Midnight Cowboy (28 page)

He was in the line with everyone else.

Finding himself in such a remarkable situation surprised him into wakefulness. A cool wintry dawn was coming in the window, washing everything with its own colors.

Ratso was wide awake, too, and he was in considerable distress. His face was wet with tears and misery was written all over it.

“Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” Joe asked.

Ratso looked at him quickly and then he looked away again, and softly, almost inaudibly, he said, “I peed.”

“You what?”

“Peed! Peed! Peed my pants!”

“So what? Is that so bad?”

“I’m all
wet!
And my seat’s all wet.”

“Hell, man, don’t cry.”

“Here I am going to Florida, and my leg hurts, my butt hurts, my chest hurts, my face hurts, and like that’s not enough, so I piss all over myself.”

Joe began to laugh. He realized that laughter was inappropriate, but he felt good and the whole thing seemed very funny.

“I’m falling apart,” Ratso said. “That’s funny?”

Joe nodded. And in a moment Ratso was laughing, too.

Then Joe said, “You just had you a little rest stop wasn’t on the schedule.” They both laughed as if this was the funniest remark they’d ever heard. They laughed for several miles. Ratso’s face turned blue and his eyes were wild and bloodshot, and he complained that it hurt him to laugh so, but when he showed signs of letting up, Joe would speak out some new comment on the scatalogical aspects of Ratso’s misery, and they would laugh some more. The last three or four remarks were clearly not very funny, but they enjoyed the laughing just the same. Then Ratso started to cough and choke, and he had to lean forward while Joe patted him on the back.

After this seizure, Ratso was weak and drowsy. His spirit had been quieted, but the interval of laughter had been exhausting. Joe told him there were plenty of empty seats and they would find a dry one at the next stop, and he promised that in one of these towns they would be able to buy some new trousers. He convinced Ratso that everything would be all right eventually, and by the time the bus stopped for breakfast near Richmond, Ratso was fast asleep. Joe drew the window shade to keep the sun from his eyes.

A few seconds later, when Joe stepped off the bus, he was surprised to find that the special quality of the dawn was spreading itself into the entire morning. He remembered having had some splendid dream but he couldn’t recall the details of it. There was this almost painful prettiness about the day, even the air was pungent with it, and he supposed it all had to do with being out of New York City.

In the restaurant he ordered blueberry pancakes and a cup of coffee, and while he was waiting he was caught by some swift and profound emotion which he mistook for sadness. The feeling became so intense in him he thought he was going to have to vomit. He hurried back to the men’s room, locked himself into one of the booths and bent over the toilet. He put his finger into his throat, but nothing came out but air. Then he started to cry. This surprised him. He wondered what these tears were all about on a day when he had been feeling so good. Soon they stopped. He blew his nose. Then he went back into the restaurant and ate his breakfast. The pancakes were good, but after the first bite he forgot to savor them. For some of the special quality of the morning had seeped right into the restaurant, so that all the while he ate he thought about the day he was having instead of the food, even ended up leaving half of his coffee to go out there and get right into the thick of it.

It was an awesome thing, this Saturday morning. It had simply taken over everything. Joe felt he could’ve reached out and closed his fingers around it.

But what made it this way? He walked over to the edge of the parking lot and looked at the ground. It was hard brown mud covered by some stubborn colorless weed that winter couldn’t kill, and in the distance was a row of ordinary naked trees with nothing special about them. The sky had a very soft blue color you could look at without the least squinting, and the air was cool, very cool but not cold, so that breathing it was like breathing the soft blue of the sky and you knew you were getting the good of it in you. Joe stood there on the edge of the parking lot and cried some more, shaking his head in puzzlement at the tears streaming down his face, full of the wonder of this perfectly ordinary weather and pondering the freakish sadness that had come upon him.

The fact was that it was not sadness at all, but he had no way of knowing that.

He wiped his face on the arm of his jacket and then he got back onto the bus.

Ratso was still sleeping.

They rode on through the Southern morning, and the odd intensity of the day continued. Each little town they passed through seemed to have such Saturday things going on in it, people hauling Saturday-sized grocery loads, children running and bicycling and skating, gorging themselves on their Saturday freedom, young women already in curlers and lipstick headed for Woolworth’s to buy still more beauty things to wear for their Saturday young men who filed in and out of every barber shop or stood about on the sidewalks of all these main streets jingling the change in their pockets, waiting for a shine or for new cleats to be put on, impatient for the Saturday night that was coming at them slow as a clock, slow but they believed in it, they knew it was coming at them, they could sniff it in the air, and Saturday’s old women could be seen, too, in twos and in bunches they convened on every corner to cluck their teeth and speak of death while an occasional old man strutted by to confound them with his survival.

Joe saw all this, and at Raleigh in North Carolina he was happy to step right into it all.

He bought new corduroy trousers for Ratso at a dry-goods store near the depot, and for himself a cheap make-do jacket, a dark-blue one with white buttons. He told himself it was make-do but he liked it all right, and he placed the stained one in a trash receptacle.

Joe tried to move Ratso off the bus, so that he could take him into the men’s room and help him change his trousers. But Ratso wouldn’t wake up. Joe tried to rouse him by telling him they would soon reach South Carolina and it would be time to keep an eye peeled for the first palm tree, but Ratso was unresponsive. He did open his eyes for a moment, but he didn’t seem to be seeing anything with them.

