Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

  Cutter and Bone

  Newton Thornburg

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1976 by Newton Thornburg

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition April 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-746-3

  Also by Newton Thornburg

  To Die in California

  Dreamland

  A Man’s Game

  Eve’s Men

  Valhalla

  The Lion at the Door

  Beautiful Kate

  Black Angus

  To Karin

  my wife, my love,

  my life

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  More from Newton Thornburg

  1

  It was not the first time Richard Bone had shaved with a Lady Remington, nor did he expect it to be the last. Nevertheless he felt a distinct breath of revulsion as he drew the instrument back and forth above his mouth, and he was not sure whether this was because he detected on it some slight residue of female armpit musk or whether the problem was simply his image in the mirror, old Golden Boy all tanned and sleek and fit. What a liar it was, this image. An honest mirror would have thrown back something more along the lines of Cutter, he felt, a figure with missing limbs and a glass eye and a smile like the rictus of a scream. Idly Bone contemplated the reaction of the shaver’s owner had she known a little more of the truth of him, for instance that he was not so much interested in keeping the old corpus tanned and fit as he was in merely keeping it alive, feeding and clothing it, checking its occasional vagrant impulse to swim out into the channel a tantalizing hundred yards too far or to push his senile MG around a curve a few rpms faster than it was meant to go. Wait, he kept telling himself. Have patience. Something will happen. Something will change.

  Though he had finished now, he was reluctant to turn off the razor, anticipating that the woman would pick up her lament again. He still could not believe her lack of cool. In the past, when he had gone straight for the money like this, most of them simply had walked, a few had thrown him out, some even had come across. But this one preferred to hang in there and suffer.

  When he put the razor away finally, there was a knock at the bedroom door, followed by the swish of her Sears robe as she got up and answered. It was room service: champagne and deep-fried fantail shrimp, an enthusiasm of hers. Coming out of the bathroom, Bone slipped into his peppermint-stripe shirt, which was going into its third straight day of wear. The Chicano roomboy, leaving, gave him a conspirator’s wink, probably because the woman had signed the check. Bone ignored him.

  “Want some shrimp?” the woman asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Shellfish, they’re supposed to be good for virility, aren’t they.”

  “Men in my line of work, we couldn’t get along without them.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, then. It’s just that this thing is—well, it’s kind of hard on a woman’s vanity.”

  “What thing?”

  She laughed wistfully. “You don’t have any idea?”

  “Your friends,” Bone said, “you going to join them again?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “I thought maybe you would.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Is it really?”

  He shrugged. There was nothing to say, nothing that would make any difference. The woman was one of three Fargo, North Dakota high school teachers who had come here to Santa Barbara for the spring vacation. Their rationale apparently had been that if no men turned up they could fall back on touring the local historical sites or scavenging through curio and antique shops. When he had found her sunning herself alone on the beach—her colleagues were late risers—she had not been at all bashful about abandoning them, taking this new room in the motel, and spending two days and a night with him so far, footing all the bills of course. He was having his troubles, he had told her. A tight period. It would pass. And she had accepted this with a fine contemporary aplomb, in fact had seemed to take an almost indecent relish in cashing her traveler’s checks and slipping him money under the table and sometimes over.

  The trouble had begun only hours before, in bed, when she had broken their after-sex silence with some vague moist words about love and commitment and settling down. He had been swift in reply, coming back with his request for “a loan.” Just three or four hundred, he had suggested. Something to tide him over.

  Occasionally it had worked. But not this time.

  At the table, Bone lifted the lid on the chafing dish and drew out a pair of shrimp. Dipping them in sauce, he devoured them in one bite.

  “What will I say to them?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “My friends. What will they think?”

  “About what?”

  “You. This thing we’ve had going. What do I tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Bone had poured the champagne. Now he reached over to give her a glass but she ignored it. He set it down. “That you found out I was a loser,” he said. “Broke. A bum.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I don’t even have a room, for Christ sake. Got locked out a couple weeks ago. And the guy I’m staying with now, he’s two months behind in his rent. A loser too.”

  “You don’t look the part.”

  “Well, I feel it.”

  She sagged into an orange vinyl chair.

  “Come on, eat,” he told her. “It’s getting cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “And I wouldn’t think you’d be hungry either—all the eating you’ve been doing.”

  That made Bone look up from the table. “I enjoy it, lady. Thought you did too.”

  Though he called her lady, he judged she was a few years younger than he, twenty-nine or thirty, not likely the dewy twenty-five she laid claim to. In the beginning she had been reasonably attractive, good company, good in bed. But the woman confronting him now was someone brand new, a stranger with a trembling mouth and long Dakota winters in her eyes. Meredith, she called herself. Meredith Saunders.

