Cutter and Bone (23 page)

“Peace, my child,” he intoned.
“La plume de ma tante est dans votre derrière.”

As the afternoon crawled toward night, Cutter gained strength and Valerie grew increasingly quiet. One after another she smoked her Virginia Slims and drank her Tom Collinses, but she said almost nothing and in fact barely moved except when Cutter would ask her for more money, which she would then obediently dig out of her purse and hand over, as if that were her only purpose in being there. When they left the hotel, it was Bone who drove the Pinto while she sat meekly between the men, submitting to Cutter’s hand under her sweater and up her skirt, and even accepting his kisses too, this despite the fact that he had thrown up in the hotel men’s room not even an hour before and his breath would not let them forget it.

Bone had had five or six drinks himself and he was not keen on driving anywhere, especially not on the Hollywood Freeway to Sunset and then making his way through the heavy night traffic to the strip, but Cutter had insisted that was where they must go, that no other place except Sunset Strip could possibly do justice to the misery of the occasion, and if Bone did not want to take the wheel, well Cutter would be happy to do the honors himself and in the bargain would save them a good deal of time. So Bone drove. But he had to fight the alcohol every mile and every block of the way, forcing himself to concentrate hard on the traffic signals and the cross streets and the cars hurtling at him on Sunset. Once he had parked, however, it was like giving in to sleep—the alcohol seemed to pour through him, deadening and dulling all but his ego, making his mind a kind of fisheye lens blurring and shrinking the strip and all its florid fauna while at the same time it magnified him and Cutter and Valerie at the center. And that was how the night progressed, this small bagged epicenter of the universe moving erratically down the street, from one bar to another, from topless to straight to bottomless to gay. And even high as he was, Bone found the topless-bottomless mills as depressing as ever, sexless and castrating, soul-killing cells of gloom in which red-and blue-lighted girls listlessly swung and stroked and bumped their sleek spayed bodies before the uplifted and oddly bovine gaze of the crowd, dead men all. Even Cutter could not endure it for longer than a drink, nor find a blasphemy to equal it.

A gay bar up the street, however, proved no such obstacle as he loudly asked where all the girls were. And as one, the cool cosmeticized faces swiveled on him, like a firing squad of B-B guns. But Cutter laughed it off:

“Just kidding, girls. Actually I’m a latent from Fresno. I’m thinking of coming out.”

Bone knew there were few surer ways of getting stomped than by abusing homosexuals on their own turf, so he hustled the three of them out of the bar, while Cutter loudly explained to Valerie that the place was a good example of what he’d meant by epiphany: “These bastards really got something to believe in—the priapic principle, the cocks as God.”

But somehow they made it to the street, with Cutter laughing happily and banging his cane against anything that would make a racket. Because this was the strip though, he barely drew a glance, fitted in as unremarkably as a coyote in a zoo. The street in fact reminded Bone of those old movies about Hollywood, with the inevitable studio scene showing the hero and heroine as they made their way across the lot crowded with “extras” hurrying here and there—cowboys and Indians, slave girls and Roman senators, pirates and Foreign Legionnaires—all managing somehow to look quite normal, workers costumed for a job. Such was not the case, however, with their modern counterparts on the strip. For some reason the costume had become the reality. Indeed these actors did not even appear to know that they
were
costumed. And so they paraded the street—Cochise and Billy the Kid, Apollo and Venus and the Count de Sade.

A block from the gay bar, Cutter, Valerie, and Bone came upon a young black man dressed almost exactly as Cutter had said he would get himself up to serve as Valerie’s pimp, and of course Alex could not resist approaching him. Whispering and limping, Cutter asked him if he could fix up his “kinky friend here” with a Great Dane—his tastes were “positively bestial.” Fortunately the pimp enjoyed the put-on, going into a kind of limp dance of amusement and even giving Cutter’s wry, outstretched hand the sharp slap of brotherhood. But the comedy and amusement were all on his side—Bone did not miss the look of desperation in Cutter’s eye. And yet he had no idea what he could do about it, how to arrest the steep angle of their descent. So he trudged along with Valerie as Alex led them into a joint that advertised “Rassle a Naked Lady.” The price was ten dollars, which naturally did not give Cutter a moment’s pause—he simply snapped his finger at Valerie and she resignedly gave him the money, which he then handed to the proprietor, a chalk-skinned little rodent of a man who looked as if he retired each morning into a coffin. He said that Cutter could strip down to his pants if he wanted to, but he had to keep them on. There would be “no hanky-panky here.”

