The Magic Kingdom (33 page)

“Over there,” Benny Maxine says, turning the key in the little boat’s ignition and looking toward the dock.

“Use your head, Ben,” Colin says. “We can’t berth there.”

“Why not?”

“That’s where the boats come in to drop off the tourists. It won’t do. It’s bespoke.”

“Ooh,” Benny says, “which way then?”

“To the other island.”

Ignoring the macaws and cockatoos, the ibis and rheas, ignoring the trumpeter swans, the cranes and white peacocks, ignoring the flamingos and pelicans, ignoring the eagles, they are towed by his chatter and cheer and make land in a cove like the underedge of a key where Colin Bible supervises their disembarkation, still pitching his mood at them as he helps them out of the boats. “And ain’t it?” he asks again. “Ain’t it old Dunkerque? Ain’t it in a way? What was the dear old Dunker anyway if not just about the grandest last stand and evacuation of all time? Talk about your quality time, talk about your finest hours. Am I right? You know it.”

“Where are we, Colin?”

“Shipwreck Marsh, Janet, it’s called on the map.”

“I wonder if there’s snakes,” Noah says.

“Snakes don’t bother you,” Benny says, “if you don’t bother them.”

“They say that about everything. Sharks and tigers and rabid dogs.”

“It’s true. That’s why they say it.”

“How would you know?”

“I been on outings. Before I was sick. I went to just dozens of rambles.”

“‘Before I was sick.’ That’s rich. ‘Before I was sick.’ When would that have been?”

“You don’t think I ever was healthy? You want to bet me? You want to?”

“Congenital. You’re congenital.”

“Oh,
I’m
congenital?
I
am?”

“Congenital and chronic.”

“Did you hear that, Colin? She says I’m congenital.”

“And chronic.”

“Did you hear that, Miss Cottle?”

Mary Cottle, downwind of Janet and Rena, takes a smoke from a fresh pack of East African cigarettes and lights it.

“You suppose I could have one of those?” Benny asks.

“Strictly speaking, Ben boy, you oughtn’t to smoke.”

“The nerve,” Lydia Conscience says. “After the way he spoke to her before.”

“May I please?”

“Certainly not,” Mary Cottle says.

“Shipwreck Marsh,” Rena Morgan says. “It’s not very pretty.”

“It’s quite suitable,” Colin Bible says.

“I
think it should do,” Janet Order says.

“For our purposes.”

“But it’s
not
very pretty.”

“Unspoiled,” Colin Bible says, “it’s unspoiled.”

“Just what does
that
mean, Colin?”

“That the landscapers haven’t been by yet. To put the macaws and cockatoos into the trees. The ibis and rheas. The trumpeter swans.”

“Well?” Mary Cottle says.

“Well what?”

“I was thinking of our famous purposes.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Where’s the fire?”

“If I’m old enough to die,” Benny sulks, “I’m old enough to smoke.”

“It
looks
like a marsh.”

“It
looks
like a shipwreck.”

“That stuff isn’t sand. Is that stuff sand?”

“It’s some kind of cement, I think.”

“The basic building blocks of life.”

“This place must be crawling with poison ivy.”

“Poison sumac.”

“Deadly nightshade.”

“Bloody pokeweed.”

“Leaves of rhubarb.”

“Seeds of castor.”

“Whoever ain’t game let him go back to the boats.”

“Charles?”

“Ask the ladies.”

“Janet?”

“Ask the blokes.”

“Blokes?”

“All right then,” Colin says. “You’ve a grand day for it.”

So they split up. So they paired off. Charles, Tony, Noah, and Ben with Colin. Lydia and Janet and Rena Morgan with Mary. Not even thinking about swimming. Swimming not only out of the question but never even in it, as boating had never been in it either. Making their way in opposite directions across the spare, low, man-made island in the wide, blue man-made lake, stepping through the stunted thickets of mangrove and out into a sort of twin clearing, each group, perhaps not even consciously, seeking purchase, the advantaged, leveraged high ground, running silent as salmon all the traps and steeps (and this not only in opposite directions but with their backs to each other, and not only with their backs to each other but in actual stride-for-stride company with their tall leaders) of inconvenience.

