Midnight Cowboy (10 page)

Juanita on her way out of the room stopped at his chair to look him over at close range. Then she nodded, still looking at him, and said: “Quite a horse, quite a horse. If I had me one like this, I’d head East with it, New York City. Hear tell it’s all fags there, fags and money and hungry women. Young stud like this in the stable, I’d clean up good.” She shrugged and walked toward the door. “But look what I got, will you?” Juanita jabbed the air with her thumb in the direction of Tombaby Barefoot. Then she and Perry went through the dining room into the back of the house.

Joe knew good and well that the woman who had just left the room was a frightful person. She had said things appalling enough to shrivel the balls of Tombaby Barefoot a dozen times over, and she was clearly selfish and callous and disagreeable in all possible ways. He knew too that in Tombaby here, hands folded grandmotherlike across his stomach, was a cold skinny black tongue connected to a heart full of poison. And the house itself, with so many darknesses beyond the darknesses he could see, was fearsome as a nest of vipers. But still he would have moved into it with these persons on a second’s notice. For they were not one, alone in the place, but two, sharing the horrors of it and of one another; and he saw clearly—without knowing what name to give it (love? hate?) or how it came to be or what it could lead to-some kind of priceless safety in their connection with one another.

Joe felt the soft eyes of the halfbreed upon him. He lifted his bourbon glass and said, “Well, here you go, Tombaby.”

Tombaby had no drink. His hands were figeting with one another on his stomach and he was looking at Joe with a damp smile on his mouth. “Oh yes, here I go,” he said, and he kept on smiling, kept on looking.

After a moment in which the Andrews Sisters sang
The Shrine of Saint Cecilia
, Juanita appeared in the doorway. “Son?” She was beckoning to Joe with her hand “Come on, come on! We got somethin’ for you.”

Joe followed Juanita through the dining room and into a long dark hallway. They stopped at a closed door at the end of the hall. Juanita hit the door with the back of her hand. “All right, Dolores.”

She looked at Joe. “Go ahead, son, enjoy yourself.” She turned the knob and gave him a gentle shove forward.

In a corner of the room stood a girl of no more than seventeen, short, dark, clean-faced. She wore a long blue robe held tight about her body as if for protection. She looked at Joe with a mixture of fear and hostility and seemed to be trying to think of ways to keep him at bay.

Joe closed the door and took a step toward her. The girl stiffened as he approached.

He said, “What’s the matter, miss?” But the girl said nothing.

Puzzled, Joe started to leave the room, but when his hand was on the doorknob, the girl said, “No!”

He turned to look at her again. The girl studied his face for a moment, and then the fear and hostility gradually drained from it, leaving nothing, just resignation. She turned her back to him and began slowly to untie the robe. When she had stepped out of it, she walked quickly to the bed in a way that made Joe feel he was stealing something from her. The girl lay flat on her back, stared at the ceiling. She was motionless.

After a moment, Joe walked over to the bed and looked at her face. She wouldn’t turn her eyes to him.

He tried not to look at her body, feeling it had not truly been offered to him, but his eyes were not entirely under his control. They traveled quickly over the bed, saw a kind of sweet plumpness, olive-tinted cream in color, with many soft round places, two of them tipped with perfect rosettes, and one, the softest of all, dark-tufted, mysterious.

He held his hands in front of himself.

“Say, miss, I, uh …”

He wanted to say something to this girl, something important, something deeper than a thought, a fact about himself: that making love was the one special use he had found for his manhood, and therefore he could not pride-lessly climb onto someone just to take his pleasure, too much would be lost. But such facts, scarcely understood by their owners, do not easily yield themselves up in the form of speech. “I don’t partic’ly think—what I mean, ‘less
you’re
in the mood, why don’t we just—”

“No speak,” she said. “No onnastan.”

Joe walked around the foot of the bed to the place where she had stepped out of her robe. He picked it up and placed it over her body. The girl looked at him, astonished. He shook his head back and forth several times, trying to convey gently to her his reluctance. She studied his face for trickery. Joe offered her a cigarette. She declined and he lighted one for himself.

