Midnight Cowboy (7 page)

“Tch.” Marvin sighed. “All
right
, Perry.”

Perry would not remove his eyes until Marvin repeated what he had said, omitting the implication of resistance.

“All right, Perry.” And, “Thank you!” he threw in for good measure.

Perry went through the revolving door, and Joe followed close behind. As they passed the window, Joe looked in at the little movie scientist. It was eerie to see him sitting there, in motionless obedience, his thick glasses catching the light of the cafeteria at an angle that made them look like two high-powered flashlights following Perry’s departure.

They were in a parking lot, Perry leaning on the fender of a white MG, Joe standing before him, thumbs caught in his hip pockets, smiling uncertainly, wondering what in the world was about to take place. The night was cold and clear, and the stars, like the possibilities, seemed brighter and far more numerous than usual. Joe laughed. Perry smiled and looked at him and shook his head in the manner of one who is indulging a small child.

“Joe,” he said. He made frequent and gentle use of a name, knowing that to its owner it is likely to be the most sacred word in the language, reaching not only the ear but the heart as well. “What’re you laughing for, Joe?”

Joe shook his head, still smiling. “Beats me.” He laughed some more, trying still to pretend he understood everything and yet fully aware he was merely making a fool of himself.

“We got to get you cooled, Joe, we got to get you tuned in. Would you like that?”

“Yeah, hell yeah, that’s just what I need.”

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Joe?”

“Well now, tuned in, that’s a—No, not exactly; I wouldn’t say I knew exactly.” He tried another little laugh, an immediate failure.

“No, you don’t, Joe. You don’t know anything much. But that’s valuable. Otherwise you couldn’t learn. You want to learn, don’t you?”

“Oh yeah, you bet I do, Perry.”

“Well then, isn’t it a good thing you don’t know much?”

Joe frowned, afraid to risk another laugh.

“Do you trust me, Joe?”

Joe nodded, quite vigorously. He meant for this nodding to express all of his respect and affection for Perry, and he went at it in earnest. And then he heard himself babbling something: “I sure do, Christ yes I do. But I’m just fairly new here in town, and uh—” He was trying to get some point over to this highly important new friend, but it wasn’t coming out at all right. “I just got to town here, I’m a stranger, I come in from—” No, that wasn’t it, not even close.

“You don’t have to tell me where you came from, Joe. You’re here, aren’t you?”

“I’m what? Here? Yeah I am, by God.” This was not the kind of conversation in which he’d learned to participate in the army. There it had been fairly safe to laugh and pull a certain face when you’d lost the thread, and that usually got you through. But with Perry here it was different: He kept pretty close track of things.

“I’m going to help you, but I want you to relax and trust me. Now listen, have you got a room near here?”

“A room! Yeah, I got a room in a hotel.”

“Let’s go there then. Where is it?”

“It’s got an
O
missing.”

“Where? I mean, do we walk or do we drive?”

“Either way, we can just—”

“How far is it, Joe?”

“I’d say it was a few blocks.”

“Get in.”

They parked the MG across the street from the place, walked past the desk clerk’s cubbyhole and up the stairs to Joe’s room.

Perry sat on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t see a radio, Joe.”

“Radio? Nope, no. I don’t have a radio. Yet. I’m gonna get one, though.”

“Make yourself at home, Joe. It’s your room, isn’t it? And you’re with a friend, so relax.”

Joe sat on a straight-backed wooden chair. “It make a lot of difference in here to have a radio.”

“Yes it would. It’s very bad not having one.”

Joe said, “I believe I’d like to have me a transistor, you know about them and all?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Mm-hm, well, I’m saving for one.”

“Starting when?”

“Tomorrow.” A moment passed, then Joe said, “What I want, I want one with some power in here, not one of them little dinkies.” He looked around the place, scanning the dark walls quickly. “You understand what I mean?”

“Exactly,” Perry said. “You want a radio with some power. You don’t want one of those little dinkies.”

Perry placed a thin, hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth and lighted it. He sucked some smoke out of it, making a hissing sound, then held his breath and handed it to Joe. Joe tried to imitate Perry, but he gave away his inexperience by emitting the smoke at once.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, Joe. You must learn from me and then you’ll know. Now—” he held the cigarette in the air between them—”this is not tobacco, Joe, this is a special cigarette, containing the dried leaves and flowers of a hemp known botanically as
Cannabis sativa
. It’s comparable to the high-powered non-dinky transistor radio you’re saving up for starting tomorrow. No, that’s not quite true. You and I are the radios, the
Cannabis sativa
is the, uh, juice, power….”

He stopped talking and filled his lungs again, using sign language to get the technique across to Joe. Together they finished the cigarette and then they sat in silence for a few minutes and then they smoked another one. Joe got up to open the window. Perry told him not to. Then Joe realized he was enjoying his own movements in a new way, and this caused him to smile.

“That stuff
helps,”
he said. “I believe it helps.”

Perry took the tiny ends of the two cigarettes they had smoked and tore them to pieces, dropping the fragments into the sink and washing them down the drain. “Unlike tobacco, the butt of the
Cannabis sativa
must be disposed of entirely, Joe. There.”

“Hey!” Joe said suddenly. “That was
marijuana!
That cigarette had marijuana in it!”

“That’s right, Joe.”

“Hell!” Joe was delighted. “No wonder I feel so nutty! You sure are one sneaky devil, Perry.” He went about the room testing his responses to movement, to seeing, to simply being, and he found them altered, heightened, and he felt more amused with himself than ever before.