“Just rassle,” he said. “Just what you pay for.”

Cutter took the man at his word, probably to a degree unprecedented in the history of the establishment. The girl was a tall Chicano built along the lines of a Lachaise sculpture, with great swelling breasts and thighs. And her gaze was lithic, unmoved, as Cutter took off his sweater and T-shirt, revealing the stump of his arm and the terrible quilt of shrapnel scars dimpling his torso. She knew what he wanted of course, what they all wanted, to squeeze her great bazooms and touch her big black pussy, and she would suffer it, she was paid for it, it was a job. Instead Cutter walked up to her and, grasping her by the arm, threw her face-down on the mat. Then, forcing her arm up behind her back, he told her to say uncle or he would break her ulna and possibly her Volga too. For some reason the girl preferred to lie there and scream for the proprietor, who came running out of a back room with a small baseball bat in his hand. But Cutter would not let go.

“Tell her to say uncle,” he persisted.

“Say it! Say it!” the man yelled at her. “Jesus Christ, tell him uncle!”

And finally the girl caught on. “Uncle! Uncle!” she cried.

Cutter got off her then, mugging triumph, holding his good arm and the stump together above his head. The proprietor was yelling at him and threatening to call the police, but Cutter barely glanced at him. The bat the man held could have been a breadstick for all the attention Alex gave it.

“You said rassle,” he told the man. “So I rassled.”

Down in the street again, he gave Bone and Valerie a different reason: “The poor kid, having a job like that. I decided to give her something to remember. For a day or two, at least.”

Between eleven and midnight Cutter led them into the Bergerac, a small posh restaurant with a domed ceiling and a large fireplace and soft globe lights burning over a very voluble clientele, most of them young, mod, and successful-looking. One look at Cutter and the maître d’ hustled the three of them into the bar, an even smaller room with birdbath tables crowded along a row of leaded stained-glass windows. Bone, hoping to avoid the drunk tank, asked the waiter for a menu and was told in exceedingly fine diction that the kitchen was closed. But the long night of drinking had not been totally lost on him either, and he crooked his finger at the undoubtedly once-and-future actor and told him pleasantly to reconsider his answer or Bone would personally shove the table lantern up his ass sideways. The waiter reconsidered, brought them menus and drinks, and took their orders, petit filets mignons all around. But almost immediately Cutter wondered out loud why he had bothered to order any food, since he couldn’t possibly eat anything.

Valerie asked him what was wrong. Was he feeling sick again?

“Of course,” he told her. “Always.”

“Throwing up sick, I mean,” she clarified.

“Of course. Always.”

Valerie turned to Bone, her look almost accusative. “Say something. Do something.”

“There’s nothing to do,” Alex said. “Nothing he can say. I’m just not hungry, that’s all. Thirsty, yes. In fact, I think I’ll probably be thirsty the rest of my life.”

“Why not?” Bone put in.

“Listen to him, will you? The old Bone credo—why not?”

“Why not?” Bone said again.

And Cutter laughed. “
Because
, that’s why. Simply
because
. Didn’t anyone ever teach you anything?”

“Because, huh?”

“Hell yes!” Cutter started to laugh then, hard, doubling over his drink. And a number of people in the small room turned to look at him, which only caused him to shout at them. “What’s the matter with you cats anyway? Can’t a man laugh? Can’t a man be happy?”

Bone suggested that he quiet down, and Cutter asked why he should.

“It’s like you just said—because.”

“I said no such thing.”

“My mistake.”

But Cutter would not be mollified. “Will you please get the goddamn hell off my back, both of you. And let me try to deal with this thing in my own way. Try to remember, kiddies—this morning we were just a few hours away from payday, hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk. And what’ve we got now?—not even an outhouse on Baltic Avenue. So let me laugh, okay? Let me weep.”

“Whatever turns you on,” Bone said.

“Killing him, that would turn me on,” he said, so loud a number of people in the bar turned to look at him again, though not with alarm so much as condescension and amusement.

