Midnight Cowboy (5 page)

That was the end of Joe Buck’s fourth blonde. The horse threw her, and the old lady simply broke to pieces.

This news reached him late one afternoon while he was cleaning his truck at the motor pool. A chaplain’s assistant came over to him and handed him a telegram from a woman who worked in Sally’s shop.

When Joe had read the telegram several times, the soldier from the chaplain’s office asked him if he was all right. Joe didn’t seem to understand the question. He went behind the truck and stayed there. After a few moments, the other soldier found Joe lying on his side under the truck, shaking from head to foot, the telegram stuffed into his mouth, his arms clasped about himself.

The young assistant didn’t know what to do. “Are you all right, soldier?” he asked. But there was no answer. A little later he said, “Why don’t you come out of there now?”

But Joe stayed where he was. His eyes were wild, and the assistant was alarmed. He went for help, bringing back two soldiers to remove Joe from underneath the truck and a doctor to give him an injection. Then they put him in the hospital and kept him under sedation for a few days and of course he was unable to attend Sally Buck’s funeral.

After three weeks he went back to his duties. And when his time was up, Joe tried to re-enlist. But the army didn’t seem to want any soldiers who reacted as he had to the death of a mere grandmother. They paid him off. He went back to Albuquerque, not quite realizing until he arrived that no one was there waiting for him. He checked into a hotel and went calling on Sally’s friends. Sally had left no will. He learned she had a sister, one she’d never mentioned, up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. This old woman knew nothing of Joe either. She had come down, liquidated the assets of the dead beautician—including the house Joe Buck had lived in from the age of seven—and had gone back to Idaho with the proceeds, never to be heard from again.

Now at the age of twenty-five, with his head full of grief and worry, Joe felt the need to do some thinking. But he was unused to having any very wide variety of thoughts in his head, and there seemed to be severe limits as well to his imagination. There was nothing wrong with these faculties in him, but they were untrained and did not serve him well in emergencies.

He stayed on in the hotel for a few days, spending most of his time up in his room with the shades drawn. Night and day became confused and he didn’t always remember to eat. He slept a good deal and had nightmares. Awake or sleeping, he pined for Sally Buck, sometimes calling out for her. Once he was certain she came into his room while he slept and sat on the edge of his bed. He awakened and there she was, fidgeting with her fingers as real as could be. He saw her face in profile. She was looking at the night sky through the open window. He said, “Sally, what am I going to do?” But she gave no sign of having heard him. And then she said something, but it was unclear. She had said either “I’ll get my house back” or “I can’t ride horseback.” Whichever it was, it was no help at all to Joe. But he was glad she’d shown herself to him once again.

One night he dreamed a dream that would become recurrent, a dream of an endless chain of people marching across the side of the world. From his vantage point in some chill and dark and silent corner he could see them coming up from over the eastern horizon, all joined at the bellybutton by a golden rope of light and walking to a rousing march beat, and he could see them moving along until they had gone out of sight behind the western horizon. There were people of all kinds, bus drivers and nuns, musicians and soldiers and ten-cent-store girls; there were chinamen and pilots, hillbillies and fat men and red-headed women; you could find miners and bank clerks there, millionaires, store detectives, swamis, babies, grandmothers, thieves; look for any kind of person in this golden rope and there would be one, a whore, a dwarf, a saint, a crazy man, cop, teacher, reporter, pretty girl, bookkeeper, shortstop, ragpicker. There seemed to be every kind of person but his own. He made many attempts to join them, running up close to the marching stream of golden people, hoping to discover an opening big enough to slip into; but just as he would find one there would be a rapid closing of ranks, the chain would become tight and exclusive and impossible to break into, and the dreamer was forced to remain always on his chill and dark and silent edge.

After this dream, Joe could no longer remain in that hotel room. He dressed and went into the nighttime streets of Albuquerque, wondering how such familiar places could be so strange to him. “You may know us,” said the buildings of the town, “but we don’t know you.” He walked over to the old neighborhood and stood outside Sally Buck’s house. The place was empty now and all the windows were black. He went around to the back yard and knocked on the window of Sally’s bedroom, half expecting some kind of an answer.

He waited and waited.

“The thing to do,” he thought at length, “is get the hell out of here, away to someplace.”

He went back to the hotel and placed his few belongings in a duffel bag, amazed that all of his years could be stuffed into something so small.

In Houston, Joe hoped to find a person named Natale, a barber he had known and liked in the army. But Natale had a long Italian surname, and Joe spent more than an hour in the bus station poring over the Houston telephone directory in unavailing efforts to find him. Before he gave up entirely he had dialed away a dollar’s worth of dimes.

Then he went out onto the sidewalk for a first good look at Houston. “Shee-it,” he thought, “this ain’t no improvement on nothing. Don’t look to me like this town needs any Joe Bucks in it. But they got one, goddam ‘em.”

He walked until he came to a hotel. It happened to be the one with the
O
missing in its sign, a cheap, dark place with poorly ventilated rooms and a bathroom floor always covered with water.

It was a cold January day. He sat on the edge of the bed wondering what to do about his predicament and not quite certain just what the predicament was. He saw a future for himself sitting on the edges of hotel-room beds trying to get his thoughts straight. In fifty years, with a long white beard reaching to the floor, he would surely find himself in just such a place, asking himself why it was that the world everywhere was as peculiar as the world in Albuquerque, and why it was he found himself shut out of it.

