Cutter and Bone (2 page)

“Cutter,” Murdock said. “You still staying with him, right?” Bone nodded.

“That’s it then. Anyone sane, that guy drive him crazy. Anyone don’t drink, he’ll put him on the sauce. Any anyone don’t want a job—hell, he’ll have you punching a clock before the week’s out.”

Bone smiled wearily. “I take it he was in.”

“You take it right, pal. Couple hours ago.” Murdock looked down the bar, where a rheumy-eyed old man was anxiously regarding his empty glass.

“Tell you later.” Murdock moved away.

Bone lit a cigarette, grateful for the interruption. He was not in any mood for conversation. Ever since he had left the woman he had felt the anger growing in him, the resentment. He had a pretty good idea how she pictured him, as some sort of footloose swinging stud blithely moving from woman to woman, victim to victim, taking what he could and skipping on, no sweat, no lost sleep. The irony of it galled him, for right this minute he felt about as swinging and free as a Carmelite monk. Like the quinine water, fear ran cold in him. And it was the sort of fear white middle-class Americans just were not supposed to know about, fear of things like hunger and cold and toothache, all quite minor unless you had twelve dollars to your name, five of which you would blow this night on liquor. Would he eat tomorrow? The coming week? Would he have a place to sleep? The ridiculous truth was he didn’t know, for both right now depended on Cutter’s disability check, which would probably last about as long as a Southern California snow, considering that the man’s tastes ran to abalone steaks and Cabernet Sauvignon and Packard restorations.

But then Bone was his own man, was he not? Free, white, and thirty-three, sound of wind and limb? Couldn’t he simply do as Murdock suggested, get a job, pay his own way? The evidence indicated otherwise. For he had tried, every now and then had bowed to necessity and taken a job, probably a dozen of them in the past thirty months, two in marketing again, relatively high-paying positions in which he was expected to do only what he did best, and yet within weeks the stomach had begun to go bad just as in the past, sleep would not come, and his exhaustion was as if he had been drugged. So he had quit. And even the other jobs, the frequent blue-collar gigs as a gardener or truck driver or laborer—the story there was no different. Always the tightening in the stomach would come, the feeling of entrapment, and finally the inevitable flare-up with some asshole boss or other. Then it would be the street again, the women again, his only real security.

Later, if he drank enough, he would pass the problem off as philosophic, reflecting that he simply could not think in the old terms anymore—man, job, life—not when the death of Richard Bone was no more than a sudden leg cramp out in the surf tomorrow morning or a drunk driver coming his way just beyond every curve ahead or an exotic virus even now prospering in his flesh. When your mortality was that real for you, how could you spend what might be your last hours in someone else’s hire, making or selling or serving disposable junk?

But now, sober, Bone had no answers, no certitude, nothing but the fear, the coldness trickling through him.

Murdock returned. Wagging his head ruefully, he lit a small cigar. “Yeah, he was here all right, your landlord. About two hours ago. Came in with this hippie freak and a girl.”

“Mo?”

“Who’s Mo?”

“Maureen. His old lady. Mother of his kid.”

“What’s she look like?”

“Blond. Kind of thin. A chain-smoker.”

“Christ no,” Murdock laughed. “This one was a spade. But some looker, let me tell you. Real cool, you know the kind. Anyway they come in here about nine and take that table over by the jukebox. Hardly drink anything, the three of ’em, just stand there feeding quarters into the thing and breaking up over the music. Now I say, you don’t like a number, well and good, you don’t have to play it.”

“Cutter does.”

Murdock frowned in consternation. “He’s a leaker, all right. You know, I had the feeling he was kind of playing it double, making fun of the three of them same as he was the rest of us.”

Bone knew the routine. “Now you see him, now you don’t.”

“Another thing. The guys here like the fights on TV, so naturally I turn ’em on. So what does your boy do? He sits over there telling this hippie and the girl—just loud enough so if you wanted you couldn’t help but hear him—he tells ’em how sick American men are, that the only way we can get our jollies is through secondhand violence, like the fights, watching one poor creep pound on another. Only he served it up with a lot of psychological mumbo jumbo, you know?”

