When they reached Needles, Cutter announced that he and the girl were going to stay the night and get an early start in the morning, and he suggested that Bone do the same, since he looked like a dead man and smelled worse and his only hope for a lift back across the desert would be a Hell’s Angel with advanced rhinitis. Bone had not intended to start back yet anyway, not feeling the way he did, but he knew that his staying the night in a motel, or for that matter even eating, depended on Cutter’s generosity, which, as he soon found out, was not excessive. He asked him for a loan, or more accurately, compensation.
“A hundred,” he suggested. “I figure that’s about what you owe me. Sort of a kidnapping fee. The cost of getting me back where I was.”
And Cutter shrugged a grudging agreement. “Of course, my son. But not now. Not tonight. You’d only spend it on spirits, poor souse that you are. I’ll give it to you in the morning. Meanwhile, you can stay with us.”
Bone did not object. If he had really wanted the money now, he knew he could have insisted, he could even have strong-armed Cutter for it. But the next morning would do fine, he decided. For one thing, it meant he would not have to pay for his food and lodging for the night. And for another, he wanted to find out if Cutter was serious about this aimless little tour through the motherland or whether it was all a put-on, a smokescreen he was laying down for the girl as well as for him.
They rented a twin-bed room in a dreary rundown little motel with a sign out in front that succinctly recorded the nation’s recent economic history—an original $6 per nite with a crudely painted number 1 inserted to make $16, which in turn was crossed out with a large and angry X. All bets were off, all contracts canceled. It was a lodging for today, tonight. No one was making any promises about tomorrow.
Once inside, Bone waited for Cutter and the girl to finish with the bathroom and then he preempted it for almost an hour, most of which he spent in the shower, first trying to steam the alcohol out of his system and then resorting to the shock treatment of a full cold spray the final ten or fifteen minutes. After dressing, he continued the pursuit of his lost health by talking Cutter into dining at a nearby steakhouse instead of the usual hamburger joints he favored whenever haute cuisine was either unavailable or unaffordable. There Bone tried to restore some of his vitamin loss with a fourteen-ounce New York-cut steak and french fries and a tossed salad washed down with tomato juice and milk and coffee, all in quantities that had the waitress watching him with wary hostility, as if she were afraid he might be putting her on. She was middle-aged and hard-faced, with a beehive of champagne-colored hair that she kept patting and touching to reassure herself it was still there in all its glory. But she was not a bit out of place in the steakhouse, with its linoleum-covered floor and tube-steel furniture and blaring, country-rock jukebox. Bone did not care about any of that, however, for the food was good. And he noticed that the Virgin of Isla Vista seemed to be taking almost as much pleasure in his eating as he was, probably because she had considered him a doomed alcoholic until now. She even insisted on giving him part of her own steak, had cut off a sizable portion and forked it onto his plate almost ceremoniously, like an offering, a bribe to keep him sober. Then she settled back, arms folded, eyes shining, looking every inch a twelve-year-old First Class Boy Scout who had just done his good deed for the day.
“You know, I still don’t know your name,” he told her now.
“Monk.”
“That’s not a name.”
“It’s an insult, yeah,” she laughed. “The clap twins hung it on me.”
“Well, the hell with them,” Bone said. “What’s your real name?”
“Monk’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m used to it now. I like it.”
Cutter was lighting a cigar. “We’ve already been this route, Rich,” he said. “The alternative is Dorothy or Dot.”
Bone gave in. “Okay—Monk it is.”
“Monk from San Jose,” Cutter continued. “Surname Emerson, nineteen years old, English Lit major, only child of divorced parents. Daddy’s a dentist, Mom’s a social worker, and Monk herself is a nigger-loving, com-symp, atheistic socialist with allergies. And a bad case of virginity. It just won’t go away.”
The girl gave Cutter a rueful look. “Don’t talk about that, okay? I’m sorry I told you.”
“You should be,” Cutter scolded. “Shame on you. With all your advantages. And in this day and age.”
Bone tried to rescue the girl. “You’ve been busy, Alex. No grass growing under the old foot, huh?”
“You forget, Rich, you been bombed out for some time now.”
Bone could only agree. “Yeah, a day and a half, as I recall. And it seems like a month and a half. Last time I touched ground was the funeral home. And now here I am, sober in Needles.”
“Stuck in Needles,” Alex amended.
Bone did not pick it up. Mention of the funeral home had suddenly brought it all back. He would never understand why the sea had rejected him.
“The funeral,” he said, “is it tomorrow?”
