Cutter and Bone (7 page)

Bone looked at his watch. It was past twelve o’clock and people on their lunch hour were beginning to crowd the sidewalk café. Many were standing in line, waiting for tables.

“We’re through eating,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“And my two problems?” Cutter asked. “No answers?”

“Your only problem, Alex, is your imagination.”

Driving back uptown, Bone found it hard to believe the amount of traffic they had to fight through. Even in his small MG the going was rarely swift, but it was decidedly slower with the one-armed Cutter maneuvering the 1948 Packard, which reminded Bone of a beached whale, a great bloated tin fish. With the traffic already this bad, he hated to think of summer and especially Fiesta week, when tourists would glut the city like starlings in a favored tree.

As they moved along, stopping, starting again, smoking and rattling past the handsome old fake-adobe structures along streets lined with palm trees and hibiscus and jacaranda, Bone could almost feel with Cutter the sick outrage of the native Santa Barbaran. For the town quite simply was perishing of its own spectacular beauty and climate, was on its back almost full time now, putting out for all kinds of pimps and promoters and developers, anyone with the price of a lay. Santa Condominia, Cutter called it, relishing how it too had betrayed him.

But Bone could not work up much of a sweat over the problem. In fact he could not even keep his mind on it. The photograph in the newspaper kept intruding. He had played the thing casually back at Ziggie’s, but the truth was he had no answer to Cutter’s question. He had no idea why he had blurted
It’s him!
And that uncertainty, he was sure, worried him even more than it did Cutter, for only he knew how immediate and thoughtless the connection had been. It was not the face, of course, for he had not seen the man’s face. Nor was it simply that both men had the same bearlike body and large head. No, it was something beyond that, an animus, an almost inhuman arrogance that flowed as equally from the dark shape dumping the body in the trashcan as from the face in the photo, the celebrated new conglomerateur grinning amiably next to the burned-out shell of his rented car. And for that matter, Cutter had a point there too, the car going up in flames within an hour of the dumping of the body—how many coincidences added up to noncoincidence?

But again Bone caught himself. Had he flipped or was it just exhaustion? As if to prove to himself the absurdity of his thoughts he picked up the paper now, which had been lying between him and Cutter in the front seat, and absently, almost carelessly, he opened it to the third page, expecting to find nothing there but a grinning stranger. Instead he found the same sick feeling as before. And Cutter did not miss it.

By the time they reached the house, Bone had begun to feel the need for both solitude and exercise, and he asked Cutter if he could take the car onto the beach. But Cutter crossed him.

“Great idea. I’ll join you. We can race.”

After Mo got out, taking the baby with her, Cutter drove off. On the way they went past the apartment building that once had been Cutter’s home, a huge three-story white stone structure sitting back amid the surviving palms and sycamores, its sprawling lawn all asphalt and parking places now, its porte cochere glassed in and modernized, a lobby. Behind the house rising young stockbrokers and communications specialists lived the chic life in converted stables and servants’ quarters and drank mai-tais around the same pool where Cutter’s mother, drunk, had fallen in and drowned a few years after his father, Alexander the Third no less, had met a similar fate, going down with his heavily mortgaged hundred-thousand-dollar yacht in a storm off Point Conception. By the time of the mother’s death the executors of the estate could scrape together only enough for Cutter to have a year at Stanford, and then it was all over, done, three generations of money and privilege canceled like a subscription. And Cutter moved on without a backward look, slipping easily into the mid-sixties, that golden age of cant, of bare feet and acid and Aquarius, followed by either disillusionment or boredom, Cutter was never sure which, except that it led to turnabout, metamorphosis into a marine of all things, a hardgutted grunt who reached Nam just in time for Tet of 1968, just in time to step on a claymore.

Most of this had come from Mo. What little Cutter ever revealed about himself was usually in the form of black humor, as when he referred to his parents as the aquatic branch of the family. Even now, driving past the old house, he did not glance its way. Nevertheless Bone could not forget the make and model of the car they were in, and he could only wonder what significance it held beyond the obvious, precisely how and where its psychic tendrils linked Cutter to the flesh and spirit of his past.

