Midnight Cowboy

by James Leo Herlihy

  Joe still held in his mind the image of the man and the telephone, the telephone and the man, and in his confusion he still felt it necessary to subdue the two of them. He therefore pushed Locke to the floor, sat astride his chest, and shoved the telephone’s receiver into the toothless mouth.

  There was blood on Joe’s hands and, foolishly, instinctively, he wiped them on his jacket. Then he got to his feet and looked around the room. Locke’s blood seemed to have spread in impossible ways. It was all over the man himself, it was on the carpet and on the woodwork. It was as if something terrible—call it evil and picture it a dragon—had raced about the room leaving its imprint everywhere.

  As Joe left the room at a run, headed for the stairway, the last thing he saw was the man from Chicago, rolling onto his side, half naked, clinging to the object in his mouth like an enormous child struggling with its pacifier.

  9

  They rented pillows for the trip and then the driver got on the bus. He climbed into his seat and pulled the switch that causes the door to close, and he spoke to the passengers through a microphone, told them there would be regular rest stops, and they were going to enjoy the trip and would arrive in Miami Florida in thirty-one hours.

  Joe listened to this announcement carefully but not for its content: What he got from it was the comfort of the driver’s voice, the strength and kindness in it.

  “These guys are good drivers,” he said to Ratso.

  “They got to be,” Ratso said. Then his teeth started chattering again.

  The bus began to move.

  “It’s moving,” Ratso said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thirty-one hours.”

  “Is what?” Joe said.

  “What d’you mean, is what? Is what what?”

  “Thirty-one hours.”

  “The trip is. Eight-thirty in the morning we get there. Not this morning. But the next one at eight-thirty.”

  The bus made a number of turns on its way out of town, and pretty soon it entered a tunnel, and then a few minutes later they were on a speedway.

  Joe said, “Do you believe it?”

  “That we’re on our way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I can’t hardly believe it. I just can’t hardly believe it.”

  “Me either,” Joe said. “I just can’t believe it.”

  They rode a few miles in silence. Joe turned around to see what the other passengers looked like. He thought they looked all right, the ones he could see. There were quite a few empty seats, which meant there’d be some places to stretch out for sleep.

  “What’ll be our first thing?” he said.

  “That we do?”

  “Yeah, when we get there.”

  “Well, I guess hook a bathing suit, huh?”

  “And just go right on over to the beach,” Joe said, “and start in? I mean just start right in bein’ there, is that it?”

  “W-what the hell else?” Ratso said.

  “Shee-it, I don’t know, I ain’t the expert on going to Florida. I mean, I don’t know what the hell you, uh, do and all. So I just ast. But Christ, I’m sorry I open m’mouth. Why don’t you quit shivering?”

  “I can’t help it, that’s why,” Ratso said. When some more miles had gone by, he said, “You get your first palm tree in South Carolina.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was told that.”

  “By who?” Joe wanted to know.

  “This guy, that’s who!”

  “Well, to hell with South Carolina,” Joe said. “We going to Florida. And if you have to shiver, why don’t you pull the blanket up more?”

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you already?”

  Joe said there was nothing the matter with him, and for the next mile or so he was aware of Ratso’s eye on him.

  Then Ratso leaned in close and beckoned Joe with his hand. They put their heads together and Ratso whispered: “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  Joe backed away at once, but just far enough to show Ratso the urgency in his eye as he whispered, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” He took a quick glance at the woman across the aisle. She was asleep, her head against the window.

  Ratso said, “You can tell me.”

  Joe leaned in again and whispered, “All I done was stick the phone in his mouth. I told you that. And it went dut!” He made a noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Like that.”

  “I know, but listen,” Ratso said. “You got blood on your jacket!”

  “From his nose, from his nose, I told you he had a bloody nose! You trying to get me all nervous or what?”

  “No! I just wanted to know. I mean can’t I ask?”

  “Yeah, but why, why? You think blood has to mean somebody’s dead?” They were silent for a moment, then Joe said, “You think a guy could get a telephone stuck in his mouth?”

  “No. No.”

  “And then that person choke to death?”

  “I said no, it’s an impossibility! Now see how your mind is?” Ratso said. “You’re gonna think about that. You shouldn’t think about that. I mean it. Think about Florida.” Ratso pulled the blanket up around his neck and settled into his pillow.

  When they had ridden a few miles more, Joe said, “Ratso, you realize day after tomorrow, I mean the day after to-goddam-morrow, you and me is going to have a miserable pair of sunburned asses on us? Don’t that grab you like it does me?”

  Ratso was silent.

  “Don’t it?” Joe said.

  Ratso was looking at him, frowning, and he was touching his teeth with his fingers.

  Joe said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I just wondered is all.”

  “What?”

  “How’d you get it past his teeth?”

  Joe was furious. “His teeth was out!”

  “You knocked ‘em out?”

  Joe had to take a deep breath before he could answer. “They was false, jackass, they was false!”

  There was no more talking for a while.

