Cutter and Bone

by Newton Thornburg

  “You want me to call George for you?” she asked, starting to get up.

  Bone had already taken her by the wrist, holding her there. “I’ll call him,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I can’t take you myself. But that shift in the Packard, you know what it’s like. I just can’t—”

  “Mo.” Bone was standing now too, and he had taken her by the shoulders. But she refused to look at him, had turned her face away.

  “Mo.”

  “Don’t,” she asked. “Please, Rich.”

  He let go of her then. He watched as she went over to the windows and stood there looking out, hugging her shoulders as if the bright morning sun somehow made her cold.

  “At least, do me a favor,” he said.

  “What?”

  “See a doctor. Have a checkup. And do what he tells you. Start taking care of yourself.”

  “Like eat right, get plenty of rest, and take Geritol every day?”

  “Might be a good idea.”

  She turned now, smiling wearily. “You’d make someone a good Jewish mother.”

  “Maybe you could use one.”

  “I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “And a gentile lover? How about one of those?”

  “I’ve already got one.”

  “I keep forgetting.”

  After calling Swanson and asking if he could drive him to Montecito—which of course he could, George never being loath to get out from behind his desk—Bone packed his few belongings and, carrying them out to the front porch, sat down to wait and smoke a cigarette. Cutter was still in bed and Mo had gone back into the bathroom, to get away from him, Bone suspected. But when he finally heard Swanson’s Jag snarling up the long hill, he went back into the house and tapped on the bathroom door, and Mo opened it immediately, as if she had been standing on the other side, waiting for him. Her eyes were red and her hand trembled at her throat, fussing with the open top of her kimono, which hung sacklike on her body except for the points of her breasts.

  “George is here,” he told her. “I’ll be off.”

  She said nothing.

  “I’ll drop by later in the week.”

  All she did was nod. And Bone was about to turn away and leave her when he realized how unnatural that would have been, how much in violation of the moment. So he reached out and took her by the arms. And he kissed her, chastely at first, just on the cheek, but because there was no stiffening in her, none of the resistance he had expected, he moved to her mouth, kissing her deeply, gathering her body to his. And only then did it come, the pulling away, the convulsive turning of her face, as if he had slapped her hard.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “Please, Rich. Go.”

  He left then, almost stumbling over the baby, who was sitting on the floor happily playing with the empty vodka bottle from the night before.

  According to Cutter, Swanson had missed out on the Vietnam War because he was busy trying to keep his pipe lit. And he would miss the impending Great California Earthquake for the same reason. Further, he was the only living American still seriously looking for the Lost Generation. Physically, he reminded Cutter variously of an Armenian rug merchant, the chief procurer for King Farouk, or John Wilkes Booth, wethead. In short, there was seldom a time when Cutter did not consider it open season on Swanson. Yet if his friend minded, he never let it show. Still in his early thirties, Swanson could have passed for a decade older, having already achieved a comfortable middle-aged spread and an attitude of almost comatose aplomb, none of which kept him from playing a competent game of tennis or from forming troublesome alliances with attractive young married women about town. As Cutter’s descriptions indicated, he had a distinctly Arabic look about him, slicked-down black hair and pencil-line mustache and saturnine hawk face, a classic villain physiognomy in fact, which made all the more surprising his easy unassuming good nature, the small still eye of sanity he maintained amid the storms that occasionally whirled about him, whether marital or Cutter-inspired.

  Like Alex, he had once wanted to be a writer, in fact had spent a couple of years in Europe watching bullfights and fishing the old Hemingway streams and even renting rooms high in a Rhine castle tower, there to write cryptic little stories about disenchanted postwar youth. Now, tending to his realty company and gift shop, all that was behind him but definitely not over, not forgotten. There were few conversations he would not somewhere along the line try to bend to the subject of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other lost ones. Cutter in fact insisted that Swanson’s first marriage had broken up because he could not keep from crying Zelda! during orgasm.

