by Bruce Wagner
CHAPTER 2
The Digger’s Tomb
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.
A gypsy, a nomad, a vagabond of death, Mr. Trotter had loitered the twenty-six cemeteries of greater Paris (for a seven-figure fee, a dubious realtor promised a shadier berth at Père-Lachaise near one of two pairs: Abélard and Héloïse or Gertrude and Alice B.)—on to Venice, then Campo Verano in Rome—Malta and Milan, Staglieno in Genoa and Almudena in Madrid—St. Petersburg, Cambria, Prague, Turkey, Cairo, Scotland … Brompton, Kensal Green and Highgate (they’d plant him, said yet another Underworld broker, “not sixteen meters from George Eliot”) with jaunts to the thirty-one necropoli of New Orleans—Metairie, Lafayette and Odd Fellow’s Rest—then on to the song-line haunts of the Outback—squatter-infested mausoleums of Manila, Ecuador, Brazil and beyond the infinite. Yet all roads led to Westwood, and he had to laugh. Wasn’t it always like that? If his soul was in Bel-Air, then its gloved hand could the more easily reach over to that humble little place in the Village; you-can’t-go-home-again be damned. Here would lie Louis Trotter, in a mildly meditative, sedately urban place, proximal to the variegated myths of his life. Yet who would build his tomb?
As usual, the quandary made him chuff; Dot’s chafing panty hose, sounding not unlike sandpaper, made him turn.
“We haven’t seen you in a while!”
She was a plain, doughty nurse and he tolerated her well enough—no sense alienating the afterlife custodians. (Once, he’d almost done just that by proffering her a hundred-dollar bill to leave him in peace.) She wore a heinous frock, one in a series which he detested and thought almost an incentive to be elsewhere interred.
“I’ve been traveling,” he said, with a wince.
“I used to have the travel bug. But it’s important to be safe, don’t you think? World’s become such a danger
ous place. I’d like to go to New York, where my sister Ethel lives; they’ve done a marvelous job getting the murders down. Nothing could be as terrible as this town—my Lord, you’re as likely to be killed by the police as you are by a rapster. The police used to be helpful, but now, well they gun you down for jaywalking. Plant dope on you without batting an eye. But the terrorists! I think the McVeighs, the homegrowns, are worse than the Jackal types any day—that’s what Ethel says and I agree. There was a man on the morning show, his entire job is smuggling guns through airport metal detectors, looking for weak spots. Works for the government. Even he said there’s nothing you can do. Did you read in the Times about the man who impersonated a pilot? Everyone knew him at LAX—well, he stole baggage and came and went just as he pleased for five years! Lived in Venice. Police found a whole room full of Tumi luggage; he took them right off the conveyor! They said once he even got in the cockpit. Now, what in the world would he be doing in a cockpit? Just chatting away! The man on the morning show was saying that kind of thing wasn’t even the problem. It’s the viruses—and I’m not talking computer. Oh, I am sick to death of the viruses! Did you know that if someone blew a cloud of anthrax in over Manhattan—and believe me, they’re out there figuring out how to do it—it would be three days before anyone even got symptoms?”
The old man smiled and floated backward like a jack-o’-lantern putting out to sea; she went after him with a long pole.
“This was on the morning show, can you imagine? I’m not sure I want to start my day hearing it. Anyway, he said that by then—by the time they even found out about it—a lot of folks who were exposed would’ve already disappeared and gone back home: you know, tourists flying all around, some of ’em right back to Westwood for all we know. And the way the planes recirculate the air—well if someone in the last row of coach so much as clears his throat, first class gets it right in the lungs at the speed of sound. You’re minding your own business watching one of those dreadful movies or munching on honey-coated peanuts—I love those things!—and well now evidently with anthrax—and this is what the morning-show man said—with anthrax the infection starts with a little cold, but then you get all better. There’s even a medical term he used for that … what was it? The ‘eclipse’ or something. Yes! The anthrax eclipse. Well it goes away, then before you know it you’re sick again, but this time instead of a cold, it’s a terrible hemorrhaging pneumonia. I think syphilis is like that too—I mean, with an eclipse. The man on the morning show said people clutch their throats and die right in the middle of a sentence, like bad actors in a play. And the doctors—well your doctor won’t have a clue. Did you know that when Ethel had shingles, it took him a full week to diagnose? Mind you, he’s a cardiologist, so that’s partially explainable. But when it came time to prescribe, she said he had to peek inside a book—the older ones don’t even know how to use the Internet. Now, this is a top doctor, a Park Avenue man. And we’re not talking anthrax, we’re talking shingles. And Ethel said that whatever he gave her made it worse!”
“Yes! Well!” he said, backing off as if she had the pox herself. “It’s a difficult time! The world can be very unpleasant! And you, Dot, you have a good afternoon!”
He bared a bucktooth, winced, chuffed and slunk off.
“Mr. Trotter,” she called out. “What a marvelous coat! Never saw such a fabric.”
“Thank you,” he said vainly, pleased at being out of her clutches; he had almost reached the car. “A tailor found it, in London. Bespoke, of course.” He instantly regretted the use of the word.
“What?”
