The Magic Kingdom (34 page)

“Better give it a rest, Gale, or you’re going to lose it for certain.”

“Let it come up for air once in a while.”

“That’s right, Matthew. It’s going to burn out on you. It’s going to disappear like a wick.”

“Who was it this time?”

“Ten thirty-three?”

“Seven-oh-four?”

“The
blonde?
The one with the humongous mammaritos and the sweetheart great ass?”

“A fellow don’t kiss and tell.”

“You
kissed
them?”

“Man, you know what’ll happen to you if the manager finds out?”

“Yeah, you better off if her daddy finds out.”

“You’d believe all those workouts in the health club might slow him down a bit.”

“They do! You think any of them gals would still be alive otherwise?”

So they kidded him, joshed into heroic farmboy studship the familiar creature from the tearooms of central Florida.

“Some lover,” the bell captain said. “I saw you step into that elevator not fifteen minutes ago.”

“Maybe it stopped on the fifth floor,” he said. “Maybe that’s where a certain redheaded Cuban spitfire got on board. Maybe she threatened to dance all over me with her spike heels if I didn’t lock it from the inside. Maybe I serviced her right there in the box. Maybe that’s all the time we needed. How you doin’, Andy?”

“Pretty fair, Matthew. Yourself?”

“Be an ungrateful liar if I complained.”

“Be seeing you, Matt.”

“Be seeing you, Andrew.”

And spotted the dog, Pluto, surrounded by kids and holding the brace of Mickey Mouse balloons he always carried but so sparingly gave out.

(“Jesus, Lamar, you’d think you paid for them yourself,” he’d said.

(“No, but I have to fill them with helium. Do you know I have to blow up Goofy’s as well as my own?”

(“Really?”

(“He outranks me.”

(“No shit?”

(“Sure, and I’ll tell you something else. That son-of-a-bitch dog is one hard taskmaster.”

(“You know something? You had me going. You break me up, Lamar.”

(“Well, shit, I’m a pro.”)

Who owed him one. Probably more than one. For sometimes spelling Kenny whenever he drove over to Orlando or Winter Park or Daytona Beach or Kissimmee for an audition. (“Jesus, kid,” he’d said, after returning from one of these auditions and coming up dry, “you’ve given away every fucking balloon I had. I’ll be a year blowing the mothers up again. Show business!”)

So then and there Matthew Gale decided to call in his marker. He ambled over to the besieged pup and gave what always before had been Lamar Kenny’s overture, their secret silent signal. (Silent because as one of the characters he’d been forbidden all speech, not permitted even a growl. “Kid,” he’d say afterward, “they’ve muzzled old Pluto.”) He made the gesture with his hand. Kenny saw him but shook his head like a pitcher declining a sign. Matthew did the thing with his left hand again. The dog looked at him quizzically. (So comical, Gale thought. Damn, he’s good! Matthew had no idea why Lamar never landed those jobs. He was a wonderful actor.) So Matthew stepped up to him and did it again. Again the pooch shook it off and again Matthew repeated the signal. Pluto shrugged and released the balloons he held in his paw. They floated up out of the reach of the children, who jumped to grab at their strings. In the confusion Matthew Gale sidled up to his friend. “Meet me,” he said. “It’s important!”

Pluto looked up sadly after the balloons. He didn’t break character by so much as a whimper, but Gale could tell that anyone looking at him, every kid in the place, could read his mind, the expression written plain as day across his doggy jowls. Fuck damn, he was thinking, now I’ll have to blow up twenty more of these mouseshit balloons!

They were standing by his locker. Not until he’d removed the last of his Pluto suit and hung it neatly away did Lamar Kenny say anything at all. He pointed to the locker. “Is that the dressing room of a star or is that the dressing room of a star?”

“What do you think, Lamar?”

“I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy, a U.S. Steel worker, an A. F. of L.”

“About the gig.”

“Leave them to Heaven.”

“Come on, Lamar, what do you say?”

“I say it’s nuts. I say if you’re looking to get us fired you’ve struck pay dirt.”

Gale rubbed his finger across the locker’s dusty metal shelves. “I think it’s the dressing room of some assembly-line guy too.”

“That’s the way,” Kenny said. “Play up to the trouper in me.”