  Bone did not care about any of that, however. He did not dislike the man so much as find him a touch unreal. He sometimes wondered if a day would not arrive when Swanson would take up an ax and give the nearest living thing the required forty whacks. But then Bone knew that was ungenerous of him. He was so used to his own unflagging nastiness, and now Cutter’s, that he was afraid he had reached the point where he found its absence in another man suspect.

  “So you’ve flown the coop,” Swanson said, as they drove away.

  “Two weeks is enough.”

  “Above and beyond the call of duty, huh?”

  “I guess. But when I needed him, he was there. No questions.”

  “That’s Alex, all right. He still in bed?”

  Bone nodded. “Where I should be too.”

  “Rough night, huh?”

  In his mind, Bone saw the tanklike Packard smashing into the Toyota, backing up, smashing it again. Grinning, he said, “Unusual anyway. Even for Cutter.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  Bone told him, hitting just the high points. And Swanson laughed helplessly. “Oh God, I wish I’d been there,” he said, eyes streaming. “He’s an original, Alex is, no doubt about that.”

  “None,” Bone agreed.

  Frowning now, Swanson shook his head. “I don’t know about him lately though, Rich. It’s funny and all, but it’s more than that—it’s sick. I’m really worried about him. You know what he said to me last week? He said he’d sell me the next five years of his life—you believe that? Ten thousand a year, he said. And in return he’d promise not to ‘harm my merchandise,’ that’s how he put it, can you beat that? Harm the merchandise. I told him he was crazy. Fifty thousand? Where could I get that kind of money? And for what? What would you call it? Reverse blackmail?”

  “That’s about it.”

  Again Swanson wagged his head. “God, what a character. Tell me, you ever seen a picture of him before Vietnam, the way he used to be?”

  “No.”

  “Give you an idea what he lost. He wasn’t, you know, what you’d call pretty-boy handsome. But he was good looking, all right, and he had this kind of magnetism-still does, for that matter. Anyway, I often think what he could’ve been if things had been different, you know? If his old man hadn’t squandered their money, and if both parents hadn’t died the way they did, and if there hadn’t been any Vietnam—”

  “A lot of ifs.”

  Swanson shrugged. “Yeah, I know. But they’re what he must think about himself, you know? A guy’d have to. Jesus, I wish I could help him. And Mo too. She’s really down lately.”

  Bone told him to turn at the next corner, and Swanson turned. He also changed the subject.

  “Anything new on the killing? Police been in touch with you anymore?”

  Bone said no, he hadn’t heard anything. Which did not surprise Swanson at all—the goddamn police were too busy handing out speeding tickets to law-abiding taxpayers like himself to pay any attention to murderers, especially one who pitches cheerleaders into trashcans. Had Bone heard the one about the guy being an ecofreak, that he stashed the girl because he was against littering? No, Bone hadn’t heard that one.

  “Rock musicians,” Swanson said, “they’re the ones the police are coming down on, from what I hear. Probably one of them did it, that’s what everybody says.”

  “The
police ought to know.”

  “You think it was someone else?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Swanson looked over at him quizzically, as if he hoped to be let in on a secret. “You really didn’t see the guy then?”

  “Not his face, no.”

  They were nearing Mrs. Little’s house now.

  “Next place on the right,” Bone said.

  “Nice,” Swanson observed. “Uh, what kind of work you be doing here?”

  “Handyman.”

  Swanson looked impressed. “Handyman—Jesus. Tell me, Rich, you ever going back? I mean, get a regular job again? Get married and sink into debt like the rest of us?”

  “If I can.”

  “Well, why not? What’s to stop you?”

  “There’s always something.”

  “Maybe I could find you a spot.”

  “I’d only blow it.”

  “Well, with that attitude, sure.”

  Bone shrugged. “That’s what I mean. There’s always something.”