Bone drained his glass. “Cutter knows the words.”

“Yeah he does. But believe me, by then the cats in here wasn’t digging his words very much. Fact, most of ’em didn’t like it from the beginning, him bringing the hippie and the black girl in here. But what could they do, huh? Him hobbling around on a cane and with one arm missing and that goddamn black patch over his eye. He uses all that, you know? He takes advantage. Hell, he ain’t the only cat got shot up over in the paddies.”

Bone slid his empty glass across the bar, hoping for both a refill and an end to the tirade.

“Man’s got his problems,” he said.

Murdock picked up the glass, dumped out the ice, the twist of lime. “One final word on the subject,” he said. “Move out. Get away from him. Sleep on the beach if you have to.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Sure you will.”

In the next few hours Bone bought four more drinks himself, accepted one from an off-duty cop who had taken the stool next to his, and finally got a freebie from Murdock himself. So he was without anxiety when he left the bar at eleven-thirty, walking through a cold spring rain to his car parked up the street. The rain meant that before he could drive anywhere he first had to get out a towel and dry off the seat and dashboard, for the MG’s torn old canvas top was about as effective as rattan in keeping out the weather. And even then the drying off was not totally successful, because the worn-through seat absorbed much of the wetness and would surrender it only to the pressure of Bone’s weight, which it began to do as he started for home—a sensation that always made him feel as if he had been time-warped back into wet diapers and a crib. But even this feeling did not altogether kill his pleasure in the night, the almost midwestern lushness of it, with the wind soughing in the sycamores and pepper trees and the palms whipping back and forth, raining dead fronds on the darkly gleaming streets.

He was moving along Anapamu, under its graceful canopy of stone pines, when the car’s engine began to cough and rattle. Then abruptly it cut out. He knew he had been playing things close, not having bought any gasoline for almost a week, so he was not surprised at running out now. And yet he could not completely check his anger either, his disgust at the goddamn miserable little limey heap with its leaky top and useless gas gauge and general debility, and he had to resist a strong impulse to steer the thing off the road into a tree and just leave it there, abandon it for good. Instead he coasted to a stop along the curb, and taking the ignition key, set out on foot the rest of the journey home, most of which was sharply uphill. He knew he could have gone for gas at one of the all-night stations on Milpas, but they were not much closer than Cutter’s place, and this way, leaving the car overnight, he would not have to walk back but could use Cutter’s car in the morning, if by some outside chance it happened to be running.

To his right, the high school sprawled low and dark and very Californian in its parklike setting, an almost collegiate campus compared to the bleak diploma factory Bone had attended in his native Chicago Plains. He was not surprised that given this setting and climate students tended to overachieve mostly in illiteracy and venereal disease. And it made him almost wish he was sixteen again, mindless and full of juice, embarking on that long road of teenage ass. Certainly compared to the road he walked this night it would have been more pleasant, and a lot easier on the nerves. First there was the rain, which suddenly became a cataract as he turned uphill away from the school. Then in the first block a huge Doberman dragging a broken chain came snarling out of the darkness at him like the hound of hell itself, and he found himself circling gingerly around the beast, walking backward in a cold feral sweat, jabbering pleasantries. Then no sooner was he out of danger and on his way again when a late-model car came speeding down the hill and, braking suddenly, swung into an alley next to an apartment complex. There the car came to a stop and Bone saw a man get out, a squat, large-headed figure silhouetted against some distant garage doors floodlit by the car’s headlights. Moving rapidly, stumbling once, the figure scurried around to the other side of the car and opened the passenger door, apparently getting something out of the front seat, though Bone could not be sure since he was across the street and approaching from the driver’s side. But as he walked on, the angle changed rapidly, and he saw the man just as he finished stuffing something—golf clubs, it looked like—into one of a half dozen trash barrels evidently left there from a pickup earlier in the day. Immediately the man slipped back into the car through the open passenger door and roared on up the short alleyway, fishtailing the car as he accelerated and then braked again, turning left as the alley turned. Seconds later Bone heard the tires shrieking once more as the man turned onto Anapamu and floored the car again. Already a few lights were coming on in the apartment buildings as outraged widows and retirees checked their alarm clocks to see what time it was, at what ungodly hour they had been awakened by what drug-crazed hippie freak. Bone hurried on, not eager to have to answer any questions, especially any put by a policeman.