Cutter looked away and shrugged, almost as if he had been asked the time. And Bone did not understand. He sat there waiting, shaken. Finally he turned back to the girl.
“I forgot to thank you for helping me,” he said. “I guess it isn’t your fault I wound up here in the desert.”
“I’m afraid it’s my doing as much as Alex’s,” she said. “I thought you’d be all for it. And I still think it’s a super idea—the three of us just taking off, going nowhere in particular.”
“You sure there’s such a place?” Bone asked.
“Might as well give it up,” Cutter advised her. “The man would be a drag anyway, looking for hidden meanings and grand significances all across this great land of ours. I can just see him poring over every greasy spoon menu—‘What does it really mean, over easy?’ And that we don’t need, Monk. We can get by.”
Bone tried to set the matter straight. “Hidden meanings I’m not after, Alex. Just a few answers, that’s all I want.”
“Like what?”
“Like what went wrong at George’s? Why this sudden flight into the desert?”
Cutter flicked ash off his cigar. “Nothing big,” he said. “George’s wife just wasn’t enamored of my bathroom deportment. She’s very keen on closed doors and individual towels, toothbrushes, toilet paper—you name it. I think the lady has a Ph.D. in personal hygiene.”
Bone was grinning, but he did not believe. “What about the car?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“George give it to you, loan it to you, what?”
“A kind of loan.”
“The kind he didn’t know about?”
“I left him a note.”
“That was considerate.”
“Thank you.”
“And the check?”
“Simple generosity, that’s all. I told him it was a matter of life and death, which it is—and that I will repay him, which I might.”
“George the generous.”
“He can afford it.”
“And the stuff in the car—the guns and cameras and all that—his too?”
“It was.”
Bone smiled now, in open wonderment. “Now let’s see—you loot his house, you load the stuff in his car, you drive to his office and hit him for a thousand-dollar ‘loan,’ and then you take off—in his car.”
“In one of his cars, yeah. And then I fence the purloined items. You forgot that.”
“When I was sleeping.”
“In L.A., right. A guy I know, name of Slats. Terrific fence, old Slats.”
If Cutter had expected a laugh, he did not get it. Bone looked over at the girl and found her staring at Alex as if sight were a new experience for her, a frightening experience. Seeing this himself, Cutter reached over and covered her hand with his own, patted it.
“Don’t sweat it, kid,” he said. “It’s nothing. Which is why I didn’t bother to fill you in before. The car is just borrowed, like I said. And the rest, hell, the man has probably already written it off—a debt to an old friend. A guilt payment. Because he’s loaded. Because he was 4F. Because he’s what he is. So take my word for it—not to worry.”
She looked at Bone, and he nodded. “He’s probably right. George would give him both kidneys if he asked.”
“And I probably will,” Cutter said.
After that, they finished the meal largely in silence. Toward the end, Bone mentioned that he had trouble figuring out the sequence of it all, just how it had happened. He remembered Monk making the phone call from Isla Vista and he remembered their dressing him, he said, but he could not figure out how they got from there to here.
“I mean, just what happens when Alex shows up?” he asked. “He says hello, I’m taking this lush on a trip, and do you want to join us? And you say sure, give me a minute to pack? Is that how it goes?”
The girl was staring down at her plate. “It wasn’t like that,” she said.
“Then how was it?”
“Does it matter?”
Bone said it mattered.
“It was you, jackass,” Cutter broke in. “You and that old black magic you weave so well.”
The girl did not raise her eyes. “I asked to go,” she admitted. “I don’t know much about alcohol and I was worried, the way you were going at it, and the way you kept saying Mo over and over, like you wanted to die.”
Bone could feel Cutter’s eye on him, but he did not look up.
Back at the motel Bone waited until the girl was asleep and then he pried Cutter loose from the room’s vintage black and white television set, on which Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon were doing their vacuous little thing for a grateful nation. Bone pushed Cutter’s jacket at him and practically dragged him out of the small room into the cold desert night.
“What the hell is this?” Cutter groused. “What’s with you anyway?”
“We have to talk.”
“So why not back inside? The kid’s asleep.”
Bone shook his head. “Out here. I want you alert. I want answers.”
“Don’t we all.”
The motel courtyard was asphalt, a parking lot with a small empty swimming pool in the center, a concrete hole guarded by a chain-link fence with a NO SWIMMING sign attached. Cutter, unzipping his fly, observed that there wasn’t any NO PISSING signs in evidence and proceeded to water a dead potted palm just over the fence. Bone lit a cigarette and waited.
