Cutter and Bone (28 page)

He remembered the floor of a darkened minibus, wrapped up in blankets and shivering as the stone-eyed girl huddled near him, bracing herself against the bumping of the vehicle. And then there was only silence, a great long tunnel of nothing, a sleep that could have been death for all he knew of it.

He woke in daylight alone in a cluttered room, a small efficiency apartment plastered with peeling posters of youth-cult and rebellion: the inevitable Che and W. C. Fields along with Henry Kissinger as a nude Cosmopolitan Man and other non-pictorial ones proclaiming such profundities as
Shit
and
Bitch, Bitch, Bitch
in artsy typography. Empty clotheslines crisscrossed the room above a floor strewn with sleeping bags and broken chairs and scattered books and sheet music and cans and ashtrays, along with a torn bass drum and a guitar without strings. The kitchenette, buried in beer cans and dirty dishes, was such a mess that Bone almost expected to see Mo come shuffling out of it—which was the wrong thought for him to have, for abruptly he was conscious then, aware of who he was and what had happened, and with that realization he also discovered his hangover, the cold dishwater that was his belly, the stake being driven into his head. Slowly he sat up, not surprised to discover that he had been sleeping on a davenport instead of a bed. Of three doors in the place, one opened into a closet and the other was obviously the front door, so he was about to set himself in the direction of the third, hoping there to find relief for his seared throat and aching bladder. But just as he was about to try to stand, the door opened and someone came out, a small dark creature with a boy’s haircut and build and clothes—rope sandals and Levi’s and a leather jacket over a UCSB T-shirt, whose slight pointed rise at the U and B suggested the creature might be female.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“Could be,” he admitted.

“Well, put something on, for God’s sake. Don’t just sit there showing off.”

Bone pulled a ratty blanket over his lap. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I thought you were a boy.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Standing, he pulled the blanket around him. “Uh, can I go in there now?” he said. “I’ve got problems.”

“You sure have.” She moved out of the doorway.

Bone did not ask for clarification. The problems he knew about were sufficient for now. Closing the door behind him, he did what he could to end them. After urinating for what seemed like twenty minutes, he drank a glass of cold water and promptly threw it up. Trying warm water then, he stood for a while staring at the derelict in the mirror, trying to psych him into keeping the water down. He was only mildly surprised to see that he had a bruise under his left eye and a cut running from his hairline down to his earlobe. It was already dried, a fine handsome scab.

Wrapping the blanket around him again, he went back into the apartment. The girl was standing at the front windows, which looked out on a straight ugly street bordered by California’s answer to the brownstone, four- and eight-unit stucco apartment houses, pastel boxes built to last a decade.

“Isla Vista?” he said.

She nodded sourly. “Yeah—the ghetto.”

“The kids on the beach—I take it they brought me here.”

“My roomies, yeah—Carla and Josie, the clap twins.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“You remember, then?”

“What?”

“The beach. Coming in out of the waves ‘like a fucking Greek god’—I believe that’s how Carla described it.”

Bone shook his head wonderingly, in pain. “Beautiful,” he said.

“Isn’t it? She didn’t specify which god though.”

“Bacchus.”

The girl looked dubious. “Aphrodite came out of the sea.”

“Okay—her, then.”

“No, Carla wouldn’t agree. She said you were spectacular, whatever that means.”

“Whatever.”

“But then of course I wasn’t there.”

“Why of course?”

“Because I’m the Virgin of Isla Vista—didn’t you know?”

“No, I’m afraid not. But congratulations anyway.”

“Well, that’s what everyone calls me.”

Bone said nothing as a fresh wave of nausea swept over him. He carefully sagged back onto the davenport.

“That or Monk,” she said.

“Fine,” he got out. “Keep up the good work.”

“It isn’t hard, believe me.”

“Good.”

“Josie’s at work, and Carla’s got an art class. She told me to take good care of you. She’s looking forward to meeting you sober.”

“You sound like an answering service.”

“That’s about it,” the girl admitted.

Bone asked her what time it was.

“A little after one.”

“I got any clothes here? Did they find-”

She was shaking her head. “Nope—they brought you just as they found you. In all your glory.”