  Bone ate more shrimp. “Didn’t figure you for a romantic,” he said. “You came on like a realist.”

  “And you came on like a human being.”

  “False representation, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  Despite his hunger, Bone was beginning to wish he had already walked out. He had hoped for a reasonably friendly parting, starting with this late evening snack together, the two of them sitting here warts and all in the crummy motel room, eating, swilling, a chance for her to adjust her vision to the reality of the situation and see it as it was and had been all along, a one- or two-night stand and nothing more. Love. Where could she have gotten such an idea?


  “Is it always so easy for you?” she kept on. “This gigolo bit? Don’t you ever have any trouble ‘rising to the occasion,’ so to speak?”

  “It ain’t much of a ‘bit,’ I’m afraid. Nothing regular. I come to the beach to run and sometimes I see someone who interests me. Someone attractive, like you.”

  “Someone to fuck. Someone to sponge off of.”

  He did not respond.

  “It never reaches you? Never bothers you?”

  And suddenly he was out of patience. He could feel the anger beginning in him, like the first hot breeze of a Santa Ana. Getting up, he slipped into his seedy sportcoat.

  “See you around,” he said.

  She called his name as he left, a tearful “Richard!” that made him slam the door behind him all the harder as he headed for the elevator at the end of the corridor.

  His car was parked across Cabrillo, the beach drive, which curved west in a long graceful sweep of streetlights to the distant wharf and yacht harbor, beyond which the drilling platforms in the channel winked green and red at the rim of the sea. As he crossed the street and entered the parking lot, he could almost feel the woman’s eyes on his back, their cloying outrage following him every step of the way. He halfway expected her to call out his name again, but gratefully all he heard was the surf breaking lightly on the beach, that and a kind of chant rising from a group of hippies sitting on the sand in lotus position around a driftwood fire. Why couldn’t they be singing? he wondered. Why couldn’t it be laughter and hot dogs instead of prayer beads and theological posturing, weird amalgams of fire worship and Zen? Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved.

  But then that was more than a little specious, he knew, because he was indisputably one of them now, just another player indistinguishable from the evangelists and fire-worshipers, the pornographers and primal screamers. And his casual abuse of the schoolteacher only proved how well he fitted in. For his reason had not been the money he had pointedly asked for and not the few days of high life either, the good food and drink and service he still had not lost his taste for, even three years after having walked away from it. No, his reason at bottom was probably nothing more than simple boredom, that and the always attractive prospect of spending a few days away from Cutter, free of him and Mo and their kid and all their problems, their booze and battles and squalor, their crisp invective and soggy leftovers.

  But as he reached his car now, and took in its bald tires and rusting fenders and the springs coming through the rotted leather of the seat, he had to admit the three- or four-hundred “loan” would have come in handy. At the very least it would have meant new rubber and a valve job, so he could stop dragging behind him a long blue tail of exhaust gases wherever he drove. It was funny how indifferent he had become to the thing, a classic 1948 MG-TC with running board and wire wheels and all the rest. Yet now it was transportation, that was all, no different from the gleaming Detroit iron he used to buy new each year in Milwaukee, before he had cut out on Ruth and the girls and his problems at work. But when he had first drifted here two years ago in the company of a nice lady he had met in Acapulco—and eventually was given the car by her, to remember her by, she had said—well, for some reason these four wheels had become nothing less than the symbol, the bright red emblem, of the new life he was to lead, not this year’s model of some cheap chrome and plastic dream but rather wood, leather, steel, a work of care and art, honest, real. That had been about the scope of his expectations, the measure of his innocence. The reality had turned out somewhat different. Now he would have settled in a second for some of that Detroit chrome and plastic, wheels that ran fast and quiet and did not trail a spoor of smoke.

  On the way home, he stopped in for a few drinks at Murdock’s, a Chicago Loop tavern misplaced in Santa Barbara, a cool dark narrow room with thick carpet underfoot and a new color television behind the bar and a gaudy Wurlitzer that played bland pop music, not the sort of place the Montecito or Hope Ranch sets were likely to turn up even in their more desperate slumming forays. Murdock’s clientele was basically working-class Anglo, enough of a minority in Santa Barbara so the place was rarely crowded, and the prices reasonable, the service good.

  Bone still had twelve dollars of the schoolteacher’s money left, five of which he put on the bar now, so Murdock would know he was not planning to add to his already embarrassing tab. Seeing the bill, Murdock quickly fashioned Bone’s customary vodka and tonic and brought it to him.

  “Long time,” Murdock said. He was about forty, lean for a bartender, with thin red hair and blotchy skin.

  Bone shrugged. “No bread.”

