Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Now he could see white, tented forms — furniture? — in the rooms within, but was interrupted when a daymare shape came from nowhere shouting, “Little fucker!” Tull was startled enough that he couldn’t read any features, though it was wearing bib overalls, the perfect parody of a ghoulish Mr. Greenjeans. In a blink, the figure rudely tumbled, care of a certain Dane; the terrified man, having met a fair match for the Olympian pedestal’s remains, retreated to the severed column while Tull made a sprinting Hardy Boy getaway. Regal and unruffled, Pullman strutted a beat in his master’s direction, then paused, slyly turning with calm eye and tarry muzzle to fire a last warning shot toward the groundskeeper — the astonished head of whom already appeared in an upper portal of the cylindrical mirage. Then, like a Saturday-morning-television creation, the aristocratic beast leapt toward his charge, through the chilly gantlet of yews, past the huge myrtle balls leading to the brambled entry that would carry them back to Carcassone Way and the homely, reassuring traffic of the world.

Since this is a book of houses — shelters for the living and the dead — it should not be unusual that our narrative approach the boulevards of Westwood and Wilshire, epicenter of what is still nostalgically called the Village; an unlikely place for a cemetery. Yet there it exists, sewn behind the back alley of Avco’s smoky glass façade like a spare black button beneath a lapel, a stone’s throw from Qwikcopiers and cineplexes, barbers and Borders, middling lunch crowd sushi bars, oversize pet boutiques and the smug bone-white ridges of formidable crosswalks linking high-tower marble REIT palaces. Strolling the memorial’s smallish grounds, one notes a rustic, dignified intimacy, unexpected considering the outlandishness of its bright, blandly civic context. Though the parkland’s beginnings are for some other history, we will soon become familiar with its laconic caretaker — the one with the JESUS IS COMING! LOOK BUSY bumper sticker on his sun-warped maroon Marquis; the one unmaliciously called Sling Blade, because of a casual resemblance to the sentimental creation of a well-known Hollywood hyphenate. We will learn to embrace him, as he does so honorably his extended family of dead.

At dusk, at least three times a week, he watches the arrival of an impeccably dressed old man. The car rolls to its same position and a chauffeur midwifes its passenger’s entry to the world, albeit a sunny netherworld; Mr. Louis Trotter then stands before a pricey five-hundred-square-foot patch, the largest family plot in the yard, spotted hands clasped at small of back, pensive captain on a ghost ship prow, well-oiled skin the color of ivory, visionary orbs the singular, crustacean blue of the epic self-made. Hairless, save for bushy tangle of eyebrow, charcoal thicket of inner ear and friar’s whitish fringe peeking from collar like a threadbare angora wrap. The enormous gnomish space between nose and upper lip has the piquantly poignant effect of making him soft and beasty, fragile yet full of hope, imperious and obeisant. Like Monet’s haystacks (one of which hangs on the wall at Saint-Cloud), his cunning face, open to the endless translations of moving sunlight upon still life, invites scrutiny; one could make a vocation of its study, as of a rock or an illuminated text. Perhaps the answer to the riddle of its magnetism is that it provokes something exquisitely, abominably parental — you focus on its moods, growths and grandeur as a precocious child madly, futilely attempting to learn the catechism of his father.

Mr. Trotter is an animal who speaks — no, chuffs , literally, the way a dog does — Tull sometimes observed him and Pullman greet each other that way, muzzle to muzzle, a fraternal clearing of throats by the amicably encaged. But the old man holds dominion and, like the wild place of his sovereignty, is primordial as well. Nothing governs him: he chuffs when and where he pleases. The despotism of such a quality is, for most of his subjects, irresistibly charismatic. In his presence one feels like a strop, a worn leathery thing waiting to be rubbed against, the more for Mr. Trotter to hone or drop his quills. His ability to enlist fascination continually surprises — he mesmerizes, for while changing constantly, he remains unchanged. Paid underlings and blood relatives alike journey roughly through the seasons, hanging on for their lives, for his life, renewing themselves each day so that he might be renewed, willing the old man to be cozily predictable, as one wills the same of all one’s fellow men. (He nearly gives them what they want, and in so doing binds and grafts those close, addicts them, even minor players — and sometimes, too, by another eccentricity: he is a perversely lavish tipper.) The minions swig morning lattes, already beginning their time-clock day by dreamily nudging him toward Good Boss and Benefactor, Good Father and Mentor, but it is their dream and theirs alone, dreamers trying to undream something that they, with inferior twitching animal noses — why, they can’t even properly chuff! — sense is not quite right. All efforts come to naught and the strop gets its workaday workout; he will not be tamed. To make things worse, he’s something of a dandy. His bald-faced buck-toothed mien, hovering above faintly absurd ascots and greatcoats, could not be more touching and inscrutable.

Mr. Trotter likes it here. Nothing showy: no Gardens of Ascension or Harmony Hills, Whispering Glades or Resurrection Slopes, no Babylands or Vales of Memory. He sees someone looking but takes no mind. Sling Blade and Dot, the park’s chatty, efficient manager, have watched him pace his plot for almost two years, himself a movable monument, pharaonically obsessed by a single thought: who would build his tomb?

The old man has spent a decade quietly researching locus and method. He considered cremation but felt it too forced, too sudden; as big a fan of fire as he was, he wished a slower, less radical denouement. He consulted with Buddhists, who could arrange to dice him up, mixing crushed bones with barley flour and the milk of the dri, the more easily to be digested by vultures on Tibet’s rock-strewn plateau — the idea being that buzzards, those infernal landlords, would expediently ransack the house, tossing soul-tenant out onto street, “perforce accelerating reincarnation.” The Parsis did the same in India, sans plateau; the dead played hide-and-seek within round stone dokhmas called towers of silence.

It had all been great fun, hell of an education for an unschooled man, but in the end Louis Trotter decided to go the way of the Jews (he’d always admired the Jews) and be laid out in a plain pine box. But where? For the first time in his life, he was daunted. The irony was that his fortune came from waste management — quarries and fills were his métier. In the trade they called him a geomancer, legendary for his sixth sense of the land. He chuffed aloud and mordantly sniggered: having a bit of trouble with the eighteenth hole .

He found an architectural book on Tallum, a cemetery in a forest south of Stockholm, and impulsively flew there on his son’s BBJ. The memento mori above chapel portico was worth the trip: a Brothers Grimm oak zealously overtook the plinth of a columned temple, and between its pillars was carved HODIE MIHI CRAS TIBI ( Today Me, Tomorrow You ) … yet so far away, in the cold Swedish ground! What could he have been thinking? Besides, all those ramrod trees and open spaces reminded him of the freakish cloister he had made for Katrina as a gift on her wedding day. Fifteen years had passed since he’d created the storybook meadow, with its perfect replica of the famed folly of Désert de Retz — La Colonne Détruite. He sometimes wandered there, but made certain she never knew.