Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg

was the reverse, that she had almost never let the girls out of her sight. Of the two, Bone was not sure which was worse. The kids undoubtedly knew. But they weren’t talking.
    In time he decided that a little sunshine would not do the two of them any harm either, and after writing a note to Mo—“Baby’s with me. Think I’ve found a buyer for him. B.”—he put a cap and jacket on the kid and drove him the few blocks to the park across from the Mission.
    Little Alex Five, as Swanson called him, was thirteen months old and just now beginning to toddle. So Bone carried him to a bench near the sprawling rose garden, which was not yet in bloom, and the baby immediately began to work his way around the bench, holding on most of the time but occasionally letting go and taking a few tentative steps out into the grass, where he would stop and do a little balancing act and then abruptly turn around and lunge back to the safety and support of the stone seat. Bone moved about ten feet away and sat down on the ground, trying to play his new role of superannuated baby-sitter as coolly as possible. If he were seen at it by someone he knew, so be it. But he did not particularly want to appear to like it; that would have been a touch precious, he thought, possibly even sick. A grown man alone with someone else’s baby—in modern America it was definitely a combustible situation. So he sat his distance and glanced over at the infant every now and then. And in time he realized that little Alex did not like the new gulf between them, in fact was about to challenge it. Twice he started out and then stopped, sat down and crawled back to the bench, where he immediately pulled himself up and resumed his enterprise, scowling over at Bone like a quarterback trying to read a new defense. Finally Bone offered him a little encouragement and the baby set out again, carefully stepping the first half of his journey and then falling the rest of the way, plunging into Bone’s hands. Bone told him he was pretty big stuff and the kid gurgled happily. But he wanted more. He crawled back to the bench, pulled himself up, and made another beeline for Bone. Then he kept doing it, over and over.
    Still Bone had time to sit and smoke and observe the park scene. As usual there was the Frisbee set, young hippie types who had piled out of their minibuses to spend a fruitful afternoon sailing Frisbees back and forth, to each other as well as to their dogs, the inevitable pack of mangy Dobermans and German shepherds and other kindred gentle breeds they seldom went anywhere without. When Bone thought of his own young stud days, the college years and after, he could not conceive of having to drag a dog through all that. To his way of thinking, young men needed dogs about as badly as they needed clap. Yet these characters clung devotedly to their canines. And about the only reason he could see was the species’ unselective capacity for instant adoration. To feed a dog was to become a god of sorts. Maybe not to Mom or Dad or to the creeps back in school, or to the pigs and straights of the world, but to your dog, oh yes, you were a winner, you were bright and beautiful, you were loved .
    But then Bone had to admit the syndrome was hardly confined to raunchy kids in minibuses, especially not in Santa Barbara. Downtown or on the beach or here in the parks, or for that matter along any residential sidewalk, the story was pretty much the same—dogshit. Or as Cutter put it, “Pedigreed dogshit. You can always tell by the slight royal purple cast it leaves on your sneakers.”
    “It was not the sort of day, however, to sit and ponder dogs and their waste. The afternoon sun, warm and brilliant, lay like a coat of fresh paint on the adobe façade of the Mission. On the stone steps in front, a number of tourists sat in shirtsleeves while others wandered the colonnade or snapped the mandatory snapshots around the old Moorish fountain. And closer, beyond the rose garden,