Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“It’s actually kind of cool — I mean, about your mom and the cop. Very forties. You know, you shouldn’t be so judgmental, Tull. Trinnie hasn’t had the easiest life. You’re not the only one stuff happened to.”

“You’re so Zen ,” he said nastily. “Are you a Buddha-bitch?”

“Fuck you.”

She sulked, slowing her pace as they continued uphill. Pullman sniffed at the elaborately coiffed flower beds along the pricey road.

Tull turned back to make a peace offering. “He ate dinner at the house the other night — Sherlock Dowling — and I could tell Mom wanted us to talk. Wanted me to talk. Creepy! What am I supposed to say? ‘How come you couldn’t find Dad?’ Or, ‘Hey, can I see your gun?’ ”

Lucy laughed. “He’s probably not such a horrible person. Anyway, I’d like to talk to him.”

“For your book?”

“He is a real detective — and I am writing a mystery, you know.”

“Oh, right! You know I am so happy that my personal tragedy is bringing everyone together!”

They both laughed this time.

The Mauck sat in its blue-zoned berth outside Four Winds. A gull wing cantilevered over the passenger’s side just enough to accommodate a chill demitasse of September air.

Edward was depressed. Today, he didn’t have it in him to admire the orchids, freshly arranged; or to engage the mechanism that would eject the cushioned, canopied buggy into the scholastic world. He had ordered Eulogio (Epitacio was off with Grandpa Lou) to take a walk — he didn’t want to have to look at hunching, dandruffy shoulder pads while the driver labored over his Spanish crossword. He didn’t even want to see the gang; the gang was doing well enough. All were preoccupied, he thought somewhat sardonically; Lucy with her bestseller , Tull with his mythic search , Boulder with her new little film … let them go with God. Allah be praised! As for Edward, he’d had enough. He was tired and in pain; aside from the acne, a cyst in one of his kidneys was now saying hello. He felt sorry for himself, an indulgence he ordinarily loathed. But today there was a moratorium on his usual rigor. Today, Headward the First, as the witty bully had once anointed him, cried real tears.

“You and me, Pullie, we’re two of a kind,” he said, kneading its neck.

The mottled dog looked up with an eye the size of a horse’s.

“We’re almost ‘done,’ aren’t we? But who would I rather be … would I rather be Tull, or Lucy? Eulogio? Would I rather be you? For an hour, I would — or a day. I’d like that, Pullie, if you could arrange it. I’d run and run like a fucker.” If the Dane had any reciprocal yearnings, albeit not for running, of which he did precious little, but for living like a sweet and damaged human king, he kept them to himself. “But you’re a healthy sovereign. You’re the anomaly — you’ll live forever, won’t you, Pullie?”

The dog and Grandpa Lou were his only confessors, but they were enough. He lifted the silken hood to dab at his eyes — today would be a gaudy blowout, a veritable Mardi Gras, a saturnalia of self-pity! He wailed, letting loose a torrent; his body shook convulsively, chin knocking against titanium support, chronicle of a short life foretold.

Then something peculiar happened.

Shadows fell across the front seat, accompanied by a sharp intake of astonished breath.

“Eulogio?”

For a moment, the hair of his fissured head stood on end. A tiny thing with matted hair looked in — dirty wet chick, beneath aluminum wing.

“Who are you!” gasped Edward, naked-faced and weeping.

He could not stop his ejaculations — water still sprang from stunned eyes, and body still shook. She stared at the cousin with the horror of a toddler at the fun house; yet much like before, her actions contrary to her fear, the waif found herself inside the truck.

As she walked toward him, zombie-like, Edward’s tears abated while his panic grew. “You’re the girl —the girl from before!”

Pullman tardily stood to greet her, and the sudden bigness of the beast gave her a final push off the ragged cliffs of consciousness, dropping her hard at the mouth of some faraway cove. The Dane tongued her cheek while Edward shouted for help.

Eulogio rushed in and regarded the collapsed girl with confusion. The cousin imperiously ordered him to make a getaway, and when he balked, Edward made it clear that if he did not secure the Mauck and drive off at once, he would be sacked, as would his brother, Epitacio; as would his sister, Candelaria; as would his Mexican mother and Peruvian father, wherever they were; as would all Monasterios who walked the earth, making sure to include Eulogio’s present, past and future wives, unborn children and children’s children. The reinvigorated cousin added (in Spanish, for effect) that he would then fire Christ and the Devil himself.

“ Comprendiste todo ? Then, vamanos !”

Neither father nor mother was home; smuggling her in wasn’t a problem. A more serious hurdle would be to keep the nursing staff at bay — of late, they’d been hovering too close for comfort.

After carrying the groggy girl to his employer’s apartments, poor Eulogio was upbraided further. While he did not relish his role as torturer, Edward knew how far he must go to ensure that the easygoing minor domo held his mud. Thus said, it is unnecessary to elaborate on the cousin’s scoldings; they were adequate to achieve their end.

Finally, alone with the girl, an assessment was required: was she ill or simply exhausted? Amaryllis stirred fitfully on the couch, looking more frightened than anything else. He would nurse her back as one might an eaglet fallen from a nest; with medicos in residence twenty-four/seven, it would be safe enough to monitor her progress and seek immediate attention if the need arose. There was no reason to raise a flag, for now.

“My name is Edward Trotter,” he said, handing her a cup of lovingly, if laboriously prepared, hot chocolate. “You, if I recall, are Amaryllis —like the flower. And, more vaguely, as my dear friend Tull attested, like the Texan city.”

She nodded gravely at her host, as if he had exposed her last and deepest secret.

“Can you talk?” he asked. She cautiously indicated that she could. “Well then, would you?”

“Where am I?”

“At my home,” he said, “otherwise whimsically known as the Boar’s Head Inn — there’s even a sign ouside: established 1843. It’s where I maintain my apartments and workshop. My parents — you shan’t be meeting them —stay in the main house; and my sister — who you have met — lives up the ‘street,’ above the Majestyk — that’s the movie palace — the whole of our fair town being called Olde CityWalk and bordered by Stradella Road, which passes through the exceedingly dull principality of Bel-Air … itself a part of Los Angeles County, I believe. I don’t think we’ve seceded quite yet.”

The shell-shocked Amaryllis could make no sense of what he was saying. She dumbfoundedly looked to the dog, whose long, fat body now hibernated amid piles of books and dry, deformed papier-mâché.

“And that ,” he went on, “is Pullman, noblest of harlequins (remember?) — property, so to speak, of cousin Tull, né Toulouse, who I’m confident you do recall. At any rate, he was the first of the clan you laid eyes on. It was actually Tull who introduced us: ‘us’ being myself, the well-known Boulder Langon and the less-well-known Lucille Rose Trotter, sister and future novelist of note.”