“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 i
n 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.)
“Look there!” Colin Bible said. “And there. Look at those over there!”
There was a couple with the lined, bloated, and satisfied heads of midgets. Wens were sprinkled across their faces like a kind of loose change of flesh.
There was a potbellied, slack-breasted man, his wife with bad skin, wrinkled, scarred, pitted as scrotum. They had smooth, fat fingers, and their hands were balled into the ineffectual, hairless fists of babies.
“Look, look there, how ugly!” Colin said.
An angry woman with long dark hair, her back to the street, stood near the couple with the wens. Her hair, tied beneath her chin, looked like a babushka. She stared back at Colin and the children, her black, thick eyebrows exactly the color and shape of leeches above eyes set so deep in her skull they seemed separated from her face, hidden as eyes behind a mask or holes cut from portraits in horror films. A set of tiny lips, Kewpie- doll, bow-shaped, red and glossy as wet paint, and superimposed, grafted onto her real lips like a botched bookkeeping or clumsy work in a child’s coloring book, tinted an additional ferocity into her scrutiny.
“It breaks your heart,” Colin said. “Imperfection everywhere, everywhere. Not like in nature. What, you think stars show their age? Oceans, the sky? No fear! Only in man, only in woman. Trees never look a day older. The mountains are better off for each million years. Everywhere, everywhere. Bodies mismanaged, malfeasanced, gone off. Like styles, like fashions gone off. It’s this piecemeal surrender to time, kids. You can’t hold on to your baby teeth. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors. A bite of candy causes tooth decay, and jawlines that were once firm slip off like shoreline lost to the sea. Noses balloon, amok as a cancer. Bellies swell up and muscles go down. Hips and thighs widen like jodhpurs. My God, children, we look like we’re dressed for the horseback! (And everywhere, everywhere, there’s this clumsy imbalance. You see these old, sluggish bodies on thin-looking legs, like folk carrying packages piled too high. Or like birds puffed out, skewed, out of sorts with their foundations.) And hair. Hair thins, recedes, is gone. Bodies fall away from true. I don’t know. It’s as if we’ve been nickel-and-dimed by the elements: by erosion, by wind and water, by the pull of gravity and the oxidation of the very air. Look! Look there!”
A middle-aged woman in a print dress waited in house slippers for the parade to begin. She was crying. Tears pushed over the ledges of her eyes. A clear mucus filled a corner of one nostril.
A dowager’s hump draped a pretty young woman’s shoulders and back like a shawl.
They saw the details of a man’s face, the stubble, lines, cleft, dimples, and pores, sharp and clarified as closeups in black-and- white photographs.
Sunglasses in the form of swans, masks, butterflies, or random as the forms of costume jewelry. Odd-shaped wigs and hairdos sat on people’s heads like a queer gardening, a strange botany. And, everywhere, penciled eyebrows, painted lips, like so many prostheses of the cosmetic.
It had begun now, the parade. A well-dressed man in a business suit stood at attention as the floats passed by. He held his hat over his heart. (And sanity, sanity too, marred, scuffed as a shoe, wrinkled as laundry.) It had begun now, but the children weren’t watching. They couldn’t take their eyes off the crowd. (“This, this is the parade!”) They stared at the special area the park had provided for guests in wheelchairs, at the old men and women who sat in them, bundled against some internal chill on even this warm day, wrapped in blankets that tucked over their feet, in sweaters, in scarves, in wool gloves and mittens, covered by hats, by caps, Mickey Mouse’s eared beanies, dark as yarmulkes, on top of their other headgear; at, among them, an ancient woman in a rubber Frankenstein mask for warmth; at her nurse, feeding her cigarettes, venting her smoke through a gap in the monster’s wired jaws. At other women, depleted, tired, who sat on benches, their dresses hiked well above their knees, their legs (in heavy stockings the color of miscegenetic, coffee-creamed flesh) not so much spread as forgotten, separated, guided by the collapsing, melted lines of their thighs. At their husbands (or maybe just the men they lived with, for convenience, for company, for making the welfare checks go farther), their hands in their laps, incurious as people who have just folded in poker. (And everywhere those dark glasses. “It ain’t for the glare,” Colin told them, “it’s for the warmth!”) At grown men and women wearing the souvenirs of the Magic Kingdom: sweat shirts, T-shirts, with Eeyore, with Mickey Mouse, with Jiminy Cricket, Alice-in-Wonderland pinafores, Minnie Mouse dresses, carryalls with Dumbo and Tigger and Tramp. At a woman in her sixties, inexplicably wearing a boa, a turban, a veil of wide, loose black mesh; at hands and arms and shoulders blotched by liver spots; at a man in baggy pants suspiciously, unscrupulously bulging. At a man in shorts, the enlarged veins on his legs like wax dripping down Chianti bottles in Italian restaurants.
