Cutter and Bone (29 page)

They were not much past Carpinteria, however, when Cutter announced that he was starved, and turned off the freeway. Pulling up to a Sambo’s restaurant, he gave the girl twenty dollars and sent her off with instructions to load up on hamburgers and fries and Cokes and anything else that tickled her fancy. When she was gone, he reached back for the brandy and took a few pulls himself. Then he sat there looking at Bone and shaking his head.

“Did it help?” he asked.

“What?”

He gestured with the bottle. “This.”

“Help what?”

“Richard Bone, the secret bleeder.”

“That’s me.”

“Old blood and tears.”

“Now you know.”

“Well don’t sweat it, kid. We gonna get ours. We gonna make ’em pay.”

Bone took the bottle back. “Right on. Let’s stick it to ’em.”

Cutter was not taken in. “Who?” he asked.

Bone grinned. “You name ’em, pal. I’ll do the sticking.”

“You don’t know who, do you?”

“
Them
.”

And Cutter laughed. “Of course,
them
. Who else?”

Cutter let the girl drive from then on. Bone ate some of the fries and about half of a hamburger—his first food in almost two days—but most of the time he stayed with the brandy, and by the time they reached Los Angeles he had finished the bottle and had stretched out on the seat with a rolled-up coat under his head. He was vaguely aware of their stopping once, in some crowded urban alley, where Cutter scooped up most of the junk on the floor and disappeared for a while, for what purpose Bone did not know or care. Again sleep seemed so much more important.

When he woke again, he woke in pain and thirst and cold, the latter roaring out of the car’s air conditioner. Slowly sitting up, he looked about him and all he could see were the rolling wastes of the Mojave Desert, gray in the twilight, a lunar terrain scored by the twin bands of the blacktop freeway stretching ahead of them. The girl was still driving. Cutter, next to her, raised his head to look back at Bone.

“It lives,” he announced. “It has risen.”

Bone was in no mood for comedy. “Where the hell are we?”

“Just past Barstow.”

“Barstow!”

“Yep, Barstow.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“That we don’t know.”

“
Where
, Alex?”

“Monk and me,” he said, “We got to thinking about it back in L.A. And we decided why the hell not just keep right on going. See America first and all that.”

Again Bone asked him where they were headed, what was going on.

Sighing, Cutter sank back into the car seat. “I told you he wouldn’t dig it,” he said to the girl. “The man is other-directed.”

She looked back from the wheel, flashing Bone an anxious, almost frightened look. “You were asleep,” she said. “And when Alex brought it up—well, it seemed like such a super idea, you know? Just to keep right on going, the three of us.”

“Yeah, super,” Bone muttered.

“We got the bread,” Cutter assured him. “And it’s like I was saying to Monk just a few miles back—school keeps. It’ll all still be there.”

“When we get back,” the girl put in.

By now Bone was feeling sick, puking sick. But he fought it down. He was angrier than he was sick. “Not me, Alex,” he said. “Not on your goddamn life.”

“Well, it’s up to you, old buddy. We sure want you to come along. But if you feel you got to go back—well, we can let you out anytime, anyplace. Just say the word.”

Bone wanted to tell him to pull over right then, but the words would not come. He knew what shape he was in. And he knew the desert. He knew it that well anyway.

“Needles will do,” he said. “You can let me out there.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Cutter was still slouched down in the seat, staring out at the darkening desert. “We’ll miss you, Rich,” he said. “It just won’t be the same.”

When they reached Needles, Cutter announced that he and the girl were going to stay the night and get an early start in the morning, and he suggested that Bone do the same, since he looked like a dead man and smelled worse and his only hope for a lift back across the desert would be a Hell’s Angel with advanced rhinitis. Bone had not intended to start back yet anyway, not feeling the way he did, but he knew that his staying the night in a motel, or for that matter even eating, depended on Cutter’s generosity, which, as he soon found out, was not excessive. He asked him for a loan, or more accurately, compensation.

“A hundred,” he suggested. “I figure that’s about what you owe me. Sort of a kidnapping fee. The cost of getting me back where I was.”

