Midnight Cowboy (9 page)

“Yes, Joe. But I want you to shut up now. Okay?”

Joe withdrew his arm slowly, and looked straight ahead. He stopped breathing for a moment and said, “I said too much, didn’t I.”

“Oh no, no you didn’t.” Perry said. “But now I want you to shut up. That’s all.”

“Okay, Perry,” Joe said. “That’s the least I can do.”

The little sports car turned off the freeway into a helter-skelter arrangement of trailer parks, building-supply places, old houses and small factories known as Newville, Texas. And then it drove onto an un-delineated field on which there were no trees or bushes, no vegetation at all, nothing but bare earth surrounding a big old frame house. No path led to this house and no driveway: Its placement in that setting seemed haphazard, as if it were the abandoned toy of some god-sized child who tomorrow might choose to wind up its bulldozer and do away with the object completely.

Perry parked the MG alongside the place.

As they climbed the front steps, a porch light went on, the door opened, and there, holding the screen for them, stood a tall and ungainly person named Tombaby Barefoot.

Tombaby Barefoot was a light-haired, pale, oddly constructed halfbreed. He had a small head and no shoulders to speak of, but from his stomach to the ground he was big and thick and heavy. He wore a gray sweatshirt with
HABVARD
printed on it, faded and torn levis, sneakers, and a pair of golden earrings.

“Hey Perry,” he said. His voice was soft and high, his accent Texan.

From inside the house came an angry growl: “Turn off that porch light, Princess.”

Tombaby smiled. “Mother wants you to fall on your asses, isn’t she sweet?” He shook hands with Perry and then with Joe Buck.

Perry said, “Joe, meet Tombaby Barefoot.”

“Pleased,” said the big pale epicene Indian.

“How do, Tombaby,” said Joe.

Tombaby Barefoot led the way through a hall and into the living room. He moved like a cow with loose knee joints and seemed always on the point of collapsing into a pile of thighs and elbows. Inside the door, he stepped aside. “Welcome to the palace of Mother Goddam,” he said.

The room was furnished with thick oversized stuff from Grand Rapids in a style known as modern in the nineteen thirties. On the mantelpiece, and flanking a sequined vase that contained the American flag, were framed photographs of unrecognizable but famous-looking people (all signed), and on the striped, dark-pink walls hung a number of framed prints—fragments from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for the most part details of bosoms, backsides, and hands.

Squatting Buddha-like on the center cushion of a couch on the far side of the room was a small, middle-aged hag in a red satin kimono. Her enormous watery eyes were pale blue, rimmed with feverish red and sleepless black. These eyes seemed a monstrous liability to the rest of her organism; rapacious, incessantly active, they seemed not to belong to any small woman, but to some great nightmare foe. Across her mouth was a quick deadly slash of purple paint, and jutting from it a cigarette butt with a hot red coal on the end of it.

“Perry!” she shouted in a surprising man’s voice.

“Evening, Juanita,” Perry said.

“Evening
my ass,” she said. And then to Joe, “Hello,

son.”

While Joe was being introduced to this woman, whose name was Juanita Collins Harmeyer Barefoot, her son disassembled himself into a rocking chair and folded his hands across his stomach.

“Up up up!,” Juanita commanded, gesturing. “Tend bar, Princess, tend bar. Bourbon all around.”

Tombaby rose with less effort than one might have expected. “Bourbon all around,” he said.

As he left the room, he walked past a remarkable article leaning on the wall next to the dining room archway: an eight-foot stuffed toy in the image of a giraffe. Joe, in his own mind, allowed Tombaby to climb onto this toy giraffe and ride away, not just into the dining room but clear out of Texas, but then the giraffe grew weak under its burden and there was a dreadful collapse with many skinned knees and broken limbs. And while he was coping with this crisis in his imagination, he and Perry in reality took seats in big chairs that faced Juanita across a mirror-covered cocktail table.

“I,” she said to Perry, “went thoo one bitch of a commotion here for you tonight.”

Perry smiled. “You always do, Juanita.”

