Cutter and Bone (35 page)

“Quite a comedian, your new boyfriend,” Bone said.

Cutter sneered. “Boyfriend, my ass. Between her and the goddamn kid, I’ve about had it.”

Bone sat there watching him, waiting for the tip-off, the beginning of a smile, a touch of light in his eye. But there was nothing.

By the time they returned to their room Bone was convinced that Cutter’s condition—and starting back home with him immediately—were more important than the idle curiosity of seeing J. J. Wolfe in the flesh. And he tried to convince Cutter of this:

“The hell with Wolfe and the parade. Who needs it? Let’s start for home now.”

“No, you got to eyeball him,” Cutter insisted. “That’s why we’re here.”

“But I don’t give a damn, Alex. I don’t care one way or the other.”

Cutter shrugged. “Well, I do. And anyway, I feel like a parade.”

Outside, without saying a word, Cutter gave Bone the car keys and slipped into the back seat, as though out of long habit. And he positioned himself sideways, giving Monk no choice except to get into the front next to Bone. She too was very quiet now, had said almost nothing since the hand incident in the restaurant. So they were not a very festive group as they headed toward the festivities of Bank Day.

At a service station on the highway Bone asked about the parade and was informed that it would not start for an hour yet. It occurred to him then that he might still be able to see Wolfe at home, at his ranch, and thus avoid the risk of taking in the parade with Cutter in the condition he was in. He asked for directions to Wolfe’s ranch and the attendant, husbanding a huge wad of chewing tobacco, allowed that it was harder not to find the place than it was to find it.

“Six whole sections last time anybody bothered to count,” he said. “And with buildings you wouldn’t believe. I tell you, them cattle of his’n live a darn sight better’n most people hereabouts, me included.”

Bone tried to look properly impressed. Again he asked how to get there.

“Three miles up, turn right on County K. Another mile, you be there. Place got a gate cost more’n my house trailer, and that’s a fack.”

Bone thanked him and drove on, expecting some reaction from Cutter. But Alex said nothing, just sat in the back seat staring out the window, his eye—in the rearview mirror—registering nothing as the car swept on through woodlands and rocky dells and steep green hills stippled with grazing cattle.

Within a few minutes they came upon the ranch, which looked like a small town spread out along the rim of a hill about a quarter mile back from the road. The buildings, fences, corrals—all were white, dazzling in the sun. And as the service station attendant had said, the entrance was an impressive piece of architecture, with huge native stone pillars and stout white board fences bordering the drive, running all the way back to the ranch. In each of the pillars was a marble square engraved with the words Wolfe Farms, as if the place were some hallowed old institution. To the Santa Barbara horse set it would have been a hilarious gaucherie, but Bone imagined that here it got the job done effectively enough. J. J. Wolfe did his boasting in marble.

For a moment, after he had turned into the drive, Bone considered going on ahead to the house and trying to see the man now, get it over with. But the moment passed and he braked the car, reversed onto County K, and started back for Rockhill. He would be able to see Wolfe in the parade, he told himself. That would be sufficient, one quick look just to make sure whether or not he was his man. And either way, it would not make any difference. Either way, the three of them would simply pick up and leave.

As he turned around he expected Cutter to comment on the move, on the sudden flagging of his will, but Alex said nothing. And Monk seemed more interested in the ranch itself. Wouldn’t it be great to have such a place, she said. Wouldn’t Bone dig owning it?

“It depends,” he told her.

“On what?”

“On whether I’d have to live there.”

“You wouldn’t like that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Bone tried to think of a reason. “People,” he said. “You could go a whole lifetime and never run into the clap twins.”

“Big loss!” the girl scoffed.

Bone laughed and looked in the rearview mirror, hoping to see Cutter smiling at least. But he was not. He had not heard them.

