Midnight Cowboy (29 page)

Joe got up and walked down the aisle and stood next to the driver, leaning down and looking out at the Sunshine Parkway, having the same view the driver was having. After a moment, the driver acknowledged him.
“Yes
sir.”

Joe said, “My friend is dead in the back seat but I don’t know how to spell his name.”

The driver said, “Your friend is
what
in the back seat?”

Joe said, “Dead. He’s dead as a doornail.”

“Is this some kind of a …?” The driver looked at Joe quickly and then he turned his eyes back onto the Parkway. He looked into the rear-view mirror and then he slowed down and pulled over to the far-right lane and stopped the bus altogether. He climbed out of his seat, and as he followed Joe to the back of the bus, he said in his official bus-driver voice: “All right, folks, everything’s fine. You be in Miami less’n an hour now.”

The other passengers knew everything wasn’t
fine
. Many of them craned their necks to get a look at the trouble, but they couldn’t see anything. Those persons in the immediate area could have seen something, but they didn’t want to be caught trying.

The driver took a look at Ratso and then he nodded at Joe. He began to take his hat off, but he didn’t follow through.

“Is he kin to you?” he asked Joe.

Joe nodded.

Then the driver said, “Don’t you want to close his eyes?”

“Close ‘em?”

“You just reach over and you close ‘em. That’s all.”

Joe closed Ratso’s eyes.

“Well,” said the driver uncomfortably, “I guess we’ll just drive on, right? There isn’t anything else to do.”

Joe said, “Yes sir.”

The driver made another announcement. “Just a little sickness, folks, nothing serious. We’ll be in Miami in—” he consulted his watch—”forty minutes.”

Joe went through his plans in his mind, and then once again, and still a third time until he was certain he had done everything there was to do up to this moment. And then he did something he’d always wanted to do from the very beginning, from the very first night he’d met Ratso at Everett’s Bar on Broadway: He put his arm around him to hold him for a while, for these last few miles anyway. He knew this comforting wasn’t doing Ratso any good. It was for himself. Because of course he was scared now, scared to death.