Cutter and Bone (33 page)

Bone was feeling not only relief but downright pleasure. He could see Cutter’s frustration. Honest friendly advice was not what he had been looking for, not what he could handle.

Nevertheless he tried now, turning to Bone and lisping, “My, isn’t he the nicest person.”

But Billy was unflappable. “Far as that goes, Humperdinck, maybe you ought to ask yourself why make fun in the first place? What’s the purpose? I mean it’s not like it could change anything, make you all one piece again. Ain’t nothin’ gonna do that, ever.”

And finally Cutter had no comeback. He just sat there staring, not drinking, while Billy made a gesture of goodbye, first to him and then to Morgan and the two old men at the bar. Then he left, with the other cowboys trailing respectfully behind.

For a time the bar was like a wax museum. The two old men sat staring at their drinks, while Morgan contentedly contemplated a row of beer glasses he had just washed and dried. Cutter was equally silent. And Bone could not think of one thing to say, no glib lie with which to counter the cowboy’s brutal truth. Finally Cutter finished his drink. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and told Morgan that he wanted a bottle of Red Label “to go.”

“Something to see me through the sabbath,” he mumbled.

Morgan gave him the bottle, took the bill and brought back his change, all without once looking at him. And Cutter left, not waiting for Bone.

By the time he returned to his room, Bone’s feelings of anxiety and dread had withered into resignation. Cutter obviously could not control his recklessness. He was going to get the two of them killed or maimed or thrown in jail, and there was not one thing Bone could do about it except run out on the man, and that he knew he wouldn’t do. He was caught. Trapped. He felt about as he imagined a soldier felt the night before storming some lousy bloody beach somewhere, almost that kind of impotence and outrage.

So he was not feeling very sociable or communicative as he got ready for bed. Cutter kept offering him a nip from the bottle of scotch he had bought, and Bone kept refusing. All he wanted was sleep, he said, and maybe a little silence, if Cutter thought he could manage such a tall order. Frowning, Alex said he would work on it, he always enjoyed a challenge.

But he did not work very hard. As Bone turned out the lights and got into bed, Cutter promptly drew open the drapes on the window wall at the front of the room. Then, dropping into a plastic chair there, he began to hum Brahms’ Lullaby. And Bone wished he had had some small modicum of lightheartedness left in order to appreciate the comic absurdity of the moment, but all he felt was weariness, a weariness that very soon awarded him with sleep.

He had no idea how long that first sleep lasted—probably no more than an hour—for it seemed that almost immediately he began to hear this strange sound, this soft inhuman keening, like the cry of an animal caught somewhere, wounded, dying. As sleep-drugged as he was, it took a while for him to determine the source of the sound: Cutter, still dressed, standing at the window his face pressed against the glass while outside the rain was still coming down, drumming on the cars parked beyond the sidewalk. Only as Bone struggled to a sitting position in his bed did he notice the drawing on the window, where Cutter’s breath had clouded the glass: a tick-tack-toe form filled with zeros.

Swinging his legs out of the bed, Bone groped for his cigarettes. “What’s up, old-timer?” he said. “You got a bellyache?”

Cutter moved unsteadily from the window, sagged into the chair again. “I’m drunk, I guess,” he admitted.

“I guess.”

“But you right, Rich—I ache. Yeah, I do ache.”

“Why not go to bed?”

“If it would help, I do it.”

“But it won’t, huh?”

Cutter shook his head and looked over at the bottle next to him on the table. It was one-third empty now. He started to reach for it and then gave up, let his hand fall. And again he shook his head back and forth, like an animal contemplating the bars of its cage.

“You ever feel divided?” he asked finally. “I mean, like you was split, like some goddamn worm cut in two, and the two parts of you keep crawling around looking for the other, for the whole of you?”

Bone said nothing. He wanted to respond, but the right words would not come, and he was afraid of the wrong ones.

“I’m scared, Rich,” Cutter went on. “I’m way out here, and I don’t think I can get back this time.”

“Back from where?”

“I don’t know. I guess that’s the problem. I’m out here, and I’m alone. And I don’t think I can get back.”

Bone seized the opportunity. “We could leave tonight, Alex. Right now. Try some bigger town, with the right kind of doctors. The right kind of hospital.”

