Late in the morning Bone left his room and went to the motel restaurant to have coffee and read a newspaper while he waited for Cutter and the girl to join him for breakfast. In daylight the room pleasantly surprised him. For one thing, Billy Graham the Younger was not on duty behind the organ, and for another the view outside the huge windows at the rear of the room turned out to be spectacular, overlooking a chasm with a steep limestone cliff on the other side, fringed with cedar along the top and plunging a good two hundred feet to a narrow strip of white water that widened a short distance beyond, turning calm and limpid as it slipped on through lesser green hills spattered with rosebud and dogwood. And the rain had ended. The sun was out.
So Bone was feeling almost contented as he sat at a table by the windows sipping black coffee and catching up on the calamities of the world, which not unexpectedly had kept pace with his own. Maybe the sunshine and the scenery were an omen, he told himself. Just maybe Alex would be out of the woods now, free of both the Wolfe fantasy and his last night’s deep depression, and the three of them could be packed and on their way back to the coast by evening—after the parade. For Bone accepted it that he would have to go that far at least. He would have to see J. J. Wolfe in the flesh and once and for all settle the matter in his mind, whether Wolfe had indeed been the man in the alley, the Santa Barbara police captain’s own true Prince of Darkness. Bone did not think he would be, not now, after Cutter’s confession last night. Somehow all the lies about Wolfe and Los Angeles had only made Bone more unsure of who and what he had seen in the alley.
He had been sitting there about twenty minutes when Monk came in, alone, looking like a typical California runaway in her old jeans and Adidas sweatshirt. Her eyes were red from crying or loss of sleep, and when Bone said good morning, she asked him what was good about it.
He gestured at the window. “Well, God seems to be out there trying.”
“You believe in God, do you?”
“Sometimes.”
She put her face in her hands and shook her head disconsolately. “I guess you know what happened.”
“I guess.”
“He’s out walking now. He’s been gone for over an hour.”
Bone said nothing. The thought of Cutter, in the condition he was in, wandering the cliffs behind the motel alarmed him more than he let on.
“It was so terrible,” the girl went on, her eyes filling.
“I’m sorry. I guess I should have—”
“No, I don’t mean that. Not the sex part,” she explained. “I’m glad about that. It’s like getting rid of acne or something.”
Bone grinned, and for a moment the girl brightened too. Then she remembered. “No, it was the other, Rich. The things he said. He kept calling me Mo. And there were other weird things too, like private jokes between the two of them and when I couldn’t pick up on them, he got all upset.”
“He’d had a lot to drink,” Bone said.
She shook her head in denial. “No, it wasn’t like that, I mean just a guy being smashed, you know? Mixed up. It was more like—well, like he was sick. Like he couldn’t get it all straight in his head, who I was, and where we were.”
Bone took his time getting out his cigarettes, giving one to the girl and taking one himself, lighting them. He wanted to calm her. He wanted to calm himself. “Booze can do that,” he said finally.
But the girl was adamant. “It wasn’t booze.”
“Maybe not.”
“No maybe about it.”
Bone would not concede the point. “You don’t know that, Monk. It could be, but that’s all. Could be. The fact that he spent a long time with the shrinks in VA hospitals doesn’t mean anything—his wounds made that inevitable, for anyone.”
“I know that.”
“All right, then. Let’s just wait and see, okay?”
Monk’s face was puckered now, the face of a lost child. “I was so happy at first. So shocked and yet so happy when he came in. He shooshed me. And then he pulled back the covers, and—”
Bone put his hand on hers. “Take it easy, all right? Forget it for now. Let it go.”
And this late morning hour only two other tables in the room were taken, but the patrons at each of them had fallen silent and were watching him and Monk with growing interest. Monk, however, was oblivious of them.
“And now this!” she said. “What do you think it is? Will it be permanent? Do you think he’s—”
“Why hell no,” Bone cut her off. “What are you talking about? He’s just rundown, that’s all. Strung out. He’ll be okay.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. We’ll cut out of here this afternoon. And we’ll take our time going home. We’ll eat in restaurants and stay in motels. Swim and take it easy. He’ll be all right. I promise.”