  At Mrs. Little’s the maid was the only one at home, and the reception she gave Bone was no warmer than it had been two days before.

  “Mrs. Leetle in San Francisco with her husband,” she explained. “She say you just move in and wait, do what you want. She be back two days. Food in the kitchen.”

  Bone tried to thank her but once again she gave him her back. Humbled, he picked up his few bags and moved into the garage apartment. The bed looked enormously inviting—the prospect of a long day and night of sleep temporarily more seductive to him than any woman could have been—but he knew that would only deepen the maid’s hostility, and he wanted to make a good beginning here, he wanted things to go well, there were not all that many alternatives left to him. So he got out the lawn mower and cut the grass around the house, even though it did not really need it. Then he spaded the ground around the shrubbery inside the stone fence, hard steady work that made his body slick with sweat. Time and again he caught the maid peering out at him from behind one curtain or another, but he did not let on that he had seen her. Finally she came out of the house, somberly waddling across the lawn to him.

  “You not eat today?” she said. “Why you not stop?”

  He smiled. “Why not?”

  In the kitchen she served him cold roast beef on rye bread, some highly spiced potato salad, and Chianti. Her name was Teresa, she said. Teresa Chavez. And she did not understand why he worked so hard, since “thee woman” was away, why should he bother? He told her that he liked yard work, and that he figured she was in the house working, so why shouldn’t he do the same, outside. She laughed at that.

  “Work? What work is here? A house like this, one woman, no kids, and husband almost never home—I could keep it clean about two hours a week, all it take. Biggest job is find work, you know? Look busy. And I guess maybe that why she pay so bad. I could make more money at welfare.”

  “Couldn’t we all?”

  “What you say?”

  “I could use a little welfare too.”

  She gave him an appraising look. “Other times she have boys here, for your job. College kids, you know? Bums. But you look like a man could make big money. Could be a boss. A big shot.”

  “I’m working my way up,” he said.

  For a moment she was not sure of his irony, then at his smile she shook her head.

  “Oh, I think I know you now. You a macho, that what. Thee woman, she better watch out, huh?”

  “I’ll be gentle,” he said.

  And Teresa, his new friend, shook with laughter.

  In the afternoon he slept for almost two hours and then wandered back to the house and joined Teresa, who was having a few drinks in preparation for her journey home to Santa Barbara’s “mesa” and the small rented house where seven children and a beat postman were lying in wait for her. The prospect did not seem to cheer her and she compensated by having “one more for thee roads”—straight Red Label scotch—then finally drove off, in an early-1960s Cadillac that laid down a smoke screen heavier and darker than Bone’s old MG had ever managed. Alone, Bone toured the house and found it even more luxurious than he had first thought. The furniture alone had to have a value of thirty or forty thousand, for only the six rooms. And he found the kitchen just as lavishly stocked. The refrigerator and freezer and pantry were loaded with so much fine food he had a hard time choosing, but finally settled for a thick porterhouse steak, mushrooms, and an enormous salad tossed together from every fresh vegetable he could find in the refrigerator. He washed it all down with champagne and then repaired to the game room, where he watched a Celtics-Bullets playoff game on television and read the latest issue of Time.

  So when he went to bed at eleven o’clock, tired and comfortably high, he expected to fall asleep quickly and deeply. Instead he set out upon a flat dead sea of wakefulness, long hours in which his mind seemed to take on a life independent of his will, so that he found himself thinking about the one thing he did not want to think about. In the darkness of his room it took no effort to see the night street again, the big car braking and pulling into the apartment complex alley, the huddled figure moving against the headlight-illuminated background, going around the car and out of sight for a few moments and then back into it almost immediately and laying down rubber again, fishtailing the car through the complex and disappearing. A silhouette still, that was all the man was, there was no doubt about that. And yet the newspaper photograph, old country boy J. J. Wolfe grinning benignly over the burned-out shell of his rented LTD, there was no doubt about that either, no question that the picture had come up off the page at Bone like a fist, and no question that it lay in his mind still, a thing imperfectly seen and understood, a palimpsest, something he could not quite make out under all the other random scribbling and yet which he somehow recognized, had seen before. But in the apartment house alley? No, he could not be sure about that, not ever. And that was why Cutter’s sudden enthusiasm, the “It’s him” he apparently accepted as gospel, cut through Bone like salt spray in winter. For he knew better than he cared to the lineaments of Cutter’s character, that his friend could no more leave the thing as it was than he could leave unopened a ticking box. But it was not avarice he feared in Alex so much as death, the recklessness unto death, the love of death that came off him like the reek of putrescent flesh.