Bone drove back past the motel and made the turnoff into Rockhill, where he discovered a very different scene from that of the night before. Cars were parked everywhere, on the streets and lawns and sidewalks. And after he had parked the station wagon and the three of them had followed the crowd to the square, he found it filled with people, most of them from out of town, judging by their number. And he was surprised at how homogeneous they all seemed, with none of the meltingpot, multiracial character found in California and the northern cities. The vast majority looked Anglo-Saxon and Celt, not unlike a single huge extended family—a divided family however. For the sexes were like two races apart: the men lean and sunburnt and improbably pleased with themselves, laughing, spitting, japing with each other as they swaggered about in stovepipe Levi’s and pointed boots and wing-brimmed cowboy hats, while their women were somehow like chaperones, old and fat and peevish, struggling along in armor-plated girdles under frilly Sunday dresses and constantly fussing with yesterday’s permanents, endless tight little waves of blue-rinsed hair, black-dyed hair, bleached hair. Their facial expressions pretty well told the story of their lives: while the men had cattle and corn liquor and each other, they had to make do with Jesus and the Bible. And they weren’t happy about it. They didn’t think it was fair. Walking among them, Bone was convinced that nine in ten would have dismissed the female orgasm as a vicious rumor. The thing he disliked most about them, however, was their reaction to Cutter, the way they turned and stared at him with the same sour disapproval as the woman at the motel.

But it was a disapproval Cutter himself did not even seem to notice as he limped along next to Bone and Monk, as silent as he had been in the car. And here at least, Bone was relieved, for he doubted that the natives would have understood or put up with Cutter flying at anything like his normal altitude. As the cowboy Billy had warned them last night, almost every pickup had a rack of rifles and shotguns inside the back window, and Bone had no difficulty believing that most of them were loaded, judging by the macho air of the men, that look and attitude which proclaimed them goddamn ready and eager for any commie revolution the pinko nigger-loving government might be cooking up. And since the pickup seemed to be the prevailing mode of transport—the good old boys’ answer to Santa Barbara’s
de rigueur
Mercedes and Porsches—the crowd constituted a fairly well armed army.

This day, however, the men and the children at least did not seem concerned about much of anything except having a good time. There was a considerable amount of beer flowing, and occasionally a pint or half-pint of whiskey would make a furtive appearance, all of it smuggled in of course, certainly not being sold openly in Rockhill on this fine Southern Baptist sabbath. Yet, despite this puritan note, the general mood was decidedly festive, which as far as Bone was concerned meant discomfort more than anything else: noise and sweat and unwanted body contact. And he would not have endured a moment of it if it had not been for the parade and the chance to see J. J. Wolfe—perhaps for the second time.

But this possibility seemed of no interest to Cutter, no more than did the Bank Day celebrants: the huddles of chawing men and their spouses already settled into aluminum folding chairs, patiently fanning themselves and gossiping, waiting for the great event, while herds of hyped-up kids stampeded the streets and sidewalks, kids every bit as long-haired and raunchy as their coastal counterparts but somehow wilder by far, perhaps because their natural brutish vigor had not been leached out by dope and money and the soporific rays of the Pacific sun. Every few steps one or more of them would come crashing into Bone, playing tag or generational war, and he would shove them out of the way. Even Monk began to yell at them, trying to protect herself and Cutter, who just limped along, serene and apathetic, his eye fixed on something ahead of him, something that moved wherever he moved. Nor did he show any interest in the square itself and its picturesque old buildings, some with cast-iron façades and covered walks in front, and others made of cut stone and ancient clapboard, but all equally adorned with decals celebrating God and country:
America—Love it or leave it. My God is alive—sorry about yours. What a friend we have in Jesus
.

At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.

Contrary to what the old man in the bar had said, J. J. Wolfe did not lead the parade. That honor belonged to the Bank Day queen and her court riding in an open Cadillac convertible, five teenage girls whose soapy bright-eyed prettiness reminded Bone how uncharacteristically celibate he had been of late and that he should be careful not to carry the situation to extremes. After the girls, came the usual school bands and pom-pom girls, the Boy Scout troops and fire companies and the inevitable American Legionnaires, three venerable men who shuffled up the street with a fragile dignity.

Compared to Santa Barbara’s famed annual Fiesta parade, this one was slight and unimaginative, yet somehow much more “American” to Bone’s mid-western eyes. Where the Santa Barbarenos spent small fortunes getting themselves up as Spanish grandees and nubile senoritas, costumed to the nines and often borne by a coach-and-four, here there was an almost religious shunning of costumery and pretense. For the most part the parade was simply horse owners riding their horses, a few in full cowboy regalia but the rest making do with jeans and cowboy hats no different from those worn by half the watching crowd.

