NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Light rain drips from the Arrowwood Viburnums blooming outside on the patio. It is cool. I need a jacket. Overcast low light days and rain keeps Fauxmont’s chilly streets black and shiny. The Shrinkrap news site, tells me that Snaz Inc. was bought for $95 billion by Ensor International the secretive Belgian conglomerate owned by Axel Ensor. The new company will be called “SnazE’. He’s known in the tabloids as “The man of many masks.” He is said to be negotiating a deal with Armond Macadamia for a Macadamia/Ensor tower in Brussels, two hundred stories high. Axel wants to call it Ensor/Macadamia. According to a wire story quoted by Shrinkrap, Macadamia is running for president as an independent, and has lost interest in the project.
The rain lets up. I turn off the computer to go shopping and when I open the door, a Carolina wren flies out from among the drenched blossoms, as if to take advantage of the break, like me.
I run into Daisy at the Safeway in her yellow polka dot boots, engulfed by a brilliant orange plastic poncho.
“Hi Fred, our stomachs growl together!”
“Daisy! It’s a rumble.”
She is standing out of the rain under the covered entrance and turns from the bulletin board covered with old business cards, and other ragged papers fastened by thumbtacks and in one case a long pin. When available tacks run out, a single tack may fasten several messages at once.
“You got a spare thumb tack Fred?”
“Sorry, I don’t carry.”
“Yeah, well neither do I”
“You might try the internet instead of this thing. I don’t think any one reads it anymore.”
“Well, my old PC died, and I never did get a smart phone. Can’t afford one now. You know any one who needs a dog walker? I am going into business…see.”
She points to a generic dog shape, cut out of purple paper, hanging from the bottom of the board by a single rusty tack positioned like the eye of the dog. She has typed her phone number on to a lot of thin strips coming off the dog’s back like long shaggy extra thick fur. The same tack holds down the bottom of a flyer offering a reward for return of a lost ferret; with an email address not a phone number.
“How about ferret walking?”
“No, wombats were enough. It’s just pet dogs from now on.”
Her long arm reaches out of the poncho and some water drips in through the arm hole. She shakes the whole thing, then takes off her bowler and shakes the rainwater off it. Her shopping list falls from the hatband and blows out into the parking lot. I try to pick it up before it is too wet, but a black Humvee, though it breaks hard, runs over it. I am too late.
“This thing may be pulp by now.”
I hand her the soggy paper and can’t help noticing it is a check, or the dripping remains of one.
“Fred, you should be more careful. You ran out way too close to me!”
Boyd Nightingale is standing next to us in a black Stetson and fatigue jacket, with Militia patch.
“I did?”
“Yeah! I don’t know why you didn’t see me!”
“Oh, I did, sort of, I wanted to get a piece of paper that fell out of her hat band before it was turned to pulp.”
Daisy is holding her soggy check in one hand, and has grabbed my arm with the other. She looks into my face frowning and then whispers in my ear.
“My God Fred! I don’t know if this is any good now.”
I start to reply but she shakes my arm.
“No no no, forget it, forget it!” She puts the paper in her purse and goes into the store. Boyd goes after her but soon comes back out.
“What’s up with her?”
Without giving me time to answer he walks back to his Hummer and gets in and I go into the store.
After picking up our groceries, Daisy and I start back to Fauxmont and there’s Boyd sitting in the monster of his aspirations, engine idling, waiting for us outside the entrance. The window is open.
“Hey guys! You want a ride?”
“Boyd, what are you doing?”
“Daisy, I couldn’t miss you in that orange thing while I was gassing up. Thought you might like a ride home on such a rainy day.”
The rain has started again and it is getting heavier.
“Thanks Boyd. Daisy you get in front.”
Daisy pushes past me.
“No Fred you get in front.”
Daisy opens the back door as I get in the front. After climbing in she takes off her bowler and puts it on the seat next to her, then flips her poncho over her head, and over the back of the seat. Her long black hair flies up and falls in wet strings and she smoothes them out with long thin fingers.
Boyd takes us on a roundabout route via Bails Lane and then down another lane I have never seen before, called ‘Mid Off’. It is even narrower, steep, and unpaved with huge potholes full of water like little ponds. Parts of it have washed away as it becomes a stream in heavy rain. The Humvee’s big tires roll slowly over exposed tree roots, fallen branches and through the potholes, splashing muddy water. Gravel rattles under the fenders.
“You’ve got to see Chuck’s new place down here by the river.”
Daisy is holding on to the side of her seat as the vehicle tips into and out of the next hole.
“Chuck’s who?”
“Chuck Newsome, Daisy, don’t you remember?”
“Oh maybe, is he that giant blond guy? Kind of looks like Carl Sandberg, only he’s about 7ft tall?”
“He’s not seven, he’s only six nine.”
“Yeah, big difference, so he’s the one you mean, right?”
“Right, he is helping Senator Lee Levenworth’s, ‘Jobs for Americans’, campaign and he’s a great guy. Albrecht met him out West back…ah, well a few years ago, at a CUPA event.”
