Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“’ El lo, ’ el lo,” said Benny Maxine, coming out of the bathroom and spotting the snow outside their window. “Coo, la! Look at the weather, will you! What odds on something like that happening?”

The snow had already begun to melt. In the restaurant Nedra Carp and the children, joined by the rest of the adults, tried not to notice as Lydia Conscience, swept in the waves of her morning sickness, gagged bits of dry toast and gouts of grapefruit into her napkin.

“Must have gone down the wrong pipe,” Lydia said, her face red.

“Here, dear,” Rena Morgan said, offering Kleenex she’d slipped from a sleeve.

“Sorry, didn’t think,” Mary Cottle said, snuffing a Gitane into her saucer.

“Smokes like a man, that one,” Benny Maxine whispered to Noah Cloth. “Bet she’s les.”

“Well,” said Mr. Moorhead, again taking up the remarkable topic the children had been discussing when he, Bale, Bible, and the two ladies had first joined Nedra in the restaurant, “I don’t agree.”

“You only mean my disease,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said. He was seated at the head of the table, and it seemed to Eddy that a queer clarity had settled over the strange child. The waitress had handed him the check, and before Eddy could even reach for it, Mudd-Gaddis was already signing the back of the bill. “I want to be fair. What’s fifteen percent of seventy-three dollars and forty-four cents? I can’t think,” he said in his reedy old voice.

“Leave eleven dollars,” Mary Cottle said.

Mudd-Gaddis smiled up at the waitress. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, and turned back to the doctor. “I really haven’t. I’ve never felt special, I’ve never felt marked. Singled out, I mean. What I’ve lived was just”—and here the little geriatric paused, struggled for the exact words—“a life.”

“Just a life, my dear fellow? Just a life?”

“Oh, you mean my symptoms,” Mudd-Gaddis said. “You’re a physician. Symptoms make a difference to you. I’ve my fingerprints, of course, and my eyes are probably their own shade of blue. And I sit on a different bum than the rest, my own special customized behind, but so does everyone.”

“Charles!” Nedra Carp scolded.

But his hearing was bad. He was a little deaf and went on as if there’d been no interruption. “I mean we all know that bit about no two snowflakes, and when we first hear it it’s news of a sort. Of a sort, it is. We think, we think, ‘All this stuff in the world and no two leaves exactly alike? No two thumbs or signatures?’ Make-work for the handwriting experts, the forgery detectives. But what difference does a difference make? A fine distinction? All right.” He sighed. “Those three or four months back when I was a kid, I admit it, I do rather remember imagining I was wrapped in some mantle of the special. But all kids think that. It’s a snare and a delusion.”

He’s wise, Eddy Bale thought. He’s a wise old nipper. Like whoosis, Sam Jaffe, in Lost Horizon. One day I’ll get him alone. I’ll pour out my soul. I’ll ask about Liam, I’ll ask about Ginny.

“What’s Her Royal Highness’s given name?” Moorhead asked suddenly.

“Her Royal Highness?”

“Her Royal Highness. The Queen. What’s the Queen’s given name?”

Mudd-Gaddis seemed confused. There was cloud cover in his eyes. “Wait,” he said, “it’s on the tip of my…on the tip of my…the tip of my…”

“I’ll give odds he don’t get it,” Benny Maxine said.

Moorhead nodded encouragement, but the little pensioner could only look helplessly back at the physician.

It was Goofy and Pluto who broke the tension. They came up to the table clutching a brace of balloons in vaguely articulated paws, a cross, it seemed to Eddy, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between mittens and hands. Goofy grinned at the children behind his amiable overbite. Pluto, his long red tongue lolling like an oversize shoehorn, stared at them in perpetual pant, his tremendous, lidless eyes fixed in agreeable astonishment. Ears hung from the sides of their heads like narrow neckties.

“Hi, there,” Rena Morgan said.

Goofy nodded.

“Ta,” said Noah Cloth, choosing a purple balloon from the bunch like a great grape and taking it in his own modified mitt.

Janet Order patted the crouching Pluto, soft boluses of orange-brown nape in her blue hand. “Does that feel good? Does it? Do you like that, Pluto? Do you, boy?” The doggish creature turned its head, silently offering luxurious swatches of bright coat to her cyanotic nails. “Can you beg? Can you growl for me? Pluto? Can you beg?”

“They’re not allowed to speak,” Nedra Carp said. “It’s a strict rule. I read it in the brochure.”

“What? Like in the Guards, you mean?” Tony Word said.

“Outside Buckingham Palace?” Lydia Conscience said.

“That’s right,” Nedra Carp said. “They’re trained.”

“Ooh,” said Benny Maxine, “ there’s a bet. I’ll provoke them!”

“ Benny !” Eddy Bale warned.

But it was too late. Maxine had stood up and was already holding Goofy’s nose, round and black as a handball. “Bugger off,” he said. “Go on, beat it.”

The manlike animal — Goofy wore a kind of clothes, a bunting of vest, a signal of trousers, a streamer of shoes, over his body — just stood there. Perhaps he inclined his head a few degrees to the side, but if he had he still stood in a sort of plaintive, lockjaw serenity, his dim good humor stamped on his face, broad, deep and mute as a crocodile’s.

“Think you’re a hard case, do you? All right, all right, but I haven’t shown you my best stuff yet. You ready, dogface?”

The creature brought its head to attention.

“Benny,” Eddy Bale said, “ don’t.”

“What’s this then,” Benny Maxine said, and placed his hands on the spiky bristles stuck like splinters along the cusps of its jowls. “What’s this then, quills? Call yourself a dog? You’re a bleedin’ por cupine.”

“I told you they were trained,” Nedra Carp said. “Well done, young man!”

“Cut it out, Benny,” Eddy Bale said.

But the animal stood still, quite as the guardsmen he’d been compared to, his cheerfulness like an indifference.

“Oh, I ain’t done wif you yet, young porcupine,” Benny Maxine said, and laid hands on the tall bent-stovepipe hat pinned to its costume. “Ooh, ’ere’s a doggy bone. What you want to put it on your head for? You hidin’ it from the mutt? Suppose I throw it. Suppose you fetch.”

“I mean it, Benny,” Eddy Bale said. “If you expect to eat with us again, if you don’t want to take the rest of your meals in the room…”

Benny Maxine carefully removed the first pin. “Steady, fellow, this could smart,” he said, withdrawing a long second pin from Goofy’s scalp.

“Benny,” Rena shouted, “if you’re going to be wicked I won’t be your friend.” She began to cry, her fluids and phlegms spilling from their reservoirs.

“’Ere now, ’ere now,” Benny Maxine said, “me and the Goof was only ’avin’ a bit of fun. ’E enjoys it. Don’t you enjoy it, Goof?” Though its expression of stony contentment hadn’t at all changed, the animal seemed to shrink before its tormentor, its amusement subtly bruised, its bearing and demeanor at odds with the gorgeousness of its trusting smile, the Cheshire risibilities of its pleased teeth, almost as if its doggy expectations and hopes were frozen forever two and three beats behind its more clever limbs and more knowing body. Rena Morgan was pulling Kleenex and handkerchiefs from all their cunning places of concealment. “All right,” Benny said, chastened. Carefully he replaced the first hatpin, weaving it through the hat and loose folds of Goofy’s fabric scalp. Rena continued to sniffle and Benny handed over the second dangerous-looking pin to the contented, oddly dignified Goofy, who, though it was his own, bowed, stood to his full height, accepted it as if it were a surrender sword, and withdrew.