  An hour later, Ratso was perspiring and pushed the blanket away. Joe put it back on, thinking Ratso was asleep. But he wasn’t. He opened his eyes and said, “Hey, listen, I been thinking.”

  “You got to keep that blanket on you,” Joe said.

  “I been thinking, I hope we’re not gonna have a lot o’ trouble ‘bout my name down there. Because what’s the whole point of this trip, anyway? I mean New York is one thing, but can you see this guy, imagine it, he’s running around on a goddam beach, and he’s all suntanned and he’s going in swimming and all, and then somebody hollers Hey Ratso at him? Does that sound good to you? Admit it, it sounds like shit. And I’m not gonna have it. I’m Rico altogether, do you blame me? Hey, look, this blanket is making me too hot. I’m sweating like a pig already.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” Joe said. “Well, then take it off. Take your shirt off, too, and open the window while you’re at it. Maybe you could get you a good case of pneumonia, how would that be?”

  “I didn’t say I was gonna take it off. I just said I’m sweating. But it’s agreed, okay? We’re gonna tell all these new people my name is Rico?”

  Joe nodded.

  He closed his eyes and tried for some sleep, but all he got was some foul dreams. He couldn’t quite tell if he was asleep or not, but there were these dreams all the same, wild and ugly and vivid. In many of them he experienced a reenactment of the violence of the evening just past, opening his eyes in horror at the moment the lamp stopped short of crushing the skull of Townsend P. Locke. In these many awakenings it was always a relief to find himself on the bus at Ratso’s side.

  And then he began to have a number of these half-awake dreams in which Sally Buck’s old boy friend, Woodsy Niles, was a dead man. The Woodsy dreams took place right there on the bus and they seemed real in every particular. The cowboy’s corpse went through every kind of caper imaginable: In one of them it was propped up in the driver’s seat operating the bus on h
airpin roads and the passengers were screaming, Help help the driver is dead the driver is dead! In another of these terrible dreams, the bus arrived in Miami and all the passengers took their suitcases off the rack and left. All but one. The driver saw him there, apparently asleep in a seat near the back, and went down the aisle to awaken him. And then, “Shee-it,” he said, “I believe I got a corpse on m’hands here.” At this point, Joe recognized himself as the driver and the corpse as his old friend Woodsy. He picked up Woodsy’s body and began to sing to it The Last Roundup, softly and slowly, half lullaby, half requiem.

  After these death dreams, Joe would awaken and study Ratso for signs of life, placing his hand under his nose to feel the breath coming out. At one such moment Ratso woke up. He looked at Joe and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” Joe just laughed.

  It was about three-thirty in the morning, and they were having their first rest stop, somewhere in Maryland. Many of the passengers were asleep. Ratso said he wanted to stay on the bus. Joe got off and brought back some coffee in cartons. They sat there smoking cigarettes and sipping their coffee.

  “Listen, Joe, we got to talk about something,” Ratso said. “When you was gone, I tried to get up, but … He shrugged, and then he shook his head and frowned. His face was grave. “I couldn’t.”

  Joe listened.

  “It’s serious,” Ratso said. “I mean, I couldn’t. I couldn’t get up. I mean I tried and all, and I just couldn’t get up.”

  Joe nodded.

  Ratso said, “What am I gonna do?”

  “Well now,” Joe said, “when we get to Miami, we’ll carry you right on over to the doctor’s.”

  Ratso shook his head quickly and grimaced. “Huh-uh. They can’t do nothing with legs. They just go tch tch tch and they shrug their shoulders and grab your ten bucks and that’s it.”

  “The thing you tend to forget,” Joe said, “is all this sunshine we’re coming into tomorrow.”

  “Course I know a dozen ways to screw a doctor out of his fee. But what’s that got to do with sunshine? Oh, you mean like healing benefits and all?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  After a moment, Ratso said, “All right, but look, what if, that’s what I want to know, what if?”

  “I—I guess we could get you a … I don’t know what.”

  “A crutch?” Ratso said.

  Joe looked at him quickly. “That’s up to you, if you want one.”

  The other passengers were returning to the bus.

  Ratso said, “And if I don’t want one, what?”

  Joe opened his mouth to speak, but he found he had nothing to say.

  After one or two more false tries, he said, “Ratso. I mean Rico. Um, when we get to Miami, I’m fixing to go to work, did you know that?”

  Joe hadn’t known it himself. He hadn’t known he was going to say that at all. His thoughts and his speech had become coordinated in some surprising way, so that what he said was as new to himself as it was to his listener. The bus started to move again and he kept on talking. “I got to do that, ‘cause see, I’m no kind of a hustler. I ain’t even a good bum. The way things is been, I ain’t even nothing. So I’m gonna have to go to work, I don’t know, sweeping, doing dishes, some damn thing or other. ‘Cause we want it to be nice down there, don’t we? Well, it not gonna be nice, it not gonna be all coconuts, it gonna be the usual crap, you can bet on that. Besides, I’m gonna be honest with you, I don’t want to sleep on no beach. I want a bathroom and some bay rum in the medicine cab’net, know what I mean? And some toothpaste? And a change o’ shoes! ‘Cause I am so sick o’ lookin’ at these goddam boots. I am! I’m gonna throw ‘em in the ocean! Watch me. I want ever’thing new. And I don’t care if I have to get a job picking flyshit out of a pepper box.”

