The Magic Kingdom (28 page)

So how could Eddy, who could not sort his own, have made anything at all of the jumble of mixed motives and crossed purposes, ordinary and routine as heavy traffic, or seen design in their snarl of wills, feelings, and intentions, asynchronous and asyndeton as timber soaking in a logjam?

4

W
ell, Colin Bible had seen enough. He’d a feeling he’d disgraced himself. He’d been had. But was in no position to cast aspersions. The guy was as good as his word (though, just as well, not that great in bed). The repair manuals were waiting for him in an outsized manila envelope when he checked his and Bale’s box the next day. There were even some blueprints Matthew had been able to lay his hands on, even a few diagrams of what Colin supposed—he was no mechanical illiterate, after all; he was a nurse, could make a certain sense of x-rays and cardiograms, plug in I.V.’s and administer shots, and just generally knew his way around the human body (oh, yes, he thought, remembering and flushing), which was as complicated as any piece of just machinery—were schemata for wiring, for fire alarm systems, burglar.

But, he saw, the Empire was finished, over, dead. The future, certainly the present, was with the superpowers and the go-getter Nips. They had the nuclears and lasers, they had the highest tech and the microchips and the animatronics. One day soon there wouldn’t be an up-to-date, decent, self-respecting tourist attraction left anywhere between America and the U.S.S.R. Everything else was just scenery—yes, and they had the wilderness areas, the deepest canyons and longest rivers; they had the sunsets; they had the climates—and thrill rides. There’d be nowhere else a dying kid could go.

But his real gloom, his real patriotism, he reserved for Colin back in Blighty in his obsolete waxworks. (We have the wax.) Poor Colin, Colin thought, and could not have said which one of them he had in mind.

No, by disgrace he meant he’d allowed his desperation to show and knew that, in his position, Mary Cottle would not have permitted herself the luxury. He admired the woman, and if he tried to snitch on her that time she’d become separated from the group, that had only been duty. The desperation was something else. Everyone’s desperate, he knew, Mary Cottle included. It was giving oneself permission to reveal it that was off. Like the poet said, most blokes lead lives of quiet desperation, but the poet was wrong. Most blokes shouted it from the rooftops, they shouted and shouted it till the rafters rang. He yearned for the days of his former silence, for the old-time, stiff-upper-lip qualities that made him British and had kept him in the closet. He wanted his quiet desperation back. (It was too late, of course. If they hadn’t maintained such a sterile field in this place—you could practically operate here—his name would be spray-painted all over the lavs by now.) It had been Mary Cottle’s room they’d used, Mary Cottle’s bed—his nursing skills had come in handy when he remade it; Matthew marveled at his hospital corners—and the least he owed her was his silence. He hadn’t told Gale it was not his room. He didn’t know what she was up to in hiring a hall—he’d cut Nedra off when she offered her theories after telling him of its existence—but desperation was bound to be in it. He’d leave her to Heaven. She could be one of the blokes to lead the quiet desperation life. While he, now
he
was in it, would have to continue to make his unseemly noises.

So the first chance he had he took his manuals and sought Gale out.

“What do you mean?” Gale said. “You’ve got William Henry Harrison there. You’ve got Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Van Buren. Warren Harding, James Knox Polk. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats. I gave you a Whig! I made up a nice assortment.”

“A lovely assortment.”

“I picked it out myself,” Matthew said.

Fags, Colin thought, and had a vagrant image of Matthew Gale’s toes curled in his shoes, smitten, shy and sly beneath the shoelace line. The penny-loafer line, he corrected, and realized Gale was in love, and wondered again if he were holding out on him.

“Matthew?” Colin said.

“What?”

“Are you holding out on me?”

“Holding out? Did I last night?”

“I’m not talking about last night.”

“Whatever
are
you talking about?”

Fags, he thought. High-minded fag-aristocrat syntax-flourish. “I’m talking about the manuals. Really, Matthew! ‘The Lowdown on Central Heating in the Magic Kingdom!’ ‘Secrets of Mickey Mouse’s Loo Revealed!‘”

“Do you know what would happen if they found out I was giving this stuff away?”

“Trading it,” Colin Bible said.

“Oh,” Matthew Gale said, “we’re KGB, are we? We’re CIA, we’re MI-Five.”

“No, Matthew,” he said, “we’re only a nurse in love.”

“You going to turn state’s evidence?” Matthew wondered gloomily.

