Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

  “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 go
od 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.

  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.

  12

  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.