  Ratso was looking at him with a very serious expression on his face, and he was doing a lot of nodding.

  Joe laid a hand on Ratso’s knee, and he looked past him and out the window at the dark landscape rushing by. “My whole point is, working, I’m gonna be able to look out for you, too. Not just me. Okay?”

  A moment passed. They crossed a river and then there were more dark moonlit trees rushing by. Finally Ratso said, “Okay.” Each of them was careful not to look at the other. They settled into their pillows and closed their eyes, each of them thinking his own thoughts.

  Joe was astonished at the thing he had just said to Ratso, promising to take care of him, and even more astonished to realize that he meant it.

  And so now here he was with this burden on his hands, responsible for the care of another person, a sickly, crippled person at that. But oddly enough, he liked the feeling it gave him. It was a curious kind of burden under which he felt lighter instead of heavier, and warm. The seat became exceptionally comfortable and his head fit the pillow better. He felt joined to everything that touched him, and pretty soon he fell asleep, dreaming his golden-people dream.

  But there was a startling difference in it. They were marching to rodeo music, a wild march beat. And the rope of light that bound the people in their trip around the earth was on this night of a special brilliance and clarity so that Joe was able to see the actual features on the face of the marchers. The one that caught his interest was the face of a cowboy swinging a lariat, a lariat made of the same golden stuff that bound all the marchers. He looked hard, very hard at the face of the cowboy, longing to get his attention and disturbed more and more by an ever increasing sense of familiarity with what he saw, and lo and behold! There came a moment in which he knew the face of the cowboy to be none other than his own.

  He was in the line with everyone else.

  Finding himself in such a remarkable situation surprised him into wakefulness. A cool wintry dawn was coming in the window, washing everything with its own colors.

  Ratso was wide awake, too, and he was in considerable distress. His face was wet with tears and misery was written all over it.

  “Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” Joe asked.

  Ratso looked at him quickly and then he looked away again, and softly, almost inaudibly, he said, “I peed.”

  “You what?”

  “Peed! Peed! Peed my pants!”

  “So what? Is that so bad?”

  “I’m all wet! And my seat’s all wet.”

  “Hell, man, don’t cry.”

  “Here I am going to Florida, and my leg hurts, my butt hurts, my chest hurts, my face hurts, and like that’s not enough, so I piss all over myself.”

  Joe began to laugh. He realized that laughter was inappropriate, but he felt good and the whole thing seemed very funny.

  “I’m falling apart,” Ratso said. “That’s funny?”

  Joe nodded. And in a moment Ratso was laughing, too.

  Then Joe said, “You just had you a little rest stop wasn’t on the schedule.” They both laughed as if this was the funniest remark they’d ever heard. They laughed for several miles. Ratso’s face turned blue and his eyes were wild and bloodshot, and he complained that it hurt him to laugh so, but when he showed signs of letting up, Joe would speak out some new comment on the scatalogical aspects of Ratso’s misery, and they would laugh some more. The last three or four remarks were clearly not very funny, but they enjoyed the laughing just the same. Then Ratso started to cough and choke, and he had to lean forward while Joe patted him on the back.

  After this seizure, Ratso was weak and drowsy. His spirit had been quieted, but the interval of laughter had been exhausting. Joe told him there were plenty of empty seats and they would find a dry one at the next stop, and he promised that in one of these towns they would be able to buy some new trousers. He convinced Ratso that everything would be all right eventually, and by the time the bus stopped for breakfast near Richmond, Ratso was fast asleep. Joe drew the window shade to keep the sun from his eyes.

  10

  A few seconds later, when Joe stepped off the bus, he was surprised to find that the special quality of the dawn was spreading itself into the entire
morning. He remembered having had some splendid dream but he couldn’t recall the details of it. There was this almost painful prettiness about the day, even the air was pungent with it, and he supposed it all had to do with being out of New York City.

  In the restaurant he ordered blueberry pancakes and a cup of coffee, and while he was waiting he was caught by some swift and profound emotion which he mistook for sadness. The feeling became so intense in him he thought he was going to have to vomit. He hurried back to the men’s room, locked himself into one of the booths and bent over the toilet. He put his finger into his throat, but nothing came out but air. Then he started to cry. This surprised him. He wondered what these tears were all about on a day when he had been feeling so good. Soon they stopped. He blew his nose. Then he went back into the restaurant and ate his breakfast. The pancakes were good, but after the first bite he forgot to savor them. For some of the special quality of the morning had seeped right into the restaurant, so that all the while he ate he thought about the day he was having instead of the food, even ended up leaving half of his coffee to go out there and get right into the thick of it.