I'll Let You Go Read Free

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.

CHAPTER 2
The Digger’s Tomb
    S ince 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 ofthe 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,