“The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs”
“Sergeant Is that you?”
“Professor Kelly?”
“Listen, I thought I’d head out your way and drop in on Fred Small. Want to join me? And please call me Homer, for heaven’s sake.”
“Well, all right, Homer. And my name’s Bill. Sorry I can’t join you, I’m on traffic duty all day. Besides, Small would slam the door in my face.”
“Okay. I’ll just barge in, the innocent bystander. All he can do is throw me out. Where does he live, exactly?”
Kennebunk told him, but when Homer got to Southtown he lost his way. Out the Pig Road, Kennebunk had said. Then he had corrected himself, Oh, no, it’s Skylark now, or something like that. Homer drove around aimlessly, hoping to run into Skylark Road.
Southtown was a village of annihilated farms turned into housing tracts and shopping malls. After driving for miles down a country lane lined with houses built in the 1950s, modest one-storied cottages with big triangular gables, Homer stopped to ask directions from a man who was washing his car.
“Skylark? Never heard of it.” The guy lowered his hose and the water ran out on the driveway. “Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway.” Homer turned his car around and went back the way he had come. At a crossroads he took a right, just for the heck of it. At once he saw a carved sign, “Meadowlark Estates.” Wasn’t that what Kennebunk had said?
There were gateposts at the entrance to Meadowlark Estates, surrounded by dwarf Alberta spruce trees; Blue Rug junipers, and daffodils. The daffodils spoke up at once and addressed Homer sternly. This is a pretty classy place. Are you sure you measure up?
I’m afraid not, mumbled Homer, glancing nervously at the miniature castle behind the daffodils. It was a guardhouse. Like the daffodils, it asked a nosy question: Do you have any legitimate business here, my friend? Are you acquainted with any of these impor tant people?
Homer rehearsed an answer in his head. Can you tell me which house belongs to Mr. Frederick Small.?
But there was no one in the guardhouse. How lax, thought Homer, how careless. In the absence of the palace guard, anybody might walk in off the street, just anybody. An outside agitator like himself, for instance.
Homer grinned and drove slowly along the curving drive, examining the splendid houses left and right. The place was a jumble. There were fairy castles straight from Disneyland, French châteaux, and Grecian temples. Medieval crenellated towers and half-timbered Elizabethan mansions were cheek by jowl with Corinthian peristyles and Italianate balustrades. Homer thought about the abundant gushes of cash that had resulted in the building of these dream homes. He imagined husbands saying to their wives, “Honey, the sky’s the limit, let your imagination soar.” And the wives had answered quick as a flash, because they knew exactly what they wanted, they’d been dreaming about it for years, “Marble foyer, curving staircase, gold fixtures in the powder room.” Were they happy now, the wives? Did they wake up joyfully every morning and leap out of bed with glad cries, or did they suffer from the ordinary anxieties of the rest of humankind? Did their husbands run around with other women, did their children flunk out of schools?
Homer drove on, looking for a human being who could direct him to the house of Frederick Small. At the end of Meadowlark Drive, circling past an Ionic temple with a cupola on top, he was surprised to see a blot on the landscape. Behind the temple rose a rusty tower, a contraption of crumbling chutes and ladders. Surely this was not part of Meadowlark Estates? No, it was some sort of rattling, clanking commercial enterprise. Homer guessed at once what it was, the sand-and-gravel company belonging to Frederick Small.
His house must be here somewhere. Homer drove on, looking for someone to talk to. But the massive houses were blank, and the shades of the windows were pulled down. No children played on the faultless grass, no father washed his car, no dog barked. The houses looked abandoned, like monuments in the desert.
But not utterly abandoned. Homer put his foot on the brake and stopped his car. The garage door of one of the fairy castles was rising without the aid of human hands: A car backed out silently, a low sports car with swollen fenders.
Homer jumped out and hailed the driver, a faceless dark shape behind the tinted windows, but the car continued to back up, swerving out into the street, ready to take off. Homer ran in front of it, waving his arms.
Reluctantly the driver stopped. A window rolled down. A white male face in black goggles looked out at him and said, “How did you get past the gate?”
Oh, what a courteous welcome! What a hospitable reception to the stranger from afar! Homer bent down to the window and explained that he was looking for Frederick Small.