Midnight Cowboy

by James Leo Herlihy

  But Joe, having wandered homeless and a stranger for three weeks, a long time by the clocks of limbo, was thrilled to see a face that was known to him. His whole being stopped short, accustoming itself to this keen, unexpected pleasure, and it took more than a moment to remember that Ratso Rizzo was an enemy. Joe went straight for the door and entered the place.

  When Joe’s hand landed on his shoulder, Ratso trembled, shriveling even farther into himself. “Don’t hit me,” he said, “I’m a cripple.”

  “Oh, I ain’t gonna hit you,” Joe said. “I’m gonna strangle you to death.” The anger in his voice was the anger of an actor, for so acute had been his pleasure at seeing someone he knew, it would not leave him entirely. “Only first, I want you to turn your pockets inside out for me. Go ahead, start with that one.”

  Ratso complied without a whimper. The search yielded:

  64 cents

  2½ sticks of Dentyne chewing gum

  7 Raleigh’s cork-tips, crushed flat

  1 book of matches

  2 pawn tickets

  “What’s in your sock?” Joe asked, remembering to snarl.

  “Not a cent, I swear to God.” Ratso raised his right hand and cast a quick glance toward heaven. “I swear on my mother’s eyes.”

  “If I found out you was holdin’ out on me,” Joe said, “I’d kill you quick as look at you.” He pushed the contents of the pockets across the counter toward Ratso. “Here, take this shee-it, I don’t want it.”

  “You keep the sixty-four cents, Joe. Go ‘head, it’s yours, I want you to have it.”

  “Agh, them nickels is all sticky, what you do, slobber on ‘em? I don’t want to touch ‘em. Put ‘em back in your pocket.”

  At this point, having nothing to gain, Joe felt he should walk away from the filthy little rat altogether. But somehow he couldn’t get his feet in motion. He was in a new quandary: Reason told him he was in the presence of an archenemy, and yet he had no appetite whatever for vengeance. Too much time alone had done something peculiar to his heart: A confused and unreliable organ at best, it now held something akin to joy.

  Ratso was talking rapidly about that first night, saying I swear to God this and I didn’t realize that, probably trying to lie his way out of the swindle he’d perpetrated.

  Joe said, “You want some free medical advice, you’ll shut y’goddam mouth about that night, hear?”

  “Okay, right, right, okay!” Rizzo said. “Another subject: Where y’livin’? Y’still at the hotel?”

  This question caused Joe to remember something he had been avoiding for days: his black-and-white horsehide suitcase locked up in that hotel room. Clearer than reality, it stood out now in his mind quivering with some quality of life it had never before possessed. At this moment he knew he would never see it again, and all the inappropriate joy he felt at seeing Ratso Rizzo turned suddenly to pain. He had to clench his teeth to keep his face in proper shape, and then he turned and hurried out of that Nedick’s and across Sixth Avenue, headed uptown.

  As he approached gth Street, a voice called his name. He turned and found Ratso hurrying toward him, his body gyrating grotesquely with each step and his balance so precarious he seemed to be running the risk of a bad fall. Joe wanted to be alone, but he knew if he increased his pace, the runt would only hurry faster. In his present mood he had no stomach for such a spectacle; he slowed down.

  When Ratso caught up with him, Joe said, “Listen, piss-ant, keep away from me. Now I mean it.”

  “Where you staying, Joe? You got a place?”

  “You hear what I tole you?”

  “‘Cause I have. I got a place.”

  “I mean it, Ratso. I ain’t just talking. You come near me again, I’m gonna snatch you ball-headed.”

  “I’m inviting you, goddammit,” said Ratso. “I mean I’m inuiting you.”

  “You inviting shee-it.”

  “I am.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you already.”

  They started to walk uptown together. Joe said, “I don’t want to stay with you. You think I’m soft in the brain, stay with you?”

  Ratso paid no attention to these protests. “It’s got net heat,” he said, “but by the time cold weather comes, I’ll be in Florida. So what do I care, right?”

  “I’d have to be out of my goddam mind,” Joe said. “You’d sell the teeth right out o’ my head while I’ze sleepin’.”

  “Actually, I don’t have no beds either. But I got enough blankets to smother a horse.”

  “That how you gonna do it, eh, you crooked little turd? Smother me to death? Just you try it.”

  “An’ I don’t bother with no electric. To hell with it, I got candles. Right?”

  Bit by bit, Joe began to understand Ratso’s living conditions.

