Cutter and Bone (27 page)

Cutter stood there looking at them. “I love you too,” he said.

Lieutenant Ross told him to shut up and move out.

“Move out?
What’s happened? We back in the marines?”

The woman was crying heavily now and her husband was trying his best to comfort her, hugging her to him with one hand while he used the other to daub her face with a handkerchief.

“You killed my baby!” she screamed at Cutter. “You killed her! You filth! You pig!”

Ross told her to take it easy. “He’s leaving, Mrs. Johnston. He’s leaving now.” He turned to Cutter. “Aren’t you, pal?”

Cutter shook his head. “I’m gonna see the bodies first—pal.”

The lieutenant grinned. “No, you’re not.”

Swanson, heading for the door, tried to pull Cutter with him. “Come on, Alex. Let’s leave for now. Maybe we can come back.”

But Cutter shook him off. “I’m going to see the bodies.”

Bone could see that Ross had already spent his small fund of patience, so he moved quickly, asking the proprietor where the phone was.

“I want to call the paper and our lawyer,” he explained. “The lieutenant must have forgotten—common-law marriage has certain rights these days. There’s no way you can legally keep Mr. Cutter from seeing the bodies of his wife and son. He’ll be able to sue your ass—I guess you realize that?”

Evidently the mortician did, for his color was rapidly beginning to resemble that of his clients. He turned imploringly to Ross, who had quickly shifted his hostility to Bone, Bone the uncooperative, the myopic, the deadbeat who had helped him back onto baby food.

“You get around, don’t you?” the lieutenant said.

Bone did not respond, and Ross turned to the Johnstons.

“This is Richard Bone,” he told them. “He was the last one to see your daughter alive.”

Bone was not sure how Ross knew this—he had given his statement to a Sergeant Waldheim down at the station—and in fact he had no idea what Ross was doing here with the Johnstons in the first place; a simple body identification would not have seemed big enough to warrant the services of a lieutenant. But then that did not matter now, Bone decided, not with Mo’s parents staring at him.

“That’s right,” he told them. “I dropped by yesterday evening. She gave me some supper. And I think you ought to know she didn’t seem unhappy or depressed. She loved her baby. What happened was an accident. I’m sure of that.”

This set Mrs. Johnston crying again, but her husband gave Bone a nod of understanding and perhaps even gratitude, and Bone was’ glad for what he had said. He only wished he could have believed it himself, beyond all doubt.

The lieutenant meanwhile had changed his mind. He nodded to the mortician, who then asked Cutter to follow him. Bone and Swanson went along, through a wide door and down a corridor to a small room. In it were two high wheeled tables covered with white sheets gently mounded in the middle. Casually, without a touch of ceremony, the mortician pulled back the sheets, revealing a pair of clear plastic sacks each containing what looked like blackened mummies, eyeless, hairless, skinless, one almost life-size and the other very tiny, a doll, a plaything for beasts.

Swanson gagged and turned away, doubling over as if he had been kicked in the stomach. Bone withstood it a moment longer, waiting to see if Cutter would need him, then he too turned and followed Swanson out of the room, feeling as if his body were splitting from the inside, like an egg about to bear some hideous crawling thing. Inside, the mortician was enjoying himself with Cutter:

“When they’re this bad they don’t even post ’em. Just bring ’em straight here.”

Cutter made no comment. When he came out a few moments later he looked calm, almost serene.

“Let’s go have a drink,” he said.

The Bay Tree Bar was around the corner from the mortuary, so they went there on foot. They went in silence and settled into the midmorning gloom of the place like bears into a winter cave. They were the only patrons, which only added to their reticence, made them like strangers with each other. For a time Swanson tried to talk about the tragedy, and he tried to get Bone to tell them about yesterday afternoon, how Mo had seemed, what she had said. But Cutter interrupted, saying he didn’t want to hear any of that, it was unimportant now, it was beside the point. There he stopped, however, not going on to explain just what “the point” was, not uttering one word about J. J. Wolfe or any “messages” the man supposedly had sent him. Instead he sat there drinking scotch and chain-smoking cigarettes, a new habit for him, apparently willed him by Mo.