They could have been duelists pacing off their combat like a piece of property.

“I guess this is as good a place as any,” Colin Bible hears Mary Cottle settle.

“Right here’s all right,” Mary Cottle hears Colin Bible approve.

“Okay?”

“All right?”

The boys and girls scramble out of their clothes and lie down to their sun baths in
the
negligible humidity, in the balmy breeze across the perfect blue sky with its clouds like topping.

“Won’t you be joining us, Miss Cottle?”

“I’m fine. I’m smoking my cigarettes.”

“Colin? This is lovely. It’s really super, Colin. It really is.”

“That’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll keep an eye peeled in case the kid at the marina goes back on his word.”

Separated by perhaps a hundred feet, the two groups lie about on hummocks of earth and rock at skewed, awry angles. Tony Word and Lydia Conscience lie in nests of their own clothes. It is really too great a distance to distinguish features, to make out the still only incipient shapes and chevrons of genitalia. They stare across the distance that separates them and have, each and collectively, a gorgeous impression of flesh. They are skinny-dipping in the air and leer across space in wonder and agape.

“That’s enough, Rena. Put your clothes on. You don’t want to burn.”

“Five more minutes. Please, Miss Cottle? Just five more minutes.
Please?”

“All right,” she says and the boys get five more minutes to study her indistinct pinkness, the girls to note the fragile pallor of the boys.

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at
their
young age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

6

O
h,” said Matthew Gale when Mary Cottle, thinking it would be the housekeeper with her towels, answered his knock and opened the door to the hidey-hole, “excuse me. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for eight twenty-two. Oh,” he said, “this
is
eight twenty-two.”

“May I help you?”

“No, no. No problem. My friend used to have this room, but he’s obviously checked out and gone back to England. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“To England?”

“Gee,” Matthew Gale said, “you’re British too. Just like Colin. Well,” he said, “enjoy your stay.”

“Like Colin?” Mary Cottle said. “You were here with Colin?”

“Uh-oh,” Matthew Gale said. “I’ve gone and put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

“Colin brought you here.” Because now she recognizes him. He’s the young man who had helped them that time at the Haunted Mansion and whose exchange of winks with Colin she’d intercepted back in those now-dead live-and-let-live days of their arrival. It hadn’t been he, of course, but the boiling circumstances of which he’d been a part that had turned her nerves into so many fuses waiting to be ignited and had caused her—who hated all arrangements in the first place—to—in the first place—take the room at all.

“Listen,” he said, who, being no dummy and having a feel for the strange displacements of the ordinary and sizing up the situation, its unspeakable ramifications, and wondering, for example, just what Mrs. Bible was herself doing on the night in question, sought to give comfort where comfort may or may not have been due, “who knows what goes on in another person’s marriage? In another person’s life? May I come in?”

“You may not.”

“I have no problem with that. I can say my piece right out here in the hall and let the neighbors think whatever they want to. I’m not going to tell you we’re two consenting adults and there’s the end of it. Because I’m beginning to suspect that in these particular circumstances two consenting adults wouldn’t even begin to get the job done. No, ma’am. I’m beginning to suspect that to be fair to all the parties we’re dealing with here would require a general goddamn election, a whole entire plebiscite. Well, there’s you, of course, and that other one, the master industrial spy, the London, England Colin, and Lord knows who else, the man, woman, or child with whom you yourself may have been disporting on the fateful evening.…Look, if I’m the least bit out of line, blow the whistle on me, please. Promise now.

“He’s really quite charming, your Colin. He even made me come up with the key to this place. I’m certain it was a test. Well,
you
know the sort of thing I mean. The little negotiations we do with the fates.…If such-and-so is meant to be, let a purple chicken come around that corner pulling a red wagon. Re
li
gion!—No, thank you, I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much; it’s not a
bit
drafty out here—But, well, frankly, though it’s
not
my business, it’s just I
like
your Colin so. He has his faults, of course. Who’s perfect? Certainly not
me.
Well, I’m sure you know that. Colin probably told you all about it. Well, why not? say I. What’s an open marriage
for
if the party of the first part ain’t free to lay it all out for the party of the second? However disgusting, degrading, and humiliating it may turn out to be for the poor hick son-bitch party of the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth! Am I getting warm?”

