Midnight Cowboy Read Free

them in fact, one for your butt and one for your feet, and you don’t need a reservation, the whole world is reserved, and the minute you sling your horsehide suitcase onto the overhead rack, the driver shifts into gear and begins to back out on schedule. Maybe not on schedule from the Greyhound’s point of view, but from yours. Because you
are
the schedule, and that bus
moves
.
     

2
     
    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