Beyond the highway and the buildings lining it—the drive-ins, motels, and gas stations—he could see patches of the Colorado River running black in the night light, a vein of lifeblood trickling through the vast corpse of the desert. For some reason he thought it would be better to talk over there, under the scrawny trees scattered along the riverbank, and he headed in that direction. Cutter limped alongside, suddenly a wondering Celt.
“Aye now, Richard me boy, is it not a sight to behold up there? Stars so big and bright a body could almost reach out and touch them, he could, if a body’d a mind to, mind you.”
Bone did not respond. When they reached the bank, Cutter found a large rock at the base of a tree and sat down. Sighing, leaning back, he lit a cigarette.
“Okay,” Bone said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, give.”
“Give what?”
“The truth, Alex. Once again—what is going on?”
Cutter laughed and shook his head. “I got this weird sense of déjà vu, you know? Like I’ve already lived through this moment, like about a half hour ago.”
“Just tell me your destination. That would help.”
“We already told you, man. Nowhere. We’re just tripping, that’s all. Car tripping.”
“No particular destination, then?”
“None.”
“And direction? How about that?”
Cutter picked up a pebble and tossed it, waited until it plunked into the water. “Well, there is this one cat I know from Nam, he’s got some kind of lake resort near Tulsa. I figured we just might move in that general direction. See what develops.”
“And after that?”
“You tell me.”
Bone’s attention momentarily had strayed to the river, where an inflated raft was sliding past, unmanned, empty. And though he knew this was a phenomenon that merited comment, and even concern, he gave it nothing. He already had enough problems.
“Tulsa,” he said. “Pretty close to Missouri, isn’t it?”
“Pretty close.”
“And in Missouri, down near Arkansas, there is this little town of Rockhill.”
Cutter dragged on the last of his cigarette and dropped it on the ground, interred it with his foot. “Yeah, Rockhill,” he said finally. “Home of J. J. Wolfe, as I recall.”
“As you recall.”
“As I recall, yes sir.”
“But you wouldn’t be heading there?”
“Now why would I want to do that?”
“It was just yesterday morning, Alex—you forgotten already? You telling me that Wolfe had ‘sent you a message’?”
“I said that, huh?”
“You said that. And you believe it, too. It’s the only explanation for all this.”
“All what?”
“Leaving town. Taking George’s car and the money. And even more, your attitude. Yesterday morning you were a man in shock, and now—well, it’s like nothing had happened. You’re back at the same old stand, without a hair out of place. And Mo and the baby—it’s like they never were.”
“And somehow this all relates to Wolfe, huh?”
“In your head it does, yeah.”
“Then lay it on me. Explain.”
“You know the old phrase about beating swords into plowshares—well I think you’ve beaten your grief into a sword.”
Cutter pretended to lose his balance on the rock. Grinning, he struggled to right himself. “Such eloquence, Rich—I just wasn’t prepared.”
“Screw you.”
“All in good time.”
For a while neither of them said anything more. Cutter got up and limped a few steps closer to the river, a move that seemed without purpose, except that it put his face beyond the reach of Bone’s eyes. For a span of minutes he stood there staring out at the night and the river and then finally he turned and came back, and though he was grinning again, slightly, crookedly, all Bone really saw was his eye and the tears that filled it, made it seem incandescent in the starlight.
“Vengeance?” he said. “You think that’s what I’d have in mind, Rich, just because of what happened to Mo and the Kid? Hell, you know how I treated them—like so much dirt, wasn’t it? Just because she wasn’t ugly and had this thing about loyalty and didn’t get all choked up about stumps and scar tissue, you think I’d lay the ticker on the line? Or just because she pulled out all the stops and gave me old Brown Pants, myself all over again, only all in one piece, with the four limbs and the two eyes working so fine a man couldn’t even bear to look at the little bastard for fear some goddamn toy might go boom or the highchair topple over and crush a little footsie or maybe even the baby formula come up poison—who could know? Not his old man certainly. No, all he could do was run and hide, right? Drink too much and stay out of the house, try not to be there when it happened.”
The smile came again, rueful and crimped, a scar running under the open wound of his eye. “And I wasn’t there, was I?” he got out. “So why should I want revenge against Wolfe, huh? What did the man ever do to me except free me from anxiety, kill the old fear and trembling?” He held out his hand now, held it shaking in Bone’s face. “See, old buddy? So who needs revenge, huh? Who needs to get his own back?”
