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Midnight Cowboy
Copyright © 1965 by James Leo Herlihy
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright © 2002 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Electronic editions published 2002, 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795311673

eForeword

In some ways, it was unfortunate for author James Leo Herlihy that his novel Midnight Cowboy was adapted into the landmark film of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Although the film, which won several Oscars including Best Picture, certainly brought the rising author a new level of regard and notice, its almost legendary status in the history of American filmmaking has somewhat overshadowed its literary progenitor. This is especially unfortunate since Herlihy’s work is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II.

The novel’s protagonist is Joe Buck, a nalve young Texan who decides to leave his dead-end job and find a grander, more glamorous life in New York City. The city, of course, turns out to be a much harder place to conquer than Joe expected, and he soon finds his dream compromised. Buck’s fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Riuo form the novel’s emotional nucleus, and the unlikely pair is one of the most sensitively-drawn and complex portraits of friendship in recent literature.

The focus on male friendship is in fact a longstanding motif in American literature: Twain’s Huck and Jim, Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, and Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity are some of the notable examples. Herlihy’s Joe Buck and Ratso Riuo continue this venerable tradition in their unique, starkly-drawn fashion. Midnight Cowboy also takes a well-deserved place among a group of distinguished American novels that write-often with unnerving candor-about people living on the “margins” of society: Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonleyhearts, John Fante’s Ask the Dust, Kerouac’s On the Road, and William Burroughs’ Junky, to name a few.

Midnight Cowboy, written by Herlihy with a unique mixture of severe realism and sensitivity, may well prove to be the best and most durable of these accomplished works of fiction.

part one

In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different. As he walked out of that store in Houston something snapped in the whole bottom half of him: A kind of power he never even knew was there had been released in his pelvis and he was able to feel the world through it. Brand-new muscles came into play in his buttocks and in his legs, and he was aware of a totally new attitude toward the sidewalk. The world was down there, and he was way up here, on top of it, and the space between him and it was now commanded by a beautiful strange animal, himself, Joe Buck. He was strong. He was exultant. He was ready.

Joe knew he was no great shakes as a thinker and he knew that what thinking he did was best done looking in a mirror, and so his eyes cast about for something that would show him a reflection of himself. Just ahead was a store window. Ta-click ta-click ta-click ta-click, his boots said to the concrete, meaning power power power power, as he approached the window head on, and there was this new and yet familiar person coming at him, broad-shouldered, swaggering, cool and handsome. Lord, I’m glad I’m you, he said to his image—but not out loud—and then, Hey, what’s all this ready crap? What you ready for?

When he arrived at the H tel, a hotel that not only had no name but had lost its O as well, he felt the absurdity of anyone so rich and hard and juicy as himself ever staying in such a nameless, no-account place. He ran up the stairs two at a time, went to the second floor rear and hurried into the closet, emerging seconds later with a large package. He removed the brown paper and placed on the bed a black-and-white horsehide suitcase.

He folded his arms, stood back and looked at it, shaking his head in awe. The beauty of it never failed to move him. The black was so black and the white so white and the whole thing so lifelike and soft, it was like owning a miracle. He checked his hands for dirt, then brushed at the hide as if it were soiled. But of course it wasn’t, he was merely brushing away the possibility of future dirt.

Joe set about removing from their hiding place other treasures purchased in recent months: six brand-new Western-cut shirts, new slacks (black gabardines and black cottons), new underwear, socks (a half dozen pair, still in their cellophanes), two silk handkerchiefs to be worn at his neck, a silver ring from Juarez, an eight-transistor portable radio that brought in Mexico City without a murmur of static, a new electric razor, four packs of Camels and several of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, toilet articles, a stack of old letters, etc.

Then he took a shower and returned to the room to groom himself for the trip. He shaved with his new electric razor, cleaning it carefully before placing it in the suitcase, splashed his face and armpits and crotch with Florida Water, combed a nickel-sized glob of Brylcream into his brown hair, making it appear almost black, sweetened his mouth with a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit and spat it out, applied some special leather lotion to his new boots, put on a fresh, seven-dollar shirt (black, decorated with white piping, a shirt that fit his lean, broad-shouldered frame almost as close and neat as his own skin), tied a blue handkerchief at his throat, arranged the cuffs of his tight-thighed whipcord trousers in such a way that, with a kind of stylish untidiness, they were half in and half out of those richly gleaming black boots so you could still see the yellow sunbursts at the ankles, and finally he put on a cream-colored leather sport coat so soft and supple it seemed to be alive.