He could not help groaning. “Beautiful. Oh Jesus, that is just beautiful.” He remembered having seventy dollars left after buying the bottle of scotch yesterday, fifty of which—two twenties and a ten—he had secreted in his wallet between his driver’s license and a three-year-old American Express card.

The wallet of course had been in his pants. And his pants were now in the sea.

“Where’d you leave your clothes?” the girl asked.

“On the beach.”

“Maybe they’re still there.”

Bone shook his head. “Tide was still rising.”

“How neat. When the tide brings it all in again, they’ll think you’re dead. You’ll be a free man. You can start a brand-new life.”

“Yeah—how neat.”

“It isn’t, huh?”

“I’m too successful with this one.”

“Feel kind of lousy, huh?”

He did not bother to answer.

“How much did you have?” she kept on.

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Obviously.”

She seemed to have nothing else in the world to do except stand there and stare at him, something like a lonely tomboy sister with a big brother back from the wars. Even sick as he was, the intensity of her interest embarrassed him and he wanted to tell her to get lost. Instead he asked if there was any coffee.

“Yeah, instant. You want some?”

“I could try.”

She nodded approvingly. “Bravo. That’s the spirit.”

While she busied herself in the cluttered kitchenette, Bone got up and rummaged through an equally cluttered closet until he came up with something he could wear, a white terry beach robe with a large Budweiser beer label printed on the back. Putting the robe on, he pulled the sash tighter than he should have and found himself struggling not to retch. His legs suddenly were fileted and his stomach felt as if it had been wadded by a large hand. With his head booming, he teetered back to the davenport.

From the kitchenette, the girl asked him who Mo was.

“Why?” he said. “What do you mean?”

“You talk in your sleep.”

“He’s just a guy I know.”

“And you’re in love with him?”

“Yeah, I’m mad about him.”

For a time the girl just stood there watching the kettle heating on the burner. Finally she said, “I know three things—Mo is a woman, she has a baby, and you are sorry. You are very sorry.”

Bone looked away from her, convinced that he had never felt worse in all his life. He could not remember a time when his body and spirit were so all-of-a-piece, so consonant in their pain and disrepair. It made him wonder why men held life precious. Just the possibility of there being days like this somehow devalued all the others, at least for him.

Idly, he looked out the window at a vacant lot across the street, where some students or street people had a fire going, a bonfire, of paintings, evidently some twenty-year-old artist finally throwing in the towel, succumbing to the forces of darkness. The paintings appeared to be portraits or figure studies, one of a nude woman whose golden skin turned a brief brown and then black and then disappeared altogether as the flames consumed her. And Bone could not help thinking of the blackened mummy in the clear plastic sack. His stomach crumpled again, pumped something bilious into his throat, where he choked it off, trembling, tear-blinded. He put his head down for a time. Then, drying his eyes, he looked up at the girl.

“Let’s forget the coffee, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe some hair of the dog,” he suggested. “You got anything?”

“Beer,” she said. “And an old bottle of brandy.”

“That’ll do. Even old.”

Standing on a chair, she got the bottle out of a cabinet over the refrigerator. “You want a glass?” she asked.

“No. Just the bottle.”

She brought it over and gave it to him, grudgingly. Taking his first pull on the bottle, he closed his eyes and waited, straining to keep it down. And then he felt it, the special gift of brandy, the sudden stain of warmth spreading through his stomach.

“You gonna get drunk again?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s the hangover, that’s all. A little of this and I’ll feel better.”

“How about a little food?”

“Later.”

She looked at him dolefully. “Don’t stay here, okay?”

Bone tried to smile. “Not too keen on me, huh?”

“On
them
. The clap twins. They won’t be good for you.”

“I can believe it.” He took another drink.

“I’m getting out too.”

“Can’t blame you. The place is a pigsty.”

“I know. I just gave up after a while.”

“One does.”

She watched him as he took another pull on the bottle. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Richard Bone.”

“You drink pretty fast, Richard Bone.”

“Not fast enough.”

“I thought you weren’t going to get drunk.”

He was feeling better now, as the warmth continued to spread in him. “I’m not. I meant something else.”

“What?”