Bone said nothing for a while, unwilling to trust his voice. It was the first time he had seen Cutter cry, the first glimpse he had ever had beyond the man’s carapace of raillery and black humor. And it crossed his mind as vaguely as a feeling of guilt that he probably loved him, that if anyone’s pain was automatically his as well, it was Cutter’s. So he dealt from weakness.
“You are going to Missouri, then,” he said.
“I guess so.”
“To kill him.”
“I don’t know that yet. Maybe just the blackmail bit still, I won’t know till I get there. Till I see him, face to face.”
“Then you do believe it,” Bone said. “You actually believe the man had something to do with Mo and the baby.”
“Not possible, huh?”
“Not possible, Alex.”
“Oh, yeah it is.” It was a statement, a matter of fact.
“You’re out of your tree,” Bone told him.
“Maybe so. But I was there, man. I know what happened. I know how they reacted to what I laid on them. And I know they knew who I was, where I lived. Name, hotel, phone number—I gave it all to them, because I was feeling that reckless, Rich, that confident. I couldn’t see any reason not to tell the bastards.” He shook his head. “Now I know better.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Bone said. “Forgetting whether or not the man would do it, there’s still the problem of how, the time element. I don’t see how—”
“You don’t have to.”
“The hell I don’t!”
“Face it, Rich. What are the alternatives? Suicide or accident, right? And you know as well as I do how Mo loved that kid, how she took care of him. Oh, she was a pillhead, yeah. And maybe the world’s worst housekeeper too. But tell me—you ever see a time when she wasn’t able to take care of him? When she wasn’t there?”
Bone thought of the afternoon he had found the baby alone at home and had taken him to Mission Park, which in turn led him to the sound of Mo’s voice—How touching, How too, too sweet— and her face above him, the smiling mockery he had no idea he would ever miss, but did miss now. He said nothing, however. And Cutter pushed on:
“You ever see him when he wasn’t fed and clean and healthy? Like hell you did. And as for suicide—well, you said it yourself, she wasn’t depressed. And you were the last one to see her.”
Bone heard the words like a judge’s sentence, words he had known he would eventually have to listen to and deal with.
“That wasn’t exactly true,” he said.
“What wasn’t?”
“What I said before. She was depressed.”
Cutter had sat down on the rock again. His eye was dry now. “How depressed?” he said.
“I don’t know. Very, I guess. She had cried while I was there. She was asleep when I left her. And I’d promised to stay, to be there when she woke up. She’d made me promise.”
“But you cut out anyway?”
“That’s right.” Bone was not breathing now, was just standing there, waiting, his body tensed. For he did not plan to move, not if Cutter hit him, not even if he caned him. But, unbelievably, all Alex did was smile slightly.
“It figures,” he said. “With that leviathan ego of yours, you’d naturally assume a girl would run straight for the gas burner the second you walked out on her. I mean, after all, what other choice would she have, right?”
“She was depressed, Alex,” Somehow he thought the statement would be definitive, that it would put an end to the matter.
But Cutter only scoffed. “Who ain’t?”
Bone stared at him. “You take it real good, don’t you?”
“Which part? The dying? Or the screwing?”
“Take your pick.”
Cutter shrugged and reached down for another pebble. “I try, man,” he said. “I try to feel something. But it just isn’t there. The two of them, they could’ve been a couple of dogs for all I care. For all I feel.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t want to either.”
Bone’s fists shook at his sides. “You’re lying,” he said. “You’re posing. You’re a fucking poseur.”
“I don’t feel much of anything, no loss or grief or any of those nice normal feelings. Maybe I just scooped up too many guys and dumped them in body bags, I don’t know. Maybe there were just too many pieces.”
“And what about all that a minute ago?” Bone asked. “About Mo and the baby, and you not even wanting to look at him for fear—?”
Cutter held up his hand for silence. “Like you said, a pose. I thought I’d try it on. A noble, if phony, reason for going to Missouri.”
“Then what’s the real reason?”
“Must be greed, huh? Our little blackmail bit? Especially now, with you and Valerie pulling out, and no one to share the proceeds with. Why, shee-it, man, I be able to retire on Ibiza.”
“And vengeance—‘getting your own back’—that doesn’t figure in?”
Cutter tried to grin, he tried to meet Bone’s gaze, but neither worked. Finally he just looked down and shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going. For some reason I’ve got to. I’ve got no choice.”
Bone nodded slowly, understanding nothing, except that he would be going along, that this time at least he would not be walking out on someone who needed him, even if that someone suddenly made his flesh crawl.
