Midnight Cowboy Read Free Page B

of tobacco and a pack of Camels, and each morning he checked to see if anyone had come in the night for a chew or a smoke. No one ever did. And soon he lost completely the belief that there was anyone walking with him or talking with him or telling him he was His own. Jesus joined the people Joe would never see again; He was behind the sky with the three blondes and Woodsy.
     
    That summer flurry of churchgoing ended for good when Sally Buck landed a new beau, a telephone lineman. He walked into her shop one afternoon, his wide leather belt riding low on his hips, heavy with tools, to make an installation. Sally’s pupils dilated at the sight of him, and by the time he returned to his truck, the lineman had fallen under her pretty little gray-eyed spell.
     
    There followed a year in which Joe saw hardly anything at all of his grandmother. For that matter he saw very little of anyone at all. A listlessness took possession of him during that fall of his fourteenth year, and by Thanksgiving he had ceased going to school. The effort needed to get there and to remain awake could no longer be summoned in him. Several boys of Joe’s temperament, boys unresponsive to talk, drifted away from the school that year. Some few remained for the social life, but this was no lure to Joe, who never had been included in it. No one had disliked him, but then, no one had really noticed him much either. He was simply the one with the big front teeth (sometimes called “Buck” Buck), the one who seldom spoke, never had his lesson, and always managed somehow to angle a seat in the back of the room. Sally was visited at her shop from time to time by truant officers, but this never resulted in any real action on her part or theirs, and Joe was left to do as he pleased. He got up at noon, combed his hair a lot, smoked cigarettes, ate peanut butter and sardines, and watched thousands of miles of film unroll on the television set in Sally Buck’s living room. He kept that TV going from noon till long past midnight. Away from it for any length of time he actually became confused and disoriented. He urgently required the images it gave out, and especially the sound it made. His own life made very little noise of its own, and he found that in silence there was something downright perilous: It had enemies in it that only sound could drive out.
     
    Then, too, the TV had lots of blonde women, and every last one of them looked somehow like one of his own. It seemed that every stagecoach and covered wagon, every saloon and every general store, if you watched it long enough, would prove to have a blonde in it: The swinging doors would open, or the curtains would part, and out would come Claire Trevor or Barbara Stanwyck or Constance Bennett, looking for all the world like his own familiar yellow-haired women. And who would that tall man be, riding high in his saddle, face against the sun, jaw squared toward goodness and justice, bursting with his own hardness and strength and purpose, and portrayed by anyone from Tom Mix to Henry Fonda? Why, that was Joe Buck himself. In a sense.
     
    During this time of his television addiction, an astonishing thing was happening to him. He was becoming, day by day and bit by bit and feature by feature, as tall and strong and handsome as a TV cowboy. One day, when summer had come and gone and then had come again and Joe was swimming in the river, there was a moment in which he discovered himself to be inhabiting the body of a man. He climbed out of the water and looked down at himself and there he saw this shimmering new man conveying himself through the mud on a man’s strong legs. His arms and body had developed a full muscle structure, and there was on his chest and limbs a perfectly presentable man’s growth of dark body hair. He became tremendously excited by these sudden discoveries and hurried home on his bicycle to study the situation in Sally’s bedroom mirror. He found that his face too had changed: Its