Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

“Bad booze,” Cutter reflected. “Or escargots, I’m not sure which.”

  “Who gives a fuck?”

  In answer, Cutter raised his hand, a prelate blessing his flock. “Be still, my child. One cookie yet to toss.” Arid again the finger wriggled down his throat. Again he gagged, vomited.

  Bone, dry now, felt like killing him. What a sight the man made, what a celebration of the grotesque: the thinning Raggedy Ann hair, the wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial apache dancer’s costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up or sewed but knotted, an advertisement, spit in your eye.

  After flushing the toilet, Cutter tore off some toilet paper, wiped his mouth and blew his nose. Bone was hurriedly slipping into his Jockey shorts, but not fast enough. Cutter wagged his head in mock appreciation.

  “What a bonny lad ye are, Rich. Not a mark on ye. Not one li’l old scratch.”

  Bone slipped into a pair of jeans. “Could be I’m not accident prone.”

  Cutter grinned happily. “You got me there, kid. That about says it.”

  “We have guests?”

  “You could call them that.”

  “How late they staying?”

  Cutter shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. The one’s a boogie chick, real cute. Maybe you could score there. The boyfriend was in Nam same time as me. Served under a buddy of mine, cat I knew at Stanford before I got the boot. The kid’s a bombthrower and figures I still am too, which I didn’t disabuse him of, ’cause he was buying. Gonna blow up the energy establishment, he is—how’s that for ambition, huh? While all you want to do is pull down some poor cunt’s panties, he wants to pull down Exxon. I don’t know about you, Rick. You lack ambition.”

  “How late?” Bone persisted. And got a Cutter response:

  “Time will tell.”

  After Cutter left, Bone found himself staring down at the toilet bowl and the shreds of vomit that flecked its rim, vomit that would still be there a week from now, dried by then, but still there, still vomit. And suddenly he knew that Murdock was right—he had to get out from under Cutter’s roof as soon as he could, in any way he could, even if it meant finding a job.

  Still toweling his hair, Bone returned to the living room to find everyone but Mo settled in around the coffee table. The Negro girl, sunk in the beanbag chair, turned out to be every bit the “looker” Murdock had said, a high-fashion type, all skeleton and sinew and great black eyes that swung insouciantly on Bone as he came in, questioning his right to be there or for that matter anywhere. Without any real satisfaction, Bone saw that her hippie friend fell safely within the parameters of his preconception of him, departing chiefly in his woolly mop of blond hair, almost an albino Afro. Across from him, cutter sat draped on the davenport, his steel and plastic right leg propped on the boat hatch amid a clutter of paperbacks and bottles and ashtrays and bowls with leftover popcorn from the week before.

  “Behold, the squeaky clean Richard Bone,” he said. “Rich, this is Steve Erickson and Ronnie. Say hello.”

  Bone nodded, but said nothing.

  “Steve was in Nam too,” Cutter went on. “He and Ronnie are just passing through, trying to line up talent, you might say. They were kind of wondering, Rich—think you’d be any good at blowing up drilling platforms?”

  Erickson suddenly looked ill. “Jesus, Alex,” he protested. “Knock it off, huh?”

  “Oh, you can trust Rich,” Cutter assured him. “He’s totally apolitical, aren’t you, kid. Sort of an ideological blob. At best, a tits-and-ass independent, you might call him. Votes the straight party ticket.”

  Bone yawned. “You missed the bowl in there, Alex. You got some on the floor.”

  “See, you can trust him,” Cutter said, grinning.

  Bone went over to his pile of suitcases in the corner and rummaged out an old maroon silk robe, one of the few artifacts remaining from his upwardly mobile days in the Midwest. Putting the robe on, he remarked how late the hour was, almost twelve-thirty. He did not add that he wanted to go to bed, or that bed was the davenport.

  “You in Nam too,” Erickson asked.

  Cutter answered for him. “Unfortunately Rick couldn’t make it. Couldn’t be spared. He was doing vital work in marketing at the time.” He looked over at Bone. “What was it you were pushing up there in Milwaukee, Rich?”

  “Toilet paper was our big item. We gave away flags once.”

  Cutter nodded gravely. “I knew it was something like that. Something big.”

  Erickson smiled thinly, embarrassed. The black girl, however, seemed totally with it, and totally bored. She looked up wearily as Mo came in from the kitchen with a bowl of corn chips, the same bowl Bone had seen twenty minutes earlier, filled then with rotted grapes. He did not have to wonder if she had washed it in the interim. As was her habit, after she had unceremoniously popped the bowl onto the coffee table, she sat down on the floor near Cutter’s feet and lit a cigarette, listened.

  He’d only been putting Erickson on, Cutter confessed. Actually Bone was one of the few cats around a man could trust. It was true Bone had worked in marketing paper products for a number of years, but that was the measure of the man, that he was here in Santa Barbara broke and free instead of pimping for the establishment in Chicago and Milwaukee, and making a bundle doing it, by God. A v.p. by thirty, Cutter said, a real corporate tiger, with the big house and cars and wife and kiddies and the whole schmeer. Yet he’d walked away from it all.

  “And why?” Cutter concluded. “Because he’s one of us. Because he couldn’t stand all the lies. All the newspeak. Exxon wants you to know, sure they do. But what, huh? Just what do they want you to know?”

  Once again Erickson was caught, a believer. And it was a forgivable mistake. You had to know Cutter, almost live with him, to understand the savagery of his despair, that it precluded his responding to any idea or situation with anything except laughter, sometimes wild but more often oblique and cunning, as now. His mind was a house of mirrors, distortion reflecting distortion.

  Erickson looked from Bone to Cutter. “You mean, I should—?”

  “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.”