Cutter and Bone (31 page)

Bone however contented himself with the scenery, the numbing grandeur and variety of the Great Southwest. Leaving the green vein of the Colorado River Valley, the freeway climbed steadily into Arizona, up out of the mesquite and desert into the high country around Flagstaff, all snow and rock and ponderosa pine, a cold clear Valhalla that abruptly ended ten or twenty miles to the east, changing into mesquite country again, barren rolling land with small mountainous formations whose dark red hue explained the color of the freeway at that point, before it moved on into the flats of eastern Arizona and then the deserts of New Mexico, Little Joe country, a vast dun wasteland strewn with buttes and mesas of unlikely configuration. Except for Bone, it was wasted scenery, superfluous splendor, nonexistent for the two in the front seat, both of whom were caught up in the apparently more fascinating scenery of Cutter’s mind.

As usual, Alex was roaming his fields of death and gore, and though Bone wanted to tune him out, to fix his mind on the geological phenomena out the car window, he found that he could not, that he was almost as caught up as Monk in some of Cutter’s stories, for instance the one about the honky in his platoon.

“A mean little crew-cut redneck Okie named Oral Roberts Russell,” Cutter described him. “One of God’s really gifted haters, a boy who had learned well at Mama’s knee. Niggers, spics, papists, Jews, commies—he knew us all for what we were,
the enemy
, more enemy than old Charlie out in the bush could ever be. So Oral was on guard, in fact he was snapped to attention twenty-nine hours a day, those tight little pale gray eyes of his swiveling back and forth like a brace of twenty-millimeter cannon, taking it all in, you know, taking the role for up yonder, get-even time, for him and that mean, jealous God of his. He even called me the devil, old Oral did—yeah, Lieutenant Satan I was, even though the kid saw me resting, knew I rested most of the time. Anyway he watched. And he hated. And then it happened—his undoing—a replacement kid name of Dewey White. Only Dewey wasn’t white, he was black as coal and beautiful as sin, cool and smart and with just too goddamn much of that one unforgivable thing the blacks got, that thing we all secretly hate them the most for—their laughter, their ‘soul.’”

And here Cutter digressed to give Monk a theory he had about soul, that Caucasians and Orientals had it once too, long ago, but that the “old debil” natural selection had worked its remorseless mechanics here as well, with survival of the fittest proving true in civilization just as in a state of nature. Only in civilization the “fittest” were the shrewd, the calculating, the unemotional. In a civilized society they were the ones to survive and thrive. So naturally, over the millennia, the “soul” had died out of the race. And proof of this, he said, existed for anyone to see just by observing the emergent black middle class, already as restrained and soulless as their white counterparts ever were. Monk by now had the look of a fervent acolyte, and she leaped upon the idea—of course it was true, it was there for anyone to see, but not just anyone had. No, it took someone with special insight to have seen it.

“It took
you
, Alex,” she said.

But Cutter was already back with his honky in Vietnam.

“Anyway, little Oral, he couldn’t deal with Dewey, just couldn’t handle the phenomenon of him. Because the kid wasn’t just cool and beautiful, you see, he was also
friendly
. He actually seemed to like us whites. And he liked slants, dogs, newsmen, anybody, everybody. I guess what he was, was a fucking saint, old Dewey.” And here Cutter paused to light a cigarette, one-handed, as the station wagon roared down the freeway, uncontrolled. When he went on, his voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “And, well, he bought it, Dewey did. Tripped a mine and came down in little pieces. Which wasn’t exactly unusual, in fact was happening to somebody all the time. But Oral Roberts Russell, he just wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t let it go. For days he kept going on about that ‘stupid nigger, that stupid sonofabitching nigger.’ Over and over he kept saying it, and he was crying all the time and he didn’t know it. Then just as suddenly he quit. And from then on, his bag was silence. Silence and killing. Overnight he became the best grunt we had, a real killer, a mechanic. Girls on bicycles, little kids, old people, even a tiger once, a goddamn big beautiful Bengal tiger—if the thing moved and wasn’t us, he shot it. And he always wanted point, he insisted on it. But it never did him any good. He never got a scratch. He just went on living and killing, untouched, a charmed life.”

As he finished, Monk regarded him with shining eyes. “That Dewey,” she said, “he wasn’t the only one beautiful.”

But Cutter pretended not to catch her meaning. He busied himself lighting another cigarette.