  In New York there are always a large number of tenement buildings being emptied for eventual demolition. One by one the families are moved out, and as they leave, the owner, a great corporation, has a large white X taped across each window of the evacuated space. Ratso had been living in a series of these X-flats—as he called them—since he’d left home at the age of sixteen. In need of a place, he would walk the streets in search of a building on whose windows these white X’s had begun to appear. Sometimes he had to break a lock, but more often the door had been left wide open. And occasionally he would even find that the departing tenant had left behind a few sticks of furniture for him. He would move his own meager belongings into the place and use it as his home until the management became aware of his presence, or until the last legitimate tenant had left and the water had been turned off.

  His current dwelling was in a largely Puerto Rican block in the West Twenties. He took Joe there, led him up two flights of stairs to an otherwise vacant floor and down the hall to a little flat in the rear.

  The late afternoon sun still gave some light to the room, and Joe found the place more welcoming than anything he’d slept in in weeks. Ratso’s only furniture was a table and chair, but he had enough blankets to supply a rooming house. Joe’s eyes were drawn to a thick stack of them in one corner near the window: every kind of blanket imaginable, comforters, quilts, army blankets, Indian blankets, all spread out neatly on the floor, making a good soft bed.

  Ratso was eager to demonstrate the graces of his situation. He offered Joe a chair and then set to work with a saucepan of water and some canned heat to brew up powdered coffee for his guest. Joe headed for the chair but walked right past it and lowered himself onto the bed of blankets. He started mumbling something about how hard it was, but before he got the sentence out he had fallen into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Some hours later, he awakened lost. He knew himself to be lying face to the wall in a strange, nearly dark room where a candle flame cast weird shadows on the walls and ceiling. But where? He turned slowly and found himself on a makeshift bed on the floor. Next to him, clad in corduroys, was a pair of poorly matched legs that he began to recognize.

  Ratso was sitting there in the candlelight leaning against the wall, smoking, examining Joe’s radio.

  Joe sat up and snatched the radio from him. He turned it on to make certain it was undamaged. Then he switched it off again and held it close to his body.

  “Where’s my boots?” he said.

  They were under the table. Ratso pointed at them.

  “How’d they get off me?”

  “I took ‘em off ya.”

  Joe looked at the boots again, and then at Ratso. “What for?”

  “So’s you could sleep is all. I mean, cripes!”

  Joe got to his feet and went to the table where his boots were. “I believe the smart thing for me is haul ass out of here.” He sat on a chair and began pulling on the boots.

  “Why? Why why why?” Ratso said. “What’sa matta?’

  Joe held one of the boots between his forefinger and thumb, swinging it back and forth slowly, and in a sense he held Ratso in a similar fashion with his ey
es. It was as if he were weighing one thing against the other.

  Ratso was a thief, Joe thought, and only dangerous if you had something worth stealing. Now if he were to spend the night here, he could put the radio under his pillow—and as for the boots, what good would they be to somebody whose feet were of two different sizes? And what else could the kid be after? He didn’t seem to be a fag. Looking at him now, Joe saw nothing more frightening than a puny crippled kid sitting on a pile of old blankets on the floor of a tenement flat afraid of being left alone. So why not stay? He didn’t know a reason, but it seemed to him like every time he did something that looked simple, it ended up costing him his ass. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to get one good night’s sleep. But first he would scare hell out of the little sonofabitch on general principles.

  Joe said, “Listen, I’m gonna tell you something, Ratso. Only first gimme cigarette.”

  Ratso gave him one of the crushed Raleighs and held the candle for him to light it with.

  Then Joe looked squarely at Ratso and said: “It’s this I want to tell you. For your own good. Now, um, you want me to stay here tonight, is that the idea?”

  Ratso shrugged. “I ain’t forcing you. I mean, like, you know, I ain’t forcing you.” His voice was lacking in conviction, and when he shrugged to demonstrate the quality of his indifference, his shoulders hardly moved at all. Joe knew that in spite of his actual words Ratso was pleading with him to stay, but still he felt the need to assert his control over the situation.

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” He put his foot inside his boot. “Hell, I had the ‘pression you wanted me to stay here with you. But, uh, seems like I had the wrong ‘pression.”

  “All right, I do,” Ratso growled. “I want you to stay, you’re invited. I tole you that already.”

  “You know what you’re in for?”

  “What?”

  “If I stay? ‘Cause I’m a very dangerous person, you didn’t know that, did you? About all I think of is ways to kill people.” He studied Ratso’s face for a reaction. Ratso simply looked at him, betraying nothing. Joe continued: “It’s a truth. Somebody does me bad like you done, all I do is think up ways to kill ‘em. So now you been warned. Y’hear me, Ratso?”

