by Bruce Wagner
“And why,” said the cousin, having a bit of sport, “would Grandpa Lou be suddenly inclined to joyride in the Mauck?”
“It’s not for your grandpa,” he answered, one-upping.
“Really!” said Edward, like a Roman toying with a slave boy. “Then who is it for? Is it for you, Blade?” They’d somehow stopped calling him by the full appellation, for the groundless fear he might take offense.
“That fellow in Santa Barbara.”
Eureka! Edward winked at Toulouse, who had not by a long shot recovered from the blow delivered only minutes before.
“Which fellow?” asked the boy.
“You know who he’s talking about,” said the cousin snidely.
The caretaker became circumspect. “I’m going to stay out of everybody’s business.”
“Well then, why does he need the Mauck?” asked Toulouse.
“Town Car broke down on the freeway somewhere.”
“He’s driving himself?” asked the astonished Lucy.
“I didn’t say that. Car broke down over in the Valley. Gonna go pick him up.”
Sling Blade was unaware of the blood ties between Toulouse and the agreeable “fellow” he occasionally ferried from one place to another. (He never thought to ask his employer about the big man; that was his way.) Mr. Trotter didn’t wish Marcus to know about the boy—not yet—so had kept the cognoscenti to a minimum. That way, there’d be less chance of a slipup. He had already issued a rather stern warning to the Weiners, but was concerned that Harry and Ruth would inadvertently kvell about their grandson to Marcus before he was psychologically prepared to “deal.”
Sling Blade asked if he might use the rest room, and was pointed the way.
When he disappeared, an agitated Edward lifted his gauzy mask. “Toulouse, this is it. This is fate! You’ve got to get in the Mauck!” Lucy and Toulouse gaped at him. “I’m telling you—go! Hide in the Mauck! You want to see your father, don’t you?”
“But—” stammered Toulouse, “hide where?”
“In the media cabinet! It’s totally empty—they’re swapping out the components. Take my sister if you’re so scared. There’s room for both of you!”
“Oh my God …” hissed Lucy, like air rushing from a tire.
“I can’t—” said Toulouse.
“Then you’ll never see him! And you’ll always remember this day! You’re the one who found him, OK? And they’re doing what they always do—conducting business on their time and at their convenience. It’s your right, don’t you get it? What if he runs away again? You don’t think that could happen? What will you say then?”
“Come on, Toulouse, let’s hide in the closet!”
“But what if he—”
Edward shook his head dismissively. “Aw, he’s chickenshit.”
“Why don’t you just go fuck yourself, Edward?”
He had never spoken like that to his cousin, and the goad quickly replaced the veil, not out of effrontery but rather to conceal a classic if malformed Cheshire grin.
In mere sweaty minutes, Lucy and Toulouse stood still as hostages upon the plush carpet and chopped wiring-conduit remains of the Mauck media center bowels. The plucky scamp took the opportunity to stick her tongue down his throat; he was about to push her away when suddenly she started.
“Oh my God, I left my pad! Be right back!”
She bolted from the truck just as Sling Blade entered the garage, lifting the gull wing to clamber in. In a blur of moments, he had switched on the engine, secured the passenger door and backed out into the circular drive.
Toulouse would tell him it was only a prank—after they passed through the gate, he’d reveal himself, then have Sling Blade drive him home. (He only hoped the caretaker wouldn’t be so startled by his presence that he’d swerve into something.) But how would he live it down to his cousin? He would have to say Sling Blade heard him cough and that’s how he was discovered. Or maybe that he’d gotten an electric shock from one of the exposed wires and had cried out …
Sling Blade turned on the radio and began to sing the way people do when they’re alone. Being a stowaway was more fun than he’d thought; he was glad Lucy had left. He could smell her on his upper lip, and wiped a residue of saliva away with his cuff. His driver bantered with the guards as the Stradella delivery gate was raised, and then they were on the open road, winding toward the West Gate.