He met her gaze for a few moments, the unblinking eyes above the pugnacious tomboy mouth and chin. “I forget,” he said.

She seemed to give up on him then. Turning away, she went back into the kitchenette. “Is there anybody you want me to call?” she asked. “Someone to come and get you?”

Bone thought about it. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I don’t know the number—George Swanson in Santa Barbara. Ask for Cutter. Mister Alexander Cutter.”

She got the phonebook and began to leaf through it, looking for the number. “You don’t want me to call Mo?” she asked.

Bone could not remember alcohol hitting him so hard before. The bottle of brandy had been only half full when he started and though there was still at least a third of it left he felt totally and painlessly high. And he imagined the reason was that he had started out already halfway home, with a respectable level of alcohol still sloshing about in his blood. But whatever the cause, he was not about to complain, for his hangover had gone the way of his sobriety, and he missed neither of them.

As he drank, he sat on the davenport looking out the window at the few raunchy kids still left around the fire, poking and worrying its smoking ashes like scavengers at a city dump. He also watched the Virgin of Isla Vista banging around in the kitchenette, putting things away and straightening up and starting to wash the dishes. And then he stretched out and slept again, for how long he had no idea. There was no question, however, as to what it was that woke him finally—a cane sticking him in the ribs. And then Cutter’s voice:

“Wake up, my son. Thy father hath need of thee.”

Bone remembered trying to push the cane away, but it kept prodding him in new places. And he remembered getting up finally, teetering there in the middle of the room like an infant while the two of them struggled to dress him. As they were working him into his jockey shorts, he recalled warning them to look the other way because he was actually the Virgin of Chicago Plains and it was rumored that anyone who dared look upon his private parts would be blinded by their purity and perfection. And Cutter went along, saying something to the effect that, yes, he and the girl were aware what a signal honor fate had visited upon them. But then he ruined the moment by observing to the girl that probably never before in human history had so little given so many so little, and Bone remembered the girl laughing, smiling happily, and how unexpectedly beautiful that smile had seemed, lighting not only her drab little face but even for a few moments the alcoholic wastes of his own spirit.

Dressed finally, and clutching his precious hangover antidote, the fifth of Christian Brothers, he let Cutter and the girl lead him downstairs and outside to a late-model Ford station wagon, which Bone recalled seeing in Swanson’s driveway and garage, the family utility vehicle, something for George and his wife to fall back on in such dire emergencies as having to carry a third person or an extra sack of groceries. At the car Bone noticed that the girl had brought her own suitcase with her, an expensive overnight bag which she stuffed into the back of the wagon, next to Bone’s own luggage from his room at Mrs. Little’s. It crossed Bone’s mind that none of this made any sense—the girl going along, and his own things being there, packed and loaded—but it just did not seem important to him, not where he was, gliding up above it all like a beatified seagull. And even when he got into the back seat of the wagon and had to make a place for himself amid all the junk—the rifles and shotguns and cameras and tape recorders—he still did not bother to ask any questions.

After driving back to Santa Barbara, Cutter pulled into the parking lot of Swanson’s real estate office and got out. He said he would not be long and he was true to his word, coming out of the building within a few minutes and grinning as he fanned himself with a piece of paper—a check which he promptly cashed at a drive-in bank near the freeway. For some reason Bone remembered his instructions to the teller:

“Make it twenties, my good woman.
Fifty
of them.”

And Bone thought: good old George, trusting Cutter to pick up a thousand dollars for him.

But instead of going back to George’s house, as Bone expected him to do, Cutter swung south on 101, which caused Bone to look up from the bottle of brandy long enough to inquire where they were headed—Hollywood? Tijuana? Chile?—he thought it might be a good idea if he knew. But Cutter said he was not to worry; they were just out for a drive, that was all, a quick spin down the coast in order to give Bone time to sober up, because, as he well knew, George’s wife wasn’t keen on lushes or one-eyed cripples, and while they couldn’t do anything about the latter, the former was a different matter. So he advised Bone to drink up, finish what he had started, and then once he was safely back on the wagon, they could all repair to Santa Barbara, there to live happily ever after. Bone said he would drink to that, and he did.