And Cutter shrugged a grudging agreement. “Of course, my son. But not now. Not tonight. You’d only spend it on spirits, poor souse that you are. I’ll give it to you in the morning. Meanwhile, you can stay with us.”

Bone did not object. If he had really wanted the money now, he knew he could have insisted, he could even have strong-armed Cutter for it. But the next morning would do fine, he decided. For one thing, it meant he would not have to pay for his food and lodging for the night. And for another, he wanted to find out if Cutter was serious about this aimless little tour through the motherland or whether it was all a put-on, a smokescreen he was laying down for the girl as well as for him.

They rented a twin-bed room in a dreary rundown little motel with a sign out in front that succinctly recorded the nation’s recent economic history—an original
$6 per nite
with a crudely painted number 1 inserted to make
$16
, which in turn was crossed out with a large and angry X. All bets were off, all contracts canceled. It was a lodging for today, tonight. No one was making any promises about tomorrow.

Once inside, Bone waited for Cutter and the girl to finish with the bathroom and then he preempted it for almost an hour, most of which he spent in the shower, first trying to steam the alcohol out of his system and then resorting to the shock treatment of a full cold spray the final ten or fifteen minutes. After dressing, he continued the pursuit of his lost health by talking Cutter into dining at a nearby steakhouse instead of the usual hamburger joints he favored whenever haute cuisine was either unavailable or unaffordable. There Bone tried to restore some of his vitamin loss with a fourteen-ounce New York-cut steak and french fries and a tossed salad washed down with tomato juice and milk and coffee, all in quantities that had the waitress watching him with wary hostility, as if she were afraid he might be putting her on. She was middle-aged and hard-faced, with a beehive of champagne-colored hair that she kept patting and touching to reassure herself it was still there in all its glory. But she was not a bit out of place in the steakhouse, with its linoleum-covered floor and tube-steel furniture and blaring, country-rock jukebox. Bone did not care about any of that, however, for the food was good. And he noticed that the Virgin of Isla Vista seemed to be taking almost as much pleasure in his eating as he was, probably because she had considered him a doomed alcoholic until now. She even insisted on giving him part of her own steak, had cut off a sizable portion and forked it onto his plate almost ceremoniously, like an offering, a bribe to keep him sober. Then she settled back, arms folded, eyes shining, looking every inch a twelve-year-old First Class Boy Scout who had just done his good deed for the day.

“You know, I still don’t know your name,” he told her now.

“Monk.”

“That’s not a name.”

“It’s an insult, yeah,” she laughed. “The clap twins hung it on me.”

“Well, the hell with them,” Bone said. “What’s your real name?”

“Monk’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m used to it now. I like it.”

Cutter was lighting a cigar. “We’ve already been this route, Rich,” he said. “The alternative is Dorothy or Dot.”

Bone gave in. “Okay—Monk it is.”

“Monk from San Jose,” Cutter continued. “Surname Emerson, nineteen years old, English Lit major, only child of divorced parents. Daddy’s a dentist, Mom’s a social worker, and Monk herself is a nigger-loving, com-symp, atheistic socialist with allergies. And a bad case of virginity. It just won’t go away.”

The girl gave Cutter a rueful look. “Don’t talk about that, okay? I’m sorry I told you.”

“You should be,” Cutter scolded. “Shame on you. With all your advantages. And in this day and age.”

Bone tried to rescue the girl. “You’ve been busy, Alex. No grass growing under the old foot, huh?”

“You forget, Rich, you been bombed out for some time now.”

Bone could only agree. “Yeah, a day and a half, as I recall. And it seems like a month and a half. Last time I touched ground was the funeral home. And now here I am, sober in Needles.”

“Stuck in Needles,” Alex amended.

Bone did not pick it up. Mention of the funeral home had suddenly brought it all back. He would never understand why the sea had rejected him.

“The funeral,” he said, “is it tomorrow?”

Cutter looked away and shrugged, almost as if he had been asked the time. And Bone did not understand. He sat there waiting, shaken. Finally he turned back to the girl.

“I forgot to thank you for helping me,” he said. “I guess it isn’t your fault I wound up here in the desert.”

“I’m afraid it’s my doing as much as Alex’s,” she said. “I thought you’d be all for it. And I still think it’s a super idea—the three of us just taking off, going nowhere in particular.”