“I am. I want to. Didn’t I come to you with my proposal?”

“Some proposal.”

“Admit it, Lamar. It’s a great gig. Admit that much.”

“Don’t say ‘gig.’ You’ve got no right to say ‘gig.’”

“Sorry.”

“Do I say ‘rough trade’? Do I say ‘butch’?”

“I didn’t mean to offend, Lamar.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m so touchy. I’m in a profession; we live, we let live. You’re right,” he said, “it’s a hell of a part. Nah,” he said, “they’d turn us in. They’d call Security. We’d be lucky if all that happened was we lost our jobs.”

“They won’t turn us in. The guy, Colin, is in too deep. Forget about the bed part. The bed part’s the least of it. He has sensitive manuals in his possession.”

“You gave him sensitive manuals?”

“You think I know what I gave him? I don’t
know
what I gave him. I threw some stuff together. He played it down. He made out like it was nothing. Naturally I’m suspicious.”

“And the wife?”

“There’s something strange there.”

“Strange.”

“She’s got this
at
titude.”

“
You,”
Mary Cottle commanded Colin Bible, “stay out of my room!” And reminded him of her good name and demanded to know how he’d found out.

It was astonishing, really. How the bottom of things lay at the bottom of things like
the
lowest rung on a ladder. But how, beneath that, there was a still lower level, that open area of the air, some apron of the underneath, mysterious, inexplicable. Colin sent her to Nedra Carp. Who put her on to Janet Order. Who implicated Mudd-Gaddis.

She went to him.

“Charles?” she said.

“Yes, lady?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“The Angel of Death?”

“No,” she said.

“Do I get another turn?”

She stared at him.

“Are you living?”

“Of
course
I’m living!”

“Are you bigger than a breadbasket?”

“Mudd-Gaddis!”

“How many is that?”

“Mudd-Gaddis!”

“Do you reside in eastern Europe west of the Odra?”

“I’m Mary Cottle!”
she said.

“That was my next question.” He looked at her. “Yes, Miss Cottle?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation.

She didn’t really care about getting to the bottom of things. She didn’t care about the mystery. She wasn’t even protecting her good name. She was protecting that room.

“She’s proper pissed,” Mudd-Gaddis said.

“I’ve never even seen the room,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Neither have I,” said Rena Morgan.

Noah and Tony hadn’t. Nor had Janet Order. Benny, of course, couldn’t wait to get back there but knew there would be little point if anyone else came along.

They turned to Benny. He was the oldest. He had the Swiss Army knife that could get them in.

“It’d be breaking and entering,” Benny said.

“But not for the first time,” Rena Morgan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Rena said, “that by now you’re so practiced all the risk is removed. It isn’t as if it were anything
stealthy.”

“Anything furtive,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Clandestine,” said Janet Order.

“Anything hugger-mugger.”

“Hole-and-corner.”

Benny Maxine looked from one girl to the other. “What’s going on?” he asked. If they had told him “sorority” he wouldn’t have known what they meant. They wouldn’t themselves. They were friends now, close as they’d been that day on the island, closer than their mortality could take them. (Closer than Tony and Noah, who slept in the intensive care ward together and made sure they sat next to each other at every meal and on all the rides. Who regarded each other as best friends. Closer than that.)

“What could be
in
there?” Lydia Conscience said.

“Something important,” Janet Order said.

“Do you think she has a lover?” asked Rena Morgan.

“A lover? Why would she have a lover?” Benny said angrily. “What do you mean do you think she has a lover?”

“That maybe she’s in love,” Rena said.

“She’s not in love,” Benny said.

“How would
you
know
what
people are?” Rena said.

“Come on,” Benny said. “She’s not in love.”

“What’s
in
that room?”

“Take us. Please?
Do
let’s go see.”

“Come on, Benny.”

“Please.”

“It’s crazy,” he said.

“We’ve been on all the
other
rides.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“She’s proper pissed, Ben.”

“There’s nothing there,” he said again.

Though of course there was. Her human geography. At least his memory of it. The sexual topography of those elliptical hollows, the two dark shadows, those twin stained darning eggs in her ass. At least there’d be the bedspread on which she’d lain.

So if he agreed to take them it was to honor the memory of those delicious relics.