Now Joe would appraise the finished product. During the grooming process, he seldom looked at his total image. He would allow himself to focus only upon that patch of face being covered by the razor at a given moment, or at the portion of the head through which the comb was traveling, and so on. For he didn’t want to wear out his ability to perceive himself as a whole. He was in some ways like a mother preparing her child to meet some important personage whose judgment will decide the child’s fate, and so when all was ready and the time had come to assess the total effect, Joe Buck would actually turn his back on the mirror and walk away from it, roll his shoulders to get the kinks out, take a few deep belly breaths and a couple of quick knee bends, and crack his knuckles. Then he would slouch in a way that he thought attractive and that was his habitual stance anyway—most of his weight on one foot—get hold of a certain image in his mind, probably of some pretty, wide-eyed adoring girl, smile at it with a kind of crooked, indulgent wisdom, light a Camel and stick it into his mouth, and hook one thumb into his low-riding garrison belt. And now, ready for that fresh look at himself, he would swing his eyes back onto the mirror as if some hidden interloper beyond the glass had suddenly called his name: Joe Buck!

On this day of the trip, Joe liked especially what he saw: liked the sweet, dark, dangerous devil he surprised in the dirty mirror of that H tel room. Beyond his own reflection he could see the splendid suitcase lying on the bed, and in his hip pocket he could feel the flat-folded money, two hundred and twenty-four dollars, more than he’d ever at any one time owned before. And he felt most of all the possession of himself, inside his own skin, standing in his own boots, motivator of his own muscles and faculties, possessor of all that beauty and hardness and juice and youngness, box-seat ticket holder to the brilliant big top of his own future, and it was nearly overwhelming to him. Formerly, and not so long ago, there had confronted him always in mirrors a brooding and frightened and lonesome person who was not at all pleased with himself, but he was gone now, put out of the way entirely, while Joe beheld the new. He could not have borne one more scrap of splendor without buckling under the wonder of it, for even as it was he felt that if he savored for one more instant the incredible good fortune of being himself in this time and place and on the move through it, he might easily wreck it all by weeping.

Over the door of the Sunshine Cafeteria was a big yellow sunburst with a clock (twenty to seven) set in it, and on the face of the clock it said TIME TO EAT.

He goes into the Sunshine. His employer, a pink man in a soiled gray suit, is just inside the door holding his pocket watch in his right hand and shaking the forefinger of his left at Joe. “You’re due here at four o’clock, four to midnight, understand?” he shouts. Customers stop eating and look up. Joe Buck takes the pink man by the ear and leads him past the astonished diners and into the scullery. A number of cooks and counter girls and dishwashers pause in their work to watch as Joe shoves the pink manager against the dishwashing machine. Joe takes his time lighting a cigarette, lifts a brilliantly booted foot and rests it on a dish crate. Then, exhaling a puff of smoke, he says, “They’s something about that dishwashing machine been bothering me. Been bothering me a long long time. Yes it has. What I been wondering is whether or not that dishwashing machine would fit up your ass. Now bend over.” “What? What? Bend over? Are you crazy?” the pink man protests. Joe remains dangerously still, looks out from under dark eyebrows: “Did you call me crazy?” “No, no, no, I only meant—” “Bend over,” says Joe. The man bends over and Joe sees a billfold sticking out of his hip pocket. “Believe I’ll take my pay,” he says, removing the money, “plus help m’self to a little bonus.” He stuffs a great wad of money into his jockstrap and walks out of the place, all eyes upon him, wide open and profoundly impressed. But no one dares follow or in any way impede his exit. In fact just to play it safe, the pink man himself remains bent over for several days after Joe has gone.

He clicked across the street, pushed through the revolving door and into the Sunshine Cafeteria, swung his new body past the tables and toward a door that said EMPLOYEES ONLY on it. This door marked the end of the air conditioning; inside it was hot and steamy. He passed through another doorway that led into the scullery. A colored man of middle age was filling a tray with dirty dishes. Joe watched as the man filled the tray and placed it on a conveyor belt that would carry it through the dishwashing machine. Then he smiled up at Joe and nodded toward a mountain of dish-filled wire baskets stacked on the floor. “Looka that shit, will you?” he said.

Joe stood next to the man. “Listen, uh, it looks like I’m headin’ East.” He lit a cigarette.

“Naw, I don’t guess. I just come to say goodbye, tell you I’m headin’ East.”

A door opened and a fat woman with a splotchy face stood there shouting “Cups!” at the top of her voice. Then she closed the door and was gone.