When they went back to the motel, Bone told Cutter that he was not ready to go to bed yet, that he wanted to walk for a while by himself and do some thinking. And Cutter said he thought it was a capital idea, he often recommended thinking to those who were jaded and wanted to do something unusual, but he advised Bone not to overdo, and of course not to accept any candy from strangers.
Bone had to walk almost to the other end of the small town before he found an outdoor booth with a workable telephone. There, first, he placed a collect call to Mrs. Little, who was understandably waspish at the outset. She hadn’t liked it one bit, the way his gimpy friend had stormed in and cleaned out Bone’s apartment. She herself had not been there at the time, but Teresa had, and when the poor soul tried to find out what was going on, “your friend told her he was FBI and that you’d been arrested for impersonating an officer and indecent exposure and God knows what all, and that if Teresa didn’t get her ass out of his way he was going to deport her to Mexico. That’s what he told her. Why, the poor thing was scared half to death.”
Bone commiserated with her, said yes he knew all about that offensive character and he too wanted nothing more to do with him. It was another friend of his he was concerned with now, a nice guy who had just kicked his teenage son out of the house for stashing drugs there and now the father was worried sick, was looking all over for the kid, and Bone was helping. It was too complicated to explain it all now, but one of the things he’d had to do was abandon her truck, had left it in the Leadbetter beach parking lot—a fact Mrs. Little was very happy to hear, she said, because tomorrow she’d planned on reporting the thing stolen and she would have regretted getting him into trouble with the police. Bone thanked her, said he appreciated all she had done for him, and that he thought she was one hell of a lady. In return, she told him that the job and apartment would always be open to him. “We’ve got some unfinished business,” she said. Bone slipped hurriedly around that, thanking her again, then saying goodbye.
Next he called George Swanson, and once again he found the man more than a little tainted by sainthood. Yes, George had read the note Alex had left for him, so of course he knew about the car and the other “items” that had been taken. But he had no intention of calling in the police and reporting anything stolen, Bone could put his mind at rest on that. Bone thanked him and explained about his binge and his not having known what was going on, in fact that he still was not sure what their destination was. But he said that if he was able to stay with Cutter now he thought he’d be able to see him through “this problem of his, this obsession,” and with luck he’d even be able to get the car and the other items back to George within a week or so, hopefully with Cutter still in one piece and out of jail. George asked if Bone could tell him any more about Cutter’s “problem” and Bone said it had to do with the deaths of Mo and the baby, maybe someone Cutter held responsible and wanted to get even with, or possibly he was simply running from the tragedy—Bone was not sure, was still pretty much in the dark about everything, except that the man was close to the edge, that he needed time. And of course George gave him all that and more. He told Bone that if he needed anything else, any help or money, just to call him and he would send it. And for a few moments Bone found himself speechless in the face of the man’s effortless generosity and loyalty. Finally though he managed a few words of thanks. He told him that it would work out and they would all be back in the sun in no time. And George said he hoped so. “Take care of my boy,” he added. “I wouldn’t want to lose him too.”
Only then did Bone realize the man was crying.
Cutter’s “early start in the morning” did not take place until eleven o’clock and Bone was glad of the delay, for the long night’s sleep and the leisurely breakfast of pancakes and bacon and eggs had left him feeling almost normal again. But if the start was unhurried, the going turned out to be something else entirely, in fact was close to a steady eighty miles an hour under Cutter’s heavy prosthetic foot. And even though he had to drive one-handed, he still managed to smoke and drum the wheel and fiddle with the radio, all the while serving up an almost unbroken commentary on a wide variety of subjects, which Bone would not have minded if only the man had not also found it necessary to keep looking away from the road to read his audience, bright little Monk sitting next to him in the front seat thirstily imbibing his every word.
Bone however contented himself with the scenery, the numbing grandeur and variety of the Great Southwest. Leaving the green vein of the Colorado River Valley, the freeway climbed steadily into Arizona, up out of the mesquite and desert into the high country around Flagstaff, all snow and rock and ponderosa pine, a cold clear Valhalla that abruptly ended ten or twenty miles to the east, changing into mesquite country again, barren rolling land with small mountainous formations whose dark red hue explained the color of the freeway at that point, before it moved on into the flats of eastern Arizona and then the deserts of New Mexico, Little Joe country, a vast dun wasteland strewn with buttes and mesas of unlikely configuration. Except for Bone, it was wasted scenery, superfluous splendor, nonexistent for the two in the front seat, both of whom were caught up in the apparently more fascinating scenery of Cutter’s mind.