“You sure there’s such a place?” Bone asked.

“Might as well give it up,” Cutter advised her. “The man would be a drag anyway, looking for hidden meanings and grand significances all across this great land of ours. I can just see him poring over every greasy spoon menu—‘What does it really mean,
over easy?
’ And that we don’t need, Monk. We can get by.”

Bone tried to set the matter straight. “Hidden meanings I’m not after, Alex. Just a few answers, that’s all I want.”

“Like what?”

“Like what went wrong at George’s? Why this sudden flight into the desert?”

Cutter flicked ash off his cigar. “Nothing big,” he said. “George’s wife just wasn’t enamored of my bathroom deportment. She’s very keen on closed doors and individual towels, toothbrushes, toilet paper—you name it. I think the lady has a Ph.D. in personal hygiene.”

Bone was grinning, but he did not believe. “What about the car?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“George give it to you, loan it to you, what?”

“A
kind
of loan.”

“The kind he didn’t know about?”

“I left him a note.”

“That was considerate.”

“Thank you.”

“And the check?”

“Simple generosity, that’s all. I told him it was a matter of life and death, which it is—and that I will repay him, which I might.”

“George the generous.”

“He can afford it.”

“And the stuff in the car—the guns and cameras and all that—his too?”

“It was.”

Bone smiled now, in open wonderment. “Now let’s see—you loot his house, you load the stuff in his car, you drive to his office and hit him for a thousand-dollar ‘loan,’ and then you take off—in his car.”

“In
one
of his cars, yeah. And then I fence the purloined items. You forgot that.”

“When I was sleeping.”

“In L.A., right. A guy I know, name of Slats. Terrific fence, old Slats.”

If Cutter had expected a laugh, he did not get it. Bone looked over at the girl and found her staring at Alex as if sight were a new experience for her, a frightening experience. Seeing this himself, Cutter reached over and covered her hand with his own, patted it.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” he said. “It’s nothing. Which is why I didn’t bother to fill you in before. The car is just borrowed, like I said. And the rest, hell, the man has probably already written it off—a debt to an old friend. A guilt payment. Because he’s loaded. Because he was 4F. Because he’s what he is. So take my word for it—not to worry.”

She looked at Bone, and he nodded. “He’s probably right. George would give him both kidneys if he asked.”

“And I probably will,” Cutter said.

After that, they finished the meal largely in silence. Toward the end, Bone mentioned that he had trouble figuring out the sequence of it all, just how it had happened. He remembered Monk making the phone call from Isla Vista and he remembered their dressing him, he said, but he could not figure out how they got from there to here.

“I mean, just what happens when Alex shows up?” he asked. “He says hello, I’m taking this lush on a trip, and do you want to join us? And you say sure, give me a minute to pack? Is that how it goes?”

The girl was staring down at her plate. “It wasn’t like that,” she said.

“Then how was it?”

“Does it matter?”

Bone said it mattered.

“It was
you
, jackass,” Cutter broke in. “You and that old black magic you weave so well.”

The girl did not raise her eyes. “I asked to go,” she admitted. “I don’t know much about alcohol and I was worried, the way you were going at it, and the way you kept saying
Mo
over and over, like you wanted to die.”

Bone could feel Cutter’s eye on him, but he did not look up.

Back at the motel Bone waited until the girl was asleep and then he pried Cutter loose from the room’s vintage black and white television set, on which Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon were doing their vacuous little thing for a grateful nation. Bone pushed Cutter’s jacket at him and practically dragged him out of the small room into the cold desert night.

“What the hell is this?” Cutter groused. “What’s with you anyway?”

“We have to talk.”

“So why not back inside? The kid’s asleep.”

Bone shook his head. “Out here. I want you alert. I want answers.”

“Don’t we all.”

The motel courtyard was asphalt, a parking lot with a small empty swimming pool in the center, a concrete hole guarded by a chain-link fence with a
NO SWIMMING
sign attached. Cutter, unzipping his fly, observed that there wasn’t any
NO PISSING
signs in evidence and proceeded to water a dead potted palm just over the fence. Bone lit a cigarette and waited.