The colored man put his hand forward. “Well. Goodbye.” They shook hands and for a moment Joe felt reluctant to release the other man’s grip. Inexplicably, he felt like putting on an apron and starting to work, but that was out of the question. “What the hell am I hanging around here for, right?”

“That’s right,” the man said, looking down at his own hand, still caught in Joe’s. “What you going to do back there, East?”

“Women,” Joe said. “Eastern women. They got Eastern women back there, and they going to pay for it, too.”

“The men back there,” said Joe, “is just faggots mostly, and so the women got to buy what they want. They glad to pay for it’ cause it’s just about the only way they can get it.”

The colored man shook his head. “That must be some mess back there.” He took another empty tray and began filling it with cups.

“Yeah, it’s a mess. And I’m going to cash in on some of it. Isn’t that right?”

Joe Buck, all dressed up like a cowboy, suddenly knew he was not a cowboy at all. He stood there with his mouth slack, his big, slightly bucked teeth showing white, his blue eyes caught on the older man’s face. “Papa,” his eyes said, “I am going now to seek my fortune and have come to ask your blessing.” But of course the poor colored man was not his father. Nor was Joe the son of anyone in particular. And so he walked out of that scullery. The place owed him a day’s pay, but he had no stomach for an interview with the pink man who was manager of the Sunshine. Besides, he knew he would never actually tell the man to put the dishwashing machine up his ass.

He walked through the cafeteria and out onto the sidewalk, where it was evening and pleasant and clearly springtime, and pretty soon, with the clicking of his own heels to nourish his heart as he walked toward the bus station, he felt fine and his thoughts were thousands of miles away: walking down Park Avenue in New York City. Rich ladies looking out their windows swooned to see a cowboy there. A butler tapped him on the shoulder, an elevator whirred him up to a penthouse, a golden door opened to admit him to a large apartment carpeted from wall to wall with soft brown fur. Madame was wearing scanties covered by a sheer black negligee. At sight of Joe Buck, breathing became a labor: She was overwhelmed. Quivering with desire, she threw herself at once onto the soft floor. The juices of her womanliness had already risen to meet him. There was no time for undressing. He took her immediately. The butler handed him a check, signed in a florid hand, on which the amount had been left for him to fill in as he chose.

There was a juke box in the depot at Houston. As Joe climbed aboard the bus he heard the voice of some fine, big Western woman singing about a wheel of fortune turning turning turning, and it seemed to him that what this woman was getting at, she was sending all the studs East to clean up. Joe smiled his crooked and gleaming white smile all the way down the aisle, knowing and savoring something he had no words for about destiny: that there is a certain way of climbing inside of time that gives a man ownership of the world and everything in it, and when this takes place there is a kind of click, and from then on when you hear a juke box, for instance, it plays only what you need to hear, and everything, even Greyhound buses, operates for your convenience—you walk into the station and you say, “What time’s a bus to New York City?” and the man says, “Right away,” and you just step on the thing and that’s all there is to it. The world is music and yours is the rhythm that owns it. You don’t even have to snap your fingers, the beat is you, and when you think about those Eastern women, the big broad on the juke box sings the finish of the thought for you, yearning yearning yearning, that’s what they’re doing in the East. (Okay, here it is, lady, it’s just climbed on the bus, it’s on the way!) And there’s a seat for you, two of 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.

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 attention.

This man was named Woodsy Niles. His beard was blue and his eyes were bright, and he showed Joe Buck how to ride a horse and how to make a slingshot, and he taught him how to chew tobacco and how to smoke cigarettes, and a special way of holding his peter so that he could piss an arc higher than his own head. Woodsy Niles was a happy kind of man who had his own pleasurable and snappy way of doing everything, even walking. Yes, he walked as if he believed no moment should pass without pleasure, and he took enjoyment even from such simple acts as moving across a room or opening the corral gates. He sang a lot of songs, too, this Woodsy Niles, sang them in a fine manly voice, accompanying himself on a guitar, and sometimes when they spent the night at his ranch, Joe would awaken as late as three A.M. to the songs that issued from the bedroom where Woodsy and Sally slept. The boy always supposed Woodsy had simply awakened in the night feeling far too strong and handsome and salty to squander himself on mere sleep, and was forced to let off some of the excess in a chorus or two of The Last Roundup. He did the “git alongs” in a way that made Sally giggle, and when he got to the part about the place in the sky where the strays are counted and branded, Joe was apt to get the blues, but in a strangely pleasurable way, and he had to restrain himself from joining the beautiful people in the bedroom. This was one of the first things Joe learned about lying with a woman in the night: You sing songs to her. It seemed a splendid way to do, and what’s more, the whole house got the good of it.