As usual, Alex was roaming his fields of death and gore, and though Bone wanted to tune him out, to fix his mind on the geological phenomena out the car window, he found that he could not, that he was almost as caught up as Monk in some of Cutter’s stories, for instance the one about the honky in his platoon.
“A mean little crew-cut redneck Okie named Oral Roberts Russell,” Cutter described him. “One of God’s really gifted haters, a boy who had learned well at Mama’s knee. Niggers, spics, papists, Jews, commies—he knew us all for what we were, the enemy, more enemy than old Charlie out in the bush could ever be. So Oral was on guard, in fact he was snapped to attention twenty-nine hours a day, those tight little pale gray eyes of his swiveling back and forth like a brace of twenty-millimeter cannon, taking it all in, you know, taking the role for up yonder, get-even time, for him and that mean, jealous God of his. He even called me the devil, old Oral did—yeah, Lieutenant Satan I was, even though the kid saw me resting, knew I rested most of the time. Anyway he watched. And he hated. And then it happened—his undoing—a replacement kid name of Dewey White. Only Dewey wasn’t white, he was black as coal and beautiful as sin, cool and smart and with just too goddamn much of that one unforgivable thing the blacks got, that thing we all secretly hate them the most for—their laughter, their ‘soul.’”
And here Cutter digressed to give Monk a theory he had about soul, that Caucasians and Orientals had it once too, long ago, but that the “old debil” natural selection had worked its remorseless mechanics here as well, with survival of the fittest proving true in civilization just as in a state of nature. Only in civilization the “fittest” were the shrewd, the calculating, the unemotional. In a civilized society they were the ones to survive and thrive. So naturally, over the millennia, the “soul” had died out of the race. And proof of this, he said, existed for anyone to see just by observing the emergent black middle class, already as restrained and soulless as their white counterparts ever were. Monk by now had the look of a fervent acolyte, and she leaped upon the idea—of course it was true, it was there for anyone to see, but not just anyone had. No, it took someone with special insight to have seen it.
“It took you, Alex,” she said.
But Cutter was already back with his honky in Vietnam.
“Anyway, little Oral, he couldn’t deal with Dewey, just couldn’t handle the phenomenon of him. Because the kid wasn’t just cool and beautiful, you see, he was also friendly. He actually seemed to like us whites. And he liked slants, dogs, newsmen, anybody, everybody. I guess what he was, was a fucking saint, old Dewey.” And here Cutter paused to light a cigarette, one-handed, as the station wagon roared down the freeway, uncontrolled. When he went on, his voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “And, well, he bought it, Dewey did. Tripped a mine and came down in little pieces. Which wasn’t exactly unusual, in fact was happening to somebody all the time. But Oral Roberts Russell, he just wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t let it go. For days he kept going on about that ‘stupid nigger, that stupid sonofabitching nigger.’ Over and over he kept saying it, and he was crying all the time and he didn’t know it. Then just as suddenly he quit. And from then on, his bag was silence. Silence and killing. Overnight he became the best grunt we had, a real killer, a mechanic. Girls on bicycles, little kids, old people, even a tiger once, a goddamn big beautiful Bengal tiger—if the thing moved and wasn’t us, he shot it. And he always wanted point, he insisted on it. But it never did him any good. He never got a scratch. He just went on living and killing, untouched, a charmed life.”
As he finished, Monk regarded him with shining eyes. “That Dewey,” she said, “he wasn’t the only one beautiful.”
But Cutter pretended not to catch her meaning. He busied himself lighting another cigarette.
That night Cutter said he refused to spend the rest of his life in “worst western” motels—“Vinyl furniture is one thing, vinyl food another”—and he suggested that the three of them take turns at the wheel while the other two rested or slept. Monk of course was eager to do anything he asked, so Bone decided to go along too. They drove all through the night and into the next day, stopping only for gas and food. And Bone gradually began to lose that normal feeling of physical well-being he thought he had recovered at Needles. The car seats apparently had been designed for five-and-a-half-footers and his six-one simply could not find comfort or rest. He slept poorly, worrying about what lay ahead of them and what he could do about it. And sometimes he just lay there listening to Cutter or the girl, who occasionally and grudgingly surrendered a fact or two about herself, as if she were confessing to small crimes. She could not remember ever having a conversation with her father, she said, always just a polite word or two, an attempt at intimacy and then failure, embarrassment, silence. He had not kissed her since grade school, nor could she recall seeing him embrace or kiss her mother except for perfunctory pecks of hello and goodbye. What little time he wasn’t poking and drilling in other people’s mouths he spent in the dark of skin-flick theaters, she claimed, gorging popcorn with one hand while he held himself with the other—a detail Bone could only assume was Monk’s invention, since he could not imagine her spying on the man that closely.