  “I hear you.”

  “You don’t say that like you mean it. Maybe I better press you further.”

  “All right, I’m impressed already! You’re dangerous, you’re a killer!”

  Joe nodded. “You goddam well better believe it.” After a moment, he added, “So if you still want me to stay here for a day or two—I mean, is that what you want? or not?”

  Ratso frowned and growled, “Yeah! Goddammit!”

  Joe held up his hand, satisfied. “Easy, easy.” He dropped the boot and moved toward the pile of blankets. “Just want to be sure is all. ‘Cause I’m not takin’ any favors off anybody. Can’t afford it.”

  When he was back on the blankets again, he looked around the place, accustoming himself to his new whereabouts. They smoked in silence for a moment. Then Ratso said, “You ever kill anybody?”

  “Not yet,” Joe said. “But I tore up this one fella something awful.” He told the story of the night he gave Perry a beating in the whorehouse of Juanita Barefoot. “I couldn’t control m’self. I get mad, I don’t know m’own strength. If they had’en pull me off, that sombitch be a goner today. Same with you. I come after you with a knife that night. You didn’t know that, did you? I’ze all set to use it, too.” He stopped for a moment, thinking of a way to enrich the tale. “I spent the whole night in jail. It had’n been for them cops, they’d be one dead Ratso along about now.”

  “Ha! You think I’d mind that?”

  “So,” Joe went on, “ever’ time you pass a cop f’m now on—you blow him a kiss, hear?”

  He put out his cigarette on a jar lid Ratso maintained for this purpose.

  “And while you’re at it, Ratso,” he said, lying down, “move the hell over. Y’crowdin’ me.”

  Ratso moved over as far as he could, and then he said, “Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “In my own place, do me a favor, will you?”

  “Nope. No favors. I ain’t doin’ no favors.”

  “No, I mean, look, in my own goddam place—this is my place, am I wrong?”

  “My favor days is all over,” Joe said.

  “Well, it’s just, in my own goddam place, my name is not Ratso. You know? I mean it so happens my name is Enrico Salvatore. Enrico Salvatore Rizzo.”

  “Shee-it, man, I can’t say all that.”

  “All right! Rico then! At least call me Rico in my own fucking place!”

  “Go to sleep,” Joe said.

  “Okay, though?” the kid persisted.

  Joe lifted his head and barked out: “Rico! Rico! Rico! Is that enough?” He turned his face to the wall. Then he said, “And keep your meathooks off my radio.”

  After a moment Ratso said, “Night,” in a small, throaty voice. But Joe was far from ready to exchange any such niceties with this person. He pretended to be asleep.

  12

  This day in late September marked the beginning of Joe Buck’s alliance with Ratso Rizzo. The pair of them became a familiar sight on certain New York streets that fall, the little blond runt, laboring like a

  broken grasshopper to keep pace with the six-foot tarnished cowboy, the two of them frowning their way through time like children with salt shakers stalking a bird, urgently intent on their task of finding something of worth in the streets of Manhattan.

  Ratso chewed his fingernails, consumed all the coffee and tobacco he could get hold of, and lay awake nights frowning and gnawing at his lips. For he was the natural leader of the two, and upon his head rested the responsibility for thinking up new schemes for their survival.

  Joe Buck, in the fashion of a follower, simply expressed his across-the-board pessimism about whatever was suggested, and then went along with it. Once, for instance, Ratso heard about a town in Jersey where the parking meters were said to be vulnerable to the common screwdriver. Joe Buck was skeptical and said so, often, but still he submitted to hocking his radio in order to raise bus fare for the trip across the river. When they got there it became clear at once that Ratso’s information was out of date: the town had all new meters of a make no screw driver could ever disturb. In the face of such a disappointment, Joe Buck was capable of behaving with magnanimity, at least to the extent of keeping his mouth shut while Ratso made excuses for the failure.

  But on the whole this person with the sunburst on his boots remained cranky and disagreeable in his behavior toward the little blond runt. He realized it, too. Joe knew good and well he had become a pain in the neck, and what’s more he was none too concerned about it. But there was a reason for his unconcern: He was happy.