“Is he still married to that Hungarian trophy?”
“He sure is, Nadia Brazov, the beautiful Transylvanian.”
“I thought she was Hungarian.”
“Her mother was. Her father was from Transylvania, Rumanian I think.”
“That’s not a Rumanian name.”
“No, well, I don’t know…Russian maybe.”
We arrive at a building site on a long gradual curve, where the road levels off and drains through the gravel bed. We seem to be on a mansion size peninsular jutting into the river. I can’t see anything on the right at first but a field stone retaining wall. The mansion comes into view further around the bend, and we keep going with the river on the left. Further along the building looks more finished. The first floor in dressed granite blocks like Trip’s, but the next three stories are half timbered, mock Tudor, with huge black painted beams, like glowering brows above all the countless leaded diamond-shaped windows.
“It’s the house of seventy gables!”
Boyd stops outside the driveway as the rain slackens again. We look at the approach to six garage doors. Some faint shadows appear for a moment, then grayness. All deep brown teak with elaborate ironwork. A huge rusty steel I-beam sticks up from a raised concrete island in the middle of the driveway at its widest. Thin stainless steel spirals grow out of the sides about fifteen feet up rising vertically like big conical blossoms, shiny and wet.
“You should see that thing at night!”
“Is it some kind of antenna?”
“No Fred, It looks like one of Boris Trarantula’s sculptures.”
“Yeah Daisy, Chuck commissioned it for the house. At night the red white and blue lights come on and reflect off it. Those spirals move in the wind. It’s pretty awesome! And you know what?”
“What Boyd?”
“Each one of those spirals has the entire constitution of the United States engraved on it.”
“Hard to read though.”
“Well yes, but our guarantee of liberty is still there.”
“So that’s where he met Nadia! Artie told me about it years ago. Nadia used to work at Osiris Tarantula’s boutique, as a model or something.”
“Nadia is still pretty hot Daisy. Chuck went for it and got it!”
“Oh Boyd…it, being his sex object!”
“She is sexy Daisy, I mean that cantilever is…you know what I mean Fred?”
“Boyd, I am pleading the 5th on that one.”
“You never used to be so obnoxious Boyd!”
“What do you mean? I am just enjoying life!”
“Can we go now please Boyd?”
“Daisy, you called Nadia a trophy, not me.”
Boyd doesn’t move. He is looking at the wine red two door Porsche Panamera parked in one driveway and a hot pink Humvee with gold tinted glass parked under the porte-cochere. The massive double front door is also teak with brass work and a split Chippendale pediment. Nadia’s Hummer is even bigger than the one we are in, with a white cover over the spare tire and two gold jerry cans, one mounted on each side.
“Well I guess Nadia is here, that’s hers.” Boyd is pointing towards the entrance.
“Chuck says his house will be half a mile long when it’s done and he’s going to jog his five miles a day inside, all winter.”
“Well, Nadia is going to burn a tank of gas just getting out the driveways!”
“No way Daisy, that vehicle has a huge tank, custom job all the way.”
“Why is the house British style Tudor and the port-cochere is supported on Ionian capitals?”
“You’ll have to ask Jim’s architect that one.”
“Boyd this is worse than Trip’s place…I mean it is just a half mile mishmash.”
“Oh get off your high horse. You sound like my Mom. Have some fun Daisy!”
We drive further around Chuck’s massive curving folly, past the driveways and there’s a dock on the left, with two barges loaded with building materials. No one is around to unload though.
“Boyd, you sound like Albrecht’s mouthpiece, “Get Back JoJo”
“Hey, I’m back baby, I, am, Back, in the driver’s, seat!”
“I just don’t understand. It seems disgusting to me. That place is like an old movie set. I imagine Nadia climbing out of that pink penis she drives, to a rank of courtiers in gold brocades and jeweled turbans playing a fanfare on squeaky tin horns.”
“Not with Jim. No, those things would be solid gold trumpets trombones and tubas.”
“Let’s get out of here Boyd!”
“Honey don’t take it like that. This is a huge development. Down here used to be real poor, old shacks and lean-tos. Now look, multimillion dollar property.”
“Development? What happened to the people who used to live here? I mean what developed in their lives?”
I turn to see Daisy is looking down at her arm, moving her multiple gold and silver bracelets up from her wrist. She unfolds the soggy check and presses a Kleenex against it to dry it out.
“…and Boyd, don’t ‘honey’ me, okay?”
Boyd adjusts his navy blue American Glory baseball cap with a flag on the front and the words curling over and under it in a flourishing script. He drives all the way around and joins a new paved road with no name. He must have noticed me looking at the label on the back of his cap.
“Fred, you like my hat? I can get you one.”
“Sure Boyd, I see it is made in Sri Lanka.”
“Yeah, Ensor International finds good cheap labor!”
“But what about American jobs?”
“Fred, what can I say? You know, life is complicated.”