Toulouse thought of the immigrant boy he had once read about, hiding in the wheel well of a jet to escape his country, and for some reason that made him think of the trip to Easter Island—he could see Edward in the AirBuggy, stalwartly motoring among great stone moai. The impossible revelation of a “street” bond between his father and Amaryllis brought to mind the dinner they had all shared at Trader Vic’s … His thoughts continued willy-nilly: on their way to Cedars, Lucy was in the midst of telling him his father was still alive—then he tasted pomegranate jelly, and blood in his mouth too, unleashed by the fist of the Four Winds bully. He winced at the sight of his mother weeping in bed, fearful to meet the man whose absence had governed her aborted life.
By the time he emerged from his reveries, Sling Blade had already steered the Mauck onto the 405, past the hulking hillside clinic of the Getty (where Amaryllis had communed with gilt-edged saints, and devils too), and joined the artery of the eastbound Ventura. He would go the distance now; there was nothing to fear. He would not be a cowering Trinnie … hadn’t he been watered by his grandfather’s blood? They had all seen his dad, every single one: Burnham and Uncle Dodd and Sling Blade, even the Monasterios—was he, Toulouse Trotter, the very son, less than them? He stewed in the cabinet, raging at Grandpa Lou for so elegantly bamboozling him. Your father’s not ready, he said … as if anyone ever was. As if anyone in this whole fucked-up scenario could be. When the old man accused him of being selfish—just as the detective had! they were a coven, conspiring together!—it had caught the boy off guard. Wily, clever old man! Now he’d had enough. Edward was right; fate dictated the moment. It was his time and his right, and he would lay claim.
Sling Blade muttered, “There they are, there they are,” and the Mauck slowed, edging to the shoulder. “Stay in there, stay in there, you dumb fuck.”
Toulouse wondered who he was talking about; maybe his father was stepping from the disabled car. Maybe his father would be struck down by a drunk or a Caltrans truck and that would be the end of it.
He opened the door of the cabinet and listened a moment to the voices beneath the drone of speeding traffic. Hunching over, he crept out to peer through the tinted window. A tow was attaching itself to the Town Car while Sling Blade and a suited man spoke; the boy assumed he was his father’s chauffeur. That was when he saw Marcus Weiner heading for the Mauck.
He panicked and ran back to the closet. Fate now dictated that his bravado was no more; he whispered imprecations and prayed he wouldn’t sob or soil his pants. He could hear Sling Blade helping with the door, and the carriage was rocked by the weight of entry. What if out of sheer curiosity his father opened the closet and found him hiding there? Toulouse knew little about the man’s disease: maybe schizophrenics didn’t like jack-in-the-box surprises and reacted violently, even bloodily. Hadn’t the man recently been fingered for homicide? He never heard details … maybe he’d been released on a technicality and was guilty after all—that would be a fitting end to the saga of Toulouse Trotter’s poignant search: torn to shreds à la Hannibal by his mentally deranged dad! Lucy would have to run a fresh proposal by Mr. Hookstratten. Might not be appropriate for the kiddies.
Marcus lowered himself in the captain’s chair with a grunt. It seemed the man in the suit would be staying behind with Triple-A. “We’ll be fine,” he heard Sling Blade call out, to which the man responded, “Oh, they know I’m not going ahead with y’all—no one has a problem with that.” The Mauck shook again as the caretaker entered through the passenger side and pulled the door down after him. He opened the fridge and got an Evian for M
arcus, who thanked him.
Toulouse sat cross-legged in the darkness. If he never saw his father face-to-face, at least he’d had this proximity, at once horrifying and intimate. He could hear the rider’s breath, and even a few low farts. Occasionally, Sling Blade made small talk or inquired if his passenger wished to hear music. Toulouse wondered where they were going. His plan was to escape as soon as they reached their destination, but that might be difficult if it was a secure area—say, an airport runway. They’d probably get gas or stretch their legs soon enough … but why would they? Onboard facilities were more than adequate, and Sling Blade had most likely received instructions discouraging pit stops.