  For the first time in his life he felt himself released from the necessity of grinning and posturing and yearning for the attention of others. Nowadays he had, in the person of Ratso Rizzo, someone who needed his presence in an urgent, almost frantic way that was a balm to something in him that had long been exposed and enflamed and itching to be soothed. God alone knew how or why, but he had somehow actually stumbled upon a creature who seemed to worship him. Joe Buck had never before known such power and was therefore ill equipped to administer it. All he could do was taste it over and over again like a sugar-starved child on a sudden mountain of candy: cuss and frown and complain and bitch, and watch Ratso take it. For that’s the way in which power is usually tasted, in the abuse of it. It was delicious and sickening and he couldn’t stop himself. The only thing the runt seemed to demand was the privilege of occupying whatever space he could find in the tall cowboy’s shadow. And casting such a shadow had become Joe Buck’s special pleasure.

  He enjoyed listening to Ratso, too. As they walked through the city, or shared a cup of coffee in a lunch stand or cafeteria, or shivered together in the progressively colder doorways of the waning year, he heard Ratso’s views on many subjects. Bit by bi
t, he was able to piece together a picture of Ratso’s early years in the Bronx.

  Ratso was the thirteenth child of tired immigrant parents. He remembered his father as a hard-working bricklayer who in his off hours went to sleep whenever he found something even vaguely horizontal to lie upon. His mother, a burnt-out child bearer, usually sick, managed the family like a kindly, befuddled queen, issuing contradictory mandates from her bedroom. Occasionally she would pull a housecoat about her body and move through the flat trying to sort out the confusion she had wrought. On one such tour she found the seven-year-old Ratso under the kitchen stove in an advanced stage of pneumonia. Surviving this, he contracted infantile paralysis a few weeks later, and by the time he was discharged from the hospital the following year his mother was dead and gone. His three sisters and two of his nine brothers had left home, either for marriage or for other purposes. Of the eight remaining boys, none took any interest in cooking or housework; nor had Papa Rizzo ever given any special attention to the running of a family. When he thought of the job at all, it was in terms of supplying; food. Therefore once a week he stocked the shelves with saltines and cans of pork and beans, the refrigerator with cheese and cold cuts and milk. For six days the boys would grab what they could, and on the seventh Papa Rizzo gave them a real Sunday dinner at a neighborhood spaghetti place. Occasionally in an earlier time—usually at Easter or on Mother’s Day—he had hosted such dinners in this same restaurant, and the owner had always made him feel proud of his enormous brood by calling attention to the fact that he required the biggest table in the place. “Ecco, che arriva Rizzo!” he would say. “Prende la tavola piu grande del locale!” Even now, with only eight sons left, it was necessary to shove two regular tables together. But after the first month or so, these Sunday dinners were ill-attended, for the old bricklayer had developed a foul temper and took to using them as occasions for scolding and shouting. The boys, one by one, having learned to forage in ways they found easier than listening to the ravings of a disagreeable old man, wandered away from home altogether. Finally one Sunday afternoon at the family dinner there was only Ratso. When the owner led them to a table for two, the old man was shocked, and then embarrassed, and then chastened. He ate in silence, behaving with an almost ceremonial kindness toward the skinny, crippled, thirteen-year-old runt of his progeny. He also drank a good deal of wine, and then there came a moment in which he broke the silence and ended the meal by landing one tremendous wallop of his bare fist on the little formica-covered table, shouting his own name and reminding the world at large, and God, too, that he was accustomed to larger tables than this: “Sono Rizzo! lo prendo la tavola piu grande del locale!” The owner came over and the two old men wept together and embraced each other. Then Ratso led his father home. Entering the flat, the old man drew back and let out a dreadful howl. It was as if he had suddenly awakened from the longest of all of his naps and found his family wiped out by bandits and the walls of the flat all splattered with blood. Looking past Ratso as if the boy didn’t exist, the bricklayer started to sob, asking over and over again the whereabouts of his sons. “Dove sono i miei ragazzi terribili?” Gradually, and perhaps only by default, Ratso became the favorite, and for a while life was better for him than for the others. He was given an allowance and was never scolded. The Sunday dinners continued. There was not much talk at the small table, but a silent intimacy had grown between them and the atmosphere was affectionate and peaceful. Papa Rizzo, by now a fat, benign, baldheaded old bear in his late sixties, drank a quart of Chianti all by himself, and on the way home from the restaurant he would find a number of opportunities to place his hand upon the head of his last remaining son, or, waiting for a traffic light, to wrap a heavy arm around his shoulder. On one such afternoon of a summer Sunday, Ratso was undermined by the great burden of weight his father placed upon him, and they both fell to the sidewalk. When Ratso was able to disengage himself, he found that the old man had died on him, right there in the crowded sunlight of the Bronx River Parkway.