“The ensemble—it was custom-made. Custom-made!”
“I’m reserving a place for you in Dot Campbell’s Best-Dressed Hall of Fame—and that’s a hard thing to achieve!”
“Thank you!” he said, shivering at the rebarbative honor, doffing and chuffing and shambling toward the black-sapphire Silver Seraph, where Epitacio waited dutifully by open door. The eavesdropping Sling Blade still raked at the lawn; Mr. Trotter caught his eye, nodding as he climbed in.
The tinted window came down and the old man made sure to see Dot’s back before gesturing him over. Sling Blade approached and looked in, where the visitor sat as if floating upon the French navy–piped Cotswold hides; perched on a shiny ascot, the elfin face twisted up and fairly twinkled, an odd vintage brooch in a velvety box. He pressed a business card and some green to Sling Blade’s hand and smiled perspicaciously. A secret covenant had been made—the car sped away.
It was almost time to lock the gate. The caretaker strolled to his benefactor’s plot. A shallow wind cinematically stirred the leaves while he stared at the grass, wondering what stony monument would there be born.
CHAPTER 3
Saint-Cloud Road
By the time they reached home, Pullman had long overtaken him; the boy ran till he feared his heart would burst, never looking back. The gates of his grandfather’s house, electronically controlled and far more massive than the corroded ones of Carcassone, were, thankfully, open. A dirty vintage BMW meant his mother’s “friend” was there.
Pullman lingered, then peeled off, disappearing past a fountain, while Tull opened the front door, heavy enough that Grandpa Lou had installed sensors and tiny motors to help it along. The interior of the Wallace Neff–designed estate, built for a silent-film director in the twenties, and the design of its sixteen hilltop acres will later be revealed; they held no interest for the hungry boy scudding over terrazzo floors, headlong toward the kitchen.
Ralph sat on a stool, across from a Sub-Zero the size of a giant’s armoire. The handsome, mordantly stubbled face with dimpled chin, hollowed cheeks and tormented eyes reminded Tull of a monk in flight from a monastery—never mind that Trinnie had decked him out in Dries and motocross Menichetti and in six scant weeks addicted him to Keratase emulsions, Hortus Mirabilis elixirs, Lorenzo Villoresi aftershaves and the arcane almond pastes of Santa Maria Novella. Today he wore an absurd Edwardian tux that made Louis Trotter look positively staid. The popinjay’s head hung heavily, mocked by the pots and pans that dangled around him in cheerful, coppery profusion.
“Hey, Ralph.”
He looked up, annoyed. “Why do you call me that?”
“Sorry. I forget.”
With a grunt, Tull broke the vacuum’d death grip of the Sub-Zero and began to forage.
“Do I fuck with your name? Do I call you ‘Teal’?”
Tull phonily mused. “You can call me that.” That was bogus; it would have irritated him no end. Lugging Tupperware filled with Southern-fried leftovers from the shelves, he changed tack. “Did you hear about the tapir? It pulled off a zookeeper’s arm. It was on the news.”
“There’s a rocky island near San Francisco,” said Ralph smugly, “where some naturalists live. They saw a sea lion wash ashore, its ass bit off by a shark, clean. It lived for days, shimmying along on the front fins—whenever the thing tried to rest, a gull would come give it a little peck and it’d move on. This went on for days.”
“That’s rad.”
“A perfect marriage of Beckett and Bosch.” He simpered, then dementedly shrieked, “Teal!” like a sadistic gull himself. The boy recoiled, glowering.
“Oh! Then there’s the whale that got trapped too far inland when the water started icing up—Alaska or something. The polar bears just sat in a ring around the hole swiping at it while a shark had his way from underneath. Oh, the natural world! How pristine and unforgiving! Like Hollywood, no?” He wriggled and sneered and cockadoodled: “Teal! Teal!”
Tull lost his cool. “If you want your name pronounced Rafe, then why don’t you just spell it that way? With an f instead of an l?”
While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Tull baited his mother’s “friend”—the latest, most tolerable of a line of friends stretching as far back as he could remember—he wasn’t exactly indifferent.
“How would you know how I spell it?” asked the poseur.
“Mom said.”
“We were talking about Ralph Fiennes, the actor”—Tull used the l again, as in Ralph’s Foodmarket, and egregiously rhymed Fiennes with Viennas—“and she said you pronounced yours the same way.”
“It’s Rafe!” he furied, nostrils flaring. “Rafe Fines!” The thirtysomething self-anointed screenwriter from Colorado drew a hand through long, gel’d hair. “In this town, unless you’re very lucky, unless you’re Ron Bass”—he spat the name out like pus—“you need something else, something small and subliminal. What the Jews call minor shtick.” Tull greedily set upon half a cold chicken, green peas and whipped potatoes. “Take ‘Rafe Fines.’ You brought him up. ‘Rafe Fines’ ”—he called out the name as if he were announcing the nominees for the Golden Globes—“is a ‘double hit.’ You read ‘Ralph,’ but you hear ‘Rafe.’ You read ‘Fee-ehnnez’ but hear ‘Fines.’ The juxtaposition makes it memorable. It oscillates. And that’s especially true of a ‘double hit.’ ”