Monk, looking past Bone at the entrance to the room, suddenly started to dry her eyes with a napkin.
“Oh boy, here he comes now,” she said.
Bone did not understand her oh boy until Cutter came into view and sat down. He had not shaved or combed his hair. And instead of his customary black turtleneck he was wearing only a filthy T-shirt out of which the stump of his left arm protruded like a large white carrot.
“Nice country,” he said. “Nice morning.”
“Alexander Cutter the Fourth out taking a morning constitutional,” Bone observed. “Hard to believe.”
“Constitutional, my ass. I just stood on a rock.”
“A rock?”
Cutter motioned at the window. “Yeah, out there. A big flat baby sticking out over the edge, with about five miles straight down. You just stand there. You close your eyes and get your toes out over the edge and play chicken with yourself.”
“Sounds like great fun,” Bone said.
“Oh, it is. It’s a real high. Better than dope.”
Bone said he’d try to remember that, but meanwhile he was more interested in food. “Either of you guys hungry?” he asked.
Cutter winked lasciviously at the girl. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I already did quite a bit of eating this morning.”
Monk, turning scarlet, closed her eyes.
But Cutter was enjoying himself. “Kid must be part Chinese, though, because I am kind of hungry again.”
“Nice to have you back,” Bone said.
“Oh, great to be here. Just great.”
“But you’d better be on your good behavior now,” Bone advised. “Because I think we’re about to be visited by your old friend, American Gothic.”
She had just come out of the kitchen, and it appeared that morning had not altered the lady’s spirit. Unsmiling, she came to their table, whipped out her order pad, licked the point of her pencil and held it ready, as if she were about to stab one of them with it.
“What’ll you have?” she demanded.
“Coffee,” Cutter said. “Just a pot of coffee for me, dearie.”
The woman glanced at him and looked away, in studied revulsion. She practically sniffed. “We don’t serve coffee in pots,” she said. “You get it by the cup or not at all.”
Cutter grinned. “You got to be kidding.”
“No. That’s the rule, I’m afraid.”
Cutter looked hopefully at Bone. “Tell the lady she’s kidding.”
Bone was becoming uneasy now. He knew the look in Cutter’s eye, had seen it too many times in the past, just before all hell broke loose. So he tried to throw himself into the breach, hurriedly ordering breakfast.
“Well let’s see, I’ll have a stack of wheatcakes, two scrambled eggs, a rasher of bacon—and coffee by the cup.”
But Cutter was not to be put off. “Lady, you got a coffeepot in that kitchen?”
The woman ignored him. “And what will you have, miss?” she asked Monk.
At that, Cutter reached across the table and picked up the glass sugar dispenser, held it straight out from him and let it drop onto the tile floor, where it shattered loudly, spreading sugar out in a broad, almost geometric pattern.
“We’ll also need some sugar,” he said.
But by then the woman was gone, scurrying for the door.
Bone moaned quietly. “Yeah, it’s sure great to have you back.”
“A pot of coffee,” Cutter said. “Is that so much to ask?”
“Evidently.”
Across the room, American Gothic was already making a triumphant return, trailed by Mister Morgan from the front desk. As the man reached the table Cutter slapped his thigh and grinned.
“Well, Jesus H. Christ, if it ain’t Mister Morgan hisself! You may remember us from the bar last night.”
Morgan, standing tall, cleared his throat. “What’s the problem here?”
“Coffee and sugar,” Cutter said. “I want some.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Morgan said.
“And I’m going to have to ask you to piss up a rope, sweetheart. While you’re at it, give Miss Congeniality here a shot at it too. Might settle some of her crotch dust.”
