Cutter and Bone (34 page)

For Bone it was a pleasant thought, as narcotic as alcohol. He stretched and yawned and felt the slow sweet slide beginning again, for the third time since he went to bed. Only this time he carried nothing extra with him, no baggage of useless worry and fear. Wolfe was out of the picture and apparently Cutter was himself again, or at least sufficiently so for the three of them to leave this scenic backwater and return to the coast, in time for the earthquake. Again he slept.

Late in the morning Bone left his room and went to the motel restaurant to have coffee and read a newspaper while he waited for Cutter and the girl to join him for breakfast. In daylight the room pleasantly surprised him. For one thing, Billy Graham the Younger was not on duty behind the organ, and for another the view outside the huge windows at the rear of the room turned out to be spectacular, overlooking a chasm with a steep limestone cliff on the other side, fringed with cedar along the top and plunging a good two hundred feet to a narrow strip of white water that widened a short distance beyond, turning calm and limpid as it slipped on through lesser green hills spattered with rosebud and dogwood. And the rain had ended. The sun was out.

So Bone was feeling almost contented as he sat at a table by the windows sipping black coffee and catching up on the calamities of the world, which not unexpectedly had kept pace with his own. Maybe the sunshine and the scenery were an omen, he told himself. Just maybe Alex would be out of the woods now, free of both the Wolfe fantasy and his last night’s deep depression, and the three of them could be packed and on their way back to the coast by evening—after the parade. For Bone accepted it that he would have to go that far at least. He would have to see J. J. Wolfe in the flesh and once and for all settle the matter in his mind, whether Wolfe had indeed been the man in the alley, the Santa Barbara police captain’s own true Prince of Darkness. Bone did not think he would be, not now, after Cutter’s confession last night. Somehow all the lies about Wolfe and Los Angeles had only made Bone more unsure of who and what he had seen in the alley.

He had been sitting there about twenty minutes when Monk came in, alone, looking like a typical California runaway in her old jeans and Adidas sweatshirt. Her eyes were red from crying or loss of sleep, and when Bone said good morning, she asked him what was good about it.

He gestured at the window. “Well, God seems to be out there trying.”

“You believe in God, do you?”

“Sometimes.”

She put her face in her hands and shook her head disconsolately. “I guess you know what happened.”

“I guess.”

“He’s out walking now. He’s been gone for over an hour.”

Bone said nothing. The thought of Cutter, in the condition he was in, wandering the cliffs behind the motel alarmed him more than he let on.

“It was so terrible,” the girl went on, her eyes filling.

“I’m sorry. I guess I should have—”

“No, I don’t mean that. Not the sex part,” she explained. “I’m glad about that. It’s like getting rid of acne or something.”

Bone grinned, and for a moment the girl brightened too. Then she remembered. “No, it was the other, Rich. The things he said. He kept calling me Mo. And there were other weird things too, like private jokes between the two of them and when I couldn’t pick up on them, he got all upset.”

“He’d had a lot to drink,” Bone said.

She shook her head in denial. “No, it wasn’t like that, I mean just a guy being smashed, you know? Mixed up. It was more like—well, like he was sick. Like he couldn’t get it all straight in his head, who I was, and where we were.”

Bone took his time getting out his cigarettes, giving one to the girl and taking one himself, lighting them. He wanted to calm her. He wanted to calm himself. “Booze can do that,” he said finally.

But the girl was adamant. “It wasn’t booze.”

“Maybe not.”

“No maybe about it.”

Bone would not concede the point. “You don’t know that, Monk. It could be, but that’s all.
Could
be. The fact that he spent a long time with the shrinks in VA hospitals doesn’t mean anything—his wounds made that inevitable, for anyone.”

“I know that.”

“All right, then. Let’s just wait and see, okay?”

Monk’s face was puckered now, the face of a lost child. “I was so happy at first. So shocked and yet so happy when he came in. He shooshed me. And then he pulled back the covers, and—”

Bone put his hand on hers. “Take it easy, all right? Forget it for now. Let it go.”

And this late morning hour only two other tables in the room were taken, but the patrons at each of them had fallen silent and were watching him and Monk with growing interest. Monk, however, was oblivious of them.