But inevitably Sally had some falling out or other with this remarkable man—as sooner or later she did with all the others—and Joe was left to pine for him as for a goneaway father. But surely it was in this time of Woodsy Niles that Joe had begun to see himself as some sort of a cowboy.

There was, following this love affair, a flurry of Sundays in which Sally Buck took the boy to church. What she liked best about these mornings was their promenade aspect, the opportunity afforded for daytime dress-up. Spending almost all of her daytimes in the shop, she had, for example, few opportunities to parade around in her lovely hats. And the boy set her off well; everyone said they looked like a mother and son team, an illusion that seemed to chop an entire generation of years from her age.

But for Joe these visits to church were another matter altogether: After the regular services, the adults had coffee and rolls in the church basement while the youngsters attended Sunday school upstairs. It was at these sessions that Jesus replaced Woodsy Niles in Joe’s affections. He was taught by a young lady with warm, humorous, kindly eyes that Jesus loved him. There was always a painting on an easel in front of the class; it depicted Jesus walking with a boy child. You could see only the back of the boy’s head, but Joe felt that he himself was that child. Songs were sung, songs about how Jesus walked with him and talked with him and told him he was His own. And one day the young lady teacher told about the events of a certain terrible Friday in the life of this gentle, bearded man, and then she passed out small colored pictures that they were allowed to keep. Jesus was looking right at him, and his eyes said: “Let me tell you I have seen an awful lot of misery, and have suffered something fierce in my life, but it sure is a comfort to have a cowboy like you for a friend.” Something like that. Something that gave Joe a personal and strong feeling of connection with the suffering that was going on in those eyes, along with a desire to alleviate it in some way. Studying the picture, it: occurred to him that, clean-shaven, Jesus might have a blue face like Woodsy’s, and he began to wonder if there might be other similarities as well. For several nights he placed on his chest of drawers in front of the Jesus picture a plug 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 outlines were more squarely defined, and somehow his mouth had grown up to accommodate his big teeth so that they had become a good white shiny asset.

He was so pleased with what he saw that he got dressed up and went strutting about the neighborhood, supposing that others too would see what had taken place in him and find it remarkable. (No one did.) He stopped at Sally’s shop. She said, “Good Lord, honey, those clothes look awful on you, they’ve gotten away too small.”

Later that afternoon, Joe paraded through the streets of Albuquerque in bright-blue slacks, an orange sport jacket and oxblood shoes with cleats on the heels. Sally said the outfit seemed to clash a little, “but you look real cute, have you got a girl?”

At home, straining his eyes toward the mirror until they were all but inflamed, he wondered what had happened to his delight with himself. The new man was still there with all his beauty intact, but somehow the marvel of him had gone sour, the elation had broken apart and become a misery. And suddenly he knew why. For a dreadful thing had come about in him that day: an awakening to his own lonesomeness.

Never having had a friendship on his own, Joe knew nothing of how to bring such a situation about. His way of proceeding was to pick out a person he liked and then do a lot of hanging around in the hope that a friendship would come into being. He tried this method on: the grocer’s widow, two gas station attendants, the girl who issued money orders at the Rio Pharmacy, an old immigrant shoemaker, an usher at the World movie theater. But they never seemed to understand what he hoped to achieve. Gradually it became clear to him that conversation was a necessary part of the development of personal ties, but Joe rarely had anything to say, and on occasions when he did dredge up a few words, his listener as a rule remained unmoved and the effort went for nothing. He was simply no talker. His best conversations were with Sally, but even they were conducted on the run. He’d be sitting, say, on the edge of the bathtub watching her paint herself in the mirror over the sink; the greater part of her attention would be given over to the considerable task of getting some twenty years erased from her face, and very little would be left over for her grandson.

It was during the fall of his seventeenth year, and in this mood of hunger for affectionate connections in the world, that Joe one evening wandered into the World movie theater and began a brief and pleasurable and terrible association with a girl named Anastasia Pratt.

The name of Anastasia Pratt, even though the girl herself was only fifteen, was legendary to the young people of Albuquerque. Such legends rarely derive from fact alone: Invention as a rule takes a part in their creation. But the behavior of Anastasia Pratt from the time she was twelve was such that the imagination was stunned; no one by lying could have made it seem to be much more bizarre or improbable than it already was.

She was known as Chalkline Annie, suggesting the order that had to be maintained in order to serve efficiently the large numbers of boys to whom in a single half hour she made her body available.

