Cutter and Bone (36 page)

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.

Bone’s stay in the county jail lasted only four hours, most of which he spent in the drunk tank holding his ears and head against the vocal assault of a beer-filled teenager who kept squalling at the top of his voice a refrain of Janis Joplin:

Oh Lord wontcha buy me a Mercedes-Benzzzz
My friends all have Por-schees I must make aay-mends
.

So Bone was considerably relieved when the sheriff finally came for him. He was a big easygoing man in his fifties, and he told Bone that for over thirty years he had been carrying six pieces of fine Krupp steel around in his right leg and therefore could understand a guy coming to the aid of a buddy who had lost an arm and a leg and an eye fighting for his country. The sheriff even apologized for Bone’s headache but said it couldn’t be helped, “Junior” just didn’t know his own strength and was forever bringing people in half-dead, people who “shoulda knowed better than tangle with a officer with twelve-inch wrists.”

Bone agreed with the sheriff. He thanked him for releasing him and asked how to get to the veterans’ hospital in Fayetteville, where Cutter had been taken, along with Monk, who apparently had told the police that she was Cutter’s wife. The sheriff reflected that he didn’t envy anyone who had to go there, in fact anyone who even had to leave Rock County for that matter, but he gave Bone the directions anyway. And he returned his keys and wallet. He even shook hands goodbye.

In the patrol car, driving Bone to his station wagon, Junior observed that “a body shouldn’t believe all that patriotic bullshit the sheriff dishes out.” The only metal in the old man’s leg was buckshot from a hunting accident, the deputy said. And the only reason Bone was getting off so easy was the sheriff didn’t think it was a crime to hit a hippie, as a matter of fact took a poke at ’em hisself whenever he could. So naturally he’d talked the carnival kid out of pressing charges. Which meant Bone was one lucky sumbitch, and Junior hoped he knowed it. If it had been up to him, Bone would still be in the slam, because assault was assault, by God, and there just wasn’t no two ways about it.

Bone naturally neglected to comment on any of this. When they reached his car, he thanked the deputy for the lift and told him not to brood about busting his head the way he had, that with any luck it would probably mend in time. But Junior was not listening.

“I’m gonna follow you to the motel,” he said. “The owner wants to make sure you check out pronto, without causin’ any more fuss.”

Bone thought of the pair of them, Cutter’s American Gothic, and he was not surprised. “Whatever you say, pal,” he told the deputy.

Junior had more for him. “And after you’ve checked out, you follow me in your car. Someone wants to have a talk with you.”

“Who?”

“Never mind who.”

“And suppose I don’t go. Suppose I just take off.”

The idea did not impress Junior very much. “No pollution crap on this baby,” he said, patting the squadcar’s steering wheel. “I’ll ketch you right off and run you in for resistin’ arrest.”

“Arrest for what?”

“Speedin’.”

A half hour later Bone found himself trailing Junior over a route he already knew: three miles south on the highway, then west on County K. But this day, as he turned in at the stone portals of Wolfe Farms, he did not stop and back out. He continued up the curving crushed-rock drive to the top of the hill, following the deputy past the lane that led to the house, a modernistic sprawl of wood and glass and native stone with an empty swimming pool in the front.

When they came to the outbuildings, Junior parked and got out. Bone pulled in next to him but remained in his car. In the nearest corral two cowboys were working with a group of small black calves, crowding them down a narrow chute toward a headgate where a third man was inoculating the animals, shooting them with a hypodermic that looked like a silver pistol. Bone remembered one of the cowboys from the motel bar, the one “Billy Boy” had called Sam. And now Sam caught sight of Junior. Giving a calf one last brutal whack with the cane he was carrying, he came out through the corral gate. Junior said something to him and the cowboy looked over at Bone and grinned, all the while slapping his open palm with the cane, which was long and unpainted, as stout as an ax handle. Nodding to the deputy now, he sauntered over to the nearest building and went inside.

Bone by now had his hand on the ignition key, held it sweating there while he tried to decide whether or not to make a run for it. His throat was dry. Television and movie images raced through his head: federal backhoes digging in red clay soil while deputies just like Junior stood around joshing and elbowing each other, having a fine old time. Even as Bone was thinking this, the deputy sidled over and cut him off, sat back against the fender of Bone’s car and began to pick his teeth with one hand while the other fondled his holstered thirty-eight.

Within a few seconds Sam came back out of the building, followed by his boss—the third time Bone had seen the man that day. Only this time it was with a feeling of relief, for somehow Bone could not imagine him—Billy Boy, the cool peacemaker of the night before—as part of some bloody, honky cabal.

“Okay, you—get out here,” Junior bawled.

And Bone obeyed, moving on legs that felt like stilts.

Billy’s grin was relaxed, easy. “Well, if it ain’t old Humperdinck’s buddy,” he said.

“Big surprise, huh?”

“In a way, yeah. We weren’t sure we could catch you before you left.”

“You caught me.”

“Catch
as in contact,” Billy explained.

“Sure.”

Next to Billy, Junior had the look of a hunter who had shot his limit. But Billy had bad news for him. “We can handle it from here, old buddy,” he said, clapping the deputy on the back. “You best get back to fighting crime.”