Morgan and the woman fled as if they had been scorched by a flamethrower. And Cutter tried to call them back, saying that they could get the goddamn rope later, after he had his coffee and sugar. Monk meanwhile was laughing and crying at the same time, and Bone felt like joining her, for he knew Morgan and the woman were hurrying off not to find a rope but to call the police. So he got up and followed them, reaching the front desk just in time to ask Morgan to put the phone down and hear his explanation. Then he went through a routine almost identical to the one he had laid on the motorcycle freaks at Santa Barbara’s Cold Spring Tavern. Cutter was his cousin, he said, a poor maimed Vietnam veteran, a deranged paraplegic out on a week’s leave from the Colorado Veterans’ Hospital in Bone’s care. Bone sincerely regretted his cousin’s outlandish behavior. He apologized for him and promised to pay for any damages and to have the poor guy out of the motel before checkout time. But Morgan was not an easy sell. He was awfully put out, he said. He just didn’t think war wounds was any excuse to talk to a lady the way Cutter had, especially a real Christian lady like his wife. And Bone of course agreed. He also offered to pay ten dollars for the sugar container, and that finally seemed to touch the man’s forgiving spirit.
“Well, okay—one more chance. But that’s all he gets. And you have him out of here by three, understand?”
Yes, Bone understood. He thanked Morgan and returned to the table.
Smiling thinly, he told Cutter and the girl that for the moment things were calm again and that if anyone did anything to disturb that calm he personally was going to break off that person’s plastic leg and beat him to death with it.
“Well, what are friends for?” Cutter asked.
Another waitress came to their table, took their orders for breakfast, and poured them each a cup of coffee. After she left, neither Bone nor Cutter said anything for a time, and the silence apparently got to Monk, for she began to babble like the stream out the window: God, wasn’t it gorgeous here! And who’d ever have thought it—the Ozarks! Why she’d always thought of Missouri as flat and full of corn, would they believe that? And instead look how it was, how really beautiful. Why, even Santa Barbara wasn’t this beautiful—oh, maybe if there weren’t so many people there and if it had been the way it originally was, maybe then it might have been like this, so clean-looking, so fresh and green, with all that rock and those evergreens too—what kind were they, fir trees? Cedar, Bone told her. But she did not seem to hear, was already going on about the air, how clear and fresh it was. Hadn’t he slept well? Wasn’t it just about the greatest sleep of his life?
“Not really,” Bone said. “No, I’ve slept better.”
“Well, you’d been drinking again. Maybe that’s why.”
“Could be.”
“Anyway, I think it’s just super here. I’m glad we came.” And here she gave Cutter a new and special look, almost a lover’s look. Only there was something else in it too, something like terror. And it made Bone went to reach over and pull the kid onto his lap and try to console her or help her in some way, as she had helped him. But he knew there was really nothing he could do or say. The thing had happened to her, had actually and finally happened. The Virgin of Isla Vista was dead and buried and she was happy for the loss, she was joyous, she was probably in love. Yet here was her lover and liberator, grim as an executioner.
Lighting a cigarette, Bone asked them what they wanted to do that day. “Want to head back or should we take in the local parade first?”
Monk looked surprised. “You mean, that’s all? That’s all we came here for?”
Bone shrugged. “Might be a great parade. Who knows?”
“But what about this character Wolfe or whatever his name is? I thought the reason we came here was to see him.”
“He’ll be in the parade,” Bone said.
“I don’t mean that kind of see. I thought there was some kind of heavy business you two had with him. Something about Mo and the baby.”
“Not anymore,” Cutter said.
“Why not?”
When Alex did not respond, Bone stepped in. “A change of plans,” he said. “We decided to leave well enough alone.”
The girl said she still did not understand.
“Never mind,” Cutter told her. “Let it go.”
Bone was surprised that the girl knew even this much, that Cutter had told her anything at all about Wolfe.
“Oh well, who cares?” she said. “It was worth the trip anyway.”
Then, catching herself, she put one hand to her mouth while the other found Cutter’s arm. And for a few moments he let it lie there, did nothing except gaze down at it as if it were excrement. Then he looked up at the girl with the same expression.
“Will you get your goddamn hand off me,” he said.
Monk withdrew it.
“That’s better,” Cutter told her. “Jesus, Mo, just because we fornicated doesn’t mean we’re friends, you know.”
