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 finally 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?”
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 grateful 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.”
“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.”
“Look, the cat pick me up two days ago down in Hollywood, at some creep fag party, it turned out to be. I was broke just like now, no place to go. So when he offered, I took him up.”
“Naturally.”
“And he nothing to me, man. No more than you could be.”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“You say that a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, how about it?”
“What?”
“Don’t what me. You know what I’m talking.”
Bone considered the offer. It was late and he was tired, and the two days with the Dakota schoolteacher had left him feeling about as erotic as a steer. Then he thought of Mo, the fact that she would have to lie in her room with Cutter and listen to him, Bone, for a change, rather than the other way around. And for some reason the prospect gave him pleasure. But at bottom he knew his real reason would be the same as ever, the faithful old juices already beginning to rise in him.
“What about your friend?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Well, he do kinda like this li’l old black ass.”
“But not enough.”
The girl laughed. “You know, I think you right.”
He took hold of her shoulders then and kissed her, lightly at first, almost exploratory, as if in token homage to their racial difference, and then more deeply finally, open-mouthed, discovering a faint trace of grass on her breath.
When they went back inside, Erickson verified that he indeed did not like his black ass anywhere near enough. Bone told him that the only way he could stay the night was alone out on the deck in his sleeping bag, and the youth fussed and fumed for the five or ten minutes it took him to gather up his things and get his backpack in order. But not once during that time did he direct a critical word at Bone. No, Ronnie was the only one at fault, Ronnie the cheap opportunistic little slut if ever he found one, in fact a no-good nigger bitch that was what she was, yeah, nigger, they’d heard him right, and if he hadn’t ever used the word before it was only because he’d never run into one before.
When he left, there was not much said. Cutter, shaking his head in mock sorrow, told Bone and Ronnie to miscegenate if they must, but to please be quiet in the process because he needed his sleep, he planned to meditate all the next day. He and Mo went into their bedroom then, where the baby was still sleeping, and closed the door.
While Ronnie was in the bathroom, Bone got the cushions off the davenport and arranged them on the floor in front of the fireplace and then he pulled one of the Salvation Army chairs over to the foot of the makeshift bed, knowing Cutter would be up a few times during the night to go to the bathroom or limp out onto the deck to smoke and brood.
Finally Ronnie came out of the bathroom, naked and very handsome, her lean brown body lifted from some Egyptian frieze, a royal harlot.
Their lovemaking was about as he had expected it to be, loveless and humorless and yet better than he had had it for a long time, actually more like combat than any act of love, a silent and brutal plundering of each other there in front of the dead ash-filled fireplace. Even before they were finished, Bone began to wonder if she despised him as absolutely as he did her. For her sake, he hoped she did, had at least that much pride.
Afterward Bone fell asleep almost immediately, but not so deeply he could not hear sounds from time to time, the baby crying and doors opening and pans banging in the kitchen and finally a harsh bell ringing somewhere, a sound that cut through him like rough steel and pinned him wriggling to the past, all the hated risings day after day to shave and shower and dress and hurry, hurry nowhere, hurry to the one place in all the world where he wanted least to go.
Then suddenly he was aware of pressure on his elbow. Waking, he saw Mo standing over him, wearing the kimono again. Her bare foot was nudging his arm.
“Wake up, Rich,” she said. “It’s the police.”
Beyond her he saw them, two men in business suits looking down at him and the black girl as if they had been scraped onto a microscope slide.
“You Richard Bone?” one of them asked.
Bone did not answer.
“Get dressed,” the other said. “We’re going downtown.”