When the parade began, Bone and Cutter and Monk had insinuated their way to the curb in front of a boarded-up general store, and among the people they shared this stretch of sidewalk with was a small family that looked as if they had been lifted off an 1890 tintype: two severely plain old women in long gray dresses and bonnets sitting on wooden folding chairs in front of two men, one who appeared to be in his sixties and the other probably in his forties, though there was almost no difference in their appearance, both small and wiry and wearing overalls and blue work shirts buttoned to the neck and old-fashioned straw hats that covered all but a fringe of close-shaved hair. Like the women, their look of severity was shaded by fear, an intense wariness, as if they were in the camp of the enemy. And Bone judged that in their minds that was exactly where they were, probably true hillfolk, members of some small fanatic sect to whom even Bible Belt Southern Baptists were busy doing the devil’s work.

Strangely Cutter did not seem to sense this difference in them at all, and as he began to come out of his silence now he talked to them almost as if they were fellow Californians doing the Sunset Strip together. Some goddamn parade, wasn’t it? he said. A cat wouldn’t know which were the horses and which were the pom-pom girls if it wasn’t for the horses shitting every few feet. Or was that the pom-pom girls? Hard to tell, but one thing was for sure, there would be grass growing in the streets of this fucking burg this summer. And speaking of grass, they didn’t happen to have a joint on them, did they?

By now Bone was trying desperately to shut him up, for the hillfolk already looked as if they were in shock, mesmerized by this satanic presence that had materialized right in front of them. And for a few moments Cutter pretended to cooperate, nodding to Bone that, yes, he understood, would knock it off. But all he did was take another breath and start in again.

“Just one more thing,” he said to the hillfolk. “You cats know J. J. Wolfe? Why, hell yes, you do—all God’s chillun knows de Big Chicken, don’t dey? Well, you point him out to us when he comes by, will you do that? ’Cause we don’t want to miss the sonofabitch.”

Bone tried to drag him away, but Cutter pulled free.

“My friend here saw him kill a girl,” he went on. “He made the chick blow him first and then he crushed her skull and dumped her body in a garbage can.”

By now everyone around them was staring at Cutter in stunned disbelief. And still he kept on:

“And then the bastard burned my old lady and our kid to a crisp and tried to make it look like a fucking murder-suicide, would you believe that? And there was Vietnam too, we can’t forget that, can we? A mighty hawk, old J. J.—a few more arms and legs, well hell yes, he was willing to pay the price. Plenty more where those came from. So you point him out, okay? Point out the cock-sucker and leave the rest to us.”

But there was no need for anyone to point him out, for Bone saw Wolfe now coming around the nearest corner of the square. Bone knew it was Wolfe simply by looking at the man, at the same heavy smiling avuncular face he had seen in the photographs in the Santa Barbara newspaper and in his Hollywood office. And for Bone the moment was somehow like being caught in the middle of a highway between cars speeding at him from opposite directions: he had to see Wolfe close up, and yet he knew he had to get Cutter out of there before the crowd got its wits together and began beating him to a pulp.

Wolfe rode as part of a family unit, himself and a middle-aged woman and two young girls all dressed like Roy Rogers and mounted on matching palominos. As the four horses clattered past, Cutter moved close to Bone.

“Well, lay it on me,” he said. “Is it him? Is he our boy?”

Bone did not answer for a few moments, mostly out of fear that he would giggle if he opened his mouth, betray to the whole wide world just how absolutely hopeless he was, how totally and irredeemably a loser.

For he
still
did not know if Wolfe was the man. Even looking right at him, he still could not tell if Wolfe had been the man in the alley. His head was large and his body thick, just as the killer’s was. But that gross and swollen animus which somehow had thrived even in silhouette—it was not there. Instead there was just this costumed fat man sitting a horse, grinning, waving, the tycoon as clown. And the disappointment Bone felt, the letdown, for some reason only added to the comedy of the moment. Of course it would be thus. How could it have been otherwise? Why should Bone’s life suddenly have developed a senses of symmetry and purpose? Would he have traveled across half a continent
except
in a fruitless cause?