  “Someday you got to face it, Rich. This world, you work. No other way.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Believe it.”

  “I try.”

  “Hell you do. I mean really try. So the old stomach acts up again—so you get wound up—so what? Who don’t? No one lives forever.”

  “Just hurry up the process, huh?”

  Murdock made a face, knowing, envious. “You got it made, man. You know that? You get it wired. If I could be a professional like you and sit around some fancy office all day thinking up ways to con suckers like me, you think I wouldn’t do it?”

  “I think you would.”

  “You bet your ass. And you will again too, for a fact. You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Cutter,” Murdock said. “You still staying with him, right?” Bone nodded.

  “That’s it then. Anyone sane, that guy drive him crazy. Anyone don’t drink, he’ll put him on the sauce. Any anyone don’t want a job—hell, he’ll have you punching a clock before the week’s out.”

  Bone smiled wearily. “I take it he was in.”

  “You take it right, pal. Couple hours ago.” Murdock looked down the bar, where a rheumy-eyed old man was anxiously regarding his empty glass.

  “Tell you later.” Murdock moved away.

  Bone lit a cigarette, grateful for the interruption. He was not in any mood for conversation. Ever since he had left the woman he had felt the anger growing in him, the resentment. He had a pretty good idea how she pictured him, as some sort of footloose swinging stud blithely moving from woman to woman, victim to victim, taking what he could and skipping on, no sweat, no lost sleep. The irony of it galled him, for right this minute he felt about as swinging and free as a Carmelite monk. Like the quinine water, fear ran cold in him. And it was the sort of fear white middle-class Americans just were not supposed to know about, fear of things like hunger and cold and toothache, all quite minor unless you had twelve dollars to your name, five of which you would blow this night on liquor. Would he eat tomorrow? The coming week? Would he have a place to sleep? The ridiculous truth was he didn’t know, for both right now depended on Cutter’s disability check, which would probably last about as long as a Southern California snow, considering that the man’s tastes ran to abalone steaks and Cabernet Sauvignon and Packard restorations.

  But then Bone was his own man, was he not? Free, white, and thirty-three, sound of wind and limb? Couldn’t he simply do as Murdock suggested, get a job, pay his own way? The evidence indicated otherwise. For he had tried, every now and then had bowed to necessity and taken a job, probably a dozen of them in the past thirty months, two in marketing again, relatively high-paying positions in which he was expected to do only what he did best, and yet within weeks the stomach had begun to go bad just as in the past, sleep would not come, and his exhaustion was as if he had been drugged. So he had quit. And even the other jobs, the frequent blue-collar gigs as a gardener or truck driver or laborer—the story there was no different. Always the tightening in the stomach would come, the feeling of entrapment, and final
ly the inevitable flare-up with some asshole boss or other. Then it would be the street again, the women again, his only real security.

  Later, if he drank enough, he would pass the problem off as philosophic, reflecting that he simply could not think in the old terms anymore—man, job, life—not when the death of Richard Bone was no more than a sudden leg cramp out in the surf tomorrow morning or a drunk driver coming his way just beyond every curve ahead or an exotic virus even now prospering in his flesh. When your mortality was that real for you, how could you spend what might be your last hours in someone else’s hire, making or selling or serving disposable junk?

  But now, sober, Bone had no answers, no certitude, nothing but the fear, the coldness trickling through him.

  Murdock returned. Wagging his head ruefully, he lit a small cigar. “Yeah, he was here all right, your landlord. About two hours ago. Came in with this hippie freak and a girl.”

  “Mo?”

  “Who’s Mo?”

  “Maureen. His old lady. Mother of his kid.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “Blond. Kind of thin. A chain-smoker.”

  “Christ no,” Murdock laughed. “This one was a spade. But some looker, let me tell you. Real cool, you know the kind. Anyway they come in here about nine and take that table over by the jukebox. Hardly drink anything, the three of ’em, just stand there feeding quarters into the thing and breaking up over the music. Now I say, you don’t like a number, well and good, you don’t have to play it.”

  “Cutter does.”

  Murdock frowned in consternation. “He’s a leaker, all right. You know, I had the feeling he was kind of playing it double, making fun of the three of them same as he was the rest of us.”

  Bone knew the routine. “Now you see him, now you don’t.”

  “Another thing. The guys here like the fights on TV, so naturally I turn ’em on. So what does your boy do? He sits over there telling this hippie and the girl—just loud enough so if you wanted you couldn’t help but hear him—he tells ’em how sick American men are, that the only way we can get our jollies is through secondhand violence, like the fights, watching one poor creep pound on another. Only he served it up with a lot of psychological mumbo jumbo, you know?”