Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

  Bone drained his glass. “Cutter knows the words.”

  “Yeah he does. But believe me, by then the cats in here wasn’t digging his words very much. Fact, most of ’em didn’t like it from the beginning, him bringing the hippie and the black girl in here. But what could they do, huh? Him hobbling around on a cane and with one arm missing and that goddamn black patch over his eye. He uses all that, you know? He takes advantage. Hell, he ain’t the only cat got shot up over in the paddies.”

  Bone slid his empty glass across the bar, hoping for both a refill and an end to the tirade.

  “Man’s got his problems,” he said.

  Murdock picked up the glass, dumped out the ice, the twist of lime. “One final word on the subject,” he said. “Move out. Get away from him. Sleep on the beach if you have to.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Sure you will.”

  In the next few hours Bone bought four more drinks himself, accepted one from an off-duty cop who had taken the stool next to his, and finally got a freebie from Murdock himself. So he was without anxiety when he left the bar at eleven-thirty, walking through a cold spring rain to his car parked up the street. The rain meant that before he could drive anywhere he first had to get out a towel and dry off the seat and dashboard, for the MG’s torn old canvas top was about as effective as rattan in keeping out the weather. And even then the drying off was not totally successful, because the worn-through seat absorbed much of the wetness and would surrender it only to the pressure of Bone’s weight, which it began to do as he started for home—a sensation that always made him feel as if he had been time-warped back into wet diapers and a crib. But even this feeling did not altogether kill his pleasure in the night, the almost midwestern lushness of it, with the wind soughing in the sycamores and pepper trees and the palms whipping back and forth, raining dead fronds on the darkly gleaming streets.

  He was moving along Anapamu, under its graceful canopy of stone pines, when the car’s engine began to cough and rattle. Then abruptly it cut out. He knew he had been playing things close, not having bought any gasoline for almost a week, so he was not surprised at running out now. And yet he could not completely check his anger either, his disgust at the goddamn miserable little limey heap with its leaky top and useless gas gauge and general debility, and he had to resist a strong impulse to steer the thing off the road into a tree and just leave it there, abandon it for good. Instead he coasted to a stop along the curb, and taking the ignition key, set out on foot the rest of the journey home, most of which was sharply uphill. He knew he could have gone for gas at one of the all-night stations on Milpas, but they were not much closer than Cutter’s place, and this way, leaving the car overnight, he would not have to walk back but could use Cutter’s car in the morning, if by some outside chance it happened to be running.

  To his right, the high school sprawled low and dark and very Californian in its parklike setting, an almost collegiate campus compared to the bleak diploma factory Bone had attended in his native Chicago Plains. He was not surprised that given this setting and climate students tended to overachieve mostly in illiteracy and venereal disease. And it made him almost wish he was sixteen again, mindless and full of juice, embarking on that long road of teenage ass. Certainly compared to the road he walked this night it would have been more pleasant, and a lot easier on the nerves. First there was the rain, which suddenly became a cataract as he turned uphill away from the school. Then in the first block a huge Doberman dragging a broken chain came snarling out of the darkness at him like the hound of hell itself, and he found himself circling gingerly around the beast, walking backward in a cold feral sweat, jabbering pleasantries. Then no sooner was he out of danger and on his way again when a late-model car came speeding down the hill and, braking suddenly, swung into an alley next to an apartment complex. There the car came to a stop and Bone saw a man get out, a squat, large-headed figure silhouetted against some distant garage doors floodlit by the car’s headlights. Moving rapidly, stumbling once, the figure scurried around to the other side of the car and opened the passenger door, apparently getting something out of the front seat, though Bone could not be sure since he was across the street and approaching from the driver’s side. But as he walked on, the angle changed rapidly, and he saw the man just as he finished stuffing something—golf clubs, it looked like—into one of a half dozen trash barrels evidently left there from a pickup earlier in the day. Immediately the man slipped back into the car through the open passenger door and roared on up the short alleyway, fishtailing the car as he accelerated and then braked again, turning left as the alley turned. Seconds later Bone heard the tires shrieking once more as the man turned onto Anapamu and floored the car again. Already a few lights were coming on in the apartment buildings as outraged widows and retirees checked their alarm clocks to see what time it was, at what ungodly hour they had been awakened by what drug-crazed hippie freak. Bone hurried on, not eager to have to answer any questions, especially any put by a policeman.

  As he reached the next corner he found the sidewalk effectively blocked by an old man and a toy poodle, both dressed in oversize yellow slickers and connected by a leash. The dog, a male, was spritzing a dwarf palm tree.

  “You the one making all the racket?” the old man demanded.

  Bone deliberately did not break his stride, so the man had to haul the dog in on its leash, one leg still airborne.

  “Hey!” the old fellow complained. “Who do you think you are?”

  Bone told him to go fuck himself.