  Sleep brought release, however, and he dreamed of Mo and the baby in the park with him, along with the tourists and the Frisbee throwers and their dogs. The one different thing was in the rose garden, where someone had placed a pair of trashcans with golf clubs sticking out of them. And far in the distance there was the sound of crying, a man crying. Cutter? he wondered.

  When he woke the next morning, he heard Teresa already at work, scrubbing the walk between the house and the swimming pool. So he got out of bed and dressed, preparing to join her in another day of make-work at the Littles. Unexpectedly, he found her almost as cold and surly as she had been the day of his interview, but after he went into the kitchen and made his own breakfast she warmed noticeably, joining him for coffee and cigarettes. She had had a very bad night, she told him. Her husband had found marijuana in their oldest daughter’s purse—he had been looking for money to go bowling with, she said—and naturally he had beaten the girl. He had locked her in her room but she had climbed through the window and been gone all night. Meanwhile the husband had gotten drunk and accidentally gashed himself on a war surplus machete that he liked to threaten them with whenever he was “stinko.” Someday she would kill him with “thee goddamn machete,” she vowed. Bone would read about it in the newspaper—TERESA CHAVEZ CUTS HUSBAND INTO LITTLE PIECES. He suggested instead that she merely separate him from his cojones, because it was a less serious crime and yet would be almost as effective, and the idea so pleased her that she laughed until tears ran down her face.

  After breakfast Bone resumed the job of spading up the ground inside the stone fence, and when he finished over two hours later he t
ook a shower and put on his swimming trunks and lay out in the sun on a redwood chaise next to the swimming pool. For ten or fifteen minutes he lay there, trying not to think about anything except the feel of the sun on his body. And then a shadow fell across him, a shadow with Cutter’s voice.

  “Hey, fella, can I sit on your face?”

  Bone squinted against the sunlight at the grinning specter above him. Then he saw the girl standing back a short distance, watching them, not smiling. Even in the brightness Bone could not miss the weary cool of her eyes, the tough and honest face. He looked back at Cutter.

  “You had to do it, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave it alone.”

  “It wouldn’t leave us alone.”

  “You bullshitter, Alex.” As Bone got up from the chair, the girl came forward.

  “I believe you two have met,” Cutter said.

  Valerie Durant smiled hesitantly. “I guess you could call it that.”

  “How are you?” For the moment Bone was unable to think of a less stupid greeting on this second day after she had buried her sister.

  “Okay,” she shrugged. “Alex is keeping me busy.”

  “He has a gift for that.”

  Cutter meanwhile was making a big thing out of his new surroundings, gaping at the Littles’ sprawling house, the barbered grounds, the pool. “Land sakes, boy,” he drawled. “You shore have a way of making out.”

  Bone slipped into his old terry robe. “Sure. Twenty minutes ago I was spading the front yard.”

  “Just think of that,” Cutter marveled. “A common laborer just twenty minutes ago. And now here he is, lounging beside the pool. Which just proves a man can still make it if he’s got pluck and grit.”

  “Let’s sit down.” Bone moved toward the umbrella table at the end of the pool.

  “This old fox who hired you,” Cutter asked, “just what you got on her anyway? You catch her being faithful to her old man, was that it?”