That night Cutter said he refused to spend the rest of his life in “worst western” motels—“Vinyl furniture is one thing, vinyl food another”—and he suggested that the three of them take turns at the wheel while the other two rested or slept. Monk of course was eager to do anything he asked, so Bone decided to go along too. They drove all through the night and into the next day, stopping only for gas and food. And Bone gradually began to lose that normal feeling of physical well-being he thought he had recovered at Needles. The car seats apparently had been designed for five-and-a-half-footers and his six-one simply could not find comfort or rest. He slept poorly, worrying about what lay ahead of them and what he could do about it. And sometimes he just lay there listening to Cutter or the girl, who occasionally and grudgingly surrendered a fact or two about herself, as if she were confessing to small crimes. She could not remember ever having a conversation with her father, she said, always just a polite word or two, an attempt at intimacy and then failure, embarrassment, silence. He had not kissed her since grade school, nor could she recall seeing him embrace or kiss her mother except for perfunctory pecks of hello and goodbye. What little time he wasn’t poking and drilling in other people’s mouths he spent in the dark of skin-flick theaters, she claimed, gorging popcorn with one hand while he held himself with the other—a detail Bone could only assume was Monk’s invention, since he could not imagine her spying on the man that closely.

Nor was the girl any fonder of her mother, a short-haired, earthshod liberal Democrat who was forever marching the highways of the Salinas Valley with César Chavez and his grapepickers. In her caseload as a social worker, the Mexicans and blacks all had first names and were victims of the “goddamn system,” while the whites came with last names only and invariably were freeloaders, leeches, creeps.

Even before her parents’ divorce, the three of them had been like strangers living together. Words were spent like dollars and Monk had always thought she was the cause of it all, that if she’d been prettier and brighter everything would have been different. So what life she had, she found in television. For years Lucy and the Beaver and Rob Petrie were the realest people in her existence. She had tried the Catholic church and the Girl Scouts and the YWCA and occasionally a friend, but none of it had turned out, none of it worked as well as television. Summing up, she said she was a loser, an outsider, a nebbish, and finally the notorious Virgin of Isla Vista. So these last two days were just about the best thing that had ever happened to her. She felt free and happy for the first time in her life.

To all of this Cutter predictably gave her the backhand of understanding, saying that it was all her own fault, that there were all kinds of drugs to take and the sex fiends and religious freaks there for the asking, and if she would only try, she could be just as jolly and successful as everyone else. She laughed at that and then in a much softer voice told him about the night her roommates had brought Bone home with them, and how the thought that he’d made love to them just about drove her crazy, how she’d hated them for it.

“He’s so—well, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” Cutter said.

“Well,
attractive
, I guess the word is. Even drunk the way he was. But then the more I was alone with him, I began to see he wasn’t what he seemed—I mean all cool and together, you know? Can I tell you something?”

“Anything.”

“He was in love with Mo.
Your
Mo.”

“In his way, maybe. But she wasn’t
my
Mo.”

“Well, you loved her, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“But you said she had your child.”

“So?”

“Well, what are we making this trip for then? I mean, what you said about not being able to stay on the coast anymore, not with her there, in the ground.”

“I
liked
her,” he said.

The girl’s voice was suddenly cowed, frightened. “I don’t understand you.”

“It’s a beginning,” Cutter said.

By the second afternoon Cutter’s loquacity began to seem clearly compulsive to Bone. For one thing, he spoke faster and more stridently than Bone had ever heard him before, as if he were in a desperate race to get it all out. But even stranger was
what
he talked about. If there was any subject he had always avoided, it was his childhood in Santa Barbara, and yet now, almost all the way through Oklahoma, this was what he recounted for Monk. “Our little plutocracy’s Indian summer,” he called it. “The last doomed days of innocent wealth, before the GI Bill generation took over.” And then he went on to describe how they came in wave after wave, acquisitors and climbers and pirates all buttoned-down and gray-flanneled and other-directed, but not a bad lot actually, not when compared with their offspring, today’s sorry lot of socially aware managers and communicators with their razor haircuts and gunfighter mustaches and mod clothes and liberal politics and, above all, their
eyes
, Cutter said, their frightened eyes, the eyes of a herbivore at the waterhole. “They watch and they wait. When will it come? they wonder. When will they finally hit, our poor abused black and brown brethren?”

