Authors: Newton Thornburg
“You’re stoned.”
“Could be.”
“I don’t like you stoned.”
“I don’t like you sober.”
“How would you know?”
“I asked you, how’d we make out?”
“Not so hot.”
“Just food and drink, huh?”
“And a respite.”
“One of those, huh? From what, if I may ask?”
“You can’t guess.”
She smiled, all radiant innocence. “From
me?
Your sweet old Mo?”
Bone shook his head. “Even bullshit like this, some reason I can take it from you.”
That seemed to bring her out from behind the downers and alcohol. “But Alex’s generosity, that you can’t take, huh?”
“All I can get.”
“But resent it in the bargain?”
“Not at all. I’m grateful to him. Why, sometimes I almost like him. Let’s say I find it hard to stay with a man and his old lady.”
“And why is that, do you think?”
“Maybe it’s like in the Bible. Maybe I covet my neighbor’s ass.”
She regarded him coolly. “Don’t waste your time, Rich.”
“I didn’t say I was trying to get it, Mo. Only that maybe I coveted it.”
The cool watchful look lasted a few more seconds, then abruptly she threw back her head, laughing. “Poor Richard. The man they never say no to. And yet here he is, playing second fiddle to a one-eyed cripple. That must really gnaw on you.”
“Not too much. No, I’d say my problem is more curiosity than anything else. I keep asking myself if all this isn’t just an act. I mean, consider—here’s this tough ballsy liberated female, this pampered alumnus of—”
“Alumna.”
“Of Beverly Hills and Radcliffe—”
“Hunter.”
“I keep wondering why she’d play barefoot squaw to anyone, least of all a—” Bone faltered, wanting the right euphemism.
“A what?”
“A Cutter.”
“You don’t have any idea?”
“I don’t mean because of how he looks either—his
injuries.”
“His character then?”
Bone shrugged.
“What then? Think, Richard. Strain.”
“Don’t want to hurt myself.”
“Chance it.”
“It’s late, Mo.”
“I’m sure it is. But keep trying. The Lord loves a trier.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Come on, Richard—Why do you resent him?”
“Cutter? I don’t.”
“You do. Now try. Think of something.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
Bone lit a cigarette. “Well, let’s see. There’s you. There’s always you.”
“Fine. What about me?”
“How he treats you.”
“And how is that?”
“Lousy.”
Mo smiled wearily. The argument was beneath her. “Wrong. Alex treats me fine.”
“Sure. While he goes out every night, you sit at home minding the baby.”
“It’s my baby.”
“Not his?”
“Men don’t have babies.”
“So there’s no need for marriage.”
“Did it do your wife any good?”
There was not much Bone could say to that. “You’ve got a point,” he conceded.
But that did not make a winner of Mo. If anything, she looked more troubled now, less sure of herself. She sat on the floor staring down at her lap and the drink she cradled. Then slowly, carefully, she got to her feet, one hand on the overstuffed, overworn Salvation Army chair that sat on the other side of the coffee table. Sipping her drink, she wandered to the front window and stood there for a time looking out at the darkness, the wet street shining in the corner light.
“I suppose it does seem kind of screwy,” she said finally. “Like it does to my parents. They think I’ve flipped, you know. They think their poor dear Maureen took one acid trip too many. And I can’t blame them. Or you either. But I don’t have any answers. There just comes a day, that’s all. You come to the point where you’ve got to make a commitment. And for me, Alex is it. I think he has a kind of greatness in him, Rich. I really do. At least he’s suffered greatly, I know that. I look at him, at that poor torn face of his, and then I think of the rest of us, all the frightened little faces like yours and mine, all the mild, hungry little faces, and I ask myself if any of us by any stretch of the imagination could ever do anything, be anything, that mattered. And the answer is no. Always no.”
“But Alex could, huh?”
“I believe he could.”
“I don’t.”
“His family, you don’t know what monsters they were. And the drugs. I was in the life myself for a few years, so I have some idea what it cost him. And then Vietnam. He caught all of it, you know? But all it could do was cripple him, disfigure him on the outside. Inside—”
“Inside he limps.”
“You bastard, Rich. You poor bastard.”
“Inside we all limp, Mo.”
“Not Alex.”
Bone shrugged. “Okay. You’re right, I’m wrong. You go on playing barefoot squaw.”