“Who, me? What believes in all that allegiance and loyalty? No fear.”

“What are you talking about now?”

“The brotherhood. That old spirit of freemasonry among all the kinds and conditions of homohood,” he said wearily, deciding, Nah, he doesn’t have the goods. “Hey, Matthew?”

“What?”

“You were right. I’d never been blown till I’d been blown by a Gale,” Colin told him kindly as he moved off.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Because Colin Bible had seen enough and was ready to try a different tack.

“Come, children,” Colin said.

“We already seen that parade,” said Benny Maxine.

“I want you to see it again.”

“Where are you taking them?” Nedra Carp asked.

“You needn’t come, Miss Carp, if you don’t wish to.”

“Oh, I couldn’t let you go by yourself. Who’d push the girl’s wheelchair?”

“I’ll push it. Benny can handle Mudd-Gaddis’s.”

Maxine looked at the nurse.

“Anyway, I don’t see what the rush is. The parade don’t start for nearly an hour yet,” he said.

There were frequent parades in the Magic Kingdom. Mr. Moorhead had given them permission to stay up one night to watch the Main Street Electrical Parade, a procession of floats outlined in lights like the lights strung along the cables, piers, spans, and towers of suspension bridges. There were daily “character” parades in which the heroes and heroines of various Disney films posed on floats, Alice perched on her mushroom like the stem on fruit; Pinocchio in his avatar as a boy, his strings fallen away, absent as shed cocoon; Snow White flanked by her dwarfs; Donald Duck, his sailor-suited, nautical nephews. They’d seen this one, too. There’d been high school marching bands, drum majors, majorettes, pom-pom girls, drill teams like a Swiss Guard. Tall, rube-looking bears worked the crowd like advance men, parade marshals. Some carried balloons in the form of Mickey Mouse’s trefoil-shaped head, vaguely like the club on a playing card. (Pluto marched by, a Mickey Mouse pennant over his right shoulder like a rifle. “Dog soldier!” Benny Maxine had shouted through his cupped hands. The mutt turned its head and, in spite of its look of pleased, wide-eyed, and fixed astonishment, had seemed to glare at him.) Everywhere there were Mickey Mouse banners, guidons, pennants, flags, color pikes, devices, and standards, the flash heraldics of all blazoned envoy livery. Music blared from the floats, from the high-stepping tootlers: Disney’s greatest hits, bouncy and martial as anthems. It could almost have been a triumph, the bears, ducks, dogs, and dwarfs like slaves, like already convert captives from exotic far-flung lands and battlefields. The Mouse stood like a Caesar in raised and isolate imperiality on a bandbox like a decorated cake. He was got up like a bandmaster in his bright red jacket with its thick gold braid, his white, red-striped trousers. His white gloves were held stiff and high as a downbeat against his tall, white-and-red shako. His subjects cheered as he passed. (You wouldn’t have guessed that Minnie was his concubine. In her polka-dot dress that looked almost like homespun, and riding along on a lower level of a lesser float, she could have been another pom-pom girl.)

It was toward this parade they thought they were headed.

But Main Street was practically deserted.

“What was the rush?” Nedra Carp asked.

“Yeah, where’s the fire?” said Benny Maxine.

“Hang on,” Colin Bible told them. “You’ll see.”

“It’s another half hour yet,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Are we just going to stand around?” Janet Order asked from her wheelchair.

“We could be back in our rooms resting,” Rena Morgan said.

“We can sit over there,” Colin said. He pointed across Main Street to the tiny commons. Old-fashioned wood benches were placed outside a low iron railing that ran about a fenced green.

“We sit here we won’t see a thing once it starts,” Noah Cloth said.

“He’s right,” Tony Word said. “People will line up along the curb and block out just everything.”

“Hang on,” Colin Bible said. “You’ll see.”

About twenty minutes before the parade was scheduled to start, a few people began to take up positions along the parade route.

“Look there,” Colin said.

“Where, Colin?” Janet said.

“There,” he said, “the young berk crossing the street, coming toward us.” He was pointing to an odd-looking man with a wide thin mustache, macho and curved along his lip like a ring around a bathtub. His dark thick sideburns came down to a level just below his mouth. “They’re dyed, you know,” Colin whispered. “They’re polished with bootblack.”

“How would you know that, Colin?” Noah asked.