The girl looked genuinely frightened now, close to tears.
“Quite a comedian, your new boyfriend,” Bone said.
Cutter sneered. “Boyfriend, my ass. Between her and the goddamn kid, I’ve about had it.”
Bone sat there watching him, waiting for the tip-off, the beginning of a smile, a touch of light in his eye. But there was nothing.
By the time they returned to their room Bone was convinced that Cutter’s condition—and starting back home with him immediately—were more important than the idle curiosity of seeing J. J. Wolfe in the flesh. And he tried to convince Cutter of this:
“The hell with Wolfe and the parade. Who needs it? Let’s start for home now.”
“No, you got to eyeball him,” Cutter insisted. “That’s why we’re here.”
“But I don’t give a damn, Alex. I don’t care one way or the other.”
Cutter shrugged. “Well, I do. And anyway, I feel like a parade.”
Outside, without saying a word, Cutter gave Bone the car keys and slipped into the back seat, as though out of long habit. And he positioned himself sideways, giving Monk no choice except to get into the front next to Bone. She too was very quiet now, had said almost nothing since the hand incident in the restaurant. So they were not a very festive group as they headed toward the festivities of Bank Day.
At a service station on the highway Bone asked about the parade and was informed that it would not start for an hour yet. It occurred to him then that he might still be able to see Wolfe at home, at his ranch, and thus avoid the risk of taking in the parade with Cutter in the condition he was in. He asked for directions to Wolfe’s ranch and the attendant, husbanding a huge wad of chewing tobacco, allowed that it was harder not to find the place than it was to find it.
“Six whole sections last time anybody bothered to count,” he said. “And with buildings you wouldn’t believe. I tell you, them cattle of his’n live a darn sight better’n most people hereabouts, me included.”
Bone tried to look properly impressed. Again he asked how to get there.
“Three miles up, turn right on County K. Another mile, you be there. Place got a gate cost more’n my house trailer, and that’s a fack.”
Bone thanked him and drove on, expecting some reaction from Cutter. But Alex said nothing, just sat in the back seat staring out the window, his eye—in the rearview mirror—registering nothing as the car swept on through woodlands and rocky dells and steep green hills stippled with grazing cattle.
Within a few minutes they came upon the ranch, which looked like a small town spread out along the rim of a hill about a quarter mile back from the road. The buildings, fences, corrals—all were white, dazzling in the sun. And as the service station attendant had said, the entrance was an impressive piece of architecture, with huge native stone pillars and stout white board fences bordering the drive, running all the way back to the ranch. In each of the pillars was a marble square engraved with the words Wolfe Farms, as if the place were some hallowed old institution. To the Santa Barbara horse set it would have been a hilarious gaucherie, but Bone imagined that here it got the job done effectively enough. J. J. Wolfe did his boasting in marble.
For a moment, after he had turned into the drive, Bone considered going on ahead to the house and trying to see the man now, get it over with. But the moment passed and he braked the car, reversed onto County K, and started back for Rockhill. He would be able to see Wolfe in the parade, he told himself. That would be sufficient, one quick look just to make sure whether or not he was his man. And either way, it would not make any difference. Either way, the three of them would simply pick up and leave.
As he turned around he expected Cutter to comment on the move, on the sudden flagging of his will, but Alex said nothing. And Monk seemed more interested in the ranch itself. Wouldn’t it be great to have such a place, she said. Wouldn’t Bone dig owning it?
“It depends,” he told her.
“On what?”
“On whether I’d have to live there.”
“You wouldn’t like that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Bone tried to think of a reason. “People,” he said. “You could go a whole lifetime and never run into the clap twins.”
“Big loss!” the girl scoffed.
Bone laughed and looked in the rearview mirror, hoping to see Cutter smiling at least. But he was not. He had not heard them.