“What’s more logical?” he went on. “What’s more human than to kill the killer, huh? Execute the executioner? Is there any better gauge of a society’s moral fiber than its willingness to take an eye for an eye and a crushed trachea for a crushed trachea? So why not aim high, huh? Why not kill the motherfucker?”

Bone casually lit a cigarette, trying to communicate a sense of calm. But his words went the other way. “Alex, for Christ sake, can’t you just talk? Do you have to shout?”

“Who’s shouting? You just don’t like the idea, that’s all. Because you’re chicken. A tit for a tat, that’s your style. Or possibly two tits. So how about this—why don’t we auction it off? Why don’t we sell it right here? These creeps look like they ain’t hurting for bread, right? So why not sell it to them?”

“Sell what?” Bone asked.

“Our knowledge, man. That special bit of info we got about J. J. Wolfe. Why, hell, there’s bound to be a buyer here.”

“Come on, Alex. Please. Knock it off.”

“Why, huh? Why not sell it? What else we got, huh? Silver ingots? Thousand shares of IBM? Like hell we have. All we got is J. J. Wolfe—but by the balls, my friend! By the old lemon drops!”

Even the patrons across the room had turned to look at Cutter now, and Bone was getting desperate. Slowly, patiently, as if he were talking to a raging child, he again asked him to quiet down, to knock it off. And suddenly in Alex’s eye Bone saw the whole thing shrinking to the distance between them, becoming personal, charged. Cutter’s mouth curled with malice.

“Sure, man!” he said. “Of course—the second you tell me why I should, the second you give me one good reason to.” Then he pushed back his chair, evidently preparing to get up and begin the “auction.”

Bone felt the muscles in his own legs leap tight, he was that close to walking out, leaving the two of them to whatever fate Cutter’s demons might bring down on them. Instead Bone found himself reaching inside his coat and pulling out the envelope, the
personal
note he was supposed to have delivered to J. J. Wolfe. Now he delivered it to Cutter.

And for long seconds Cutter did not understand. He stared down at it in confusion and then looked up at Bone and finally over at Valerie, where he must have found the answer, read it loud and clear in the contempt her weary eyes had focused on Bone.

“Why?” Cutter asked him. “Why, Rich? In God’s name,
why?
”

Bone shrugged. “You just said it, Alex. I’m chicken.”

Somehow Bone managed to get them back to the hotel, probably by driving twenty miles an hour all the way though he could not have sworn to it, since he remembered almost nothing of the journey except a vague feeling of personal heroism, as if he were a half-dead Saint Bernard dog dragging his poor lost charges to safety. In the hotel parking lot Cutter showed his gratitude by throwing a punch at him, but he missed and hit a parked Cadillac instead. Yelling in pain, Alex then dented the car’s hood with his cane and finished it off by urinating on two of its whitewalls. In time, however, the three of them managed to reach the right floor of the hotel and even their very own room. Once inside, Bone submitted meekly to the booze and with two exceptions did not stir from his oblivion until almost eleven the next morning. The first exception was when he rolled over once at a hammering sound counterpointed by heavy panting and he had the distinct impression he saw Cutter performing calisthenics out on the balcony. Another time he seemed to recall seeing Cutter, naked and shower-drenched, opening the door for room service, a stooped old man who pushed a breakfast cart into the room as if he had no real expectation of ever getting out alive. But Bone could not have cared less. Sleep was what he needed, sore hangover’s bath, and he drifted contentedly in it until a chambermaid came clattering into the room at eleven and, not seeing him zonked out on the floor between the beds, began to tidy up the bathroom, all the while singing a soft Spanish dirge. Bone thought of rolling under a bed and letting her complete her work in peace, but there was not enough room, so he did the next best thing—he slipped up onto one of the beds and began to yawn loudly. The maid came out of the bathroom in a crouch, her eyes round with terror.

“I no see!” she cried.

Bone shrugged. “
De nada
. You come back,
si?
”

“I no see!”

“Right. I understand. You come back, okay?”

“Hokay!” She backed out of the room carefully, knowing a
brujo
when she saw one.

Alone, Bone wondered what time Cutter and Valerie had left. Remembering the calisthenics and room service during the night, the coffee and the showers, he assumed Cutter had tried to work his hangover off instead of sleeping it off, that he had been that anxious to pick up where Bone had left off yesterday. And Bone did not have to look far for confirmation. On the dresser mirror across the room was a lipstick-scrawled message: