Midnight Cowboy (20 page)

Signs of Christmas appeared in the store windows and in the streets. But such a holiday had nothing to do with either of them. The sameness went on and on. Ratso appeared one day with a big sheepskin-lined greatcoat, offering it to Joe for a present. He claimed it had been given to him by an overstocked dealer in exchange for a small favor, but Joe had reason to believe it’d been stolen at the movies. He said you couldn’t go around stealing winter coats unless you knew for certain the owner had another one somewhere, and he ended up making Ratso feel so bad about the matter he simply hid the thing away in a cupboard. Joe went on wearing his catsup-stained yellow leather jacket. He claimed not to feel the cold, but he shivered a lot just the same and was always finding excuses to duck into stores and vestibules and theaters.

At certain odd moments Joe knew that the restlessness he felt had nothing at all to do with the sameness of his days. Somewhere in him was the knowledge that there was no such thing as sameness: You might do the same things and cover the same streets and even think the same worrisome thoughts, but inside, deep where you couldn’t see them, things were changing and changing and changing and working up to the point where they would come together and show. And then before long you would be saying that something had happened, and your life would suddenly be so different to you you would hardly even recognize it as your own.

But Joe’s was not the kind of mind that could take hold of such a thought with any good firm grip and keep it. It would appear to him for a moment or a split second and then recede as if it had a life and a rhythm all its own. So that, to Joe, his own anxiety seemed most often to be a fear of nothingness. Only at these odd, unexpected moments would it be a fear of
something
.

And then there came a night in early December when this waiting time ended altogether.

“Him?” said the boy.

“Just a second, let me look,” said the girl. She tapped Joe on the shoulder.

It was a December night. He was having coffee in the 8th Street Nedick’s when he heard these voices behind him. He turned and found himself being studied by two childlike young people dressed in identical costumes: black turtleneck sweaters and tight black jeans. They seemed to be brother and sister, perhaps even twins. There was no great difference in their apparent genders. Her hair was short for a girl and his long for a boy. Both were blond, gray-eyed, and gently pretty; neither wore any makeup.

The girl was clearly the bolder of the two. She took hold of Joe’s chin and examined his eyes. “Oh yes, definitely,” she said to her brother. “Definitely him.”

The boy smiled in a meaningless way and handed Joe a small piece of thin orange paper rolled into a scroll and held together by a gummed silver star.

Then the boy and the girl left the place. Joe, caught by something peculiarly calm and deliberate in their manner, watched until they were out of sight before opening the scroll. A message had been printed on it by hand in black ink:

Joe went outside and looked in all directions, but there was no sign of the MacAlbertsons. He looked at the note again, read
before midnight
, and then consulted the clock on the red brick tower next door to the women’s prison: it was eleven o’clock. He lit a cigarette and contemplated the good fortune of being handed something by these strange blond youngsters. The traffic light changed. Pedestrians trying to cross the street bumped against him in their effort to avoid old snow piled up at the curb.

Joe read the note over and over again. He realized he’d need help in interpreting the thing. Ratso was probably working a certain Sixth Avenue saloon. Joe crossed the street, headed in the direction of the saloon, when he caught sight of Ratso under the green awning of a newspaper vender. He was wearing the controversial sheepskin coat, and when he saw Joe coming there was a defiant look in his eye. For his part, Joe was pleased to see the thing getting some wear. He handed the orange scroll to Ratso.

“If you want to read something,” he said, “read that.” Then he explained to Ratso how the note came to be in his possession. “In that whole place,” he said, “they only give one to me.” He tried to hide the pride he felt.

Ratso pulled the great collar up about his ears and started to move. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Whay-whay-whay-where?” Joe said, following close beside him. “I mean what
is
the damn thing? Is it some kind of a advertisement, or a religion, or a what? ‘Cause we don’t know what the hell we’re walkin’ into.”

“It’s a Halloween party.”

“Halloween? This ain’t Halloween. This here’s December.”

“So what do you care? It’s a party, and we’re invited.”

We? Joe wondered. “It don’t say nothing on there about you,” he said.

“Agh!” Ratso waved the thought away.

“Man,” Joe said, “they sure look me over ‘fore they hand me that thing.”

They were walking east on 8th Street, headed toward Broadway.

Yeah, Joe thought, they sure look me over good, and the one says, Him? and the other’n says, Oh yeah, definitely. Now I wonder how come they picked me? Is it my boots and my hat? Something about my face? Just sexiness in general? Or what?

The thought of his sexiness, a suddenly remembered asset, caused him to smile and laugh out loud. They were passing a bakery that had an amber-tinted mirror in its window. Joe swung his face quickly toward the mirror, hoping to catch some of the good of that smile. He caught a little of it.

Then he said to Ratso, “You know, it wasn’t too long ago I was setting in Sally Buck’s living room looking at the TV.”

“Yeah? So?” Ratso looked at him. “I mean,
so?”

“Well, that was in Albuquerque, can’t you see? Way in the hell somewhere else. And what am I now? I’m in New York, ain’t I? Getting picked out for all these goddam—I don’t know, can’t you understand what I’m talkin’ about?”

“Nope.”

Joe’s thought was so clear to himself he felt Ratso’s failure of comprehension had to be deliberate.

“Well,” he said, “I see you’re out to fix this party tonight, fix it good, cranky little wop bastard, you.”

Ratso caught hold of Joe’s arm and hung on it. “What? What’d I say?”

“Never mind,” Joe said. “They may not let you in anyhow.” “You want to bet?”