The girl looked at him for a long time, then she lifted her head, resting on her elbow, and looked at him some more. “Hey,” she said, and patted the place next to her on the bed. Joe walked over and sat with her. She took his cigarette and rubbed it on the bedside stand, leaving another black mark on the maple finish.

She took Joe’s hand and kissed it and smiled. Joe kissed her hand. Then she took his again and kissed each of the fingers in turn. Joe returned the gesture and then he kissed the palm of her hand. They looked into one another’s eyes for a long time, and then the girl began to frown and there were tears on her eyelashes. Apparently she had things to say, too, things that were not going to get said, not on this night, not to Joe Buck, maybe never to anyone. He bent over her and touched the tears away with his tongue. Then he withdrew his face from hers and smiled at her, showing all those fine white teeth, and the girl began to laugh. She pulled at his clothes.

In a moment they were both on the bed, holding, being held, exploring, caressing, touching, sampling, kissing. And then there was a certain preliminary moment, a very quiet moment, a gentle, dangerous, important moment in which neither of them breathed. Until they breathed together. And this was followed by the deepest embrace of all, and then there took place the easy, easy, easy beginnings of a giving and a taking and a taking and a giving that caused the girl’s eyes to lose their power of focus. And at a certain moment he waited, and waited and waited, causing her to call out to him in her own tongue words of love which he nonetheless understood, and when he knew he had waited long enough he began to build for her the finest thing of which he was capable.

And then suddenly he stopped moving.

The girl clutched his shoulders.

Joe’s head was cocked to one side, listening for something. And then he withdrew himself from her, so quickly that the girl called out in pain, and he jumped from the bed and looked toward a closet in the corner of the room. The door was ajar.

The girl sat up in bed: “Hey! Hey! You crazy?”

But Joe remained standing there, and after a moment the door was pushed all the way open from within. He saw that it was not a closet at all but an adjoining room.

Seated on a stool was Perry. Behind him stood Juanita, and towering above both of them was Tombaby Barefoot.

Perry was smiling.

“Go ahead, Joe,” he said. “Don’t let
us
stop you.”

Within seconds, Perry was on the floor of the bedroom and Joe sat astride his chest, still naked, and working hard with his fists, bent on obliterating that smile. The girl screamed, but Perry himself offered no resistance whatever. In fact he looked directly into Joe’s eyes in a way that was clearly calculated to provoke him further. Juanita began barking out short unintelligible phrases made up of ugly words and Spanish ones. Joe, stopping for a moment, held his fist over Perry’s face. “Don’t smile any more,” he begged. “Quit it now. Please.” But Perry would not quit and the blows continued. The girl was now behind Joe, pulling at his shoulders with all her strength, and then Juanita and Tombaby were surrounding him, too, and there were hands all over Joe’s naked body as he was drawn away from the bleeding man on the floor. Joe struggled to free himself and then a fist caught him in the stomach. This fist belonged to Juanita. It took Joe’s breath. On the edge of the bed, he doubled over, trying to pull some air into him. Surrounding his lowered head were a number of legs that made a kind of cell around him. Still he felt hands all over him and some of them were soft damp hands and they glided all over his back and along his thighs. Combining with the pain in his stomach these hands sickened him, and he began to retch and vomit. But nothing came out. Still the hands continued and one of them began to manipulate him in a surprising way that caused in him a kind of nightmare panic, and when he was able to achieve a little air, he used it to gird himself for further struggle. But at this point, a voice, Juanita’s, said in a loud whisper, “You want it, Tombaby, they’s only one way you gonna have it.”

Now there was a crash in which everything was at once obliterated, and instantly re-created, but in a totally different perspective:

The room had become a hole, shaped something like a well, and Joe was lying in the bottom of it, looking up. No, it was only his head that was on the bottom. Everything else, even his own body lying on the bed, was above him. And beyond his toes, way up near the top of everything, were people standing: the halfbreed and the hag. They were arguing but their voices were muted, almost inaudible. It was as if his ears were submerged in something liquid that deadened his hearing. Now the woman floated out of view and Joe Buck seemed to be alone with a big yellow-looking thing leaning over the edge of the bed. It was reaching down with both hands toward Joe. And then the opening at the top of the hole was completely covered over by this fat form darkening everything so that it was no longer possible to see. Joe felt the air had been cut off, but when he gasped, he found there was still some left for breathing. He was desperate for light and began to try to work his neck muscles in a way that might pull his head up into the light.