  Between the main part of the city and the mountains was a great long foothill beginning at the Old Mission and running almost to the sea. Billed as the Riviera by the natives, it offered vistas and property values that ranged from the breathtaking along the top to the merely desirable farther down. These latter were generally older neighborhoods with smaller lots and smaller houses, most of which had been cut up into apartments that offered little for the money except a view, and sometimes not even that. Cutter’s place, however, stood alone, a small gray frame structure built in the forties on the outer edge of one of the goat-path roads that veined the hillside, a perch so precarious there was no backyard at all, just a rickety wood deck whose unobstructed view probably accounted for half the three-hundred-dollar rent Cutter and Mo scrounged to raise each month, often unsuccessfully.

  As Bone reached their street now and saw the house ahead, he found himself hoping that Mo would be in bed already, preferably sound asleep. And this irritated him, for he knew there was seldom a time when the sight of her failed to give him pleasure and thus he had to wonder if his desire not to see her now wasn’t a kind of fear, a gut need at this late stoned hour to slip past the fast guns of her scorn. How was it he had described her to Murdock? Blond and kind of thin. Which she was. But she was also kind of beautiful, a fact he had not seen fit to mention. And this too irritated him.

  As he let himself into the house, softly closing the front door behind him, he was relieved to see that all the lights were out except one over the kitchen sink, which as usual was buried under a clutter of dirty dishes. Even in the darkness Bone could feel the squalor closing in on him, for the place was truly a house without a keeper. The little house that couldn’t, Swanson called it, Swanson from the good old moneyed days of Cutter’s childhood. Cutter and Mo had lived in the place two years, Bone understood, yet to a large extent they still were not unpacked. Random supermarket boxes full of books and stereo albums and other junk sat on the floor next to unhung pictures and piles of clothing no one had bothered to put away or get hangers for. The tiny kitchen, however, was the true disaster area. There the groceries—the bags of Fritos and Cheetos and potato chips, the cans of Spaghetti-os and Hamburger Helper, the rafts of Hostess Twinkies and Ding Dongs and other such chemical concoctions—all sat exactly where they had been brought in from the store and dumped, amid the burned pots and empty fifths and accumulated TV dinner trays.

  So Bone was gr
ateful for the darkness as he ventured into the kitchen now and, rinsing out a dirty coffee cup, tried to cool his smoker’s throat with water that tasted like pure chlorine. Just as he was setting the cup back on the sink, the bathroom door opened and a shaft of light poured across the living room. In it Mo moved dreamily, carrying a drink in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other. She was wearing chinos and the beautifully ornate silk kimono Cutter claimed to have stolen from a Hong Kong whore during one of his R and Rs from Vietnam. Reluctantly Bone left the kitchen.

  “You’re up,” he said.

  “How very keen we are tonight.” Her smile was heedless, stoned.

  “Feeling good, huh?”

  “Good enough.”

  Bone turned on a table lamp and dropped onto the davenport. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Quads and vodka.”

  She shrugged indifferently. “Could be. I didn’t bother to notice.”

  “Considering, you’re looking good.”

  “You too. But then of course you always do. Sort of a dry Mark Spitz, aren’t you?”

  “Drier. And blonder.”

  “And older,” she said.

  “Much older.”

  Clumsily she slipped down onto the floor. Setting her drink on the coffee table, an old boat hatch resting on cement blocks, she chain-lit another cigarette. “Well, how’d we do these last few days?” she asked. “Did we score big? Did we make them pay for the honor of balling the champ?”

  “You’re stoned.”

  “Could be.”

  “I don’t like you stoned.”

  “I don’t like you sober.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I asked you, how’d we make out?”

  “Not so hot.”

  “Just food and drink, huh?”

  “And a respite.”

  “One of those, huh? From what, if I may ask?”

  “You can’t guess.”

  She smiled, all radiant innocence. “From me? Your sweet old Mo?”

  Bone shook his head. “Even bullshit like this, some reason I can take it from you.”

  That seemed to bring her out from behind the downers and alcohol. “But Alex’s generosity, that you can’t take, huh?”

  “All I can get.”

  “But resent it in the bargain?”

  “Not at all. I’m grateful to him. Why, sometimes I almost like him. Let’s say I find it hard to stay with a man and his old lady.”

  “And why is that, do you think?”

  “Maybe it’s like in the Bible. Maybe I covet my neighbor’s ass.”

  She regarded him coolly. “Don’t waste your time, Rich.”

  “I didn’t say I was trying to get it, Mo. Only that maybe I coveted it.”

  The cool watchful look lasted a few more seconds, then abruptly she threw back her head, laughing. “Poor Richard. The man they never say no to. And yet here he is, playing second fiddle to a one-eyed cripple. That must really gnaw on you.”

  “Not too much. No, I’d say my problem is more curiosity than anything else. I keep asking myself if all this isn’t just an act. I mean, consider—here’s this tough ballsy liberated female, this pampered alumnus of—”

  “Alumna.”

  “Of Beverly Hills and Radcliffe—”

  “Hunter.”

  “I keep wondering why she’d play barefoot squaw to anyone, least of all a—” Bone faltered, wanting the right euphemism.

  “A what?”

  “A Cutter.”

  “You don’t have any idea?”

  “I don’t mean because of how he looks either—his injuries.”

  “His character then?”

  Bone shrugged.

  “What then? Think, Richard. Strain.”