“Look!” She thrust forward a hag’s hand, tobacco-stained, dirty, its nails bitten to the quick. But what she meant to display was a pair of fresh scratches on the back of the hand. “She done that to me when I woke her up, the goddam animal.” Then suddenly Juanita tossed her big eyes into Joe Buck’s face: “You better like animals, hear?”

Joe grinned at her. But he was sick. What he saw as she spoke was a cage with a creature half lady half tiger padding back and forth in it, starved. But he didn’t want it, didn’t want any kind of animal at all. What he wanted was something soft and fat and gentle, full of rounding sweet places to hide in.

“‘Cause that’s what you gonna get,” Juanita said. She turned to Perry. “You think this is bad?” she asked, meaning the scratched hand. “Last week she bit me. Drew blood.”

Tombaby Barefoot returned with a bottle of Old Overholt and a handful of jelly glasses. “Tell about what you done to her, Mother, we’d love to hear that.”

Juanita asked Perry: “What’d he say? Something smart? D’he say something smart?” And to the halfbreed, “That’s it, Mumbles, just keep it up, keep it up.”

Tombaby handed a glass of whiskey to Perry and another to Joe. He took a sip from a third glass, and started toward his rocking chair with it.

Juanita picked up a heavy cut-glass candy dish from the cocktail table. “Princess!” she barked threateningly, taking aim with the candy dish.

“Oh!” Tombaby feigned surprise.
“‘Scuse
me, Mother, I forgot all about you.” He placed his glass on the table in front of her and poured another drink for himself.

Juanita put down the dish and picked up the glass. “And git some music. What’re we runnin’ here, a cat house or a funeral parlor?”

“Well, now, that’s a question,” Tombaby said. “If you’re the main attraction, Mother, I’d be halfway inclined to think it might be a cross between—”

“Shut up!”
Juanita’s voice rattled the place.

Tombaby left the room.

“I always like to make it clear to strangers,” Juanita told Joe, “that this big-assed rooster with the dimple where his dick ought to be, yeah, that’s right, and a sack o’ gumdrops for balls, well, he ain’t no son of mine, not by a damsite. He nothing but the mistake of some goddam broken-down night-shift nurse at the General Jones Hospital in Shreveport. She switched kids on me. You think I’m joking about a thing like that? Listen, I ermember the night, plain as day too, the night I got planted with that kid, I ermember things everybody else is forgot, I got total recall; I ermember where it was, and how I was lyin’, and how it felt, and what happened after, Darlington Barefoot and me, lyin’ out on his porch, on top of the world, drink in one hand, lookin’ at the moon in the other. Ermember the whole shebang, like it was ten minse ago. Don’t tell me poor Tombaby is what you get to ermember a time like ‘at with. Besides, my kid had black black hair when he come out of me. I know, I was wide awake, I seen him come out, and he was black-headed. What else, being son of Darlington Barefoot of Brownsville, was he gonna have for hair, pink? Shit! And what’d they shove at me next morning to feed but this mess, all mouth and rear end. Lemme tell you, my titties dried up in horror on the spot. Looka here!” She pulled apart the red kimono and showed two stringy breasts. “Think I’m jokin’? That day to this, not a drop of milk come out of these things: dry!”

“The whole point of that story,” said Tombaby Barefoot, returning from the dining room, where he had caused the sound of the Ink Spots to pervade the place with
Someone’s Rockin’ My Dreamboat
, “is to show her poor ole boobs. If she waits for a demand—well, you can just about imagine I’m sure how
long
a wait that’d
entail.”

Juanita’s eyebrows were cocked in imitation of a listening attitude. “I caught every syllable of that insult, pea-head. My notebook is crammed full. God help you, God
help
you!”

“No, Mother, you misunderstood me. All I said was they’d like to see your vagina next. Ready? Here’s your music:
Ta-taaaaa!”

“What he say, what he say? Tell me, Perry.”

