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Now at this time in which Joe Buck was coming out of the West on that Greyhound bus to seek his fortune in the East, he was already twenty-seven years old. But he had behind him as little experience of life as a boy of eighteen, and in some ways even less.
He had been raised by various blondes. The first three, who brought him up to the age of seven, were young and pretty.
There was a great deal of coming and going in the household of the three blondes and he was never certain which of them was which. At various intervals, each of them seemed to be his mother, known as Mama this or Mama that, but he later learned that two of them were merely friends in whose household his real mother shared. But the blondes all were nice to him, allowed him to do as he pleased, brought gifts and fondled him a great deal. And at least one of them sang around the house a lot: Wonder When My Baby’s Comin’ Home, The Tumbleweed Song, Accentuate the Positive, The Lady in Red, He Wears a Pair of Silvery Wings, and others. Thinking back on the matter, Joe Buck always supposed that this singer of the household was his actual mother.
There was in those days a war taking place, and some of the blondes were involved in it. They would go out at all hours wearing slacks and babushkas and carrying lunch pails. Sometimes there were bus trips between Houston and Detroit, and Joe remembered living in those cities some of the time. Wherever he was there would be men in uniform coming into the house, staying awhile and then leaving. Some of these men were known as husbands, but Joe could not remember being told that any of them was his father. (Later he was able to surmise that he had been born out of wedlock.)
At a certain point, which happened to be on the day of an exceptionally still and white sky, he was delivered to a fourth blonde in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and from then on and forever he was never to see the other three again. When he would think of them, he would think also of that special white sky and imagine those yellow-haired women to be hiding somewhere behind it.
Now the fourth blonde was his grandmother, a silly and skinny little thing named Sally Buck. For all her skinniness, she was prettier than all the others put together. She had enormous gray eyes with lashes black as pitch and waxy thick, and knees that made you cry they were so sorry-looking and knobby. If there is some part of every loved one that will make you cry to contemplate it, such for Joe were these poor, sad, bony knees of Sally Buck. Sally ran a beauty shop that kept her away from home ten and twelve hours a day, and so the boy unhappily spent his after-school hours in the company of various cleaning women. These women were never blonde, and they never wore lavender or pale-green or lemon-colored dresses; they never seemed to look at him either, and had they chosen to, it would have been necessary to do so out of very ordinary eyes with lashes that were scarcely visible at all.
Sundays were not much better. Sally usually went on dates. She had a weakness for men, especially outdoor ones, and many of her beaus were ranchers who wore Western hats. These big, broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced Western men went for pretty little Sally in a big way. She was all gossamer and perfume and fingernail polish, and they were all leather and muscle and manure, and each was titillated by the contrast. Sometimes Joe was taken along on these dates and he liked and admired a number of Sally’s men, but only one of them paid him any more than a counterfeit token of attention.
This man was named Woodsy Niles. His beard was blue and his eyes were bright, and he showed Joe Buck how to ride a horse and how to make a slingshot, and he taught him how to chew tobacco and how to smoke cigarettes, and a special way of holding his peter so that he could piss an arc higher than his own head. Woodsy Niles was a happy kind of man who had his own pleasurable and snappy way of doing everything, even walking. Yes, he walked as if he believed no moment should pass without pleasure, and he took enjoyment even from such simple acts as moving across a room or opening the corral gates. He sang a lot of songs, too, this Woodsy Niles, sang them in a fine manly voice, accompanying himself on a guitar, and sometimes when they spent the night at his ranch, Joe would awaken as late as three A.M. to the songs that issued from the bedroom where Woodsy and Sally slept. The boy always supposed Woodsy had simply awakened in the night feeling far too strong and handsome and salty to squander himself on mere sleep, and was forced to let off some of the excess in a chorus or two of The Last Roundup. He did the “git alongs” in a way that made Sally giggle, and when he got to the part about the place in the sky where the strays are counted and branded, Joe was apt to get the blues, but in a strangely pleasurable way, and he had to restrain himself from joining the beautiful people in the bedroom. This was one of the first things Joe learned about lying with a woman in the night: You sing songs to her. It seemed a splendid way to do, and what’s more, the whole house got the good of it.
But inevitably Sally had some falling out or other with this remarkable man—as sooner or later she did with all the others—and Joe was left to pine for him as for a goneaway father. But surely it was in this time of Woodsy Niles that Joe had begun to see himself as some sort of a cowboy.
There was, following this love affair, a flurry of Sundays in which Sally Buck took the boy to church. What she liked best about these mornings was their promenade aspect, the opportunity afforded for daytime dress-up. Spending almost all of her daytimes in the shop, she had, for example, few opportunities to parade around in her lovely hats. And the boy set her off well; everyone said they looked like a mother and son team, an illusion that seemed to chop an entire generation of years from her age.