At a woman with oily skin and pores like a sort of gooseflesh, visible as the apertures of chickens where their pinfeathers have been plucked. At a still handsome woman with bare, shapely, but hairy legs (hair even on the tops of her feet), but carefully trimmed as sideburns or rolled as stockings two inches below her knees; at a powerfully built man in his sixties whose chest hair, visible through his sheer tank top, had been as lovingly, patiently groomed as a high school boy’s. (Everywhere, everywhere hair—the strange feeling they had that they were among birds, the wigs, the boa, the babushka of hair beneath the woman’s chin, the piled hairdos, the thinning hair, the penciled eyebrows, the tattooed mustache and sideburns of the strange Westerner. Mudd-Gaddis’s own baldness and the chemotherapeutic fuzz of several of the children. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, and almost all had heard that hair didn’t stop growing after you died. Because everything has a reasonable explanation and hair was the gnawed, tenuous rope by which they hung on to immortality.)
Everywhere there were peculiar couples. A boy and a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve but looked in their runt intimacy as if they could have been married. The boy held his arm protectively about the girl’s shoulder, his free hand in the pocket of his three-quarter-length trench coat as though he fondled a gun. He wore a jacket, a s
hirt, and a tie. His floods, honed as a knife along their permanent crease, rose above sharp, snazzy shoes. The girl, shorter than her small boyfriend, in a decent wool coat that looked as if it had been bought at a back- to-school sale, smiled wanly. Her black full hair showed signs of gray and she seemed a little nervous, wary, even long-suffering, beneath the arm of her protector, as if she knew his faults, perhaps, his diseases—which weren’t diseases in her book—his excessive drinking, his compulsive gambling, his quick fists and rude abuse.
And stared openly at the mismatched couples: at the big, powerful girls next to undersized men and the men large as football players beside bloodless, scrawny women, at the couples widely discrepant in age in open attitudes of love and regard, handholding or clutching butts, the men’s fingers casually resting along breasts as if they lolled in water. Or their arms thrown abruptly across each other’s shoulders. Sending the smug signals of secret satisfactions, like the wealthy, perhaps, like people in drag.
And at a closely supervised group of the retarded, oddly ageless, the males in overalls, the females in loose, shapeless dresses and rolled stockings, clutching one another with their short fat fingers, their strange, pleased eyes fixed in their happy Smile Faces like raisins in cakes, beaming above their neglected teeth, beaming, beaming beneath their close-cropped hair on their broad, short skulls.
(Yet most were not defective, merely aging or old, or anyway beyond that thirty- or thirty-five-year grace period that seemed to come with most lives.)
Not even needing Colin now to direct their attention, to point things out. In it themselves now, raising their voices, like people outbidding each other in some hot contest, not even listening; or, if listening, then listening for the break in the other’s discourse, for that opportune moment when they could have their say, get in their licks; or, if listening, then listening not just for the other to finish but for some generalized cue, some more or less specific tag on which they could build, add, like players of dominoes, say, or card games that followed strict suit. But generally too excited even for that. Only half listening, really, less, fractionally, marginally, seeing how it was with them and concentrating only on the essence, pith, and gist of what they would say, thinking in a sort of deliberate and polite headlines but settling finally into a kind of conversation and still using the language of that other kingdom, the one they’d come from to get to this one.
The Magic Kingdom Page 23