Cutter and Bone Page 11

“My husband’s in the shower,” she said, “so I rushed out here to tell you—I’d just as soon he didn’t meet you yet. I told him I’d hired a new grounds boy.”

  Bone could not help smiling. “You don’t want me to wander around outside, then.”

  “Not for a while, okay? An hour at the most. He’ll be leaving by then—he’s got a meeting in L.A. in the morning.”

  “No problem.”

  “After he’s gone, though, you come on over. If you want, I mean. Naturally you’re free to come and go as you please.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good. I’ll tell you what—why don’t we go out for dinner? I’m famished myself. How about you?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Well, fine then. And, uh—you do have a jacket? A sport coat?”

  “Two. And shoes even.”

  She laughed at that, too eagerly. “Fine. I’ll see you soon.”

  Alone again, and with nothing better to do, Bone once more went over the Xeroxed material on Wolfe. The Who’s Who entry was spare to the point of brutality:

  WOLFE, J. JAMES corp. exec.: b. Rockhill, Mo., Aug. 5, 1929; s. Oral and Sarah (Russell) W.; m. Olive Field Hawley, Dec. 15, 1949; children: J. James Jr., Oral C., Virginia F., and Harlan J. Founder & pres. Ozark Poultry Co-op. 1949-55; founder & pres. Ozark Markets, Inc. 1953-58; founder, pres., chrmn. Wolfe Enterprises, Inc. 1959-. Mem. Am. Soc. Sales Execs., American Angus Assoc., Kiwanis Club. Home: RFD Rockhill, Mo. Offices: Rockhill, Mo. 64840; 109 E. 42nd St., N.Y. 10017; 407 Unicorn Drive, Hollywood, Calif. 90028.

  That terse, orderly listing bore about as much relation to the J. J. Wolfe in Time as a coach’s blackboard diagram did to the blood and thunder of an actual football game. The story was not so much about Wolfe personally as about the general new breed of “conglomerateurs,” as the magazine dubbed them. Wolfe was simply one of the group, and a smallish one at that, certainly no Perrot or Ling or Vesco. But he made for pretty good copy and thus earned himself star billing, the cover portrait and the full-page “box” inside, in which Wolfe the person—the husband and father, the cattleman and aviator, the cornpone maverick—was limned with Time’s customary slickness.

  Essentially the story presented in the article and the “box” was a simple one, a cliché in fact. Wolfe had been born in southwestern Missouri, the fifth generation of dirt-poor hillbillies who believed in the trinity of hard liquor, a jealous God, and above all “kin,” a concept whose corollary was instant mistrust and hatred of those who were not kin. The men were loggers and chicken farmers and hunters; the women were pregnant; the children, like Wolfe himself, seldom went past the eighth grade in school, dropping out to join their parents in chicken raising and pregnancy.

  But from the beginning J. J. Wolfe had been different, almost different in kind, a veritable mutant. While his father and brothers and uncles hunted and drank and dreamed, he built the first automated pullet-raising and egg-laying houses in the country, then showed other poultrymen in the area how to do the same thing, and ultimately organized them into a marketing cooperative that rapidly extended down into Arkansas and west into Oklahoma. At twenty years of age, as president of the 400-member Ozark Poultry Cooperative, he borrowed money and started a feed company intended in theory to supply cheaper feed to the co-op’s members, but which in fact ended up binding them to contracts that put Wolfe in virtual control of every member’s operation, dictating not only the feed they were to buy and what price but also where and when and at what profit they could market their eggs and fryers. Thus by his mid-twenties he had a large chunk of national poultry production in his pocket, and he quickly used it to gain control of a small supermarket chain, then a larger one, then moved on into discount stores and other fields entirely.

  By the age of thirty he had holdings sufficiently diversified to warrant his setting up Wolfe Enterprises, Incorporated, the holding company that Time reported was now a significant factor in almost every segment of the national economy. Wolfe was the nation’s single largest producer of poultry and poultry products; he was the second largest cattle feeder; his holdings in supermarket and discount chains accounted for almost four percent of all retail business; and as the article reported, he was also “into” banking and forest products and energy and communications. He was in short a conglomerate. And somehow, reading between the lines of the article, Bone got the feeling that it was a conglomerate held together by paper, a leaning tower of debt.

