“I don’t know, Ella,” Amy says, leaning back over the handrail. “Even if that is true. Even if all you get is a glimpse of that big thing or you just get to hold it for a second, I think it’s better than not having it at all.”
“Maybe,” I say. The orange fish is chasing the black-and-white one again.
“What if someone told you that you could have one piece of the very best chocolate in the whole world?”
“How big of a piece are we talking here?” I ask.
Amy just shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “Not big. One bite. But you have a choice. You can either have that one piece of chocolate with the possibility that you could have a lot more or you can have a lifetime supply of Oreo cookies.”
“Gross. But what are the odds that I’ll get more of the really good chocolate?”
“You don’t know. No one knows.” The wind blows again, harder this time, and the water ripples, so that the fish disappear. “We’d better get going,” she says. “We’re going to get soaked.” I look up at the sky, watching the clouds that are forming over the castle, changing it from fairy castle to scary haunted castle.
“I told Luke we’d meet him at the Morocco pavilion at four,” I say, checking my watch. Cinderella’s arms point to four and eleven. A gift from Mark. “We still have about five minutes.”
“Are you thirsty?” Amy asks.
“I’ll buy you a sweet lassi from the Indian market.”
“Mango?” she asks.
I make a pffting noise with my lips. “As if there’s another kind.”
“Well, there’s plain.”
“Blasphemy.” We start walking past Fantasyland and toward the gates that will take us to the Epcot monorail.
She laughs. “The church is getting pretty strict if not adding fruit to a yogurt drink is considered an affront to God.”
“I take my beverages very seriously.” I watch the shadows disappear as the clouds move over us. “Are you excited to meet this Foulfellow guy?” We walk toward the faux marble buildings and the tented booths that are supposed to mimic a Moroccan street fair.
“I just can’t get my mind around working here for thirty-three years.”
“As a fur character.”
“As anything,” Amy says. We walk under a series of awnings toward India Star.
“Apparently he lives here, too.”
“In one of those houses at Bay Lake?” The rain is starting, making soft noises as it hits the canvas canopy. “I thought only Disney elite got to live there.”
“Luke said Foulfellow used to live there, but it got too crowded for him.” We make it to the front of the line, and Amy orders two mango lassis—large.
“There’re only eight houses. How crowded could it be?” she asks, turning to look at me.
“Okay, Amy. This is a guy who has worked all of his adult life as an evil fox who wears a top hat and white gloves.” We take our lassis over to a table on the edge of the food court.
“Point taken. So.” Amy takes a sip of her drink. “What’s the deal with Luke?”
“The deal?” Without wanting to, I feel myself blushing, my cheeks turning pink.
Amy looks at me for a long moment, taking another pull on her straw. “I meant him and Foulfellow.”
“Oh, I guess they’re friends. Sort of.”
“Kinda like ya’ll are friends?” Amy asks, and I can feel her watching me. Watching as my blush deepens. I try to think of something to say when I feel a poke between my shoulder blades. “Luke,” Amy says, still watching me. “We were just talking about you.”
“Good things?” he asks. He pulls out the chair next to me and sits down. “Ella, give me a drink of that, you will,” he says, stretching out his legs.
“I feel strangely like I should give you a sip of this,” I say, starting to pass him the cup and smiling.
“Weak mind,” he says.
“Then again.” I pull the cup back and put it on the table in front of me.
“Please?”
I look over at Amy. She’s chewing slightly on her straw and watching us.
Luke takes a sip of my lassi. “I’m glad you got mango.”
“You like mango?” Amy asks.
“As if there’s another kind,” Luke says. “I mean, plain? Please. That’s a culinary tragedy.”
“That’s pretty strong language,” Amy says, still watching my face.
“I take my beverages very seriously,” he says. “What?” he asks, seeing her smiling at me. “I do.”
I feel myself getting warm again, feel my cheeks get hot, but this time it doesn’t stop with my face. I feel the warmth spreading into my chest and stomach and spilling down my legs.
