Cutter and Bone (4 page)

“Sure, let him in on it. Tell him what’s up.”

Bone almost told the kid to forget it, but then decided not to spoil Cutter’s fun. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m interested.”

Erickson cleared his throat. “We call ourselves ViVA.”

“Like the paper towel,” Cutter put in, ever helpful.

“Yeah. But with a small
i
. Means life, of course. But it’s also an acronym. Stands for—” Erickson paused pregnantly, looking from Bone to Cutter and then back again. His voice grew husky. “It stands for Violate…the Violators…of America.”

“The big polluters,” Cutter assisted.

Erickson nodded. “The big energy companies. Power companies. Conglomerates. The government even. We don’t care who—if they pollute—if they violate us—”

“You violate ’em back,” Bone said.

“Right. Fight fire with fire. Make ’em hurt. Make ’em realize the energy crisis hasn’t changed a thing—we’re still gonna fight ’em all the way.”

Cutter finished lighting a small cigar. “Your group,” he said, “you’re a spin-off from the Sierra Club, right?”

And this seemed to upset the young hippie. “I said
kind of
, Alex. Nothing official. Certainly they don’t know what we’re planning, and wouldn’t approve if they did know.”

“But most of you once belonged.”

“Not anymore. We’ve got our own thing now. And believe me, they’re gonna be hearing from us, the polluters—they’re gonna find out there’s still some of us left, a few who haven’t been coopted or scared off.”

“Right on,” Cutter said.

“Why, you know, they’re having some kind of big energy symposium at the university here right now, today. All the captains of pollution and their purchased Ph.D. eggheads, all sitting around
talking
. Well, let me tell you, pretty soon we’re gonna be doing the talking.”

“Right on,” Cutter said again, this time grinning cryptically at the girl. Then he looked over at Bone. “Steve and Ronnie are trying to get chapters started all up and down the coast. Now the local one, Rich—well, you can see what a fertile field this would be. How many drilling platforms they got out there in the channel now, ten or twelve? Think of the mess you could make. Why it’d be pure crude all the way down the coast. The whales in the spring could just slide down to Baja without so much as moving a fin.”

And finally it began to dawn on Erickson that someone was driving a truck back and forth over his body. He put down his can of Coors. “What is this, Alex, huh? You putting us on?”

Cutter made a face. The idea obviously had never occurred to him. “Not you and Ronnie. Jesus no, my son. Just your approach, that’s all.”

“But I thought you were—”

“A militant?”

“Well yeah. Dunhill said—”

“Vietnam Veterans Against the war—right. But that was years ago, kid. And I got this hangup. I think.
Cogito ergo sum
. And what am I, it turns out? Peaceable. A peaceable fatalist. Like Solomon, I looked about me and decided all was horseshit.”

“Horseshit!
What we’re doing is horseshit?”

Cutter shrugged amiably. He wished it were not so, but so it was. “You know what you are, Steve? You’re a do-badder. And you’re going to be just as ineffectual as all the do-gooders. I’m afraid life just doesn’t respond properly. You give it a bone and it bites your leg. You bite its leg and it’ll bite your balls.”

Ronnie evidently had heard enough, for she got up and wandered out onto the deck, letting in a blast of cold damp air. Bone too felt no great compulsion to stick around and went back to the kitchen to make coffee, either that or another drink, though he doubted that he would find both vodka and tonic on hand, since Cutter and Mo both liked their liquor neat. He knew from having heard it before the lecture Erickson was in for, or actually not so much a lecture as Cutter simply giving in to the bent of his mind, a bent that inclined steeply toward hopelessness. Essentially his position was that even if the unlikely occurred, even if a cabal of enlightened socialists and egalitarians somehow came to power, and the longed-for millennium of benevolent despotism finally arrived, and even if the political technicians managed to repeal all the laws of supply and demand and somehow miraculously wrought a society of both plenitude and liberty, man would still be in a funk. He would quickly begin throwing bombs at his benefactors, and for no more complicated reason than that in the dark, secret oozings of his entrails he was as mad as a hatter, a jolly assassin, a lover of crisis and war and pestilence, anything but the dreaded menace of peace and boredom. And then Cutter would illustrate: vignettes of casual barbarism culled from his years in Vietnam and veterans’ hospitals, My Lais apparently without end.

