be his own, but still, out of a kind of curious hoping for some unnamable connection to take place, he felt the need to stop for a moment and call out to himself under his breath,
earthling! earthling!
But it didn’t work at all; nothing about himself was any different than before: Say
earthling
all he wanted to, he was still who he was.

He walked on to 42nd Street, and there in front of the bank on the corner was Mr. O’Daniel, scolding a gathering of people for its lonesome sins.

“Yes, I have traveled the length and the breadth of this great country,” he said, gesturing with his right hand and supporting an American flag in his left, “and I have found the most shocking conditions. I have found the streets of this nation filled with lonesome people, young boys, middle-aged men, girls and women of all descriptions, all of them gripped by the bleakest solitude. And I’ve seen school grounds that had in ‘em children at play. And mine eyes was blinded by what they seen. I seen in the eyes of them children the seeds of the same terrible sins: The lonesomeness is been planted in them, and if it’s not stopped, I say if it’s not stopped, this country is gonna make Sodom and Gomorrah look like a Sunday-school picnic. Do you hear me? I say
read
your Beatitudes!”

Joe saw that Mr. O’Daniel was wound up good and showed no signs of running down. He walked on, hearing these last words:

“‘Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’ Jesus said that. And I say, Jesus I Help us! Before the lonesomeness taketh away all our savor and they’s nothing left.”

Joe kept walking and the voice became indistinguishable from the other street noises. Then he turned around for a last look, watching the evangelist give what was now a dumb show, and he noticed that the speaker was not actually looking at the people gathered there on the sidewalk. His gaze was well over their heads, as if ready to apprehend an arrival that had not yet taken place. It looked to Joe as if the man were making all that noise for another than the apparent reason: He seemed to be hollering and waving his flag in just the way of a lost person trying to make his whereabouts known to someone far, far away. But who? Some lady? A child? And where could he hope they would come from? New Jersey? Eighth Avenue? From out of the West? Or the sky?

Altogether it was a disturbing spectacle, this crazy-eyed, fatherly-looking searcher flailing his arms that way and seeking a visitation from nowhere. It made Joe shudder. He muttered the word
earthling
and set about again on his own aimless, gypsy business, eager to forget the matter.

And on that very afternoon, something happened that would change his entire life: He encountered, in his walking, the crippled swindler, Ratso Rizzo.

Passing the 8th Street Nedick’s in Greenwich Village, he found a pair of large brown eyes looking at him from behind a coffee mug at the window counter.

Seeing Joe, Ratso closed his eyes quickly and remained as motionless as a person praying for invisibility.

But Joe, having wandered homeless and a stranger for three weeks, a long time by the clocks of limbo, was thrilled to see a face that was known to him. His whole being stopped short, accustoming itself to this keen, unexpected pleasure, and it took more than a moment to remember that Ratso Rizzo was an enemy. Joe went straight for the door and entered the place.

When Joe’s hand landed on his shoulder, Ratso trembled, shriveling even farther into himself. “Don’t hit me,” he said, “I’m a cripple.”

“Oh, I ain’t gonna
hit
you,” Joe said. “I’m gonna strangle you to death.” The anger in his voice was the anger of an actor, for so acute had been his pleasure at seeing someone he knew, it would not leave him entirely. “Only first, I want you to turn your pockets inside out for me. Go ahead, start with that one.”

Ratso complied without a whimper. The search yielded:

64 cents

2½ sticks of Dentyne chewing gum

7 Raleigh’s cork-tips, crushed flat

1 book of matches

2 pawn tickets