“And now this!” she said. “What do you think it is? Will it be permanent? Do you think he’s—”

“Why hell no,” Bone cut her off. “What are you talking about? He’s just rundown, that’s all. Strung out. He’ll be okay.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. We’ll cut out of here this afternoon. And we’ll take our time going home. We’ll eat in restaurants and stay in motels. Swim and take it easy. He’ll be all right. I promise.”

Monk, looking past Bone at the entrance to the room, suddenly started to dry her eyes with a napkin.

“Oh boy, here he comes now,” she said.

Bone did not understand her
oh boy
until Cutter came into view and sat down. He had not shaved or combed his hair. And instead of his customary black turtleneck he was wearing only a filthy T-shirt out of which the stump of his left arm protruded like a large white carrot.

“Nice country,” he said. “Nice morning.”

“Alexander Cutter the Fourth out taking a morning constitutional,” Bone observed. “Hard to believe.”

“Constitutional, my ass. I just stood on a rock.”

“A rock?”

Cutter motioned at the window. “Yeah, out there. A big flat baby sticking out over the edge, with about five miles straight down. You just stand there. You close your eyes and get your toes out over the edge and play chicken with yourself.”

“Sounds like great fun,” Bone said.

“Oh, it is. It’s a real high. Better than dope.”

Bone said he’d try to remember that, but meanwhile he was more interested in food. “Either of you guys hungry?” he asked.

Cutter winked lasciviously at the girl. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I already did quite a bit of eating this morning.”

Monk, turning scarlet, closed her eyes.

But Cutter was enjoying himself. “Kid must be part Chinese, though, because I am kind of hungry again.”

“Nice to have you back,” Bone said.

“Oh, great to be here. Just great.”

“But you’d better be on your good behavior now,” Bone advised. “Because I think we’re about to be visited by your old friend, American Gothic.”

She had just come out of the kitchen, and it appeared that morning had not altered the lady’s spirit. Unsmiling, she came to their table, whipped out her order pad, licked the point of her pencil and held it ready, as if she were about to stab one of them with it.

“What’ll you have?” she demanded.

“Coffee,” Cutter said. “Just a pot of coffee for me, dearie.”

The woman glanced at him and looked away, in studied revulsion. She practically sniffed. “We don’t serve coffee in pots,” she said. “You get it by the cup or not at all.”

Cutter grinned. “You got to be kidding.”

“No. That’s the rule, I’m afraid.”

Cutter looked hopefully at Bone. “Tell the lady she’s kidding.”

Bone was becoming uneasy now. He knew the look in Cutter’s eye, had seen it too many times in the past, just before all hell broke loose. So he tried to throw himself into the breach, hurriedly ordering breakfast.

“Well let’s see, I’ll have a stack of wheatcakes, two scrambled eggs, a rasher of bacon—and coffee by the cup.”

But Cutter was not to be put off. “Lady, you got a coffeepot in that kitchen?”

The woman ignored him. “And what will you have, miss?” she asked Monk.

At that, Cutter reached across the table and picked up the glass sugar dispenser, held it straight out from him and let it drop onto the tile floor, where it shattered loudly, spreading sugar out in a broad, almost geometric pattern.

“We’ll also need some sugar,” he said.

But by then the woman was gone, scurrying for the door.

Bone moaned quietly. “Yeah, it’s sure great to have you back.”

“A pot of coffee,” Cutter said. “Is that so much to ask?”

“Evidently.”

Across the room, American Gothic was already making a triumphant return, trailed by Mister Morgan from the front desk. As the man reached the table Cutter slapped his thigh and grinned.

“Well, Jesus H. Christ, if it ain’t Mister Morgan hisself! You may remember us from the bar last night.”

Morgan, standing tall, cleared his throat. “What’s the problem here?”

“Coffee and sugar,” Cutter said. “I want some.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Morgan said.

“And I’m going to have to ask you to piss up a rope, sweetheart. While you’re at it, give Miss Congeniality here a shot at it too. Might settle some of her crotch dust.”