“So what do you say?” Luke says. “Should we get going? Foulfellow’s place is over on the other side of the park, but I know a shortcut.”
“You are in the know,” I say, pushing back from the table.
“I am,” he says. “I mean, in the know.”
I can’t stop laughing as we head out into the rain. It’s cold on my skin, but it doesn’t touch the warmth that keeps spreading and washing through me.
12
Luke
The living room of Foulfellow’s trailer is pretty much the whole thing, other than a kitchenette, as he calls it, and a small bathroom, and a bedroom with a pile of dirty clothes shoved in one corner. The whole place looks like a museum exhibit called something like American Life: The 1970s because everywhere you look, it’s dark paneling, and orange shag carpet, and avocado appliances in the kitchenette, and an eight-track stereo system up on a bookshelf on the wall, with a shoe box of tapes (all the paper covers wrinkled) by bands like the Bee Gees and the Electric Light Orchestra. Foulfellow keeps running around straightening things, shoving copies of Playboy and National Geographic under the couch, which is decorated with scenes of covered wagons and horses, the middle cushion sagging badly. By now, after having lunch with him three or four times and helping him last week to move a new TV into this place (which he just set on top of the old, broken TV), I am pretty much used to seeing him without his costume; but I can’t, no matter how hard I try, get used to his name. He repeats it now, shaking hands with Amy and Ella.
“Name’s Bernard,” he says. “Bernard Fitzgerald Laurant, which is Cajun French, except for the Fitzgerald part, which I like to think of was me being named for Kennedy, you know. The president? Of course, that’s impossible, at my age and all.” He wipes his mouth with his fingers, but little white flecks remain at the corners of his mouth. I get the feeling we are the first real visitors he’s had here in . . . God knows. Twenty-five years it could be. I keep trying to peg his age, but the best I can do is older than parents, younger than grandparents. Bernard, I tell myself again. Bernard, Bernard.
Amy and Ella shake his hand and introduce themselves and take nervous little glances around the place, at all the orange shag and paneling. Now that I get a good look at the place, there are some details I hadn’t noticed last week, like the strips of flypaper next to the front door; or the frozen dinner trays in the trash; or the piece of string across the kitchenette, where he has hung up coffee filters with clothespins, I guess so he can use them again; or the back wall that’s covered with old Disney bumper stickers. Some are from way back, like the faded one that says DISNEY, IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD! from when the park first opened, and some are newer, GOT MICKEY?, and some just weird, like the one that has a picture of Eeyore and reads TALK TO THE ASS! That one, I’m betting, isn’t official.
“So,” he says, “you kids like working here?” We are all just standing in a cramped circle around his coffee table, which is filled with pieces of jigsaw puzzle, some of them spilled on the carpet, mixed in with spilled potato chips. We nod and say it’s okay, it’s not bad except for the heat, and suddenly, I’m wondering if this whole visit is a mistake. I mean, why did we come here? Just to look at him?
Finally, he tells us to sit, sit, and we all do, the three of us squeezed in on
the wagon-train couch while he sits across from us in a faded blue recliner, and then just as quickly jumps up to get us something to drink, saying all he has is tequila and tomato juice and root beer. And water, he says, but no ice. His gray hair is standing up in crazy cowlicks, like he just got out of the shower and brushed it with his fingers, and he’s wearing a Ron Jon surf T-shirt and Dickies work pants and Wal-Mart sneakers with Velcro instead of laces. I’ve noticed this, how much more nervous he seems without his J. Worthington Foulfellow getup, as if all the smart-ass remarks, all the “hey kid” stuff and his raps on the head are things he puts on with his costume.
“So,” Amy says, once we all get our tomato juice in jelly jars, “thirty-three years, huh?”
He nods. “Yessir, thirty-four if you count the six months I worked garbage detail. Let me tell you, garbage can bring this place to its knees.”
I can feel that none of us has a clue what that means, so Amy just keeps asking questions. “So,” she says again, “I guess you have seen a lot of changes around here.”
He nods and sips his tequila. “Yes,” he says.