Nor was the girl any fonder of her mother, a short-haired, earthshod liberal Democrat who was forever marching the highways of the Salinas Valley with César Chavez and his grapepickers. In her caseload as a social worker, the Mexicans and blacks all had first names and were victims of the “goddamn system,” while the whites came with last names only and invariably were freeloaders, leeches, creeps.
Even before her parents’ divorce, the three of them had been like strangers living together. Words were spent like dollars and Monk had always thought she was the cause of it all, that if she’d been prettier and brighter everything would have been different. So what life she had, she found in television. For years Lucy and the Beaver and Rob Petrie were the realest people in her existence. She had tried the Catholic church and the Girl Scouts and the YWCA and occasionally a friend, but none of it had turned out, none of it worked as well as television. Summing up, she said she was a loser, an outsider, a nebbish, and finally the notorious Virgin of Isla Vista. So these last two days were just about the best thing that had ever happened to her. She felt free and happy for the first time in her life.
To all of this Cutter predictably gave her the backhand of understanding, saying that it was all her own fault, that there were all kinds of drugs to take and the sex fiends and religious freaks there for the asking, and if she would only try, she could be just as jolly and successful as everyone else. She laughed at that and then in a much softer voice told him about the night her roommates had brought Bone home with them, and how the thought that he’d made love to them just about drove her crazy, how she’d hated them for it.
“He’s so—well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” Cutter said.
“Well, attractive, I guess the word is. Even drunk the way he was. But then the more I was alone with him, I began to see he wasn’t what he seemed—I mean all cool and together, you know? Can I tell you something?”
“Anything.”
“He was in love with Mo. Your Mo.”
“In his way, maybe. But she wasn’t my Mo.”
“Well, you loved her, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“But you said she had your child.”
“So?”
“Well, what are we making this trip for then? I mean, what you said about not being able to stay on the coast anymore, not with her there, in the ground.”
“I liked her,” he said.
The girl’s voice was suddenly cowed, frightened. “I don’t understand you.”
“It’s a beginning,” Cutter said.
By the second afternoon Cutter’s loquacity began to seem clearly compulsive to Bone. For one thing, he spoke faster and more stridently than Bone had ever heard him before, as if he were in a desperate race to get it all out. But even stranger was what he talked about. If there was any subject he had always avoided, it was his childhood in Santa Barbara, and yet now, almost all the way through Oklahoma, this was what he recounted for Monk. “Our little plutocracy’s Indian summer,” he called it. “The last doomed days of innocent wealth, before the GI Bill generation took over.” And then he went on to describe how they came in wave after wave, acquisitors and climbers and pirates all buttoned-down and gray-flanneled and other-directed, but not a bad lot actually, not when compared with their offspring, today’s sorry lot of socially aware managers and communicators with their razor haircuts and gunfighter mustaches and mod clothes and liberal politics and, above all, their eyes, Cutter said, their frightened eyes, the eyes of a herbivore at the waterhole. “They watch and they wait. When will it come? they wonder. When will they finally hit, our poor abused black and brown brethren?”
But mostly he gave Monk the past, a nostalgia he tried to minimize and ridicule, but the warm sepia tones of it still managed to slip through intact: long uncrowded days in the beautiful seaside city, the fine old house under the wine palms and sycamores, with its gardeners and servants, its stables and tennis court and swimming pool and white wicker lawn furniture and guests in organdy and Palm Beach suits, some who came even then on horseback. And there were the polo matches viewed from the roofs of heavy Packards and Cadillacs, white-walled and waxed, gleaming in the coastal sun. There was the constant sailing on the succession of yachts his father kept buying and selling as if he were looking for the platonic idea boat, but on all of them the experience for Alex had been beautifully the same: the smell of wood and canvas and sea air, the salt spray free then of any trace of petroleum.
There were the Sunday dinners at the country club and, just as invariable, supper at the Biltmore Hotel, that still lushly beautiful Sarazen palace spread along the Pacific shore, where Bone once had spent three days in a cabana with a Seattle divorcée whose name he could not even remember now. Cutter, however, had no problem remembering those Sunday suppers, for they had seemed like the high church service of his parents’ set: the large dining room with its great wood beams overhead, the waiters who were almost like old friends, obsequious old friends, and then the music, the doors thrown open to the patio where couples danced decorously to the live music of an eight-piece band, Mexicans mostly, and all so happy, Cutter said, all of them smiling just as happily as the waiters and the busboys and the maître d’.