The big man began to hum, and Toulouse was swamped by embarrassment and self-loathing. His grandfather was right; he was selfish. How could he have let Edward manipulate him into this absurd, potentially cruel enterprise? Hiding in the closet like an a-hole! Incredibly, he had just been told of the mind-blowing ties between the girl—his beloved—and the father he had staked everything to find … Amaryllis, whom this mysterious being had nurtured (according to Edward), would never have stooped so low; Dad raised her with more dignity than that. But here he was, the putative son, quailing in the media cabinet. For shame! He would have to have a “sit-down” with Grandpa Lou. He would tell him he had decided it was unnecessary to meet the gentleman who had sired him—and that all he wished was for Mr. Weiner to stabilize and move on to some measure of happiness; that initiating the search had been a terrible experiment in egotism which had caused irreparable harm to his mother in the process. He would hereafter devote his life to good works. During their study of religion at Four Winds, the students learned of a monastery in the heart of Hollywood filled with cloistered Benedictine nuns. Perhaps there was an equivalent place for boys. He would live a life of seclusion as penance for his tomfoolery, and in time, after demonstrating proper maturity, might oversee a vast trust established by the Trotter Family Foundation to help those afflicted by mental illness—and homeless children, too. He could administer the moneys without ever leaving the confines of his austere spiritual haven.
Having achieved a near-beatific state during his musings, Toulouse managed to remain calm upon realizing that the MSV had glided off the freeway and was downshifting toward what felt like an end point. Not five minutes later, his feelings were borne out.
The Mauck came to rest. He waited a few minutes after the men had left before emerging from the closet. He moved slowly through the cabin and could smell the not unpleasant, musky imprint of his father; he shivered again with shame.
He crept outside and looked around. They were in some kind of urban park, on a gently sloping grassy hill. At the crest of that hill was a building with a tall smokestack. He saw the figures of Sling Blade and his father sitting on a bench, waiting. Toulouse left the parking area and walked down to the street. There was a graffiti’d sign at the entry—CREMATORIUM—and now he could see that a cemetery abutted the place he’d just been. It stretched for blocks. The surrounding neighborhood looked bleak and dangerous. He had left his StarTAC at Stradella; he would need to find a pay phone to call the cousins, to make Eulogio pick him up. Instead, he retraced his footsteps until he was again beside the MSV.
“Jesus, what are you doing?”
Sling Blade, who had just emerged from the Mauck with two bottles of Evian, barreled toward him.
“It was just a joke! I didn’t mean to …”
“But how did you—”
“I hid in the closet!” he said nervously. “We were just messing around, Blade—it was just a joke! I was going to come out, but you pulled away …”
“A joke! Just a joke that’s gonna get me fired!”
“It’s OK. I’ll take a cab—”
“The hell you will,” said the caretaker, forcefully grabbing his arm. “You come with me!”
“No!—”
“That’s all I need! You getting a drive-by. Now, come on!”
“But what do we say? What do we tell him—”
Sling Blade scratched his head; the boy’s overweening concern about an alibi for the sake of “the heavyset fellow” never even registered. “We’ll just say that—that you’re my nephew.” He cringed at the inadequacy of it all. “Oh shit. Goddamnit, Toulouse! Why’d you do this stupid thing? We’ll just say you’re my nephew, OK? No!—Dot’s nephew! You’re Dot’s nephew—Dot’s my boss. We’ll say she lives around here, OK? You knew where I was gonna be and came around to say hello. Or no! You saw me—like a coincidence. He won’t ask any questions; he’s a little disturbed. When we’re finished here, I’ll take the 10 and drop you near the Getty. And if you tell your grandfather—”
There was little chance that he would.
Toulouse followed him into the chimney-building like one condemned. “What is this place?”
“It’s where they burn up bodies.”
When they reached Mr. Weiner, he was talking to a man who held a shoe box filled with human remains under his arm. The shoe-box man took in Toulouse with vague disapproval, but the boy wouldn’t meet his eye—or anyone else’s. Marcus never gave his son a glance.
Because of this obliviousness, and because Sling Blade’s scowls gradually subsided, Toulouse had the opportunity to scrutinize the burly character now standing at a lectern skimming a ledger of the dead and holding what looked to be a prayerbook in his hand. How handsome his father was, he thought—already much thinner than the day he saw him at the Bel-Air, and with a powerful magnetism about him, though his eyes were red and his face swollen and ruddy from weeping. His suit was finely cut yet capacious as a tent. He looked wise and kind and fierce, too; he was no one to tangle with, yet that’s all the boy wanted to do.