Ella is quiet sitting next to me, but she nudges me with her knee, signaling . . . something.
“Well,” Amy says, “do you have any examples?”
He looks worried for a second, and the longer we sit there, the more agitated I feel, almost like it’s hard to keep sitting. I look around the room, collecting details of it—the bottles of rubber cement sitting next to a pile of ragged sneakers, the dusty Niagara Falls needlepoint hanging on the wall, the magnetic poetry kit on the fridge, a framed photo of a woman on a beach in some old skirted bathing suit and rhinestone sunglasses, the computer on the floor behind the recliner with a bald eagle screen saver. His whole life is in the place. Life in a can, I think, like it’s something sold in a convenience store.
Bernard is still thinking, then he starts nodding so fast, he spills some of his drink. I feel Ella’s knee pressing into mine. “Yes—hey, you kids will get a kick out of this one.” He smiles, his teeth large and whiter than I have ever seen, so much so that I decide they must be fake. “Back in seventy-one, right after the park opens, the big thing is Tomorrowland, right?” He looks at all three of us until we nod, confirming this. “Well, get this. One of the main attractions of Tomorrowland is called—” He starts laughing so hard he can hardly get the words out. “It’s called Flight to the Moon. Can you believe it?” He shakes his head, still laughing, his face red. “Flight to the freaking moon,” he says again, rocking back and forth a little.
Ella and Amy and I cut our eyes at each other, and Amy gives a slight shrug. “Wow,” Ella finally says, her voice uncertain, “what were they thinking?”
Bernard looks at us. “Well, you get it, right? I mean, this is 1971. The first moon flight had been two years earlier. I mean, what’s that, Yesterdayland?” At this he cracks himself up laughing, so that he’s bending forward. Amy and Ella look at me like all of this is my fault, but Ella can’t keep herself from smiling.
“Bernard?” she says. “You are so nice to have us over. Can I ask you something?”
“Pretty girl like you? Ask me anything you like.”
She nods. “Well, when you are here, and you come home from work, and you eat your dinner—what do you think about?”
I can hear the question inside her question: How do you get your thoughts around your life? How do you reconcile yourself to yourself? How do you make it make sense, finally? They are my questions, too, but I wonder what’s making her ask them.
Bernard ponders for a while. “Well,” he finally says, “I’ve been thinking some about Billy and Benny McCrary. You know them? They were the world’s fattest twins, back in the day, and they even played a gig here once, riding around on their tiny motorcycles.”
Ella nods, nudges me again.
“I’ve seen a picture of them, I think,” I say. “So . . . you just think about them in general?”
“No, no.” Bernard shakes his head. “I’m thinking how Billy died first, a full ten years before Benny, and I’m wondering what Benny did. I mean, how did he bill himself? The world’s fattest twin? You can’t have one twin, right?”
Amy shrugs. “Maybe he was the world’s fattest man after that.”
“That’s just the thing,” Bernard says. “He wasn’t. Not even close. So his brother dies, and suddenly he’s not anything at all. It’s like he just lost half of himself, and after that he’s just another guy with a weight problem.”
Ella suddenly looks very flushed, and she stands up, struggling a little to do so with the sagging couch. “I think we should get back,” she says.
“So soon?” Bernard says. “I have more tomato juice.”
She nods, not looking at anyone. “Yeah. We don’t want to get busted.”
We leave and walk along in silence until Amy says, “Pretty weird, but I like him.” She thinks for a moment. “Actually,” she says, “I can say the same of just about every friend I have.”
“Thanks a lot,” I say, and smile at her. I look to Ella, but she’s not even listening, just looking at the ground, putting one foot in front of the other.
The next night Cassie is in a good mood and so am I, because we had this special birthday campfire for some spoiled little six-year-old whose father hired us just to lip-synch “Happy Birthday” and dance around and hand out the presents (how many six-year-olds get their own DVD players?). But the cool part was, when we finished, the father tipped us both fifty bucks. We aren’t supposed to take tips, which is, like, number 583 on the list of things we aren’t supposed to do but do anyway. So we’re happy.