And Bone waited. Feeling like a ticking bomb, he leaned back and waited for the minutes to drop away one by one and free him in the end. He was in no hurry. He tried not to let on how he felt or what lay ahead of him, just sat there calmly drinking with the other two, a little faster than he normally did perhaps. But they did not notice. Swanson was busy giving Cutter counsel. He knew how hard it would be for Alex to stand by and watch Mo’s parents take over, take the bodies back to Beverly Hills and arrange the funeral and everything, probably even exclude him from the proceeding altogether. But Swanson advised him not to do anything about it, to accept it.

And Cutter nodded indulgently. “Don’t worry about it, George,” he said. “Funerals ain’t my forte. If it was left up to me, the bodies probably wouldn’t even get buried.”

The coarseness of the remark seemed to upset Swanson. Taking a deeper drink than was his custom, he wound up choking and coughing, and Cutter reached over and patted him on the back.

“Don’t sweat it, old buddy,” he told him. “They’re dead now. Gone. Hell, those things over there ain’t even bodies—they’re
remains.
” His voice scorned the word. “So let old Mom and Pop have ’em. Let them have all the goddamn ceremonies they want. I got other business.”

Swanson did not ask him what it was. He was sure about one thing, he said—Alex was coming to stay at his place. And it wasn’t going to be some little overnight thing either, not if he could help it. No, Alex was going to have his own room and money too, and above all,
time
. Time to get his head on straight again. And Swanson didn’t care if it took him a month, a year, or five years—he’d still be welcome.

“You remember that spring vacation your folks took me with you, to Sun Valley?” he asked.

Cutter’s eye was distant, bleak. “Vaguely,” he said.

“Well, that was the biggest thing that ever happened to me as a kid, the first skiing I’d ever done. And the first real living. I haven’t forgotten it—even if you have. So you’re staying with us, Alex. Open end.”

Cutter looked over at Bone and grinned. “Well, I’ve finally got it made,” he said, lifting his glass. “Let’s drink to George’s place. My new home.
Requiescat in pace.
”

It was close to noon when Bone left them, claiming that he had to get the pickup truck back to Mrs. Little. Instead he bought a pint of scotch at a nearby liquor store and drove up to Franceschi Park at the top of the Riviera. It was a small park, not much more than a few acres of grass fringed with eucalyptus trees and three or four picnic tables. And though it offered a stirring view of the coast, that was not the reason he had chosen it. More important to him was its remoteness, its distance from the beaten tourist path. He figured that with any luck at all a man would be able to drink there in peace for hours. And that was just what he planned to do.

The only other persons he could see in the park were two lovers sitting on a table at the far end, the girl leaning back between the man’s legs as they both stared out at the sea, its great sweep somehow diminished by the oil-drilling platforms strewn along the channel, like an armada of monstrous crabs. Bootlegging the bottle of scotch, Bone made his way down through the trees until he found a place to his liking, a flat grassy niche in the rocks, with a slight overhang above. Sitting down, he opened the bottle and took a deep pull on it, so much he almost gagged as it went down. And he thought about what he was doing, why he had to get drunk this day. He did not think it was because of his feelings of guilt and remorse, that they were insupportable. They should have been, he knew. But they were not. And he did not believe the reason was simple grief, the knowledge that she was gone now, gone forever, and the baby with her—the terrible and final knowing that he would not see her again, not talk with her, not hold her, not ever. This knowledge, this grief, had become for him an unrelieved and oddly localized pain, as if an artery in his chest had burst and was now spilling his life there. Even this he could have endured, however, could have faced it sober. He did not need the liquor for that, nor as a kind of ritual thing, part of some private memorial service, a lone man’s wake. No, he imagined that the reason for the bottle was simply that he did not care to live through the rest of this day as his customary self, his sober self, Old Faithless in the mirror. Today he needed to take his eye off the ball. He needed an unsteady hand and an unsure foot. He needed a vacation from the grubby little scavenger that was Richard Kendall Bone.

So he drank. Like some poor skid row wino he huddled back in his little hole and nipped steadily at the bottle, carefully building his oblivion. And it came as slowly and surely as twilight, the brilliant spring sun dulling to a kind of diurnal moon that muted all color and softened the biting edges of the world stretched out below him, and in time the pain in his chest began to ease and he found entire minutes passing without his hearing her voice asking him to stay, asking him if he would be there when she woke, and then his own voice answering: Sure, go to sleep now, Mo, rest.