Bone had heard it all. And if he did not dispute it, neither did he much like it. So he took his time heating water and making himself a cup of Maxim. As he went back into the living room, Ronnie was striking a supercool pose in the deck doorway.

“There’s some kind of hassle down there,” she announced.

Erickson and Cutter ignored her, but Mo and Bone followed her out onto the deck. Bone had heard the sirens too, more than once, but that was not unusual, especially at night in a Southern California city. Below them the town stretched out like a small Los Angeles, a tinselly grid of light, beautiful now in the darkness but all of it mere foreground by day, bracketed by the chameleon peaks of the Santa Ynez mountains on one side and the sea and channel islands on the other. Within the grid, no more than a quarter mile down the hill, a pair of red domelights swiveled. In the distance another emergency flasher, this one yellow, sped in the direction of the other two.

“Looks like it’s near the high school,” Mo said.

“Wonder what happened?” Ronnie put in.

And so did Bone—for suddenly he realized exactly
where
the red lights were flashing.

Next door one of Cutter’s neighbors, a young sculptor named Fishman, had just pulled in and parked his Jeep in front of the garage apartment he rented. As he got out, Mo asked him if he had driven up Anapamu.

“Yeah—you mean all the racket down there? They found a girl’s body. A teenager. And in a trashcan yet. Can you believe that? In a trashcan.”

The man’s words hit Bone like a bucket of ice water, as in his mind the remembered golf clubs began to take on shape, flesh.

“Was she white?” he heard Mo ask. Gliding with her quads and vodka, she seemed to have forgotten Ronnie at her side.

“Yeah, she was white,” Fishman said. “A white teenager.” He went on into his apartment.

“Some big old buck nigger prolly do it,” Ronnie said.

Mo caught herself then. “Oh I didn’t mean that,” she protested.

“What then? Just what did you mean, missy?”

But Bone was not interested in their problem. He still had his own.
He had been there, had actually seen the body discarded
.

“I saw it happen,” he said now. And both girls looked at him.

“You
what?
” Mo asked.

“I saw it. I was there when it happened, across the street. Only I didn’t see what it was he put in the barrel. I thought it was a set of golf clubs, with the heads sticking out, you know? But it must’ve been her feet.”

Ronnie said nothing, just stood there looking at him.

Mo smiled in amusement. “You’re putting us on.”

Bone shook his head. “I ran out of gas down there, near the school. So I was on foot. And this character pulled into that apartment complex, the driveway. Then he dumps this thing and drives off. I didn’t think anything about it. As I said, I thought it was golf clubs or something like that. I just kept on going.”

“You’re
not
putting us on.” Mo went over to the door and called for Cutter to come out. “We have a little excitement out here,” she said. “Rich has been seeing things.”

Erickson came out first, bumping into the door-jamb on the way and pretending nothing had happened, like a drunk in a comic routine. Behind him, Cutter moved carefully on his walnut cane. Mo dryly recounted what she had just learned from Bone and their neighbor. And Cutter grinned.

“In a
barrel?
” Apparently the idea amused him.

“It didn’t look planned,” Bone said. “More like an impulse. When the man saw the trash barrels he just pulled in and dumped the girl.”

Erickson had turned to go back in. “I’ll call the police,” he said.

But Cutter blocked him with his cane. “You serious boy?”

“Well Jesus yes, Alex. He’s got to tell them what he saw.”

“He does?”

“Of course he does.”

“Why? Maybe the girl had it coming.”

Erickson stared at Cutter in panic. Then he turned to Bone. “Is he serious?”

“I didn’t see the man’s face,” Bone said. “Or the car license. I couldn’t be any help.”

“Well, the car. Didn’t you see the car?”

“Late model is all. I couldn’t tell the make. But that’s beside the point.”

“What point?”

“That no one here’s going to report anything. No chance. So drop it.”