A group of college people loitered in front of the Eighth Street Bookshop. Joe wished they all knew where he was headed. But there was no sensible way of letting them know.

“I’ll make em let you in,” he said to Ratso. “I’ll tell ‘em they can’t have me unless they take you.”

“Big fuckin’ deal!”

“So don’t worry about it,” Joe said.

“I ain’t worried!”

“You’re as good as in. Besides, they’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Who said there was?”

“If you had a haircut and some meat on your bones, you be all right.”

“Thanks a million!”

“So I’ll say, uh, ‘Look, I don’t go nowhere without my buddy here.’ Okay?”

They walked a block in silence. At the corner of University Place, a cold wind blew at them until they got across the street where the buildings protected them again.

Ratso said, “You don’t want me to go. Right?”

“Did I say that? I didn’t say that.”

“No, but I’ll tell you something, Joe. I’m sorry, but I’m in the mood to let you have it. So listen: You are a very dumb person. You don’t know how to get in out of the rain. You need me! You can’t wipe your butt without me handing you the paper. So now you get invited to a party all by yourself and it’s like you’re the great man. Okay, are you ready for some news already? I don’t
want
to go no cutesy-ass party with no Hansel and Gretel MacAlbertson.” Ratso said their names in baby talk and then made a gagging sound in his throat. “Oooh, how kitchy-kitchy-koo! I’m nauseated already. The only reason I wanted to go in the first place was I thought, agh, they’ll prob’ly have a ring of baloney and a couple of soggy Ritz crackers. What the hell, can’t pass up a spread like that! Well, I lost my friggin’ appetite, so goodbye already. Okay?”

He stopped walking.

Joe said, “Gimme that address!” He snatched the orange note from Ratso’s hand and walked on. But he had gone no more than a block when his anger petered out. He stopped at Broadway and looked back.

Ratso was still there, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, huddling into his coat, watching Joe.

Joe gave him a signal with his hand, and Ratso started rolling toward him, hurrying to catch up, beating the air like a damaged bird. Joe wanted to shout at him,
Don’t run!
but instead he turned away, purposely not looking. And then he heard the step-drag step
-drag
step-drag coming closer and closer. By the time Ratso caught up with him, both of them seemed to have forgotten their altercation.

They walked down Broadway to the corner of Harmony. Among several small signs in the outer lobby of a big loft building was one that said:

Before proceeding up the stairs, Ratso leaned for a moment on the banister. His face and hair were wringing wet, and his breathing made a peculiar noise that was like a certain thin note on an organ. Joe had become so accustomed to hearing Ratso’s sneezes and coughs, and his voice like rocks being dragged across an unpaved road, and he had become so used to seeing discomfort and pain in Ratso’s face, that he had not for some weeks taken a really close look at the runt. Now he found that his coloring under all that perspiration was way off: His skin was more yellow than anything else, but it had some gray in it and a greenish cast as well; the whites of his eyes were a kind of pale peach in color, and lusterless; and his lips were lavender blue, edged with white.

Joe said, “What’sa matter with you?”

“Matter? What d’you mean, matter?”

Joe didn’t know what to say. He kept looking at Ratso for a long moment.

Ratso became agitated. “What? What is it? Am I
bleedin’?’

“No. No, you’re not bleedin’. You’re sweatin’, though. Haven’t you got a hanky?”

Ratso wiped his forehead on the lining of his coat.

Joe said, “You better dry your hair some.”

Ratso made a swipe at it with his bare hands.

Joe took out his own shirt tails. “Come here. Gimme y’ fuckin’ head.”

Ratso growled, “No.” But Joe was louder.
“Come here!”
Ratso bent forward and offered his head to be dried. Joe rubbed at it with his shirt tails. “Can’t go to a party with a wet head,” he said. “Okay now, you got a comb?”

“I don’t need a comb.” Ratso started working at it with his hands.

Joe gave him his comb. “Few dozen cooties won’t kill me, don’t guess.”

But the comb could not be passed through such a thick tangle of unwashed curls, and several of the teeth broke. Ratso handed the comb back and patted his hair into some kind of form. “How’d I look? Okay?”

Joe looked at him carefully and for a long time.

The bare fact was that Ratso did not look okay. Joe was willing enough to lie about it and let the matter pass, but something else happened as he continued to look into Ratso’s face.

What was it?

Neither of them really knew.

Some vague, awful thing had come into evidence between them, hovering in the air between them like a skeleton dancing on threads, something grim and secret that filled Joe with terror, making him feel locked out and alone and in peril.

As for Ratso, the signs of it, whatever it was, were subtle, almost not there. He simply turned his head away, somewhat sheepishly. There was a kind of stillness in his eye, a fixed look to his shoulders and the set of his head.

Joe opened his mouth to speak, but Ratso made a quick gesture of impatience and started up the wide, dark stairway.

Joe watched him. When Ratso was halfway up the first flight, Joe said, “Hey,
wait
a minute! Hey,
whoah!”

Ratso stopped climbing and looked down. His eyes begged Joe not to speak, but for good measure he threw in this challenge: “Are we goin’ to a goddam party or what?”

Joe was too bewildered to move. Something awful had just taken place here at the foot of these stairs. Or had it? He couldn’t really be certain.

“Nothin’s wrong, is it?” he said.

“Come on!”
Ratso was impatient, then pleading. “Will you come on, please?”

He waited until Joe had begun the climb, then he took hold of the banister once again and pulled himself up the stairs.