But for Joe these visits to church were another matter altogether: After the regular services, the adults had coffee and rolls in the church basement while the youngsters attended Sunday school upstairs. It was at these sessions that Jesus replaced Woodsy Niles in Joe’s affections. He was taught by a young lady with warm, humorous, kindly eyes that Jesus loved him. There was always a painting on an easel in front of the class; it depicted Jesus walking with a boy child. You could see only the back of the boy’s head, but Joe felt that he himself was that child. Songs were sung, songs about how Jesus walked with him and talked with him and told him he was His own. And one day the young lady teacher told about the events of a certain terrible Friday in the life of this gentle, bearded man, and then she passed out small colored pictures that they were allowed to keep. Jesus was looking right at him, and his eyes said: “Let me tell you I have seen an awful lot of misery, and have suffered something fierce in my life, but it sure is a comfort to have a cowboy like you for a friend.” Something like that. Something that gave Joe a personal and strong feeling of connection with the suffering that was going on in those eyes, along with a desire to alleviate it in some way. Studying the picture, it: occurred to him that, clean-shaven, Jesus might have a blue face like Woodsy’s, and he began to wonder if there might be other similarities as well. For several nights he placed on his chest of drawers in front of the Jesus picture a plug of tobacco and a pack of Camels, and each morning he checked to see if anyone had come in the night for a chew or a smoke. No one ever did. And soon he lost completely the belief that there was anyone walking with him or talking with him or telling him he was His own. Jesus joined the people Joe would never see again; He was behind the sky with the three blondes and Woodsy.
That summer flurry of churchgoing ended for good when Sally Buck landed a new beau, a telephone lineman. He walked into her shop one afternoon, his wide leather belt riding low on his hips, heavy with tools, to make an installation. Sally’s pupils dilated at the sight of him, and by the time he returned to his truck, the lineman had fallen under her pretty little gray-eyed spell.
There followed a year in which Joe saw hardly anything at all of his grandmother. For that matter he saw very little of anyone at all. A listlessness took possession of him during that fall of his fourteenth year, and by Thanksgiving he had ceased going to school. The effort needed to get there and to remain awake could no longer be summoned in him. Several boys of Joe’s temperament, boys unresponsive to talk, drifted away
from the school that year. Some few remained for the social life, but this was no lure to Joe, who never had been included in it. No one had disliked him, but then, no one had really noticed him much either. He was simply the one with the big front teeth (sometimes called “Buck” Buck), the one who seldom spoke, never had his lesson, and always managed somehow to angle a seat in the back of the room. Sally was visited at her shop from time to time by truant officers, but this never resulted in any real action on her part or theirs, and Joe was left to do as he pleased. He got up at noon, combed his hair a lot, smoked cigarettes, ate peanut butter and sardines, and watched thousands of miles of film unroll on the television set in Sally Buck’s living room. He kept that TV going from noon till long past midnight. Away from it for any length of time he actually became confused and disoriented. He urgently required the images it gave out, and especially the sound it made. His own life made very little noise of its own, and he found that in silence there was something downright perilous: It had enemies in it that only sound could drive out.
Then, too, the TV had lots of blonde women, and every last one of them looked somehow like one of his own. It seemed that every stagecoach and covered wagon, every saloon and every general store, if you watched it long enough, would prove to have a blonde in it: The swinging doors would open, or the curtains would part, and out would come Claire Trevor or Barbara Stanwyck or Constance Bennett, looking for all the world like his own familiar yellow-haired women. And who would that tall man be, riding high in his saddle, face against the sun, jaw squared toward goodness and justice, bursting with his own hardness and strength and purpose, and portrayed by anyone from Tom Mix to Henry Fonda? Why, that was Joe Buck himself. In a sense.
During this time of his television addiction, an astonishing thing was happening to him. He was becoming, day by day and bit by bit and feature by feature, as tall and strong and handsome as a TV cowboy. One day, when summer had come and gone and then had come again and Joe was swimming in the river, there was a moment in which he discovered himself to be inhabiting the body of a man. He climbed out of the water and looked down at himself and there he saw this shimmering new man conveying himself through the mud on a man’s strong legs. His arms and body had developed a full muscle structure, and there was on his chest and limbs a perfectly presentable man’s growth of dark body hair. He became tremendously excited by these sudden discoveries and hurried home on his bicycle to study the situation in Sally’s bedroom mirror. He found that his face too had changed: Its outlines were more squarely defined, and somehow his mouth had grown up to accommodate his big teeth so that they had become a good white shiny asset.
He was so pleased with what he saw that he got dressed up and went strutting about the neighborhood, supposing that others too would see what had taken place in him and find it remarkable. (No one did.) He stopped at Sally’s shop. She said, “Good Lord, honey, those clothes look awful on you, they’ve gotten away too small.”
“No,” he argued, “they no smaller than they was.”
She said, “Oh yes they are,” and she gave him money for a new outfit.
Later that afternoon, Joe paraded through the streets of Albuquerque in bright-blue slacks, an orange sport jacket and oxblood shoes with cleats on the heels. Sally said the outfit seemed to clash a little, “but you look real cute, have you got a girl?”