“
Drop it!
” Erickson’s eyes widened with disbelief and indignation. “Look, my whole bag is fighting crime, man. Corporate crime, I admit. But that doesn’t mean I approve the other. And this guy of yours, this cat you saw down there, Rich—goddamn it, he’s a criminal! He’s committed a crime. And it’s our duty—”

“I told you what I saw,” Bone cut in. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing to tell the police.”

“Well, I’d say we’d better let them be the judge of that.” And very primly, very businesslike, he started for the phone again, brushing Cutter’s cane aside.

Bone caught him in the doorway, lightly taking hold of his arm for a moment, still hoping to talk some sense into him. But the kid pulled away with all his strength and went toppling back over one of Cutter’s cheap aluminum folding chairs. Bone did not like violence, usually avoided it like any other rational man, but right now he had an even stronger aversion to sitting in the police station all day tomorrow trying to convince a squad of law officers that he had nothing to tell them.

So he reached down and pulled Erickson to his feet, holding him by his deerskin vest. Then he slammed him back against the clapboard wall.

“No phone calls,” he said. “No police. Understand?”

When Erickson did not respond Bone took a handful of his woolly hair and jerked his head up and back, so the youth had to look at him. “
Understand?
”

This time Erickson nodded. Bone let go of him and the kid stumbled back into the house. They heard him go into the bathroom and slam the door and then struggle unsuccessfully to lock it. As Bone turned back to the others, Cutter shook his head sadly.

“You big bully,” he said. “You mean person.”

“Kid doesn’t listen.”

“He’s a crime fighter.”

“So I heard.”

“Carries a silver bullet, I bet. Up his ass.”

Bone did not want to look at Ronnie but could not help himself finally, and he was not surprised to see that her cool sullenness had taken on a glint of self-satisfaction and even triumph. Feeling unreasonably angry, he returned his attention to the scene below, which was now a spreading web of light as more and more cars converged on the scene. Here and there flashbulbs went off like bursts of daylight, and finally the vehicle with the yellow domelight swung around and retraced its route, this time traveling more slowly and without any sound at all. On the deck, they all just stood there watching the scene and saying very little, especially after Erickson made a sheepish return. Then, as the cars began to leave and scatter, Cutter and Mo went back inside, followed by Erickson. But Ronnie stayed.

“I’m not with him and this jive-bomb gig of his.”

“You’re just his girlfriend, huh?”

“No chance.”

“His companion, then.”

“Look, the cat pick me up two days ago down in Hollywood, at some creep fag party, it turned out to be. I was broke just like now, no place to go. So when he offered, I took him up.”

“Naturally.”

“And he nothing to me, man. No more than you could be.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You say that a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how about it?”

“What?”

“Don’t what me. You know what I’m talking.”

Bone considered the offer. It was late and he was tired, and the two days with the Dakota schoolteacher had left him feeling about as erotic as a steer. Then he thought of Mo, the fact that she would have to lie in her room with Cutter and listen to
him
, Bone, for a change, rather than the other way around. And for some reason the prospect gave him pleasure. But at bottom he knew his real reason would be the same as ever, the faithful old juices already beginning to rise in him.

“What about your friend?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Well, he do kinda like this li’l old black ass.”

“But not enough.”

The girl laughed. “You know, I think you right.”

He took hold of her shoulders then and kissed her, lightly at first, almost exploratory, as if in token homage to their racial difference, and then more deeply finally, open-mouthed, discovering a faint trace of grass on her breath.

When they went back inside, Erickson verified that he indeed did not like his black ass anywhere near enough. Bone told him that the only way he could stay the night was alone out on the deck in his sleeping bag, and the youth fussed and fumed for the five or ten minutes it took him to gather up his things and get his backpack in order. But not once during that time did he direct a critical word at Bone. No, Ronnie was the only one at fault, Ronnie the cheap opportunistic little slut if ever he found one, in fact a no-good nigger bitch that was what she was, yeah, nigger, they’d heard him right, and if he hadn’t ever used the word before it was only because he’d never run into one before.

When he left, there was not much said. Cutter, shaking his head in mock sorrow, told Bone and Ronnie to miscegenate if they must, but to please be quiet in the process because he needed his sleep, he planned to meditate all the next day. He and Mo went into their bedroom then, where the baby was still sleeping, and closed the door.