  To Bone, the personal J. J. Wolfe did not sound much more interesting than the corporate one. Time tried to make him out as a dedicated family man, but the article also mentioned that he lived away from home much of the time, a good part of it in New York and Hollywood. The article made a big thing of his “folksiness,” the fact that he went tieless most of the time and ate hamburgers for lunch and bought suits off the rack at his discount houses. And it mentioned his habit of going into working-class bars and picking up hitchhikers because he could “learn a damn sight more about people when they think you’re just a dumb redneck—which I guess is what I am anyway.” There were photographs of him with his family on his three-thousand-acre cattle ranch near his Missouri hometown, and there was another photo of him in a hardhat inspecting a new factory. But neither rang any bells for Bone. What he saw was just another tycoon enjoying his spoils. And oddly he did not seem to relate any more closely to the man in the Santa Barbara newspaper photograph than to the figure Bone had seen in the alley. They all seemed like strangers, to each other as well as to him.

  Like his slacks, both of Bone’s sport coats were holdovers from his marketing v.p. days in Milwaukee, expensive doubleknit jobs he had bought at MacNeil and Moore’s in the Pfister Hotel building. Neither was altogether unpresentable, merely baggy, dirty, and worn at the elbows, a combination that more and more dictated he choose the darker one, the blue blazer, which in turn dictated the gray Farahs and his trusty peppermint-stripe shirt. So he was not feeling exactly spiffy as he waited in the Littles’ game room working on a martini and watching M*A*S*H on the sarcophagus-sized television set, while Mrs. Little was somewhere else in the house putting the final touches on her disguise.

  And minutes later, as she came down from upstairs, he saw what a successful disguise it was. From a distance she looked a smashing thirty-five, all lustrous black hair and long-lashed eyes and gleaming lips, the total effect an almost gooey Latin sexiness if anything heightened by her muted tan evening suit. In her smile, however, there was no hint of disguise. She looked happy and excited, and he could only wonder at her prodigious capacity for self-deception.

  “You ready?” she sang.

  “Sure.”

  “Anyplace special you’d like to go? Talk of the Town?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “How about something out of the way?”

  “Fine.”

  “There’s one down the coast,” she said, as they went out the back door. “Just past Carpinteria. It’s new and small, and the food—well, let’s just say the drinks are big.”

  “Sounds good.”

  At the garage, she tossed him the car keys. “You can drive, all right? Martinis, you know—I kind of got a jump on the evening.”

  “Sure.”

  The car, a late-model Buick Century, seemed to have every possible piece of optional equipment, including power seats, which Mrs. Little put to immediate use, stretching out almost supine as Bone backed around and drove off.

  “I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m so glad that motherfucking asshole is gone.”

  The “new small” place turned out to be only that, with drinks no larger or stronger than those served in other restaurants in the area. But Bone judged that what it did offer was safety from exposure, its resounding lack of cachet an almost certifiable guarantee that Mrs. Little would not run into anyone she did not want to run into. And Bone was fairly certain this did not include neighbors or friends so much as her husband’s customers and business contacts, that
vital group without whom she might not have been able to hire grounds boys. But if she was careful not to harm the man’s business affairs, she had no such regard for his personal reputation, and right after drinks were served and the two of them had straightened out the name problem—he was to call her Beth, not Mrs. Little, and she in turn could call him Rich or Richard, not Dick, which he detested—she quickly picked up where she had left off in the car.

  Jack Little was an insufferable bastard, pure and simple. Three days in San Francisco with the man, she said, and they had not even kissed, could Bone believe that? When Little took her out for dinner all the creep did was sit there and knead his earlobe and mentally strip and hump every girl in the room, while all she did was drink—too much, she admitted. Like tonight. Only this was fun drinking, drinking because she felt good, not bad, and that was all the difference.