Cassie walks out of the shower room in a T-shirt and shorts, her hair just blow-dried, and slips her arms around me. “Save that money,” she whispers. “I’ll get Robin Hood to hook us up with some really good champagne for our nights at the Old Key West.”
“Did his mead source dry up?” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say, and kiss her, my own hair still wet. “Dumb joke.”
This feels like the first time I have seen her in a week, and I’m only seeing her now because Mark insisted on taking a night off because of the poison ivy he got while looking in the bushes for stuff from his list. (“It’s not like he has poison ivy of the eyes,” Cassie said when she first told me.)
“I’m glad you’re here,” I tell her, almost surprised to discover how much I mean it. I feel almost nostalgic for Cassie, if you can feel that way for someone you’ve known only a few weeks. Or maybe I’m just nostalgic for the days when I thought I could come here and forget all my problems. I remember our very first day at the park and how she sat next to me in orientation because she said at least I didn’t look criminally insane, which is more than she could say for some others there, and how an hour later, over our first Disney lunch, she told me that she’d sat there really because she thought I was cute, and then she reached across the table and took my name tag, trading for hers, and we wore the wrong ones for the rest of the day, and I couldn’t believe this amazingly beautiful girl was giving me this much attention. All day I wondered what it would be like to kiss her, to touch her blond hair. And so I touch her hair now, remembering, and it feels like the first time, lifting the soft strands and watching them fall between my fingers.
She kisses me, pressing against me. “I’m glad you’re here, too,” she says. “Have you been behaving yourself while I’m busy winning the contest for us?”
“Of course,” I say, kissing her hair. I feel the warmth of embarrassment push through me, and right then I’m glad to have an excuse not to be looking at her. Then again, I tell myself, I haven’t done anything wrong—I’ve just thought about Ella, let myself swim in thoughts of her. But you can’t control your thoughts, can you?
“What have you been doing?”
I tell her how some of us went over to visit Bernard, about his trailer and the story about Tomorrowland and the tomato juice in jelly jars. “You
have got to meet this guy,” I tell her.
“Uh, no. I don’t think so.” She shakes her head, still holding me. Down the hall I hear the Merry Men laughing at something on TV.
“Why not?”
She leans back and looks at me, her hands on my waist. “Luke, sweetie, I’m a girl. That guy is, like, a pervert. There’s one story that he almost got fired three times for ‘groping incidents,’ but they can’t ditch him because he’s Roy Disney’s great-nephew or something.”
“And you believe that?” We start walking downstairs. Cassie told me earlier that after all the marching around the park all week, she just wants to sit under a tree and rest her head against my shoulder.
She shrugs. “I didn’t not believe it. And even if I don’t, I just have no desire to be around people like that.”
“People like that . . .”
She takes my hand, pulls me toward Main Street. “I’m not a snob, Luke. It’s like hippies, right? People think they were so cool and uninhibited, but what were they really like? They wasted half their lives doing drugs, then figured out what they actually wanted was BMWs. The whole thing is stupid.”
“Stupid how?”
“Stupid to romanticize failure.” She tugs my hand, and we sit on top of a brick wall watching the sun sink down in the sky. “Everybody pretends that getting ahead is bad, having ambition is bad, right? If you live in a trailer, then you’re doing your own thing. Right? Stupid. Take anybody who thinks that way and offer them the deal. They can have a ratty trailer and jelly jars and broken furniture and all the freedom they want for the rest of their lives. Freedom and used coffee filters. How many people are going to take that deal?”
“Not many,” I say. “Pretty much no one.”
“Exactly. I mean, even you guys. Why did you go over there? Just to kinda look at him, right? Like he’s a freak show?”
“A little, I guess,” I tell her, embarrassed at the truth of what she’s saying, remembering when I thought the same thing myself. And then I think of my own parents—if they were the same as thirty years ago, still dressing up in tunics and light sabers, they would probably have groups of kids coming by to gawk at them, too.
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