At Arroyo Burro they parked the car and made their way down over the huge winter boulders to the beach itself, where a ragtag school of scuba bums were preparing to go into the water, all looking to Bone infinitely weirder than anything they were likely to spear in the deep. Limping past them, Cutter asked one to keep a sharp eye out for his dog Checkers, a Labrador that liked to float out in the kelp beds for days at a time, especially at this time of year. Though the man looked dubious, he nodded.

“But be careful,” Cutter called back. “He bites.”

Bone walked on a short distance under the cliffs, to a boulder where he knew Cutter would wait for him. There he took off his shoes and jacket and started out, jogging at first, then slowly gathering speed as he ran toward the lowering sun, which was setting red fire to Isla Vista’s lonely Stonehenge of high-rise buildings. Out at sea, storm clouds moving in from the southwest had snagged on the channel islands like old newspapers blown against a fence row. For over a mile he ran, between the cliffs and the sea, past low-ride-uncovered rocks bristling with mussels and sea anemones. And then he started back, keeping up the same steady pace, until in time he could feel the cleanness coming into him as his body burned first its fuels and then its poisons too, all the tensions and angers and other gunk of this long day disappearing down the swollen river of his blood. And still he kept on, even after the cleanness had become only pain, an ax stuck in his side and sinking deeper with every step until finally it reached the point where he felt almost severed by it, and only then did he let up, slowing down for a time and then walking and jogging the last half mile to the boulder where Cutter sat staring out at the sea.

“Used to run here myself,” Cutter said. “But I guess I already told you that.”

Bone, still out of breath, did not respond.

“I’d have beaten you then, Rich. Because you coast, man. You glide. You don’t press. Me, I pressed.”

“I believe it.” Bone lit a cigarette and dragged, wondering whether it would undo whatever good the run had done for him.

“But back in your old v.p. days at twenty-eight, I don’t figure you did much coasting then, huh? No sir, I’ll bet you ate old men for lunch back then.”

“I don’t particularly care for the metaphor.”

Cutter laughed. “You got a point.”

Neither of them said anything for a time. A pretty teen-age girl walked past, leading an English bulldog on a leash, and Cutter gave her his customary greeting—“Want some candy, little girl?”—but it lacked all edge. Smiling, shaking her head, she walked on. And both men watched her, the long legs and small fine buttocks moving eloquently as she went on around the headland up the beach. When Cutter looked back, his eye had a strange bleakness in it. Nevertheless he grinned. He grinned crookedly and said, “Lately I been thinking of killing myself, Rich. You got any advice?”

Bone dragged on the cigarette, buying time. Out beyond the surf a pelican plunged into the sea. Bone shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“I figured not. Guy talks about it, naturally he’s not gonna do it, right? He’s just fishing. Dramatizing himself.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I would, in your place.”

“Then why tell anyone?”

“No good reason. Except it’s true.”

And Bone began to feel a breath of alarm now, like a breeze off the kelp, fetid, a touch ominous. “Why, Alex?” he said.

Cutter shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not the goddamn eye, or the arm and the leg—some list, huh? They don’t help, Christ knows. But they’re not it, not the real problem. No, that’s in here,” he said, tapping his head. “And I can’t fix it. Can’t change it.”

“What is it?”

Cutter flipped him a look, spare, flat. “Well, it goes kinda like this—you make me ill, Rich. I mean physically ill, a feeling like having to puke all the time, like having the goddamn flu or a hangover. You get the picture. And it isn’t just what you say or what you do. It’s what you
are
, what I know you are, inside.” He must have seen some of the resentment Bone was beginning to feel, for he raised his hand, signaling that there was more to come. “And the problem, kid, the big problem is you’re the best. Yeah, I guess I probably like you best—or despise you the least, I guess I should say. Less than all the others, less even than me. Probably just a matter of style, the low key, nothing important. It doesn’t change the fact that I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead.”