  “The man is totally business,” she complained. “Nothing but business from the top of his woolly head to his pedicured feet. Even in sex he’s business. Doesn’t want any messy, time-consuming affairs, he says, so he confines himself to whores, would you believe that? It’s true. He brags about it in fact—the very best call girls, he says, age twenty to twenty-five, professional, efficient, clean. Hundred to hundred-fifty a throw. Bang-bang, he’s in and out and done—and back to business.”

  Like Mrs. Little, Bone was drinking steadily, and martinis at that. This night he figured he would need them.

  “He talks to you about it, though? Straight out?”

  “His sex life? Oh sure. He’s proud of it.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Yeah—real togetherness.”

  “And there’s nothing else? No children?”

  She hit her martini again and looked away. He evidently had touched a nerve.

  “Two,” she said. “A boy and a girl.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Boy’s in college.” And now in her glop-rimmed eyes the pain was raw, exposed. “The girl’s married,” she said. “And got two children of her own, which I believe makes me a grandmother, doesn’t it?”

  “Big deal.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Liz Taylor’s a grandmother.”

  “That’s hardly an answer.”

  “Put it this way, then—there are grandmothers, and there are grandmothers.”

  “This doesn’t bother you then? You don’t find it ridiculous?”

  “What?”

  “You, me—our age difference. And together like this.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then why should it me? If anyone doesn’t like, the hell with them.”

  She was smiling again. “My God, you’re attractive, you know that? And nice.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m awfully glad you dropped out or whatever you call it now. Maybe it hasn’t been good for you, I don’t know. But for me, tonight—” She shrugged in embarrassment. “I guess I’m a little smashed.”

  “That’s what it’s for.”

  The waitress came and served their food, a filet mignon for Bone, lobster for Mrs. Little. As soon as they were alone again, she suggested they eat hurriedly.

  “I want to go home,” she added. “I want us to go home.”

  Bone looked at her, the moist avid eyes, the anxiety quivering at the corners of her smile. “Sure,” he said. “But everything in its season, you know. First, food.”

  “And then?”

  He could not quite meet her eyes. “Home?”

  “Yes.” She said it as if it were a nuptial vow.

  Less than an hour later Bone found himself in the Littles’ game room again, only now trying to get a fire going in the huge fieldstone fireplace. It was Mrs. Little’s idea: “A cool night, and just the two of us, perfect for a fire.” But she had not reckoned with his hands, which five martinis and a B&B had turned into catcher’s mitts. The logs, however, were like those he had bought for Mo, pressed paper that burned in “a rainbow of colors.” They also were easier to ignite, so he finally accomplished his mission and then made it back across the room to the bar, there to slosh some vodka and ice into a tumbler and carefully guide the libation to his lips. Laughing to himself, he reflected that this was one night he would not, as the schoolteacher put it, rise to the occasion. No, he would just have to be an old softie, and blame it on the booze. If the lady bitched and moaned—so be it. He wouldn’t starve. He could always fall back on Cutter, couldn’t he? Cutter and J. J. Wolfe. Again he laughed.

  And it was then Mrs. Little made her second entrance of the evening, this time bumpily gliding down the stairs in bright red semi-see-through lounging pajamas that made Bone remember a Lenny Bruce record from his high school days, Lenny commenting on some old woman with “the kind of blouse you could see through—and you didn’t want to.”

  Like Bone, Mrs. Little apparently needed one more sip of courage, for she swept to the bar and poured herself some brandy, all the while giving her new grounds boy a look of almost gloomy erotic anticipation. Taking a quick slug, she dropped the glass onto the bar and began her advance, weaving toward him across the broad shag carpet. Halfway there, however, her stride tightened into a little stutter step, like that of a Japanese serving girl. And then she was not moving at all, was just standing there in the middle of the room, her lacquered face suddenly the color of wood ash. Abruptly she turned and lunged back across the room and into the downstairs bath, where she began to vomit what sounded like a seven-course dinner. Bone knew he should have welcomed the clamor, that it amounted to a saving bell for him. But all he felt was aversion.