“Why not aspirin? Or a Band-Aid?”

“All right—no doctors or hospitals. But what then? What else is there?”

Cutter tried to grin. “There could be God.”

“Could be.”

“Then again, there could not be.”

Bone dragged on his cigarette, exhaled. He was trying not to look at Cutter, not to stare, for he had the feeling that in some subtle and irreversible way the man had changed in this last long unknown hour while Bone had slept, and gone over some ultimate edge into an area that was somehow totally
other
, beyond Bone’s ken and reach, and both of them knew it.

“Tell me what to do,” Bone said. “Anything. I’ll do it.”

Cutter had reached out for the bottle and now he took a drink. Finished, he set it between his legs. “There’s nothing,” he said. “Ain’t nothing you can do, old buddy.”

“I could take the bottle away.”

Alex shook his head. “Wouldn’t do any good. I’d still be here. And you’d still be there.”

“We could get some sleep.”

Cutter tried the grin again. “Why, you got problems you don’t even know about, you poor sap.”

“Like what?”

“Like you trusted me. You believed me.”

“Believed what?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s better you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“You don’t want to know, Rich. Believe me.”

“Why not let me be the judge of that?”

“You’re better off.”

“It’s up to you.”

“But then, I guess I should tell you. I mean, it’s the right thing to do, the moral thing. And if I don’t do it now, whilst I am smashed—then I probably shan’t, ever.”

Bone was almost out of patience. “So do it,” he said.

“Right. Well, what it comes down to is—I ain’t sure what we’re doing here.”

“You care to explain that?”

“You heard about the cat who lies so much he winds up believing his lies?”

“I have.”

“I think I’m that cat.”

“What lie, Alex?”

“Wolfe.”

For a time Bone said nothing. Just hearing that single brutal syllable, he felt he already knew what Cutter was getting at. But it was almost too much, too absolute an outrage for him to want to hear it all now, spelled out, done and done. Yet he had no choice.

“you mean you changed your mind?” he said. “About Wolfe having Mo and the baby killed?”

Cutter shook his head. “Naw, I mean the whole thing. I mean I don’t seem to know what’s real anymore. Like, I think I know what really happened in L.A. after you left. And then I know what I told Valerie and you afterward—two different things. But it seems it got all mixed up since then, like I can’t tell the difference anymore. Otherwise, why would we be here, huh? Does it make any sense?”

Bone crushed out his cigarette and lit another. He was trying hard to keep his cool, to keep it all the way to the truth. A muscle in his jaw began to leap and he stilled it with his hand, casually, as if he were rubbing his face.

“L.A.,” he said now. “What did happen there, Alex?”

Cutter smiled again. “That’s my problem—I’m not sure anymore.”

“Of course you are.”

“I am?”

“You were there, man. Just tell it. Like it happened.”

“In space and time.”

“Right. Just the boring dimensions.”

Cutter shrugged a minor resignation. “Yeah, I guess maybe I could keep it all separate, give it the old college try. Let me think—version one. The old time and space routine. Well, let’s see—there was this cat named Pruitt, that was fact. Or so I remember anyway. But Pruitt wasn’t no assistant to the president—no, he was some kind of office boy, that’s all. A kid. A nobody. I tried to tell him what I was doing there, what we were after, but it was like talking to a water cooler. All he did was nod his dumb head and look at me like I was from outer space or skid row. And then when I was finished he gives me a sharp pencil and an employment application and tells me to fill it out and leave it with the girl at the front desk.”

Here Cutter had to break off, he was laughing so hard, doubling forward over the bottle of scotch in his lap. On the bed, Bone sat smoking and waiting.

“So you lied,” Bone said finally. “Like me.”

Cutter shrugged. “Maybe so. I’m not sure. It didn’t seem important at the time. It gave Val a kind of high. And then when you called the next morning about Mo and the kid, I think Val right away connected the two. It was Wolfe, she said. He’d had it done—because I’d been careless and stupid, she said, giving them my name and number and all. And for some reason I latched onto the idea. I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure anymore, Rich—honest to Christ. Maybe I just remember it that way now because I have to. Because the truth scares me. Like that cowboy tonight. Because I know I can’t break these people—they’ll break me.”