Bone drove back past the motel and made the turnoff into Rockhill, where he discovered a very different scene from that of the night before. Cars were parked everywhere, on the streets and lawns and sidewalks. And after he had parked the station wagon and the three of them had followed the crowd to the square, he found it filled with people, most of them from out of town, judging by their number. And he was surprised at how homogeneous they all seemed, with none of the meltingpot, multiracial character found in California and the northern cities. The vast majority looked Anglo-Saxon and Celt, not unlike a single huge extended family—a divided family however. For the sexes were like two races apart: the men lean and sunburnt and improbably pleased with themselves, laughing, spitting, japing with each other as they swaggered about in stovepipe Levi’s and pointed boots and wing-brimmed cowboy hats, while their women were somehow like chaperones, old and fat and peevish, struggling along in armor-plated girdles under frilly Sunday dresses and constantly fussing with yesterday’s permanents, endless tight little waves of blue-rinsed hair, black-dyed hair, bleached hair. Their facial expressions pretty well told the story of their lives: while the men had cattle and corn liquor and each other, they had to make do with Jesus and the Bible. And they weren’t happy about it. They didn’t think it was fair. Walking among them, Bone was convinced that nine in ten would have dismissed the female orgasm as a vicious rumor. The thing he disliked most about them, however, was their reaction to Cutter, the way they turned and stared at him with the same sour disapproval as the woman at the motel.
But it was a disapproval Cutter himself did not even seem to notice as he limped along next to Bone and Monk, as silent as he had been in the car. And here at least, Bone was relieved, for he doubted that the natives would have understood or put up with Cutter flying at anything like his normal altitude. As the cowboy Billy had warned them last night, almost every pickup had a rack of rifles and shotguns inside the back window, and Bone had no difficulty believing that most of them were loaded, judging by the macho air of the men, that look and attitude which proclaimed them goddamn ready and eager for any commie revolution the pinko nigger-loving government might be cooking up. And since the pickup seemed to be the prevailing mode of transport—the good old boys’ answer to Santa Barbara’s de rigueur Mercedes and Porsches—the crowd constituted a fairly well armed army.
This day, however, the men and the children at least did not seem concerned about much of anything except having a good time. There was a considerable amount of beer flowing, and occasionally a pint or half-pint of whiskey would make a furtive appearance, all of it smuggled in of course, certainly not being sold openly in Rockhill on this fine Southern Baptist sabbath. Yet, despite this puritan note, the general mood was decidedly festive, which as far as Bone was concerned meant discomfort more than anything else: noise and sweat and unwanted body contact. And he would not have endured a moment of it if it had not been for the parade and the chance to see J. J. Wolfe—perhaps for the second time.
But this possibility seemed of no interest to Cutter, no more than did the Bank Day celebrants: the huddles of chawing men and their spouses already settled into aluminum folding chairs, patiently fanning themselves and gossiping, waiting for the great event, while herds of hyped-up kids stampeded the streets and sidewalks, kids every bit as long-haired and raunchy as their coastal counterparts but somehow wilder by far, perhaps because their natural brutish vigor had not been leached out by dope and money and the soporific rays of the Pacific sun. Every few steps one or more of them would come crashing into Bone, playing tag or generational war, and he would shove them out of the way. Even Monk began to yell at them, trying to protect herself and Cutter, who just limped along, serene and apathetic, his eye fixed on something ahead of him, something that moved wherever he moved. Nor did he show any interest in the square itself and its picturesque old buildings, some with cast-iron façades and covered walks in front, and others made of cut stone and ancient clapboard, but all equally adorned with decals celebrating God and country: America—Love it or leave it. My God is alive—sorry about yours. What a friend we have in Jesus.
At the same time, Bone had never seen so many bullet-riddled street signs before, not even in a ghetto. But then he reflected that there was nothing anomalous in this: if piety and patriotism ever had a bedfellow, it was violence.
Contrary to what the old man in the bar had said, J. J. Wolfe did not lead the parade. That honor belonged to the Bank Day queen and her court riding in an open Cadillac convertible, five teenage girls whose soapy bright-eyed prettiness reminded Bone how uncharacteristically celibate he had been of late and that he should be careful not to carry the situation to extremes. After the girls, came the usual school bands and pom-pom girls, the Boy Scout troops and fire companies and the inevitable American Legionnaires, three venerable men who shuffled up the street with a fragile dignity.