7

T
hey went at night.

They didn’t tell anyone where they were going and didn’t take the trouble to work out elaborate alibis. What happened was they simply managed to peel off individually from their respective groups. They’d handled themselves, Noah suggested, rather like flying aces in an aerobatic squadron. When one of them left, the ones who remained took up the slack and made just that much more noise, that much more fuss, neither adding nor detracting one whit from the general collective level of demand that any seven terminally ill children might put up under a similar set of dream holiday conditions. And really, when you came to think of it, it was quite a performance, one of the best-yet illusions in the magical kingdom. They weren’t missed until after they were missing.

Any one of them could have told you straight off about 822’s appeal. As soon as they saw it, it became for them what it was supposed to have been for Miss Cottle: a hidey-hole, a sort of clubhouse. Perhaps this was one of the reasons they were so neat. They managed to lie about the room, to fill its three chairs—four if you counted Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair—and queen-sized bed—at once the girls had taken it for their own—and even—the boys—put their feet up on the wide round table, to use, in fact, all the long, deep olive oblong room with its dark modern furniture without sullying the least of its pristine from-the-hands- of-housekeeping appearance. There were tricks. Rena Morgan directed the fellows to shut flush each drawer in the bed tables, each louvered drawer in the dresser. Lydia Conscience told them they must keep the sound off if they turned on the TV. And Janet Order, their third expert in camouflage, suggested that all the advertising cards be removed from the top of the trimline TV and hidden away, that they untangle the cord on the telephone and draw the patternless brown drapes.

So they sat, lay about in this curious rowdy tidiness—well, they were dying—and trim, discounted cleanliness and order. Very much at home. Very much at ease. They might have been snug and dry in a treehouse in rain. They watched the soundless images on TV as if they were logs on a hearth.

Each felt restored, returned to some precious condition of privacy they’d almost forgotten.

“When do you think they’ll think to look for us here?” one of them asked at last.

“They’ve already thought it,” Janet Order said.

“Too right,” said Benny.

“Oh,” said Rena Morgan, “then why haven’t they caught us?”

“Because they’re embarrassed,” Lydia said.

“Embarrassed.”

“Well, they are,” Benny Maxine said.

“Sure,” Rena said. “I suppose they’re afraid they’ll bust in and catch us out in some big orgy.”

“That’s not what they think,” Tony Word said.

“You
know a lot about it.”

“Rena, it’s not.”

“No,” Noah Cloth said, “they’re embarrassed for Miss Cottle.”

“Or scared of her,” Benny said.

“Because she lowered the boom on them.”

“The room boom.”

“Probably they’ll call first.”

“No,” Rena said, “they’ll never be able to get the number out of the hotel switchboard. Isn’t that right, Benny? They don’t give out unpublished numbers? Isn’t that what you said?”

“For God’s sake, Rena,” Janet Order said, “once they have the
room
number they have the phone number too.”

“Little old daftie me,” Rena Morgan said.

“They won’t expect us to answer,” Benny said, “but probably they
will
call first. Give us time to clear out.”

“Of course we mustn’t answer,” Rena said, glaring at Janet. “What, and tangle the phone cord?”

“Ladies!” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said.

Rena patted the bedspread beside her. “Want to come up here, Noah, and rest by my side? There’s acres of room. Noah? Noey?”

“I’m fine.”

“What about you, Tony? Tonah?”

“Of course maybe they won’t realize most of us have figured it out and they’ll
expect
us to answer,” Lydia Conscience said. “I mean, maybe our friends haven’t figured it out themselves. Or maybe they’re just not the ladies and gentlemen you give them credit for, Ben.”

“Maybe,” Benny said. “I don’t think we can take the chance. If the phone rings we scarper.”

“I agree with Benny,” Rena Morgan said. She looked around the clubhouse. “Shall we put it to a vote? Who’ll make a motion?”

“Rena, for Christ’s sake,” Janet Order said.

“What is this, Rena?” Lydia asked.

“Well
what?”
Rena shot back. “Isn’t this our all-purpose, syndicalist, council-in-the-treehouse synod and social club? Aren’t we supposed to make motions? How do we occupy ourselves when we’re finished with old business? Or is the only thing on our plate what to do if the phone rings?”