He finished the bottle and left the park, drunk, but not so drunk he was unaware of it. Nevertheless he made no allowance for his condition and drove recklessly, jockeying the truck like a stoned teenager through the afternoon traffic. And instead of choosing a safe bar like Murdock’s he stopped in the barrio and entered a Chicano joint where he knew Anglos were not welcome. He did not bother to specify scotch and so found himself drinking bourbon, standing there at the bar in the seedy storefront tavern putting down shot after shot as if he were trying to slake an honest water-thirst, all the while vaguely aware that the bartender and the other patrons were watching him, in fact had put him at the center of their attention like a cock in a pit. He remembered later sitting at a table for a while, and perhaps even dozing for a time. And he had a vague recollection of some kind of trouble in the men’s room, some pushing and shoving and a tall thin young Mexican groaning on the floor in front of the urinal, and there was blood, Bone’s own blood running down his chin and soaking his shirt. And then, abruptly, it seemed he was outside, wandering up and down the street looking for the truck, and finding it eventually with the keys still in the ignition—a discovery that for some reason amused him greatly and had him laughing out loud as he drove off, not knowing where he was headed. Evidently the traffic flow was easier to the south, for that was the direction he took, crossing the freeway and winding up on Cabrillo Boulevard, which he followed past the yacht harbor to the Leadbetter Beach parking lot, where he left the truck.

The moment his feet touched sand he knew he had come to the right place, that this had been his true destination all day long, only for some reason he had overlooked it, had forgotten that on this day above all others he had to run, and run, run like that poor long-striding adolescent mark in freshman track, run as if the old life depended on it, yes, run Richard Bone right down into the sand, run him until he was stump-legged and windless, broken, his heart a pump of piss and bile. And so he started out, heading into a real twilight now, a dim fogged shore strewn with kelp and lost dogs and lovers and lonely old men.

Bone ran past them all, sometimes veering into the surf and stumbling back out and plunging on. And within minutes, it seemed, he had come to the end of the beach, the point under the cliffs where the tide each day gave and then withdrew strips of narrow rocky sand, isolate and wind. This day the tide was taking, rising to turn the gray ribbon of beach into separate headlands cleaving the waves as they thundered in. So part of the time Bone was running knee-deep in water, fighting through it to another strip of beach and then on into the water again.

And suddenly it occurred to him that there would never be a better time to go for a swim, to try for that hundred yards too far. Immediately he began to stagger and hop about the small stretch of beach, trying to get out of his sea-wet clothes. And when he made it finally he stood there naked for a few moments, breathing deeply, preparing himself for the initial assault against the breakers, which he knew would be the most difficult part of the swim, the part like climbing a mountain in the midst of an avalanche.

Then abruptly he was in the water and swimming for his life, coming up for air in the trough between the waves and diving again, stroking frantically as the great freezing tides thundered over him, tugging him toward shore. But with each wave he gained a few feet, and in time—how much time, he had no idea—he found himself out beyond the breakers, where the swimming should have been easier. But somehow each stroke was like lifting a log out of the water and dropping it, trying to force it down through a substance with the consistency of freshly poured cement. His breath ripped out of his lungs, his heart sprinted, ached. And still he kept on. He swam in the failing light. He swam in darkness. He swam until he could swim no more. And then he gave it all, this ridiculous swim, this ridiculous life, his easy benediction:

Go to sleep now. Rest. I’ll be here, yes.

And that was what he remembered, the logs coming to rest in the water and his head settling back just as hers had done, his body arching the same way, and then plunging, going deep into his own forever sea.

But all he found was sand, another small prow of beach where a driftwood fire burned and voices fell over him like salt spray, cool stinging voices laughing at what the sea had coughed up. And then there were blankets dropped over his shaking shoulders and a bottle at his mouth, wine as sickly sweet as Kool-Aid followed by the dryness of smoke, grass smoke instead of wood, balm for his savaged lungs. There was flesh with him in the blankets then, warm slick woman flesh, and this smiling stone-eyed face that disappeared every so often, huddling down over his body as if she were building a fire there, trying to blow it into life. And apparently she succeeded, for his only recollection of the beach from then on was the sex, the stone-eyed girl and then another one astride him and under him and locked with him mouth to groin, sometimes just one of them alone and other times both, and yet there never seemed to be any release for him, only the tumescence, the fire the stone-eyed one had built in him and which the alcohol kept from going out, and so there was cheering too, he remembered that, voices urging him on, like a performing animal, a circus freak. Supersalt, they called him.