Compared to Santa Barbara’s famed annual Fiesta parade, this one was slight and unimaginative, yet somehow much more “American” to Bone’s mid-western eyes. Where the Santa Barbarenos spent small fortunes getting themselves up as Spanish grandees and nubile senoritas, costumed to the nines and often borne by a coach-and-four, here there was an almost religious shunning of costumery and pretense. For the most part the parade was simply horse owners riding their horses, a few in full cowboy regalia but the rest making do with jeans and cowboy hats no different from those worn by half the watching crowd.
When the parade began, Bone and Cutter and Monk had insinuated their way to the curb in front of a boarded-up general store, and among the people they shared this stretch of sidewalk with was a small family that looked as if they had been lifted off an 1890 tintype: two severely plain old women in long gray dresses and bonnets sitting on wooden folding chairs in front of two men, one who appeared to be in his sixties and the other probably in his forties, though there was almost no difference in their appearance, both small and wiry and wearing overalls and blue work shirts buttoned to the neck and old-fashioned straw hats that covered all but a fringe of close-shaved hair. Like the women, their look of severity was shaded by fear, an intense wariness, as if they were in the camp of the enemy. And Bone judged that in their minds that was exactly where they were, probably true hillfolk, members of some small fanatic sect to whom even Bible Belt Southern Baptists were busy doing the devil’s work.
Strangely Cutter did not seem to sense this difference in them at all, and as he began to come out of his silence now he talked to them almost as if they were fellow Californians doing the Sunset Strip together. Some goddamn parade, wasn’t it? he said. A cat wouldn’t know which were the horses and which were the pom-pom girls if it wasn’t for the horses shitting every few feet. Or was that the pom-pom girls? Hard to tell, but one thing was for sure, there would be grass growing in the streets of this fucking burg this summer. And speaking of grass, they didn’t happen to have a joint on them, did they?
By now Bone was trying desperately to shut him up, for the hillfolk already looked as if they were in shock, mesmerized by this satanic presence that had materialized right in front of them. And for a few moments Cutter pretended to cooperate, nodding to Bone that, yes, he understood, would knock it off. But all he did was take another breath and start in again.
“Just one more thing,” he said to the hillfolk. “You cats know J. J. Wolfe? Why, hell yes, you do—all God’s chillun knows de Big Chicken, don’t dey? Well, you point him out to us when he comes by, will you do that? ’Cause we don’t want to miss the sonofabitch.”
Bone tried to drag him away, but Cutter pulled free.
“My friend here saw him kill a girl,” he went on. “He made the chick blow him first and then he crushed her skull and dumped her body in a garbage can.”
By now everyone around them was staring at Cutter in stunned disbelief. And still he kept on:
“And then the bastard burned my old lady and our kid to a crisp and tried to make it look like a fucking murder-suicide, would you believe that? And there was Vietnam too, we can’t forget that, can we? A mighty hawk, old J. J.—a few more arms and legs, well hell yes, he was willing to pay the price. Plenty more where those came from. So you point him out, okay? Point out the cock-sucker and leave the rest to us.”
But there was no need for anyone to point him out, for Bone saw Wolfe now coming around the nearest corner of the square. Bone knew it was Wolfe simply by looking at the man, at the same heavy smiling avuncular face he had seen in the photographs in the Santa Barbara newspaper and in his Hollywood office. And for Bone the moment was somehow like being caught in the middle of a highway between cars speeding at him from opposite directions: he had to see Wolfe close up, and yet he knew he had to get Cutter out of there before the crowd got its wits together and began beating him to a pulp.
Wolfe rode as part of a family unit, himself and a middle-aged woman and two young girls all dressed like Roy Rogers and mounted on matching palominos. As the four horses clattered past, Cutter moved close to Bone.
“Well, lay it on me,” he said. “Is it him? Is he our boy?”