“They were fine days,” Cutter went on. “Good days. Good for us anyway. The world was our oyster for a time, with that sweet strip of seacoast all ours. And I never even thought about it. I guess I figured it was for good, that it would never end. But it did. Just like for the Canalinos, the Indians who lived there when the Spanish were still home in Castile burning each other at the stake. Things change.”
“Parmenides,” the girl offered.
“Bless you too,” Cutter said.
Through the afternoon and evening Bone did the driving, and though he occasionally found himself listening to Cutter and the girl, most of the time it was his own thoughts that occupied him, flowing like stale water into the lowest spots in his mind: the continued feeling of loss and guilt, the sense of dread at what lay ahead of them and what he could do about it.
They would be in Missouri soon, which meant they would probably reach Wolfe’s hometown by midnight. And the prospect scared him. He felt that if only he had a more exact reading of Cutter’s state of mind, he might have some idea how to deal with the situation. But as usual all he had got from him was chimera and confusion. He doubted that even Alex himself knew which was real—Cutter the avenger, the anguished survivor of a wife and son he had loved almost too much to endure; the war casualty who might have lost a pair of dogs for all the grief he felt; or the coolly persistent blackmailer merely trying to get to Ibiza.
This last one Bone felt he could eliminate. And as for the other two, all his instincts told him that both entered in, that Cutter’s true state of mind probably lay somewhere between them. In the thirty-odd hours of driving since they left Needles, Bone had used what opportunities he had—whenever the girl was asleep or gone for a few minutes to stretch her legs or use a restroom—to find out more from Cutter about what had happened in Los Angeles and afterward. And though he did manage to fill in a number of empty spaces this way, nothing he learned altered the essential picture. The “they” Cutter had talked about in Needles turned out to have been only one man, Pruitt, some kind of special assistant to Wolfe. To this man Cutter had peddled himself as an eyewitness to another crime—“a very serious crime” committed in Santa Barbara the same night J. J. Wolfe’s car was firebombed. Cutter told Pruitt that the information he had “involved Mr. Wolfe, and would be very valuable to him,” but that Wolfe would have to hear it from Cutter himself. Pruitt had been very quiet, very impressed, and when Cutter gave him his phone number and the name of the hotel where he was staying, and finally, recklessly, his name, Pruitt had very carefully written it all down. And then he had said it: they would be in touch with Cutter, they would send him a message. The hour was about eleven in the morning—approximately the same time that Bone was hitching a ride back to Santa Barbara. Theoretically, then, there had been enough time for Wolfe and his minions to learn Cutter’s home address and strike him there, through his family rather than directly at him, and thus not risk one of those situations in which an eliminated witness leaves behind a letter addressed to his lawyer or a district attorney. So the elements of possibility did exist. If a man wanted to, he could concoct a scenario involving arson and double homicide and intimidation of a witness. And a further proof of this scenario for Cutter was Valerie’s reaction to the news of the fire and the deaths of Mo and the baby. After Bone’s phone call from Santa Barbara, Valerie had practically collapsed. Cutter had had to pack for them and check them out of the hotel and it was he who drove them back to Santa Barbara in the Pinto. And almost all the way the girl had sat beside him crying and trembling and saying over and over that Cutter should not have given them his name, and that she was out of it now, she wanted no more part of J. J. Wolfe.
Bone had been surprised to learn this, that Valerie too apparently had inferred a connection between the deaths and the blackmail attempt on Wolfe. But he was just as surprised at how Cutter told him about it—about all of it—with a kind of irony and obliqueness that seemed to dare Bone not to believe it. And Bone did dare. He still considered the whole story nothing but a theoretical possibility at best. But then of course he had the advantage of having been with Mo that last afternoon and evening. Only he knew exactly how far down she had been, and how much further down he had kicked her. So he did not need some bizarre scenario. The simple reality was more than enough.
Nevertheless he could not control his feeling of dread as they drove on into the night and the road began to wind through the Ozark hills. The one thing he feared most was in himself, in his own mind—the belief that J. J. Wolfe might actually have been the man he had seen in the alley that night. Yet here he was, driving toward the man’s home, heading for a confrontation which might corroborate that belief, make it a fact. He wondered what would he do then.