As he reached the next corner he found the sidewalk effectively blocked by an old man and a toy poodle, both dressed in oversize yellow slickers and connected by a leash. The dog, a male, was spritzing a dwarf palm tree.

“You the one making all the racket?” the old man demanded.

Bone deliberately did not break his stride, so the man had to haul the dog in on its leash, one leg still airborne.

“Hey!” the old fellow complained. “Who do you think you are?”

Bone told him to go fuck himself.

Between the main part of the city and the mountains was a great long foothill beginning at the Old Mission and running almost to the sea. Billed as the Riviera by the natives, it offered vistas and property values that ranged from the breathtaking along the top to the merely desirable farther down. These latter were generally older neighborhoods with smaller lots and smaller houses, most of which had been cut up into apartments that offered little for the money except a view, and sometimes not even that. Cutter’s place, however, stood alone, a small gray frame structure built in the forties on the outer edge of one of the goat-path roads that veined the hillside, a perch so precarious there was no backyard at all, just a rickety wood deck whose unobstructed view probably accounted for half the three-hundred-dollar rent Cutter and Mo scrounged to raise each month, often unsuccessfully.

As Bone reached their street now and saw the house ahead, he found himself hoping that Mo would be in bed already, preferably sound asleep. And this irritated him, for he knew there was seldom a time when the sight of her failed to give him pleasure and thus he had to wonder if his desire not to see her now wasn’t a kind of fear, a gut need at this late stoned hour to slip past the fast guns of her scorn. How was it he had described her to Murdock? Blond and kind of thin. Which she was. But she was also kind of beautiful, a fact he had not seen fit to mention. And this too irritated him.

As he let himself into the house, softly closing the front door behind him, he was relieved to see that all the lights were out except one over the kitchen sink, which as usual was buried under a clutter of dirty dishes. Even in the darkness Bone could feel the squalor closing in on him, for the place was truly a house without a keeper. The little house that couldn’t, Swanson called it, Swanson from the good old moneyed days of Cutter’s childhood. Cutter and Mo had lived in the place two years, Bone understood, yet to a large extent they still were not unpacked. Random supermarket boxes full of books and stereo albums and other junk sat on the floor next to unhung pictures and piles of clothing no one had bothered to put away or get hangers for. The tiny kitchen, however, was the true disaster area. There the groceries—the bags of Fritos and Cheetos and potato chips, the cans of Spaghetti-os and Hamburger Helper, the rafts of Hostess Twinkies and Ding Dongs and other such chemical concoctions—all sat exactly where they had been brought in from the store and dumped, amid the burned pots and empty fifths and accumulated TV dinner trays.

So Bone was grateful for the darkness as he ventured into the kitchen now and, rinsing out a dirty coffee cup, tried to cool his smoker’s throat with water that tasted like pure chlorine. Just as he was setting the cup back on the sink, the bathroom door opened and a shaft of light poured across the living room. In it Mo moved dreamily, carrying a drink in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other. She was wearing chinos and the beautifully ornate silk kimono Cutter claimed to have stolen from a Hong Kong whore during one of his R and Rs from Vietnam. Reluctantly Bone left the kitchen.

“You’re up,” he said.

“How very keen we are tonight.” Her smile was heedless, stoned.

“Feeling good, huh?”

“Good enough.”

Bone turned on a table lamp and dropped onto the davenport. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Quads and vodka.”

She shrugged indifferently. “Could be. I didn’t bother to notice.”

“Considering, you’re looking good.”

“You too. But then of course you always do. Sort of a dry Mark Spitz, aren’t you?”

“Drier. And blonder.”

“And older,” she said.

“Much older.”

Clumsily she slipped down onto the floor. Setting her drink on the coffee table, an old boat hatch resting on cement blocks, she chain-lit another cigarette. “Well, how’d we do these last few days?” she asked. “Did we score big? Did we make them pay for the honor of balling the champ?”