Bone did not answer for a few moments, mostly out of fear that he would giggle if he opened his mouth, betray to the whole wide world just how absolutely hopeless he was, how totally and irredeemably a loser.
For he still did not know if Wolfe was the man. Even looking right at him, he still could not tell if Wolfe had been the man in the alley. His head was large and his body thick, just as the killer’s was. But that gross and swollen animus which somehow had thrived even in silhouette—it was not there. Instead there was just this costumed fat man sitting a horse, grinning, waving, the tycoon as clown. And the disappointment Bone felt, the letdown, for some reason only added to the comedy of the moment. Of course it would be thus. How could it have been otherwise? Why should Bone’s life suddenly have developed a senses of symmetry and purpose? Would he have traveled across half a continent except in a fruitless cause?
As he was about to answer Cutter, he found himself staring flatly into the eyes of the cowboy at the motel last night, Wolfe’s foreman Billy, standing alone across the street, oblivious of the parade passing between them. Bone nodded slightly, a greeting of sorts, but the cowboy did not respond. Cutter meanwhile was still watching Wolfe.
“Come on, come on!” he urged Bone. “Is it him? Is Wolfe our boy?”
Bone shook his head. “No, he’s not the man,” he said.
And Alex laughed. “Of course, he ain’t. So let’s go, jackass. Let’s eat.”
A few minutes later Bone found himself following Cutter and the girl down the street that held the small carnival, which close up had the look of the sorriest show on earth, the kind of outfit that pulled into a town loaded into three or four battered trucks driven by geeks and bearded ladies and other colorful carnie types. There were only two rides: a Ferris wheel and a “Spinaroo,” a huge wheeling mechanical octopus with individually whirling cabs at the end of its tentacles, each of them filled with kids screaming in ear-stunning terror. There was also a funhouse and three or four game booths offering such prizes as Day-glow plastic dogs and satin pillows beribboned with slogans in gold thread: Sex—try it, you’ll like it…Too much sex is hard to swallow…and the ever-popular The family that plays together, stays together.
As the three of them pushed their way past the garish booths Bone asked Cutter if he was sure he didn’t want to turn and run for their lives and Alex said no, everything was okay. But he did not look at Bone as he said it. So Bone pressed.
“You sure you’re all right?”
“What’s all right?”
“Normal.”
“I’m okay.”
“You could’ve got us strung up back there.”
“Naturally. This is the place. Or didn’t you notice?”
“What place?”
Cutter gave him a searching look, ironic, unbelieving. “Don’t put me on,” he said.
“About what?”
“Here. We’re here and you know it.”
“Where?”
“Where they are. Didn’t you see him back there—old Billy Boy? They’ve come for me. They’ve finally come for me.”
Bone said nothing, did not know what to say.
And Cutter grinned, the wound again. “I said I was hungry.”
“So you did.” Bone turned to Monk. “What about you?”
“Sure. Hot dog and a Coke. Everything on the hot dog.”
“Brave girl. And you, Alex? The same?”
Cutter was shielding his eye, gazing up at the Ferris wheel. Thinking he nodded, Bone went over and joined the crowd in front of the food stand. Most of them were children and teenagers, not a few with lumps of tobacco working inside their lower lips. Occasionally a bit of it would run over, like brown blood, and the kid would turn and spit, already a good old boy. Bone stayed alert and unspattered, and finally he made it back with the Cokes and hot dogs.
Monk was alone.
“Where’s Alex?”
She nodded in the direction of the Ferris wheel.
“He went up in that?”
Again the girl nodded. “I asked him if he wanted me to go with, but he didn’t answer. He just walked away.”
Bone squinted up at the harsh afternoon sky, at the great wheel turning slowly against it. He tried to make Cutter out as the seats came around one at a time, and finally he saw him, sitting back alone, his eye fixed ahead of him, on space, on nothing.
“What’s wrong with him?” Monk asked. “Was it last night? Was it me? Shouldn’t I have let him?”
“No, it wasn’t you,” Bone said. “He was like this earlier last night. Troubled, I mean. Not himself.”