Cutter broke off there, not even looking at Bone for a reaction. Absently he scarred swastikas in the sand.

“I can’t say I understand,” Bone tried. “I feel depression myself, Alex. And fear too. But nothing like this. Mo, doesn’t she—?”

“She doesn’t figure in. She doesn’t matter. With her or without her, it’s all the same.”

“What about the VA?”

“You mean the shrinks again?” Cutter laughed at that. “No chance. A bunch of cripples in bathrobes sitting in a circle telling each other how they’ve copped out or how uptight and hostile everybody else is. And the shrink getting off on it all, sitting there with one hand stuck in his fly.” Cutter shook his head in disdain. “No thanks. Anyway I don’t figure I’m sick. I figure I’m well, one of the few. I figure I see life whole and honest, exactly as it is. And the only normal healthy response is what I have, this despair.”

Bone knew that with Cutter the possibility of a put-on was always present. But he went along anyway. “You’re serious, then?”

“About killing myself? In my head, yeah. I see no reason not to. But doing it, actually doing it, well I couldn’t say till afterwards, could I. After I’d brought it off. And then of course I couldn’t say anything. So I guess all I can say is yeah, I’m serious.”

Bone dropped his cigarette onto the sand, buried it with his foot. “At the beginning you asked for advice. Okay, I advise you to wait. You can’t lose. Things might change.”

“I’m already into that,” Cutter said. “I’ve been waiting for some time now.”

“Good. Keep waiting.”

Cutter shook his head matter-of-factly. “Not this way. Not with this setup. Mo and the kid and the food stamps. And this fucking boom town. It’s like living in the middle of a Jaycee parade.”

“What else then? Where?”

“Nothing very grand, Rich, believe me. First, money, of course. I’d need that. Enough for some decent surgery on the old physiognomy, tone down the scarface routine. The VA, they
added
scar tissue. I believe the surgeon was an orderly out of Watts, used an old switchblade. And no new ‘prosthetic devices’ either. The foot’s enough. I refuse to jack off with a steel claw. Unesthetic.” Cutter grinned disparagingly. “As for
where
, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disillusion you, old buddy. Because what I want is truly square, really and truly square. Would you believe an exotic island somewhere, with ceiling fans and dusky natives? Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and me, all sweating through our palm beaches. Say someplace like Ibiza, Clifford Irving and his freaky, decadent friends. Which after all is what I am, right? Freaky and decadent. I think maybe in a place like that, with people like that, I might lose this—nausea.”

Bone too had begun to smile now, for he was sure if the other had not been a put-on, this certainly was.

“Ibiza, huh?” he said.

“
An
Ibiza.”

“Good luck.”

“Take more than luck. It’ll take money.”

“Right. Well, let’s head back.” Bone was already on his feet, waiting for Cutter to join him, which he did now, slowly pushing off on his cane.

As they started up the beach, Cutter changed the subject, or at least for a brief time Bone thought he had.

“Back in the car I saw you look at the paper again. The picture. You still ain’t sure, are you?”

“About what?”

“J. J. Wolfe.”

“I keep repeating, Alex. I didn’t see a face. So how can I identify a face?”

“You tell me.”

“You talk in circles.”

But now the circles tightened. Picking up a stone, Cutter skipped it at the surf. “A rich man, J. J. Wolfe,” he mused.

And Bone laughed out loud. Next to him, Cutter limped along, smiling crookedly, culpably.

“So what’s funny? A rich man, that’s all I said. Which he is, right?”

“Which he is.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

“Come off it, Alex. Or rather, come out with it. Say it.”

“Say what?”

“First, all this shit about despair and your crying need for bread. Big bread. And now suddenly we segue neatly to J. J. Wolfe.”

Cutter was still grinning. “Blackmail, you mean? You think I’m suggesting blackmail?”

“The thought does cross the mind.”

“Bone, you been in too many police stations lately. Your brain’s going soft. What the hell do you think I am anyway, some half-assed mick toilet-paper salesman, some aging ever-ready beachboy who’d go down on a crocodile if the money was right?”