  “Don’t want to hurt myself.”

  “Chance it.”

  “It’s late, Mo.”

  “I’m sure it is. But keep trying. The Lord loves a trier.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “Come on, Richard—Why do you resent him?”

  “Cutter? I don’t.”

  “You do. Now try. Think of something.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  Bone lit a cigarette. “Well, let’s see. There’s you. There’s always you.”

  “Fine. What about me?”

  “How he treats you.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Lousy.”

  Mo smiled wearily. The argument was beneath her. “Wrong. Alex treats me fine.”

  “Sure. While he goes out every night, you sit at home minding the baby.”

  “It’s my baby.”

  “Not his?”

  “Men don’t have babies.”

  “So there’s no need for marriage.”

  “Did it do your wife any good?”

  There was not much Bone could say to that. “You’ve got a point,” he conceded.

  But that did not make a winner of Mo. If anything, she looked more troubled now, less sure of herself. She sat on the floor staring down at her lap and the drink she cradled. Then slowly, carefully, she got to her feet, one hand on the overstuffed, overworn Salvation Army chair that sat on the other side of the coffee table. Sipping her drink, she wandered to the front window and stood there for a time looking out at the darkness, the wet street shining in the corner light.

  “I suppose it does seem kind of screwy,” she said finally. “Like it does to my parents. They think I’ve flipped, you know. They think their poor dear Maureen took one acid trip too many. And I can’t blame them. Or you either. But I don’t have any answers. There just comes a day, that’s all. You come to the point where you’ve got to make a commitment. And for me, Alex is it. I think he has a kind of greatness in him, Rich. I really do. At least he’s suffered greatly, I know that. I look at him, at that poor torn face of his, and then I think of the rest of us, all the frightened little faces like yours and mine, all the mild, hungry little faces, and I ask myself if any of us by any stretch of the imagination could ever do anything, be anything, that mattered. And the answer is no. Always no.”

  “But Alex could, huh?”

  “I believe he could.”

  “I don’t.”

  “His family, you don’t know what monsters they were. And the drugs. I was in the life myself for a few years, so I have some idea what it cost him. And then Vietnam. He caught all of it, you know? But all it could do was cripple him, disfigure him on the outside. Inside—”

  “Inside he limps.”

  “You bastard, Rich. You poor bastard.”

  “Inside we all limp, Mo.”

  “Not Alex.”

  Bone shrugged. “Okay. You’re right, I’m wrong. You go on playing barefoot squaw.”

  “I’m not playing anything!”

  “Whatever you call it. Just so it makes you happy.”

  “Well, it does!”

  Bone got to his feet and went over to her. With mock tenderness he took her by the hair and turned her head, forcing her to look at him. “Then why the downers, Mo? Why the booze? How come you can’t get through a day without all that junk?”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “I need it,” she got out.

  Bone let go of her. “Enjoy it then. I’m gonna take a shower.”

  Even over the roar of the water Bone was able to hear the new voices in the living room, especially Cutter’s nasal rasp, that fitting instrument of the bawdy sardonic character he pushed in public, so different from the one whose soft and stumbling, almost elegiac voice Bone often had to listen to out on the deck at night as the man worked closer to his pain—a voice then in fact not unlike the other Bone heard now too, only this one bearing the softness of babyfat instead of pain. And Bone decided he had known that was what the hippie would sound like. The black girl, if she was as cool as Murdock said, would naturally prefer her meat nice and white, soft breast of chicken. He would be tall and slender, Bone judged, a pale Anglo-Saxon ectomorph with rimless glasses and pony-tailed
hair and a Mexican peon’s blouse and elaborately patched Levi’s. He would smoke grass and drink cheap wine like all his peers of course, but in careful moderation, almost as a generational tokenism, with none of the verve he would bring to his clandestine use of mouthwash and underarm deodorant. He would be working on his master’s in ecology or comparative religion at no-cal state and had temporarily dropped out in order to “get his head on straight.” Idly Bone wondered why he felt so much contempt for the type—because he himself in his mid-twenties had been pulling down twenty-five thousand a year, with a wife and child to support, a house and car and debts and responsibility? Was it their purblind luck he resented, the fact that simply by being born a decade later than he, they almost automatically had inherited a life-style and values that had taken him long years of bloodsweat to reach? Or was it his suspicion that they were the reverse of him, secret establishmentarians in counterculture drag. Not that Bone wanted to play their hippie game, with its bare feet and stink, its hashpipes and costumery and funky minibuses. He was content to leave all that to them, wanting for himself only the substance of the life, the sweet and simple state of freedom.

  He had just turned off the shower and was beginning to dry himself when Cutter came gimping through the bathroom’s unlockable door. Giving Bone a salacious wink, he carefully positioned himself over the toilet bowl, thrust the index finger of his right hand—his only hand—down his throat, and promptly threw up. Bone still found it incredible that this was part of the man’s daily existence, like eating and urinating. His stomach, an even less dependable organ than Bone’s, simply would not tolerate food on top of alcohol. This was his solution.

  “When in Rome,” he said finally, shuddering.

  “You couldn’t wait till I came out.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Bullshit.”