Midnight Cowboy (4 page)

While the young men labored over her, Anastasia lay perfectly still, her head to one side, biting her nails idly and not paying much attention to what was taking place. She was like a doomed cancer patient taking radium treatments that can’t possibly help, but taking them nonetheless, just in case.

To one of them she said, “Hurry up, I haven’t got all night, what do you think this is?” But nothing the girl said carried much conviction.

At his turn, Joe climbed on, and Anastasia’s interest awakened somewhat, perhaps to the novelty of someone new.

When she turned her head to the side again, Joe whispered to her, “What’s the matter?”

She said, “Oh, I was just wondering what-all words you could make from those letters.” She was looking at the stacks of marquee letters: Put together in a certain way, they would spell out what was to become of her.

Someone said, “I’ll bet he’s back there
kissing
her,” and Bobby Desmond said, “Let him alone.” A third young man said, “Somebody give me a cigarette,” and Adrian Schmidt said, “Wait’ll I get at her, making me be last.” Then Bobby Desmond said, “Shut up or she’ll cross her legs and go home.” And the voice of a very old lady on the screen was heard to say: “No, no! You mustn’t tell! If you do, it won’t come true!”

Joe whispered to Anastasia Pratt, “Is this all right?”

“Is what all right?”

“Like this.”

“Well, why are you asking
me?”

The voice of Adrian Schmidt was heard again: “What’s he doing back there? I mean I’d just like to time him. That’s what we ought to do. We ought to all be timed. Otherwise a guy can just, I mean,
crap!
Right, you guys? From now on … I”

Anastasia Pratt put her hands on Joe’s head and drew him toward her. Then she whispered in his ear, “You’re the only one, you’re the one, you’re the one, the only one since, you’re the only once since Gary Amberger, you are, honest, you really, you honestly are. Usually I never feel, I, honest, I mean, you’re the best. Kiss me. Please.”

Her body had come to life under him and her breathing began to sound as if she were climbing the steepest hill in the world. This ascent seemed to make more urgent her need for his mouth, as if at these rarefied altitudes her own breathing mechanism were inadequate.

But Joe could think only of what he had been told by Bobby Desmond.

“You’ve got to,”
she begged.
“You’ve got to!”

The girl’s face was wet, and then, too, the thing that was happening to Joe at that moment made everything else unimportant and so in gratitude he clamped his mouth against hers, permitting her to take from that contact something that caused her to shudder and cling to him in a prolonged and violent seizure. Even when the moment had ended, Anastasia Pratt would not release him. She wept quietly and held onto his back for dear life.

“Okay,” said Adrian Schmidt, “I’ve had it. I have had it. I count ten, and then, is that fair or isn’t it? I mean I count ten and then—One two three …”

The voice of another old lady from Hollywood said: “Now don’t forget, children, we’re all the family poor Sarah has, and it’s our duty as Christians—”

This was followed by a door slam, twenty times louder than life.

Anastasia put on her panties and would not allow Adrian Schmidt to touch her. He came at her as if to beat her up, but the other boys held him away from her. She marched out of the storeroom and down the short flight of stairs and into the passageway, holding her head absurdly high and staggering as if she were slightly drunk.

As she passed under the exit sign, the screen was producing some truly glorious music to accompany her reentry into the dark of the World movie theater.

In adolescence, a person is apt to do a lot of walking past places. He loses his imagination to someone and then, afraid to declare himself openly, he walks past the place of that someone on all sorts of dreamed-up pretexts, hoping for a miracle. Or at least a glimpse.

Joe lost himself to the idea of becoming a part of that pack of boys with whom he had shared Anastasia Pratt in the storeroom at the World. But Adrian Schmidt, the tall, blond, pimpled, impatient loudmouth of the pack, blamed Joe for the rebuff he had suffered that Friday night. And so when Joe took to walking past the magazine store that was their hangout, Adrian glowered at him through the window in a way that would have discouraged almost anyone. And then he turned the others (all except Bobby Desmond) against Joe, so that one day as he passed by they all came out on the sidewalk and made kissing sounds at him.

At the same time, Anastasia Pratt, having lost her imagination to Joe Buck, took to walking past his house. Each afternoon when school was out she could be seen walking slowly down his street. Joe watched from behind the
Venetian
blinds in Sally’s living room, noticed how like an infant she cradled the schoolbooks in her arms, was impressed by the coolness with which she kept her face aimed straight ahead while out of the comer of her eye she worked the place over like a burglar casing a jewelry store.

One day she stopped at each house on the street, rang the doorbell and offered for sale tickets to a raffle being held by the Truth Church.

“Oh!” she said, pretending surprise as Joe Buck opened his door to her, “I had no idea you lived here! I was just, I was just, our church is raffling a rotisserie, and I was just, it’s electric and all, have you lived here long? I mean would you like to buy one, a ticket?”

Joe looked at her lips as she spoke, and then he looked past her, hearing in his mind the kissing sounds of Adrian Schmidt, and he shook his head, no, he didn’t want to buy a raffle ticket.

The girl knew what he was saying no to, and without actually moving, her face strained toward him, her eyes watery and deeply troubled, and she said: “Are you sure?” He nodded. Anastasia quickly turned and walked down the steps and up the path toward the sidewalk. Her rear end moved back and forth, back and forth, in a way that made his stomach jump, and then he noticed how sorry her back was, how sad and lonesome the backs of her knees looked, and then he heard himself saying “Umh” fairly loud. When she turned to him again, Joe said, “I don’t know if I got any change,” and the tilt of her eyebrows pulled at his heart.