“Bullshit.”

“What is?”

“That you don’t remember. Tell me this—do you have any recollection at all of meeting this Pruitt you said was an assistant to Wolfe? The one who said he’d
send you a message?
You remember that ever happening? In time and space?”

Cutter thought about it for a while, frowning and grinning. Finally he shook his head. “I guess not,” he said. “I guess I made it up.”

“Yeah, I guess you did.”

Bone got up and took the bottle from him. He took a long pull on it and then set it back on the table. Going over to the window, he stood looking out through the tick-tack-toe design at the sodden Ozark night. And it crossed his mind that he was here, almost two thousand miles from the coast, on a
whim
, a vagary of Cutter’s playful psyche. Surely that was reason enough for rage. On the other hand, suddenly he no longer had to worry about storming some lousy bloody beach in the morning. Wolfe and his kin and their rock hills were out of the picture now, and that should have been cause for rejoicing or at least relief. But Bone felt neither rage nor relief. What he felt instead was numbness, a numbness cousin to death. He no longer cared. Had Cutter finally and inevitably gone bananas? Maybe so. And so what? What else was new? Was any of it as important as the sleep Bone was missing right now or a good breakfast in the morning or the prospect of sun and sand within a few days, with perhaps an occasional lay thrown in to keep the plumbing open, the nerves all fat and sleek? Not hardly. Because nothing he did here and now would matter. It never had and never would. One could spend all his life climbing onto crosses to save people from themselves, and nothing would change. For human beings finally were each as alone as dead stars and no amount of toil or love or litany could alter by a centimeter the terrible precision of their journeys.

So there was nothing to do. There were a few questions to ask, that was all, some bewilderment and outrage to express. And Bone went through the motions now.

“All this way, Alex!”

Cutter did not answer.

“Why not in Needles?” Bone asked. “Why couldn’t you have owned up then? Were we still too close to home? Wouldn’t the damage have been great enough? And why all that static in the bar tonight? Why go through all that for nothing? For no reason at all?”

Still Cutter said nothing.

“No answers, huh?”

Cutter shook his head. “None. Because I don’t know myself, Rich. I don’t know anymore…why I do…what I do.”

Bone looked at him. For the second time since he met him, the man was crying. His eye shone in the night light, slick with desolation.

“It’s like I said before,” he went on. “I’m way out here, and I can’t get back.”

Bone tried for a bedside manner. “Sure you can, Alex. Give it time.”

Cutter sagged back into the chair and his head lolled forward, as if he were falling asleep. But his eye remained open, fixed not on the floor so much as the space it filled. Bone sat there watching him, saying nothing, and finally he made one more try.

“If there’s anything, man—anything you want me to do—you just ask. I’ll do what I can.”

But Cutter did not respond, did not even look up. And after a while Bone settled back into his bed, to lie there smoking and staring at the ceiling, helpless and silent. Then, again, he slept.

He was not sure what woke him this time—the first light of dawn building like a thunderhead outside the glass wall or the sounds coming from Monk’s room, the rattling bed and desperate breathing, the soft little-girl cry coming over and over. One look at Cutter’s empty bed and the abandoned chair and Bone did not have to wonder what the commotion was. What he did not know was whether it was a consenting act or otherwise, in which case he would have felt compelled to interfere, even at the risk of driving Cutter further from him. So he slipped out of bed and went over to the door that connected the two rooms and which now was slightly ajar. The drapes in Monk’s room were still closed, so it took him a few moments to determine that despite the girl’s cries she was not being violated. Her legs and arms were right where they should have been, holding Cutter’s body fast to hers.

Bone quietly shut the door. He drew the drapes in his room closed and got back into bed, hopefully to sleep through the rest of the morning. And he was surprised at how good he felt all of a sudden, surprised because he normally did not derive much pleasure from being a spectator to sex instead of a participant. But this bit of voyeurism had been different, had been like seeing a deathly sick friend suddenly up and around again, alive again. Bone could hardly believe that the Cutter of a few hours before could now be making love. And the only explanation seemed to be that while Bone had slept, Alex had negotiated the same ultimate edge, had come back over it to rejoin the living.