“But was he scary like now? I mean so wild one moment and so quiet the next?”
“No. This is something new.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Depression, I guess. Sorrow, grief—you name it.”
And suddenly Monk was crying. “Oh God, I’m so scared,” she said. “I’m so scared.”
By now, five or six young boys had stopped to stare at the two of them as if they were part of the carnival, another sideshow. Finally one of the boys puckered up and began to cry himself. “Ma, I lost my puddy tat!” he bawled. “I lost it! I did, I did, I did!” And his friends began to laugh and hoot until Bone ran them off.
He took Monk by the arm and led her over to a spot next to a boarded-up blacksmith shop. They were in the shade here, which made it easier to watch the Ferris wheel as the contraption continued to turn against the sky, its ponderous grace so at odds with the demonic tempo of the calliope music that pervaded the street. Monk had dried her eyes and blown her nose, and now she began to eat her hot dog, while Bone watched the wheel. Twice the huge thing stopped and new riders took the place of veterans—except for Cutter. He stayed on the machine, and Bone watched his seat come around time after time, and always it was the same: the slender figure sitting back, stiff, unmoving, the single eye never straying.
The next time the ride came to an end and it was Cutter’s turn to get off, the operator began to shout at him and even tried to pull him off. But Alex would not budge. Bone immediately started through the crowd toward him, but before he got there the wheel was moving again, with Cutter still in his seat. And the operator, a young longhaired hippie, was yelling over to another employee to go for the police.
“And tell ’em to haul ass!” he said. “The bastard won’t get off!”
Vaulting a fence, Bone went over to the operator and told him he was a friend of the man who wouldn’t get off the Ferris wheel. He said that he would pay for all his rides so far and that the next time around he personally would drag his friend off the thing if it was necessary.
“But call off the police,” Bone asked him. “Please. The man is sick.”
The hippie did not answer. He was still busy moving the wheel around, letting riders off and putting new ones on. Bone tried again.
“Please—as a favor. I’ll give you ten bucks. Just call off the police. Let me handle it.”
The hippie finally looked at him, and the bill Bone had taken out.
“No chance, fella,” he said. “Save your money. That asshole up there’s crazy and we got to get him off this thing, it’s that simple. So back off, okay? Cool it.”
Bone stood there trying to think of something else he could say or do. But there was nothing. It was out of his hands, and he knew it. So he went back to the fence, where Monk was standing now, holding onto it with a death grip. Her eyes were streaming and she kept saying something over and over, but Bone was not sure what it was. He could not take his mind or eyes off Cutter as the wheel started around again, at full speed now. Some of the riders screamed and others laughed and a few took it calmly, sitting back and watching the world below. None, however, sat as Cutter did.
By now a small crowd was gathering as word spread that there was some sort of trouble on the Ferris wheel. Most of them were kids. But on their outer edges Bone was surprised to see the cowboy Billy, standing as before, by himself, patiently watching Cutter.
Bone had no time to wonder about him, however, for the second employee had just arrived, followed by a policeman, a beefy middle-aged sheriff’s deputy sweating through his suntans. The hippie said a few words to him and the deputy nodded. Then he stepped back and looked up as the wheel came around again and stopped—at Cutter’s seat. Bone felt his own hands begin to shake as the hippie unfastened the bar in front of the seat and swung it clear. The deputy moved forward and said something to Cutter, something Alex apparently did not hear, for he did not move or change his expression, just sat there as before, staring ahead, his hand gripping the side rail of his seat. Both men began to tug at him then, easily at first, evidently not expecting much resistance. But when they failed to move him, when both of them together were unable to break his grip, the hippie angrily went around to the side of the seat and began to kick at Cutter’s hand, as if he were stamping the life out of a snake.
Bone remembered very little after that. He remembered hearing Monk scream and he remembered plunging ahead and driving his fist into the hippie’s face and seeing the youth fall on his back, his nose and mouth spurting blood. And he remembered hearing behind him a kind of grunt, just before the back of his head exploded. Just before there was nothing.