And so Joe’s first woman was this fifteen-year-old Chalkline Annie Pratt. They hid like thieves. He was ashamed of her and of himself. He hated paying the price she exacted, those desperate kisses, and yet, because her need for them was so great, it thrilled him to administer them.

In his idleness, he had too much time for brooding. He was forever making promises to himself that in her presence were impossible to keep. He would think of the mound of her stomach and the moist, smaller mound below it, and these thoughts, coupled with some sense of her terrible lonesomeness, made idiots of his resolutions.

Then one day the parents of Anastasia Pratt received an unsigned letter apprising them not only of the girl’s elaborate carnal generosities in the storeroom of the World movie theater, but of her visits to Joe as well. Mr. Pratt came to the house one evening intending to “beat the life out of that boy,” but he was a small man and ended by doing something else: He went to the police. Joe never learned what transpired at the police station, but the next afternoon Sally telephoned him from downtown saying, “It’s all over, precious, they’re putting the poor girl in a nice home.” “A nice home” was Sally Buck’s euphemism for an insane asylum.

The ending of Anastasia Pratt’s career caused considerable talk. Joe Buck’s name, having been linked with it, achieved a certain notoriety. The stories that circulated were not always accurate. In one version, he had forced her to these multiple acts with others for his own financial gain; in another, he had made her pregnant; and it was also told that he was formed in a certain way that drove the girl mad.

Gradually aware of his new position in the town, Joe was ashamed and embarrassed. Soon everything about his life, his truancy, his idleness, his dependence on his grandmother, piled one upon the other and he developed an acute sense of his own worthlessness. He despised the very thought of asking anyone for a job, and since nothing in his life pressed him to do so, he continued to avoid it. Sally Buck’s shop was thriving and she showed no concern over him whatever. Apparently his lack of employment, even as it extended into his nineteenth year, and then into his twentieth, did not seem to her in any way remarkable. She continued to furnish him with the money that clothed and sustained him, and she paid him as little attention as ever. He kept the yard in shape and washed Sally’s car occasionally, and once he painted the house and made some repairs on the roof. Now and again he would drift into a purely sexual connection with someone, always with the shameful certainty that he was somehow being exploited and made a fool of, and yet hopeful that one of these experiences might bring about a real and friendly alliance with someone. Bobby Desmond was a typical case. For a brief period, perhaps a week or so, having long since broken away from the pack at the magazine store, Bobby sought out Joe’s company: took him for rides in his car, and stopped by the house now and then with a six-pack of beer. As it turned out, this young man merely wanted the experience of being used by Joe in the same way Anastasia Pratt had been used by him that night in the storeroom of the World. Joe, eager as always to oblige, gave the young man the experience he wanted. But three weeks later, when Bobby Desmond got married, Joe was disappointed not to be invited to the wedding. The persons, female and male alike, who were so eager to avail themselves of his splendid body never appeared to notice that it was inhabited by Joe Buck.

He did indeed give the impression of being absent even while his presence was clearly in evidence. A lone, lonesome childhood had taught him that today, whatever day he was in, was barren as a wasteland with nothing in it worth looking at, and it had made of his mind an inveterate wanderer, nearly always gypsying about in places and situations in which a worthwhile tomorrow might take place. Even while laboring over some lady in the hope of pleasuring her so keenly he would win her devotion forever—for this was what he sought in these early acts of love—even at such moments his mind would trot on ahead somewhere, perhaps savoring a future time in the life he would have made with her.

This, then, was the manner in which Joe drifted into his twenties, with nothing sufficiently remarkable taking place in his life to press him into the ways of manhood. And when he was twenty-three the government called him into the army. He was afraid he wouldn’t do well. And he didn’t. But he stayed out of trouble and wrote a lot of letters to Sally Buck.

That was true: some sergeant one day called him cowboy and others took it up. He was pleased and began to walk in a new way; also he developed a habit of hooking his thumbs into his back pockets as if his trousers were a low-slung gun belt.

There was much complaining in the army and Joe found he had as much to complain of as anyone else, and so he learned at last to take part in conversations. The young men clustered around the big table in the barracks said “shee-it” a great deal and some of them called each other “man.” And one young soldier, who claimed he was from Cinci-goddam-nati, had this remarkable system of fitting cusswords into unexpected corners of his talk. Joe liked these mannerisms and adopted them for his own use. Bit by bit he was acquiring a personality, a style of his own.

All in all he was having a pretty good time, and the months passed more quickly than is usual in the army.

In October of his second year he wrote:

This was his last letter to Sally, and he was never certain she received it. For back in Albuquerque something terrible had taken place.

His grandmother found a new beau who owned a big ranch. The man was a few years younger than Sally and this disparity in their ages seemed to necessitate the telling of a few white lies. For instance, she told him something that had not been entirely true for forty-five years: that she could ride horseback. People were to say later that this beau should have known better than to allow Sally Buck to ride anything at all, as it should have been clear from one glance that the poor little thing was brittle as glass. But one Sunday afternoon, this lady, at the age of sixty-six, mounted a raspberry roan and rode off into the desert with her sweetheart.