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.”
11
“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.
But in this sweeping view he felt something had been glossed over or left out; some first-class sonofabitch was playing hide-and-seek in his memory. But who? Or what?
And all at once he thought of Sally Buck.
Sally Buck on the telephone: “Joe, how you doin’, honey, that’s nice, listen, I got me a late appointment, and I’ll be s’tired when I get outa here, I might just step around the corner to the Horse and Saddle for a beer or two.”
“Handsome? How you feelin’? Listen, y’gramaw’s goin’ t’Santa Fe for over the Fourth, looks like I got me a new beau, how’s that for an ole lady, huh? You be all right here in town, won’t you.”
Sally Buck standing in the doorway of her bedroom:
“Believe I’ll just hit the hay, sweetheart, get a decent night sleep for a change, did you have a nice day, better tell me all about it in the mornin’, I’m too tired to follow what y’sayin’.”
Sally Buck in her beauty shop:
“Listen, sugar, this waitin’ room is for ladies and you know how they are, you take that magazine along home if you want, and don’t play too hard now.”
“Hey, toots, they’s no point in you waitin’ around for me. I might have to stop off at Molly V Ed’s anyhow. Can’t you tuck y’self in like a big fella?”
“Report card? Didn’t I just sign one last week? You mean it’s been six weeks! Lord, how time flies, give it here, where do I do it, on the back? There! Now run along, baby, I got me a head in there waitin for a set.”
Sally Buck. He couldn’t remember why he’d ever loved her so much: silly, pinch-faced old chatterbox, never sat still, always dabbing at her nose with perfume so you couldn’t smell the liquor (but you could anyway), or pulling dollar bills out of her pocketbook to buy off old promises she’d made, forever fooling with a compact or picking lint off her dress whenever you tried to tell something to her. All he could think of in her favor was how spindly her legs were and how sad it was to look at her big bony knees when she crossed them. But even as a ghost in that Albuquerque hotel room, she couldn’t give a little real attention to him, just sat there fretting about getting her house back or riding horseback or some damn thing. Ride on, Sally, old fool, he thought, ride on to the devil. Set his head in curls while you’re at it. Shee-it.
And who, questioned his mind, straining after a sense of fairness that would make his case even tighter, who had ever looked upon him as a creature worth giving the time of day to? Who? Just say who. There came to mind two faces and a cowboy song. The faces he would not allow: The owner of one was in the loony bin, and the other had not been a flesh-and-blood person for nearly two thousand years, if then. And that left git along little dogie git along git along …
Woodsy Niles I
Woodsy Niles was clearly an exception. But what good was he here and now? The memory picture of him was too shiny, too brilliant to look upon with any trust, it was nothing but the tobacco-scented, guitar-strumming, grining-devil souvenir of a long-ago, long-ago summer; and so rare, much too rare to find a place for in any useful view of the world. And so the crazy, shining, blue-bearded face of Woodsy Niles and the big bony knees of Sally Buck he placed out of the range of his thinking: They were dangerous to him, they caused the anger to run out of him. And somehow he had come to know that if he was going to manage in the world, he’d need all the anger he could keep hold of.
Joe found himself working faster and harder in the scullery of the Sunshine Cafeteria. There was a kind of fever in the way he loaded the dishes into the trays and threw the trays onto the conveyor belt. It was as if he had to feed just so many millions of dishes into the steaming jaws of that machine, and then it would be appeased and belch up enough money to …
He wasn’t certain what the money was for. He only knew he had to get some of it together in order to cause something to happen. He went about with the single eye of a man with a plan. But he didn’t quite know what the plan was.
Three mornings a week he spent in a gymnasium, where he performed strenuous exercises, punched a bag, and swam the length of the pool eight times. He watched his body acquire new strength and agility. He massaged his scalp and fooled with his hair a lot, and he became ob
sessed with the acquisition of a Western wardrobe, carrying with him night and day a feeling, a belief, that everything would change for the better when he had created himself in a certain new image. He knew what the image was, that of a cowboy, but he never did press himself too far on the question of how that image would make his life different. There is an Indian legend that at a certain time in the life of a young man he is given a dream in which he sees a mask, and when he awakens he must set to work carving a real mask in that dream image. This is the mask he must wear into battle in order to be victorious. It was as if Joe Buck had had such a dream, and his life was given over to the carving of the mask.
He wasted little time these days in longing for the company of others or in any kind of brooding. If he had no kin in the world, who was there to yearn for?
But he did do a lot of aimless wandering at night when he left the cafeteria. To Joe it was not aimless at all. Ask him what he was doing, and he would have brushed the question aside, as if his purpose were to be found somewhere deeper than questions and answers could penetrate. But he was clearly searching the town for something. He kept his eyes wide open and alert, scanning the nighttime streets of downtown Houston like a warrior scout. Very little of what he saw seemed worth remembering. Most of what passed his eye left no more of a mark on him than images leave on the face of a mirror.
Midnight Cowboy Page 8