“Well, not to blind you with science, I’m a nurse, aren’t I? And ’aven’t a nurse eyes, ’aven’t a nurse ’air? When you seen stuff so inky? There ain’t such darkness collected together in all the dark holes.”

“All the dark holes,” Benny Maxine repeated, pretending to swoon.

“Look alive, mate,” Colin scolded, “we’re on a field trip, a scientifìcal investigation.”

“We’re only waiting for the parade to begin,” Lydia said.

“A parade we already seen.”

“Two times.”

“By day and by night.”

“
M-I-C K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
.”

“Can’t we give the parade a pass?”

“This,”
Colin hissed, “
this
is the parade! This is the parade and you’ve
never
seen it! All you seen is the cuddlies, all you seen is the front runner, excellent dolls, happy as Larry and streets ahead of life.”

“Really, Mister Bible,” Nedra Carp said, “such slangy language!”

“Lie doggo, dearie, please. Keep your breath to cool your porridge, Miss Carp.”

“I don’t think this is distinguished, Mister Bible,” Miss Carp said.

“Jack it in,” he told her sharply. “Distinguished?
Distinguished?
I’m showing them the popsies, I’m showing them the poppets. I’m displaying the nits and flourishing the nut cases. The bleeders and bloods, the yobbos and stooges. I’m furnishing them mokes and bringing them muggins. All the mutton dressed as lamb. No one has yet, God knows, so old Joe Soap will must.”

“Why?”

“Ask me another,” he said.

“Why?”

“They’ve got to find out how many beans make five, don’t they? It’s only your ordinary level pegging, merely keeping abreast. There’s a ton of niff in this world, you know. There’s just lashings and lashings of death. Hark!” He broke off. “
Watch what you think you’re going to miss.
Hush! Squint!” The man with the mustache and sideburns was passing in front of them.

And now you couldn’t have dragged them away. You couldn’t have rolled Janet Order’s or Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair downhill.

“Uh-oh,” Colin Bible said, “we’ve been sold a pup.”

“Snookered!” said one of the children.

“Skinned!” said another.

“Socked!”

“Some mothers have ’em,” Benny Maxine said.

Because they saw that Colin had been wrong.

The man was not young, after all. He could have been in his fifties. He wore cowboy boots, the cheap imitation leather not so much worn as peeling, chipped as paint and mealy and rotten as spoiled fruit. His high raised heels were of a cloudy translucent plastic. Flecks of gold-colored foil were embedded in them like sparks painted on a loud tie. Up close he had the queer, pale, lone, and fragile look of men who cut themselves shaving. Of short-order cooks, of men wakened in drunk tanks or beaten in fights. A bolo tie, like undone laces, hung about a bright pink rayon shirt that fit over a discrete paunch tight and heavy as muscle. A chain that ran through a wallet in the back pocket of his pants was attached to his belt.

Nor were his broad sideburns dyed. They were tattooed along his ears and down his cheeks. His mustache was tattooed. The actual gloss and sheen tattooed too—like highlights in a landscape. Everything only indelible, deep driven inks among the raised scars of his illustrated whiskers.

They were gathering, coming together quickly now, lining up along the curbs, building a crowd, rapidly taking up the best vantage points like people filling a theater. “See ’em? They look like fans at the all-in wrestling,” Colin said wickedly. And they did. Something not so much supportive as impatient and partisan about them. Apple Annies of style, Typhoid Marys of spirit, the men as well as the women, they could have been carriers, not of disease but of vague, pandemic strains on the psyche, on tastes not depleted but somehow made accommodate to the surrender terms of their lives and conditions. As though they’d survived their dreams, even their lives, only to find a need to be at a parade of cartoon characters at Disney World.

It was different with the children, their parents. Oddly in the minority, Colin barely made mention of them, as though most lives came with a grace period, thirty or thirty-five years, say, some fifty-thousand-mile guarantee of the agreeable and routine. It was the widows traveling together he pointed out, the senior citizens up from Miami or down from such places as Detroit or Cleveland on package tours. It was the retirees, the couples unescorted by kids. They were casually dressed, the women in pants suits or sometimes in shorts—it was a mild fall day—the men in Bermudas, in slacks the color of artificial fruit flavors, in white shoes, in billed caps with fishermen’s patches. (Cinderella Castle, towering above them in the background, made them seem more like subjects than ever, reasonably content, well- off, even, but with a whiff of the indentured about them, of an obligated loyalty.)