“Her name is Scull, not Scall,” said Marcus matter-of-factly after examining the log. Their host said nothing and made no move to correct the entry. “Well, I’ll see her now.” He daubed at his nose with a handkerchief and walked outside.
Toulouse watched him thread his way down the hill; keeping a discreet distance, the boy struck out on his own. There were no tombstones, but he noticed markers embedded in the grass, with years instead of names, memorialized: 1978, 1983, 1991. His father squatted down to touch one. Then Sling Blade strenuously motioned for Toulouse to return to the Mauck.
On the way back, he saw beer bottles washed up at the bottom of a chain-link fence, the sediment of small-time paganism.
They left the parking area without discussion and pulled into the street. Toulouse felt at once numb and giddily relieved—for better or for worse, the mysterious man who happened to be his father now seemed more novelty than threat. He was cocky enough to think it might be time for Sling Blade to make an introduction. He was about to nudge the caretaker when Marcus Weiner began an oratory of tears that jolted both boy and driver from their seats.
“Janey! Janey, my Janey! What did they do to you?” He tore at his hair; a worried Sling Blade looked in his rearview and was at least assured that the man had wits enough to have used his seat belt. “Why’d they do it to you, Janey? Why? My darling, my darling!” He wailed and snorted and thrashed about. The book he’d been carrying fell to the floor, and with it the envelope that was tucked inside:
To my Darling Will …
The caretaker, though inured to the trappings of grief, to its keens and waterworks, and bodies lowered into the earth, could not help but grimace at the force of his rider’s pain. There was beauty in it, too—just as in the gnarled olive trees of Westwood Memorial Park. Toulouse was all gooseflesh, like a riptide had sucked off his clothes.
Sling Blade glanced sidewise at the boy, pleased at the demonstration of humility. He saw that Toulouse was sorely moved by this stranger, and such maturity in one so young unexpectedly moved him too. Came the caterwauling and lamentations: now melodious, now atonal, now piano, now forte, monolithic arpeggios of sorrow lit by plaintive trills—grace notes singing the leitmotif: Janey, why!
He took the Sunset off-ramp and lef
t the boy just south of Sunset. When Toulouse began the walk to Saint-Cloud, he thought, Surely this life of ours is a dream—and those who said otherwise could not even aspire to be phantoms of a phantom world.
CHAPTER 41
Worries and Wrinkles
As the Candlelighters became better-known (just the previous month they had settled into the top floor of a charming little building the Trotter family owned on Brentwood’s tony San Vicente), the group received calls from friendly police departments alerting them to bitsy bodies recovered from all manner of tide and trash. This time, as earlier reported, a well-meaning soul jumped the gun; the overeager dispatcher had received half-baked information from a hospital worker but passed it on to the ladies anyway. Happy, red-faced retractions abounded.
Joyce was determined to meet the infant she had named Isaiah but was now calling Lazarus—the Candlelighters’ own “lucky angel.” She got in touch with the newborn’s foster parents, Rachel Hirschberg and Cammy Donato, a gregarious lesbian couple living in the Palisades, late-thirtysomethings who’d been planning to go the in-vitro route until reading the Times item about the McDonald’s Miracle Baby Doe. They had been touched, just as Joyce was by her first Baby Doe almost two years before.
Rachel and Cammy were eager to soak up the stories-behind-the-story of their baby’s almost novelistic arrival into the world and eagerly invited Mrs. Trotter to tea.† Joyce came in Chanel armor, bearing duffels of baby Pratesi, sweet little frog boots and English-made tattersall shirts DHL’d from the Magic Wardrobe in Virginia. The Candlelighters’ CEO was not disappointed by the mascot’s sweet disposition or his astonished, resurrected eyes. She was absolutely taken with every single Rembrandt-drawn hair of his fuzzy, sweet-smelling head.
When Rachel surprised by saying he was yet to be christened, Joyce underwent a welter of emotions she hadn’t experienced since the perilous birth of her own son; he too went unnamed for a while. The baby, jaundiced and malformed, barely left the ICU with his life (aside from ten thousand other afflictions, he had swallowed amniotic fluid and was vomiting blood)—it seemed there were two teams working full-time: one to keep him afloat and the other (Bluey and Dodd and various shrinks) to keep Joyce from going under.