“Oh,” said Perry, enunciating carefully, “he said he hoped Dolores would be ready pretty soon. So do I.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Well, Darlington Barefoot took one look at this thing—and smell? It was born with a caul, had to hold my nose every time I come near it. Anyway, Barefoot had one look at it and he was on his way, took off like greased lightning. Can you blame the man? I mean, look at it his way: His daddy,
Darlington’s
daddy, was a brave, a goddam
brave!
So what was he gonna do, take this gland case, Miss Jane Withers here, back to his tribe and say meet the kid? Fat chance!”

“Therefore,” said Tombaby, “Mother, who was already flat on her back, had no difficulty at all in making a living—except that she was forced to specialize in faulty-vision types: drunks, the blind, et cetera.” He winked at her coyly and waved his hand. “I was
telling
them,” he said, raising his voice, “how
hard
you’ve always
worked
to support me.”

A quick red flash and flutter of motion on the couch, and a glass of bourbon landed in the rocking chair. But the rocking chair had been vacated by the big blond halfbreed. He picked up the glass, unbroken but empty now, and turned to his mother. “Would you care for a drink?”

Juanita said to Joe, “Want to know why I put up with him? ‘Cause I love him just like he was my own.
Call
me a damn fool, I don’t mind, I make no bones about it.”

“I love you too, Mother,” said Tombaby. “And I love, let’s see, snakes and policemen and war and big hairy spiders and, um, oh, what else! Oh, I know! Cancer of the rectum!”

“Whatever he’s sayin’, matter how sassy it sounds, it’s based on ‘fection and erspect. Right, Tombaby?”

Now the Ink Spot with the falsetto was asking: “
When evening shadows creep, do I lose any sleep over you?”
And somewhere in the back of the house, a door slammed.

“Dolores just rang for you,” said the Indian to his mother.

“Go light a fire under her. Tell her I said
ahora mismó.”

Tombaby left the room, and while he was gone Juanita said, “That poor thing, Perry, what’s to become of him? I worry so! Every time he goes to N’Orleans or Dallas, or anywhere atall, and tries to make a livin’, some policeman chases his ass back home to mama. Enough to break y’heart. So naturally I put him to work here, do you suppose I’m too soft? He just come back from Pensacola. Was gone three months this time, I thought Christ maybe I’m rid of him. But he come draggin’ ass back last week. Don’t know
what
happen in Pensacola, he won’t even
talk
about it. He’s ugly, he’s a fag, he’s put together like Donald Duck, and nobody can stand the sight of him. ‘Cept me. So what am I gonna do? I sent him to beauty school: He can’t make a curl to save his life, can hardly wipe his own twat. Imagine all the hell I’ve had and him not even my own! I’ll tell you what’s wrong, if you want to know: Inferior blood is what it is, inferior blood, and they’s not a goddam thing you can do about inferior blood.” She took a tissue from the box on the table and blew her nose hard. “Oh, I know, you’re not supposed to cry in this business. Well, I’m sentimental, dammitall, and I do as I please, and nobody don’t like it can take a flying leap at the moon.”

Juanita finished the liquor in Tombaby’s glass, and while the stuff was working inside of her she hunched her shoulders forward, held her head back, and pressed her lips together, eyes closed. Then like a priestess of some weird cult she took a deep breath and pointed in quick succession to various parts of herself, head, throat, chest, stomach, saying: “Pain here, pain here, pain here, pain here. Who cares? Not me. Pain don’t bother me. Reach me that bottle, Perry.”

Tombaby Barefoot came simpering into the room and settled into his rocking chair. “Dolores wanted to know,” he reported with relish, “how
old
the señor was. I said roughly seventy-three. She’s in there crying.”

Juanita made him repeat this until she had heard it. Then she disentangled her legs and got to her feet. In the process, Joe caught a glimpse of her knees, noting a similarity to those of his grandmother, with this difference: in Juanita’s there was nothing very sad in all that boniness.

She said to Joe: “Listen, I’m gonna be rude as hell, I’m gonna take Perry into the kitchen and tell him something secret, hear?”

Eager to be agreeable, Joe gave a little wave of the hand and arranged his face in a way that he hoped would convey to her an impression of long familiarity with the necessity for telling secrets in whorehouse kitchens.