But mostly he gave Monk the past, a nostalgia he tried to minimize and ridicule, but the warm sepia tones of it still managed to slip through intact: long uncrowded days in the beautiful seaside city, the fine old house under the wine palms and sycamores, with its gardeners and servants, its stables and tennis court and swimming pool and white wicker lawn furniture and guests in organdy and Palm Beach suits, some who came even then on horseback. And there were the polo matches viewed from the roofs of heavy Packards and Cadillacs, white-walled and waxed, gleaming in the coastal sun. There was the constant sailing on the succession of yachts his father kept buying and selling as if he were looking for the platonic
idea
boat, but on all of them the experience for Alex had been beautifully the same: the smell of wood and canvas and sea air, the salt spray free then of any trace of petroleum.

There were the Sunday dinners at the country club and, just as invariable, supper at the Biltmore Hotel, that still lushly beautiful Sarazen palace spread along the Pacific shore, where Bone once had spent three days in a cabana with a Seattle divorcée whose name he could not even remember now. Cutter, however, had no problem remembering those Sunday suppers, for they had seemed like the high church service of his parents’ set: the large dining room with its great wood beams overhead, the waiters who were almost like old friends,
obsequious
old friends, and then the music, the doors thrown open to the patio where couples danced decorously to the live music of an eight-piece band, Mexicans mostly, and all so happy, Cutter said, all of them smiling just as happily as the waiters and the busboys and the maître d’.

“They were fine days,” Cutter went on. “Good days. Good for us anyway. The world was our oyster for a time, with that sweet strip of seacoast all ours. And I never even thought about it. I guess I figured it was for good, that it would never end. But it did. Just like for the Canalinos, the Indians who lived there when the Spanish were still home in Castile burning each other at the stake. Things change.”

“Parmenides,” the girl offered.

“Bless you too,” Cutter said.

Through the afternoon and evening Bone did the driving, and though he occasionally found himself listening to Cutter and the girl, most of the time it was his own thoughts that occupied him, flowing like stale water into the lowest spots in his mind: the continued feeling of loss and guilt, the sense of dread at what lay ahead of them and what he could do about it.

They would be in Missouri soon, which meant they would probably reach Wolfe’s hometown by midnight. And the prospect scared him. He felt that if only he had a more exact reading of Cutter’s state of mind, he might have some idea how to deal with the situation. But as usual all he had got from him was chimera and confusion. He doubted that even Alex himself knew which was real—Cutter the avenger, the anguished survivor of a wife and son he had loved almost too much to endure; the war casualty who might have lost a pair of dogs for all the grief he felt; or the coolly persistent blackmailer merely trying to get to Ibiza.

This last one Bone felt he could eliminate. And as for the other two, all his instincts told him that both entered in, that Cutter’s true state of mind probably lay somewhere between them. In the thirty-odd hours of driving since they left Needles, Bone had used what opportunities he had—whenever the girl was asleep or gone for a few minutes to stretch her legs or use a restroom—to find out more from Cutter about what had happened in Los Angeles and afterward. And though he did manage to fill in a number of empty spaces this way, nothing he learned altered the essential picture. The “they” Cutter had talked about in Needles turned out to have been only one man, Pruitt, some kind of special assistant to Wolfe. To this man Cutter had peddled himself as an eyewitness to another crime—“a
very
serious crime” committed in Santa Barbara the same night J. J. Wolfe’s car was firebombed. Cutter told Pruitt that the information he had “involved Mr. Wolfe, and would be very valuable to him,” but that Wolfe would have to hear it from Cutter himself. Pruitt had been very quiet, very impressed, and when Cutter gave him his phone number and the name of the hotel where he was staying, and finally, recklessly, his name, Pruitt had very carefully written it all down. And then he had said it: they would be in touch with Cutter, they would
send him a message
. The hour was about eleven in the morning—approximately the same time that Bone was hitching a ride back to Santa Barbara. Theoretically, then, there had been enough time for Wolfe and his minions to learn Cutter’s home address and strike him there, through his family rather than directly at him, and thus not risk one of those situations in which an eliminated witness leaves behind a letter addressed to his lawyer or a district attorney. So the elements of possibility did exist. If a man wanted to, he could concoct a scenario involving arson and double homicide and intimidation of a witness. And a further proof of this scenario for Cutter was Valerie’s reaction to the news of the fire and the deaths of Mo and the baby. After Bone’s phone call from Santa Barbara, Valerie had practically collapsed. Cutter had had to pack for them and check them out of the hotel and it was he who drove them back to Santa Barbara in the Pinto. And almost all the way the girl had sat beside him crying and trembling and saying over and over that Cutter should not have given them his name, and that she was out of it now, she wanted no more part of J. J. Wolfe.