At home, straining his eyes toward the mirror until they were all but inflamed, he wondered what had happened to his delight with himself. The new man was still there with all his beauty intact, but somehow the marvel of him had gone sour, the elation had broken apart and become a misery. And suddenly he knew why. For a dreadful thing had come about in him that day: an awakening to his own lonesomeness.
Never having had a friendship on his own, Joe knew nothing of how to bring such a situation about. His way of proceeding was to pick out a person he liked and then do a lot of hanging around in the hope that a friendship would come into being. He tried this method on: the grocer’s widow, two gas station attendants, the girl who issued money orders at the Rio Pharmacy, an old immigrant shoemaker, an usher at the World movie theater. But they never seemed to understand what he hoped to achieve. Gradually it became clear to him that conversation was a necessary part of the development of personal ties, but Joe rarely had anything to say, and on occasions when he did dredge up a few words, his listener as a rule remained unmoved and the effort went for nothing. He was simply no talker. His best conversations were with Sally, but even they were conducted on the run. He’d be sitting, say, on the edge of the bathtub watching her paint herself in the mirror over the sink; the greater part of her attention would be given over to the considerable task of getting some twenty years erased from her face, and very little would be left over for her grandson.
It was during the fall of his seventeenth year, and in this mood of hunger for affectionate connections in the world, that Joe one evening wandered into the World movie theater and began a brief and pleasurable and terrible association with a girl named Anastasia Pratt.
3
The name of Anastasia Pratt, even though the girl herself was only fifteen, was legendary to the young people of Albuquerque. Such legends rarely derive from fact alone: Invention as a rule takes a part in their creation. But the behavior of Anastasia Pratt from the time she was twelve was such that the imagination was stunned; no one by lying could have made it seem to be much more bizarre or improbable than it already was.
She was known as Chalkline Annie, suggesting the order that had to be maintained in order to serve efficiently the large numbers of boys to whom in a single half hour she made her body available.
Behind the silver screen at the World movie theater was a large room in which were stored the letters for the marquee, uniforms for the ushers, towels and soap and various other supplies and equipment. In one corner were stored some ends of carpeting left over from the theater’s most recent refurbishing. It was in this corner that the legend of Anastasia Pratt was created in the flesh. She labored as well in various living rooms, bedrooms, parked cars, and garages, in school grounds at night, and even under the sky along certain desert highways in fair weather. But it was on this stack of carpet ends in the storeroom of the World movie theater that Anastasia was most often used and by the greatest numbers.
Neither pretty nor unpretty, she appeared to be an ordinary schoolgirl, so ordinary that in light of her actual behavior the effect seemed almost studied. She wore the usual clothes—skirts, blouses, sweaters, ankle socks, and saddle oxfords. Her hair was chestnut-colored, combed straight back and held with a clip. She wore no makeup to speak of, merely plucked her eyebrows and dabbed on a little lipstick. In the daytime you would see her walking always alone to and from school, carrying her books, and seeming to be as open-eyed and listless and mildly troubled as any virginal and solitary adolescent is apt to be. Unless you knew of her special activities, you would have had no reason to look twice at Anastasia Pratt. But with that knowledge, the contrast between what you imagined and what you saw was astonishing. One young; wag referred to her as Virgin Jekyll and Miss Hyde.
Despite the girl’s fame there were at least three persons who were totally unaware of her conduct. Two of these, of course, were the girl’s parents, the father a strict, hard-working, irritable bank cashier and the mother a thin-lipped, shifty-eyed piano player at the Truth Church. The third ignorant party, until a certain Friday evening in October, was Joe Buck.
They met at the World water fountain. Joe stepped back and held the faucet for her. She drank and then looked at him gratefully and smiled. He smiled back. She said: “Would you like to sit with me?”
They sat on the side, about a third of the way down the aisle. Anastasia immediately placed her knee against Joe’s and began to wiggle in an unmistakably provocative way. Suddenly they were holding hands. Just as Joe was beginning to worry about the perspiration emanating from his palm, she took his hand and used it to caress her thigh. Then the girl used her ow
n hand boldly to study the extent of his excitement. Finding it to be considerable she took hold of his face and begged him to kiss her. Joe was not at all disinclined to do so; in all the excitement he simply hadn’t thought of it; but there was in her request such urgency, such desperation that when he did kiss her, the girl’s lips clung to his mouth as if she were taking from him some life-giving substance. He felt as if he were administering to a person who had been fatally wounded in an accident but who was not yet quite dead.
A pack of boys came down the aisle and sat behind Joe and Anastasia Pratt.
One of them said, “Jesus, it’s Anastasia Pratt.”
“You’re kidding,” said another.
A third said, “Who’s the guy?”
“He’s kissing her.”
“Hey, somebody’s kissing Anastasia Pratt.”
“Who is he? Who’s the guy kissing Annie?”
Midnight Cowboy Page 2