Two hours later, at Bennettsville, while most of the other passengers were off the bus stretching and having coffee and using the facilities, Joe carried Ratso to the back seat of the bus. The long underwear was wet, too, and removing it was a chore. Ratso was helpless as an infant. Joe had never seen him naked before. His pathetic little sex looked useless, just a token affair, something to pee through. His right leg was skinny and twisted as an old man’s cane, and he was marked from hip to knee with large black and green and purple bruises from the various falls he had sustained in the past few days. He was like a plucked chicken, one who’d spent his life getting the worst of barnyard scraps and had finally cocked up his heels and quit. This history was written all over his body, and Joe read it well and with a feeling for the sacredness of it. For a moment he saw in his mind a motion picture of himself wrapping this naked, badly damaged human child in the blanket, taking him up gently and holding him rock-a-bye and git-along-little-dogie in his lap for the rest of the trip. But he snapped off that picture fast.

They settled into that dry seat on the back of the bus, and then they rode on some more, rode on through more and more miles of this Saturday day that was as rich and mysterious as a memory. Ratso slept the deepest sleep in the world. Joe told himself that this was a healing sleep, and by the time they reached Savannah the sun had set and it was time for dinner, and still Ratso slept.

Joe didn’t leave the bus. He wasn’t especially hungry. He stayed at Ratso’s side, and he went on feeling and savoring the special qualities of the day, even though night had come.

Among the many things he thought about were the astonishing remarks he had made to Ratso about getting a job and new shoes and having a regular life with its own bathroom. And he knew it was true that he would one day have those things, and real Saturdays like the one he had been watching out the window all day. Probably he would be a dishwasher or a short-order clerk. There would be other people working in the same place with him and at first they wouldn’t look at him, they wouldn’t realize he was just like them, one of them in fact, but gradually they would get the idea. They would begin to notice he was wearing regular shoes and somehow would come to know that he was no mere hotel person but had a place of his own with a private bathroom. And there would begin to be some dropping in and visiting back and forth, and no doubt one of these new people in due course would be a woman, not necessarily a blonde either or any one particular kind of woman, but she would have lipstick and curlers, they all have that, and she would be glad to have a man to take care of her, one who was good at lovemaking; and Ratso would be like a child to them and they would make him wash his hair at least once a week, or do it for him if he was too sickly. And the whole trick to having these things come out right was that you had to work hard and wait for them to come out right, you couldn’t just say
oh it will never be it will never be;
you just had to keep on until it was, even if in the meantime your feet hurt and you grew a long white beard that reached to the ground. He had taken on a plan once before in his life, back in Houston when he decided to become a hustling cowboy and seek his fortune in the East. Well, he had carried that out, he had become a hustling cowboy and he had sought his fortune. There just wasn’t any there, but he had sought it and that was the whole point. And now, this time, maybe there wouldn’t be any ordinary life for him but he would goddam well do some seeking, and go on stubborn and hard-assed about it till the day he died.

It occurred to him that he was doing some thinking without the aid of a mirror, and he wondered if that wasn’t some kind of an improvement.

He slept through the rest of the stops that night. He heard one driver say Jacksonville, and then he heard an altogether new driver announce Daytona, but he was only half awake. He was having a pretty deep sleep, considering it was a bus. The only thing he could remember from the night were those two calls for towns, and yet it was not surprising in the morning to awaken and find what he found.

Ratso’s body had an abandoned look, rear end half off the seat, back bent at an awful angle, head slumped to the side in a breakneck position, arms splayed out like

useless sticks, eyes wide open and not seeing a single thing. Obviously the thing in charge had gone out of it. Ratso was dead.

And wouldn’t you know it would be a beautiful blue-sky day with palm trees swaying everywhere just exactly as pictured in Ratso’s folders and in
Florida and the Caribbean?

But to hell with all that.

The thing to do was to see about getting him buried, no doubt a costly procedure. He took out his money and counted forty-eight dollars and some change. The thing would probably cost some fantastic sum, but if you were going to be the kind of person who went around offering to take care of people, you damn well had to look out for their corpses when they died.

His thoughts didn’t seem right to him. He thought he ought to get upset, perhaps even hysterical and say
oh help help my friend is dead and I am all alone
. But he didn’t feel that way. He just didn’t, and that was all there was to it.

It was as if he’d known it was going to happen. Someone (who? Ratso?) had been whispering it to him for a couple of days now, whispering it to him in a kind of death language that you weren’t supposed to under stand until later. You get the idea somehow, but you don’t
know
you know until it happens.

And now it had happened.

And so there would have to be a funeral, and he’d have to make some deal with an undertaker who would do the job right, but cheap and on credit.

No. First of all, he’d have to get the body off the bus, and then … and then they would …

Who?

The bus people.

The bus people would simply have to steer him to an undertaker, and then he would make this deal to get Ratso buried on the installment plan. (Ratso? Buried? Is he really dead? Yeah, Ratso’s dead, he’s really dead now. See, there he is, dead.) And then he’d get a job. And keep it. The thing was to
keep
it. And gradually pull together enough nickels to put a stone on the grave, nothing wild, just a stone with the name and all: Rico. Not Ratso. And he couldn’t spell Rizzo, but he would find somebody who could. You had to have the spelling right on the marker so that when people passed by later they’d say,
Oh, look who’s buried here, Rico Rizzo
.

Who was going to pass by and say that?

Never mind.

There’d be somebody around who could spell it.

That wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was what to do first: tell somebody.

The driver seemed to be the person in charge.