“I’m not
playing
anything!”
“Whatever you call it. Just so it makes you happy.”
“Well, it
does!
”
Bone got to his feet and went over to her. With mock tenderness he took her by the hair and turned her head, forcing her to look at him. “Then why the downers, Mo? Why the booze? How come you can’t get through a day without all that junk?”
Tears welled in her eyes. “I need it,” she got out.
Bone let go of her. “Enjoy it then. I’m gonna take a shower.”
Even over the roar of the water Bone was able to hear the new voices in the living room, especially Cutter’s nasal rasp, that fitting instrument of the bawdy sardonic character he pushed in public, so different from the one whose soft and stumbling, almost elegiac voice Bone often had to listen to out on the deck at night as the man worked closer to his pain—a voice then in fact not unlike the other Bone heard now too, only this one bearing the softness of babyfat instead of pain. And Bone decided he had known that was what the hippie would sound like. The black girl, if she was as cool as Murdock said, would naturally prefer her meat nice and white, soft breast of chicken. He would be tall and slender, Bone judged, a pale Anglo-Saxon ectomorph with rimless glasses and pony-tailed hair and a Mexican peon’s blouse and elaborately patched Levi’s. He would smoke grass and drink cheap wine like all his peers of course, but in careful moderation, almost as a generational tokenism, with none of the verve he would bring to his clandestine use of mouthwash and underarm deodorant. He would be working on his master’s in ecology or comparative religion at no-cal state and had temporarily dropped out in order to “get his head on straight.” Idly Bone wondered why he felt so much contempt for the type—because he himself in his mid-twenties had been pulling down twenty-five thousand a year, with a wife and child to support, a house and car and debts and responsibility? Was it their purblind luck he resented, the fact that simply by being born a decade later than he, they almost automatically had inherited a life-style and values that had taken him long years of bloodsweat to reach? Or was it his suspicion that they were the reverse of him, secret establishmentarians in counterculture drag. Not that Bone wanted to play their hippie game, with its bare feet and stink, its hashpipes and costumery and funky minibuses. He was content to leave all that to them, wanting for himself only the substance of the life, the sweet and simple state of freedom.
He had just turned off the shower and was beginning to dry himself when Cutter came gimping through the bathroom’s unlockable door. Giving Bone a salacious wink, he carefully positioned himself over the toilet bowl, thrust the index finger of his right hand—his only hand—down his throat, and promptly threw up. Bone still found it incredible that this was part of the man’s daily existence, like eating and urinating. His stomach, an even less dependable organ than Bone’s, simply would not tolerate food on top of alcohol. This was his solution.
“When in Rome,” he said finally, shuddering.
“You couldn’t wait till I came out.”
“Apparently not.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bad booze,” Cutter reflected. “Or escargots, I’m not sure which.”
“Who gives a fuck?”
In answer, Cutter raised his hand, a prelate blessing his flock. “Be still, my child. One cookie yet to toss.” Arid again the finger wriggled down his throat. Again he gagged, vomited.
Bone, dry now, felt like killing him. What a sight the man made, what a celebration of the grotesque: the thinning Raggedy Ann hair, the wild hawk face glowing with the scar tissue of too many plastic surgeries, the black eyepatch over the missing eye and the perennial apache dancer’s costume of tight black pants and black turtleneck sweater with the left sleeve knotted below the elbow, not pinned up or sewed but
knotted
, an advertisement, spit in your eye.
After flushing the toilet, Cutter tore off some toilet paper, wiped his mouth and blew his nose. Bone was hurriedly slipping into his Jockey shorts, but not fast enough. Cutter wagged his head in mock appreciation.
“What a bonny lad ye are, Rich. Not a mark on ye. Not one li’l old scratch.”
Bone slipped into a pair of jeans. “Could be I’m not accident prone.”
Cutter grinned happily. “You got me there, kid. That about says it.”
“We have guests?”
“You could call them that.”
“How late they staying?”
Cutter shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. The one’s a boogie chick, real cute. Maybe you could score there. The boyfriend was in Nam same time as me. Served under a buddy of mine, cat I knew at Stanford before I got the boot. The kid’s a bombthrower and figures I still am too, which I didn’t disabuse him of, ’cause he was buying. Gonna blow up the energy establishment, he is—how’s that for ambition, huh? While all you want to do is pull down some poor cunt’s panties, he wants to pull down Exxon. I don’t know about you, Rick. You lack ambition.”