Behind the silver screen at the World movie theater was a large room in which were stored the letters for the marquee, uniforms for the ushers, towels and soap and various other supplies and equipment. In one corner were stored some ends of carpeting left over from the theater’s most recent refurbishing. It was in this corner that the legend of Anastasia Pratt was created in the flesh. She labored as well in various living rooms, bedrooms, parked cars, and garages, in school grounds at night, and even under the sky along certain desert highways in fair weather. But it was on this stack of carpet ends in the storeroom of the World movie theater that Anastasia was most often used and by the greatest numbers.

Neither pretty nor unpretty, she appeared to be an ordinary schoolgirl, so ordinary that in light of her actual behavior the effect seemed almost studied. She wore the usual clothes—skirts, blouses, sweaters, ankle socks, and saddle oxfords. Her hair was chestnut-colored, combed straight back and held with a clip. She wore no makeup to speak of, merely plucked her eyebrows and dabbed on a little lipstick. In the daytime you would see her walking always alone to and from school, carrying her books, and seeming to be as open-eyed and listless and mildly troubled as any virginal and solitary adolescent is apt to be. Unless you knew of her special activities, you would have had no reason to look twice at Anastasia Pratt. But with that knowledge, the contrast between what you imagined and what you saw was astonishing. One young; wag referred to her as Virgin Jekyll and Miss Hyde.

Despite the girl’s fame there were at least three persons who were totally unaware of her conduct. Two of these, of course, were the girl’s parents, the father a strict, hard-working, irritable bank cashier and the mother a thin-lipped, shifty-eyed piano player at the Truth Church. The third ignorant party, until a certain Friday evening in October, was Joe Buck.

They met at the World water fountain. Joe stepped back and held the faucet for her. She drank and then looked at him gratefully and smiled. He smiled back. She said: “Would you like to sit with me?”

They sat on the side, about a third of the way down the aisle. Anastasia immediately placed her knee against Joe’s and began to wiggle in an unmistakably provocative way. Suddenly they were holding hands. Just as Joe was beginning to worry about the perspiration emanating from his palm, she took his hand and used it to caress her thigh. Then the girl used her own hand boldly to study the extent of his excitement. Finding it to be considerable she took hold of his face and begged him to kiss her. Joe was not at all disinclined to do so; in all the excitement he simply hadn’t thought of it; but there was in her request such urgency, such desperation that when he did kiss her, the girl’s lips clung to his mouth as if she were taking from him some life-giving substance. He felt as if he were administering to a person who had been fatally wounded in an accident but who was not yet quite dead.

Anastasia turned around and in a whining voice said, “Shut up. Please shut up. Give me a chance, will you?”

“Me, too, Annie, how’s this? Want me to knock it against the back of your seat a few times for luck?”

Joe did not yet understand what was taking place. He’d seen lots of couples necking in this very theater, and always they had been left unmolested. He was frightened and he was confused. Apparently in his inexperience he was doing something wrong, but he hadn’t the faintest notion of what it was, and he knew even less how to handle himself in such a situation.

One of the gang stood up and leaned over the row of seats and recognized Joe Buck from grade-school days. “Hey, it’s Buck. It’s Joe Buck,” he announced, resuming his seat.

Joe didn’t know the voices behind him and he was afraid to turn around and look.

“Hey, Joe,” one of them whispered to him. “You been kissing Anastasia, you better go swallow a drug store and I ain’t kidding. She’s copped every joint in Albuquerque.” This voice was not hostile, it was in fact friendly and urgent in its tone. Joe then turned and saw a dark Italian boy he remembered from school. His name was Bobby Desmond.

Anastasia Pratt got up from her seat and flounced up the aisle. The gang ran to follow her. Before leaving with the others, Bobby Desmond paused long enough to tap Joe’s shoulder and say, “Come on.”

Joe got up and followed. In the back of the theater were six boys, all of high-school age, blocking an exit. Anastasia was pleading weakly to be allowed through. A tall, skinny, pimply, loudmouthed blond boy said “Hey, Annie, Gary Amberger’s upstairs and he’s dying to see you.”

And then they were all trooping down a side aisle of the World movie theater, this line of boys and Anastasia Pratt, heading toward a red exit sign at the left of the screen. Joe, following behind Bobby Desmond, brought up the rear. As he went through the curtains under the sign he heard the voice of some Hollywood woman on the screen saying: “I tell you, the situation’s gotten entirely out of hand. Our only hope is to pretend that nothing’s happened.”

Contents

eForeword

part one

1

2

3