His only window gave on an airshaft, so that traffic sounds seemed to be heard only from a great distance. This silence, combined with his mood of uncertainty, put him under a kind of spell that lasted for several hours. Later when he would think about them these hours would remind him of a period in his childhood when the TV set had been out of order. Time had been an actual burden under which he was unable to move. It surrounded him like a solid mass through which movement was not only impossible but inconceivable. And now, during these hours in the H tel room, a chill entered him that had nothing to do with temperature or weather; it had more the quality of death about it.

He was saved from this spell by sleep, a long sleep, and when he awakened it was night. The memory of those damp and clammy hours was like the hand of a specter on the back of his neck. He put on his clothes, raced a comb through his hair, and hurried out of that hotel so fast it was as if some slimy thing with warts all over it were chasing him into the streets.

Some blocks away could be seen a brightly lighted street. Joe walked toward it eagerly like that dreamer in the dark moving toward the golden chain where life was, and as he drew nearer, the silence gave way to traffic sounds. In a few moments he was standing in front of the Sunshine Cafeteria, the place with the yellow sunburst over its door.

Walking into the Sunshine, Joe felt himself to be embraced by all of its sudden light and flesh and color in the heart of a dark dead country. It was nearly full, and he had a sense of knowing personally everybody in the place.

There were couples; pairs; groups; silent persons and chatterers; solitary people, some women but mostly men, smoking cigarettes and staring out over empty coffee cups. There were a few travelers and some people on their way to and from night jobs, and there were the inevitable loiterers, the kind to be found everywhere on earth, and a number of that special breed known best in the U.S.A.

At first glance these young men may appear to loiter in packs, for often they occupy one table or group about a single parking meter, but chances are they are as unconnected to one another as they are to the prairies and cities and rivers of their homeland. You will find in the eyes and demeanor of these persons a kind of restless sadness that is probably incurable; they seem to be suffering some nameless common loss, as if something of worth had been snatched from them with such shocking irrevocability that they have forgotten even what it was.

Joe stood just inside the door for a moment, as if scanning this crowd for a familiar face. If he found such a face, he would go over to it and say, “Shee-it, man, where in hell you been?” And finding none, he was tempted to pick out some stranger to say it to, but that took nerve. He went up to the counter and ordered coffee and a hamburger, and while he was waiting it happened that he found a face he liked. It was looking at him from a mirrored column in the middle of the counter. Shee-it, man, he said to himself but not aloud, admiring the good-looking, dark-eyed, tousel-haired, white-toothed image that returned his sweet, crooked smile with such warmth and spontaneity. Where in hell
you
been? Who, me? he answered, Christ, I don’t know
where
all! But I’m back! And he and the mirror had a good laugh.

And so Joe took to hanging around nights in this friendly place.

One night he fell into conversation with the busboy, a pretty, rather sissified Mexican.

“Poop, buddy-mine,” said Joe, who had begun to worry over his financial condition, “I’m about busted. They give you any kind of money in here, hauling all them dishes?”

“Iss not make rich,” the boy shrugged. “One dollar itch hour.”

“Yeah, but hell, you can
eat
stuff. Right?” An idea was coming into bloom in Joe’s head. “Isn’t that right? Don’t they let you eat stuff?”

The next day he got a job at the Sunshine. They put him to work on the afternoon shift, finishing at midnight. Joe liked the place so much that when midnight came he stayed on, eating a big meal and then smoking over a coffee cup throughout most of the night.

On his second night the Mexican busboy stopped at his table, scanned him with his quick black eyes, and said, “At first I sought you wass hosty-ler.”

“Oh yeah? Naw, naw, hell no.”

The next time the boy passed his table, Joe said, “Hey, what is that?”

“Iss what?”

“That thing you thought?”

“Iss what seeng I sought?”

Joe said, “What you said I, uh, you know, before.”

The boy frowned. “I am sorry my Eengleesh,” he said, leaving with his tray. And on the next trip he stopped and said, “I wass
chure
you wass hosty-ler.”

“That’s it!” Joe said. “What is that?”

“A hosty-ler?” The Mexican boy at first was skeptical, then somehow convinced himself of Joe’s innocence. “A hosty-ler iss
chick-chick-chick,”
he said, making a grinding motion with his hips and rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in a way that indicated money.
“¿Comprende?”

Joe had some loose images in his head but none that would assemble themselves into a firm clear thought.

“Ah, fooey,” said the boy. “
!Tu comprendes muy bien!”
And with a switch of the tail, he was off to another table, where a group of his friends were gathered.

This was a group Joe had noticed before with some interest: five young men. Four were of one general type that tended to laugh a great deal, chatter more than usual, and gesture often. They dressed with a kind of ostentatious boyishness, and their eyes darted about the place like birds unable to perch.

The fifth, however, was clearly of a different breed. He neither laughed nor spoke nor gestured; his attire seemed careless—old levis, a faded denim shirt, dirty white sneakers. His hair, the color of sand, was loosely brushed to the side, and his eyes were for the most part still and remote. He listened to the chatter with some amusement but no real involvement, and somehow this detachment gave him superiority over the others. They were given sufferance so long as they continued to amuse him without making any demands upon him. He was clearly killing time and seemed to have no need of anyone at all.

The Mexican boy stopped at this table, said something and then went on toward the kitchen. The four turned to look at Joe, but the fifth did not. Instead he rose, went to the counter for a fresh cup of coffee, and came directly to Joe’s table with it.

“May I sit down?”

Joe was flustered and pleased. “Oh hell yeah.” He got to his feet and began to shuffle chairs unnecessarily, unhinged by his sudden role of host. The visitor put out his hand and said, “Perry.”

“W-what’s that?”