Gradually he became aware that some effort was being made up above, someone was trying to release him from the anguish and the darkness. It was as if some giant force were being applied at the top of the well, drawing Joe slowly upward, upward, upward, using his sex as a handle. As he knew himself to be closer and closer to freedom, the constriction he felt became more and more intolerable. He fought hard to cooperate with the force that was drawing him upward, straining every muscle in order to help. And then, just as it became clear what exactly was being enacted upon him, something broke deep inside of him, and he felt that he had fought too hard and lost everything in the effort; he felt his life spurting out of him uncontrollably, and in a way it was shamefully pleasurable to be at the end of the battle. But he had not won anything, and there was no longer anything up at the top of the hole and he was still way down in the bottom of it where “Perry pushed me,” he said in his own mind. “My friend, Perry, he shove me down a hole.”

“Shove
me
down no hole! I may be shee-it, but f’m now on, anybody look like they gonna flush me down better look out!”

Joe was fierce in the mirror. Two days had passed and he had not left his room. He was pale and he had hunger cramps and something was wrong with the back of his head. But even in this sorry shape he was able with no effort at all to hold a certain new idea in his head: that there was in this world only one person who had his and only his interests at heart. “Cowboy,” he said to his image, addressing it with a kind of excited enthusiasm that looked a great deal like love, “I’m gonna take care of you, I’m gonna work my butt off for you, I’m gonna coddle you to death. See this crapper they call a room? You gonna get out of here one of these days. Your head ain’t broke for good, hm-mm, not by a long shot.” He liked the new determination in his voice, and there was something new in his eyes, something wild and dangerous, and he was delighted to see it there.

Joe had in these days alone stumbled upon this new kind of fuel to operate on. He had taken a lot of angers, large and small, old and recent—the one against Perry was of no special importance, it merely sparked the others—and together they made something bracing, almost intoxicating: fury itself. He had taken out all of his years, like things stored in a trunk, and picked them over for memories that would help sustain this fierce new power, and it seemed that everything his mind lit upon was perfectly usable material, supporting the view that the world’s indifference to him stemmed from downright hostility. He didn’t know what it was based on, but there seemed to be something about him that no one wanted to be kin to. This feeling, always just below the surface, was one of many he did not know how to consider in his mind: the feeling of being a person with no real place in the world, an alien even under the red-white-and-blue of his birth, one who did not belong even in his own neighborhood.

He had gone about always, even in these most familiar places of his life, with a slight frown of uneasiness, his head cocked for some clue to the true meaning of the language he heard spoken but which was clearly not his own, walking softly as if unsure of the very ground of this peculiar planet. And now, thinking it all over, carefully but inexpertly, there seemed to him to have been from the very beginning a campaign afoot to make him aware always and always and always of his own alien status. And the awful conclusion he reached was that nearly everyone he knew or had ever known was part of this conspiracy. Even the many persons with whom he had enjoyed a certain sexual popularity—especially these persons—had refused any contact with his other aspects: They took their pleasure and they ran like the wind, no doubt laughing at the earnestness with which he had gone about gratifying them. And so of course they had a very special place in his new fury, but it was in no way exclusive to others. He ticked off in his mind the persons and groups and institutions he felt this anger against—old teachers, the army, his little pink boss at the cafeteria, Adrian Schmidt’s magazine-store mob, and so on. By far the greater number had no name. They included just about everyone he’d gone to school with, scores of clerks and public servants and strangers who had dealt with him brusquely or condescendingly or who had ignored him altogether. The list flourished until it included buildings and banks and libraries whose workings he did not understand and whose employees always seemed to treat him as if he had come to rob the place or to defile it in some way. At length he realized the entire city of Albuquerque was in this category, and this thought invited his mind to think in broader terms: if Houston were no better than Albuquerque, it was a safe bet that Hong Kong and Des Moines and London town were no better than Houston. Following this logic, the map of the entire world was quickly filled in with the color of his fury.