Morgan and the woman fled as if they had been scorched by a flamethrower. And Cutter tried to call them back, saying that they could get the goddamn rope later,
after
he had his coffee and sugar. Monk meanwhile was laughing and crying at the same time, and Bone felt like joining her, for he knew Morgan and the woman were hurrying off not to find a rope but to call the police. So he got up and followed them, reaching the front desk just in time to ask Morgan to put the phone down and hear his explanation. Then he went through a routine almost identical to the one he had laid on the motorcycle freaks at Santa Barbara’s Cold Spring Tavern. Cutter was his cousin, he said, a poor maimed Vietnam veteran, a deranged paraplegic out on a week’s leave from the Colorado Veterans’ Hospital in Bone’s care. Bone sincerely regretted his cousin’s outlandish behavior. He apologized for him and promised to pay for any damages and to have the poor guy out of the motel before checkout time. But Morgan was not an easy sell. He was awfully put out, he said. He just didn’t think war wounds was any excuse to talk to a lady the way Cutter had, especially a real Christian lady like his wife. And Bone of course agreed. He also offered to pay ten dollars for the sugar container, and that finally seemed to touch the man’s forgiving spirit.

“Well, okay—one more chance. But that’s all he gets. And you have him out of here by three, understand?”

Yes, Bone understood. He thanked Morgan and returned to the table.

Smiling thinly, he told Cutter and the girl that for the moment things were calm again and that if anyone did anything to disturb that calm he personally was going to break off that person’s plastic leg and beat him to death with it.

“Well, what are friends for?” Cutter asked.

Another waitress came to their table, took their orders for breakfast, and poured them each a cup of coffee. After she left, neither Bone nor Cutter said anything for a time, and the silence apparently got to Monk, for she began to babble like the stream out the window: God, wasn’t it gorgeous here! And who’d ever have thought it—the Ozarks! Why she’d always thought of Missouri as flat and full of corn, would they believe that? And instead look how it was, how really beautiful. Why, even Santa Barbara wasn’t this beautiful—oh, maybe if there weren’t so many people there and if it had been the way it originally was, maybe then it might have been like this, so clean-looking, so fresh and green, with all that rock and those evergreens too—what kind were they, fir trees? Cedar, Bone told her. But she did not seem to hear, was already going on about the air, how clear and fresh it was. Hadn’t he slept well? Wasn’t it just about the greatest sleep of his life?

“Not really,” Bone said. “No, I’ve slept better.”

“Well, you’d been drinking again. Maybe that’s why.”

“Could be.”

“Anyway, I think it’s just super here. I’m glad we came.” And here she gave Cutter a new and special look, almost a lover’s look. Only there was something else in it too, something like terror. And it made Bone went to reach over and pull the kid onto his lap and try to console her or help her in some way, as she had helped him. But he knew there was really nothing he could do or say. The thing had happened to her, had actually and finally happened. The Virgin of Isla Vista was dead and buried and she was happy for the loss, she was joyous, she was probably in love. Yet here was her lover and liberator, grim as an executioner.

Lighting a cigarette, Bone asked them what they wanted to do that day. “Want to head back or should we take in the local parade first?”

Monk looked surprised. “You mean, that’s all? That’s all we came here for?”

Bone shrugged. “Might be a great parade. Who knows?”

“But what about this character Wolfe or whatever his name is? I thought the reason we came here was to see him.”

“He’ll be in the parade,” Bone said.

“I don’t mean that kind of
see
. I thought there was some kind of heavy business you two had with him. Something about Mo and the baby.”

“Not anymore,” Cutter said.

“Why not?”

When Alex did not respond, Bone stepped in. “A change of plans,” he said. “We decided to leave well enough alone.”

The girl said she still did not understand.

“Never mind,” Cutter told her. “Let it go.”

Bone was surprised that the girl knew even this much, that Cutter had told her anything at all about Wolfe.

“Oh well, who cares?” she said. “It was worth the trip anyway.”

Then, catching herself, she put one hand to her mouth while the other found Cutter’s arm. And for a few moments he let it lie there, did nothing except gaze down at it as if it were excrement. Then he looked up at the girl with the same expression.

“Will you get your goddamn hand off me,” he said.

Monk withdrew it.

“That’s better,” Cutter told her. “Jesus, Mo, just because we fornicated doesn’t mean we’re friends, you know.”

The girl looked genuinely frightened now, close to tears.