Perry lay back on the bed. He took a long while adjusting himself, and when he was spread out comfortably, ankles crossed, hands behind his head, he said, “You comfortable there, Joe?”

“I’m fine,” Joe said. But suddenly he wasn’t fine at all. Something was wrong and he couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was as if some nameless threat were creeping silently into the room from under the door and through the cracks in the window and he was at a loss to stop it, or even describe it.

“Is there anything you want, Joe?”

“Oh no, no, I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. You’re not fine, Joe.”

“Huh?”

“You need help.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, yes, definitely. And I, in concert with the
Cannabis sativa
, am here for just that purpose: to help you find out what you want and show you how to take it.”

Joe felt as if his heart were filled with air; it might burst, and painfully, dangerously; he pressed on it with the palm of his hand. That didn’t help at all. He picked up a book of matches and began to fool with it, trying to distract himself from the anxiety he felt. The matches were very real and definitely a relief; he bent them and twisted them and put them down and picked them up. Perry was still talking:

“It’s not just tonight you don’t know what to do with.

Your whole life is a burden to you. You frown a lot, Joe. And you pick things up and put them down.” He looked pointedly at the book of matches. “You have plans for burning down the world. But you’re losing a lot of motion, a lot of time. You’ve got to get cool. Find out what you want and rule out everything else, and then you’ll be cool as can be. Now: What have you got to do?”

“Find out what I want?”

“Correct. And then?”

“Ummrn.”

“Rule out …” Perry coached.

“Rule out everything else.”

“Right. Now again.”

“Find out what I want, and rule out everything else.”

“You’re getting tuned in, Joe. That was lesson one. Here’s
exercise
one: this room. What is there in it that you want? Just name it, anything at all, and I’ll see to it you get it.”

Joe started to scan the room with his eyes, and Perry said: “Look at me. Maybe that will help you, Joe. That’s it. Now I’ll ask you again: Is there anything at all you want?”

Joe studied Perry’s face, straining to find a clue in it. But he found none.

“You know, Joe, there are people and quite a few hundred of them at that who would pay out considerable sums of money to be in your position right now: locked in a room with me and being asked what they want.”

Joe was actually dizzy from the mental effort he was expending. Another long moment passed. Then suddenly Perry was off the bed and standing before Joe’s chair, looking down at him. His movement from the bed had been so quick as to be almost violent. The quiet of the place and the mood Joe felt had been instantly annihilated, and now a strange young man had hold of his shirt front, was gripping him in a way that compelled him to look up into his face.

He was surprised to find no anger or violence in the man’s eyes, as there had been in his movements. He was simply looking into Joe’s face in a gently penetrating way, and when he had looked for a long moment, he said, “If we’re going to be friends, Joe, there’s just one rule …”

Joe felt he was living through some miracle: This stranger, a fine and handsome and knowledgeable and authoritative person, was turning his powers, his focus, his friendship, upon such an unworthy object as himself. Surely he had made some mistake in judgment, selecting Joe Buck for his attentions. When he discovered his error that would be the end of it. Meanwhile Joe was terrified of making some wrong gesture, speaking some stupid giveaway word that would hasten Perry’s departure. He tried to think up ways of stalling off this inevitable blunder, little words and gestures that would nudge it gently forward in time. But he wasn’t up to it. He knew he wasn’t up to it. Perry was too wise, too far ahead of the game, he couldn’t be fooled.

... and the rule is, no crap. There is to be no crap. None. I am sick of people who know what they want and won’t take it, won’t even speak up and name it. When I say to you, ‘What do you want, Joe,’ you answer. You just say whatever that thing is you want. You understand me?”

“Yeah. Yeah I do, Perry, I do.”

“That’s good.” His face broke gradually into a smile, and then he released Joe’s shirt front and sat on the edge of the bed, bridging with his eyes the few feet of space between himself and Joe. When Joe’s eyes had joined his own, he said, “Say it now. Name the thing you want.”

Stupid bastard, Joe said to himself,
say
something, talk up, can’t you talk up? So stupid you don’t know what you want? Say something, say anything, and that’ll be a start.

“I, uh, I think I might, uh, be—um-uh …” He closed his eyes and frowned, inclined his head toward his body, as if what he wanted were trapped somewhere in his stomach, and might be conjured out of him by an act of will.

“Just say it,” Perry encouraged him. “Whatever it is.”

“Hopeless. I’m hopeless.” Oh Jesus Christ! he thought, the truth is an ugly sonofabitch. He lifted his shoulders, wanting his face to disappear into his body.

When he opened his eyes, he half expected Perry to be on his way out the door. Instead he was looking at him as gently as ever, and with even more concern than before.

“Why? Tell me why you’re hopeless, Joe.”

“Shee-it, Perry, I may as well tell you, I am dumb. I am. I am one dumb sombitch. I don’t know shee-it. I can’t talk right, I can’t think straight.” He laughed, but his face was grave. He saw nothing funny at all. For he had hung some ugly, ungainly, unforgivable thing in the air between them and it had to be pushed away; he hammered at it with his laughter. But he couldn’t get at it. The more he laughed, the bigger it got.

Suddenly he saw in his mind a beautiful picture: Sally Buck’s gravestone, pure white and utterly blank, needing to be filled in, inscribed. The crayon in his head drew a quick sketch on the stone, a cartoon of himself, and that somehow made him easier: The picture was complete. He could look at Perry again.

“I keep thinkin’,” he heard himself saying, somewhat to his surprise, “that what I’ll do is I’ll keep worshing them dishes and then they’ll bring in some more and I’ll worsh ‘em, and then uh …”

“And then …”