“How late?” Bone persisted. And got a Cutter response:
“Time will tell.”
After Cutter left, Bone found himself staring down at the toilet bowl and the shreds of vomit that flecked its rim, vomit that would still be there a week from now, dried by then, but still there, still vomit. And suddenly he knew that Murdock was right—he had to get out from under Cutter’s roof as soon as he could, in any way he could, even if it meant finding a job.
Still toweling his hair, Bone returned to the living room to find everyone but Mo settled in around the coffee table. The Negro girl, sunk in the beanbag chair, turned out to be every bit the “looker” Murdock had said, a high-fashion type, all skeleton and sinew and great black eyes that swung insouciantly on Bone as he came in, questioning his right to be there or for that matter anywhere. Without any real satisfaction, Bone saw that her hippie friend fell safely within the parameters of his preconception of him, departing chiefly in his woolly mop of blond hair, almost an albino Afro. Across from him, cutter sat draped on the davenport, his steel and plastic right leg propped on the boat hatch amid a clutter of paperbacks and bottles and ashtrays and bowls with leftover popcorn from the week before.
“Behold, the squeaky clean Richard Bone,” he said. “Rich, this is Steve Erickson and Ronnie. Say hello.”
Bone nodded, but said nothing.
“Steve was in Nam too,” Cutter went on. “He and Ronnie are just passing through, trying to line up talent, you might say. They were kind of wondering, Rich—think you’d be any good at blowing up drilling platforms?”
Erickson suddenly looked ill. “Jesus, Alex,” he protested. “Knock it off, huh?”
“Oh, you can trust Rich,” Cutter assured him. “He’s totally apolitical, aren’t you, kid. Sort of an ideological blob. At best, a tits-and-ass independent, you might call him. Votes the straight party ticket.”
Bone yawned. “You missed the bowl in there, Alex. You got some on the floor.”
“See, you can trust him,” Cutter said, grinning.
Bone went over to his pile of suitcases in the corner and rummaged out an old maroon silk robe, one of the few artifacts remaining from his upwardly mobile days in the Midwest. Putting the robe on, he remarked how late the hour was, almost twelve-thirty. He did not add that he wanted to go to bed, or that bed was the davenport.
“You in Nam too,” Erickson asked.
Cutter answered for him. “Unfortunately Rick couldn’t make it. Couldn’t be spared. He was doing vital work in marketing at the time.” He looked over at Bone. “What was it you were pushing up there in Milwaukee, Rich?”
“Toilet paper was our big item. We gave away flags once.”
Cutter nodded gravely. “I knew it was something like that. Something big.”
Erickson smiled thinly, embarrassed. The black girl, however, seemed totally with it, and totally bored. She looked up wearily as Mo came in from the kitchen with a bowl of corn chips, the same bowl Bone had seen twenty minutes earlier, filled then with rotted grapes. He did not have to wonder if she had washed it in the interim. As was her habit, after she had unceremoniously popped the bowl onto the coffee table, she sat down on the floor near Cutter’s feet and lit a cigarette, listened.
He’d only been putting Erickson on, Cutter confessed. Actually Bone was one of the few cats around a man could trust. It was true Bone had worked in marketing paper products for a number of years, but that was the measure of the man, that he was here in Santa Barbara broke and free instead of pimping for the establishment in Chicago and Milwaukee, and making a bundle doing it, by God. A v.p. by thirty, Cutter said, a real corporate tiger, with the big house and cars and wife and kiddies and the whole schmeer. Yet he’d walked away from it all.
“And why?” Cutter concluded. “Because he’s one of us. Because he couldn’t stand all the lies. All the newspeak.
Exxon wants you to know
, sure they do. But what, huh? Just what do they want you to know?”
Once again Erickson was caught, a believer. And it was a forgivable mistake. You had to know Cutter, almost live with him, to understand the savagery of his despair, that it precluded his responding to any idea or situation with anything except laughter, sometimes wild but more often oblique and cunning, as now. His mind was a house of mirrors, distortion reflecting distortion.
Erickson looked from Bone to Cutter. “You mean, I should—?”