  In a cool and deliberate expression of what he felt, he took three quick steps over to one of the lady’s sculptures, an apparent bicycle chain welded rigid and sprouting a series of clockworks, and he kicked both it and its pedestal across the room, where it chipped a sizable corner off the television set.

  Feeling better after that, he wandered over to the bathroom and looked in upon his unfortunate employer. She was standing back from the toilet, as if frightened by the great pool of filth she had spawned. And she was moaning.

  Bone did not know what to say to her. “Not feeling too good, huh?” he tried.

  But that only made her moan louder.

  “It’s a damn shame, all right,” he allowed, waffling back from the door, preparing to leave. “Well, take care. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You can’t go now!”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “My nightie’s wet!”

  “So take it off.”

  “My robe. Get my robe upstairs.”

  “Sure thing.”

  In her room the only robe in view was a man’s—heavy, opaque, one Bone would not be able to see through—so he looked no further. Coming back downstairs he found Mrs. Little hiding behind the bathroom door, with just her hand visible, reaching for the robe. Her Frederick’s of Hollywood outfit lay in a heap in the tub.

  “You’ll be all right now,” he said, hopefully turning away again.

  But she disagreed. “No. You help me upstairs.”

  He saw no reason why she could not have made it on her own, but since he had no desire to be out on the street again tomorrow he muttered another “Sure thing” and helped the lady upstairs to her room, where she fell snuffling into bed, alternately begging him to forgive her and playing the grande dame totally aghast at her gaucherie: “I can’t imagine what happened—it’s never happened to me before. Never in my life.” And then she made a clumsy grab for him, which he wearily eluded.

  “You still smell of puke,” he explained, in his best bedside manner.

  “Then get the hell out of here,” she whined. “Go play with yourself.”

  Bone started to leave, but she grabbed his coat sleeve and held on.

  “No, you just shit here, Joe,” she said, slurring her words. “Shit here and hold my hand.”

  Bone was sober enough to know he was not Joe, bu
t he sat down on the edge of the bed anyway and took her hand. And suddenly he began to feel an enormous exhaustion. He wanted nothing in the world so much as to stretch out beside her and sleep, but he was not about to put himself in a position that could lead to a sexual showdown.

  “Bet you think I’m ashamed,” she said. “Bet you think I’m a mesh.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Not at all, your ash, Joe. Course I’m a mesh—I know that. But not always, lemme tell you. You know who you’re lookin’ at, Joe? You got any idea?”

  “No idea.”

  “The Queen, thash who. Monmouth College Homecoming Queen, nineteen hunder and for—” She giggled at her ridiculous mistake. “And fifty-five. Thash old nuff, huh?”

  “Congratulations,” Bone said.

  “Old hot lips, that was me, Joe.”

  “Hot lips, huh?”

  “Body that wouldn’t quit, let me tell you.”

  “And still hasn’t.”

  “You bet your ash.” And now she smiled reflectively. “Them Tekes, though—what a buncha hornies they were, huh? They had this auction, ya know. To raise money for some damn thing or other—I can’t remember—and you know what they got me to do?”

  “No.”

  “Shtrip, thash what! But just down to my unnerwear, course. We wasn’t so fuckin’ filthy back then.”

  “The good old days.”

  “You bet your ash.”

  “Again.”

  Bone said as little as possible from then on, and in time Mrs. Little’s fond memories faded and her eyes began to flutter closed, probably unable to support any longer the weight of her half-inch false lashes. Finally Bone gave her a comradely pat on the arm and tiptoed out of the room. He was just starting down the stairs when her voice came after him again, like a harpoon.

  “We try it again tomorrow night, okay? I won’t drink sho much.”

  At that Bone raised his eyes to the ceiling in unthinking comic dismay, and immediately realized his mistake—a drunk’s mistake—as his right foot missed the next step and he went tumbling the rest of the way down the carpeted stairs and rapped his head vigorously on the bottom baluster. For what seemed like minutes he lay there trying to decide whether to open his mouth and yell or run back upstairs and beat his new employer to death with one of her sculptures. Instead he got to his feet and went into the kitchen, where he picked up the wall phone and dialed.