“I haven’t a clue regarding whatever it is you’re talking about,” Mary Cottle said.

“No,” Matthew Gale said, smiling prettily, “of course not.”

She started to close the door in his face. Gale resisted at first, then stepped suddenly back, drawing her off balance, sending her stumbling to the door, her left cheek awkwardly pressed against it.

“I don’t know,” Matthew Gale said loudly from the other side of the door, “just what it is, what nasty sting operation you people are up to, but under the circumstances I feel obliged to warn you that what we’ve been funning with here isn’t your standard, ordinary point-of-interest or your regular, everyday, five-star, not-to-be-missed, absolute
Must,
so much as the almighty God’s almighty own country itself!
Can I get an Amen,
somebody?”

“Amen,” said somebody.

“And why not,” Gale said (and she had the impression he was whispering now, that whatever he said he might have been saying into the grain of the wooden door), “why? This is Disney World! This is the basic universal G-for-good, G-for-goodness, main attraction and main event. You’re fucking with Disney World! Lady,
lady,
do you appreciate what that means? That means, if it came right down to it, they could do you legal as apple pie if they wanted. They not only got the guns, the Bomb, and the animatronics, but the Ten Commandments and the Onward Christian Soldiers too! They’re connected high up with important principles: with Safety First and Handicap Access. With double sinks and orthopedic mattresses. With convenience, clean accommodations, and fair value understood. With public temperance and a Lost and Found like the secret fucking service! With clever mice and friendly bears, with reluctant dragons and horticultural bulls. With Nature in sweet tooth and claw, as it were. With—
Are you listening to me?”
he demanded.

“Yes,” she said. Her hand was in her pants.

“With
family,
I mean! With grampas that fish and fathers that golf. With moms who drive car pools and look great in jeans. With brothers and sisses who’d be lost if they left each other’s corner for even a minute. With pets who’d lay down their lives for any of them. This is the picture. Are you getting the picture?”

“Yes,” she said. Was separating her pubic mat like a curtain and pushing a finger up into her cleft.

“I’m talking about a tone. Judgmental calls. Because it really
is
a small world after all. The high energy of high righteousness and fervency. All the us/them dichotomies. Not just capitalism, not just free enterprise. Not even just morality, finally, but something larger, grander, more important. Efficiency! That’s it. That’s all. Efficiency. More bang for the buck. It’s simple as that. Efficiency. Everything else is moral turpitude.
Everything
else. This is still the picture. This is still the picture. Who ain’t in it?”

“Who?”

“Colin ain’t in it.”

“Colin,” she said.

“And you,” he said. “
You
ain’t in it.”

“Are you in it?”

“I’m a different story,” he said. “I’m behind the scenes.”

“I know who you are,” she said calmly. For she was herself again. Because she’d come now. Was restored to herself, in control, her nerves’ temperature normal, like fever broken in a crisis.

“What?”

“I know who you are.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Colin let on. That’s just the way of it with wise, experienced, double-dealing old fags.”

“I saw you at the Haunted Mansion.”

“Housekeeping,” a woman said. “I’ve brought you your towels.”

And when Mary opened the door he was gone.

Careful to let any guest, even a child, pass through first, he left the elevator and got off on the lobby floor. Gale high-signed his fellow cast members—we’re tight, he thought, we’re tight as skycaps passing in airports—and called out their names. He must have known almost everyone who worked at the Contemporary. Well, he hung out at the Spa so much. Which wasn’t, he thought, in the least suspicious. He was just using the facilities. As he’d seen bellboys and desk clerks at the Haunted Mansion during their lunch breaks. Only part of the perks.

What was suspicious, of course, was his use of the elevators. Being caught on the guest floors, coming down into the lobby at midnight, at one in the morning. What
was
suspicious was the flimsy cover story he put out that he was a gambler, that he went up to their rooms to take their money in poker and crap games. They thought they knew better, his bellboy and desk clerk cronies. So he grinned and aw-shucks’d them, and toed awkward circles in the pile carpets and marble floors, as if he were barefoot or wore straws in his mouth.