Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

He was a fifteen-year-old boy, still a child, still a kid, and for all his bluster, for all the pains he took to sound street-wise—“Street-wise and city-foolish” he would admit later, sheepishly — he had never done any of the things he had wanted to do. Only his sickness had ever happened to him, and he lived the realest of lives in a condition of hope and fantasy.

For the first five or ten minutes they really did push buttons, taking turns, Rena up and Benny down, and politely asking “Floor, please?” in their most distinguished British accents of everyone who came into the elevator.

“Oh, aren’t you kind?” a woman said. “Are you enjoying our country?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “but we’re not tourists.”

“You’re not?”

“My partner and I”—here he indicated Rena, who had all she could do to keep a straight face and was desperately trying to suppress laughter and the vast reservoirs of mucus that she held in check by sheer will (because a giggle could trigger horrors)—“are with the Disney organization, actually.”

“You are?”

“We were the two little children in the film version of Mary Poppins. Did you happen to see that particular film? Would you like our autographs?”

“But that was years back,” the woman said. “You’d have to be close to thirty.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “we’re small for our age. The Disney organization is giving us a chance to make a comeback on the lift.”

“This is my floor,” the woman said.

“Yes, ma’am, they’re good people. They take care of their own.”

“Oh, Benny,” Rena said when the woman got off, “what a thing to say! She never believed you.”

“She did.”

“No.”

“Absolutely. On the Queen’s life. I swear it.”

“Would you swear on your own?”

“Sure,” Benny said, “I swear on my life.”

“Oh, your life,” Rena said.

And on the way up — Rena was working the elevator — Benny deliberately cut a great noisy fart. The crowd — there were perhaps a half dozen people on board — pretended to ignore it.

“I say,” Benny said, “bad gas.”

Which they also ignored.

“P.U.!” Benny said. “Jolly stinko bad gas, that. Jolly bad!”

That innocent. Still amused by the jokes hiding in smells and by all the body’s punch lines.

And explorers. Finding the banquet and meeting rooms and special hospitality suites, bumping through the great maze of the hotel, through its guts, taking service elevators whenever they could, penetrating its laundry and maintenance plant, where they were shooed away by a guard to whom Benny insisted on showing his U.K. passport.

“We get ’em from all over,” the guard said. “We get ’em from Tulsa, we get ’em from Indiana.”

Through its restaurants and cocktail bars — outside one of which Benny invited Rena to dance — its swimming pools, looking in on the game room, the caricaturist there offering to do them together—“Please, Benny? Just to keep us honest,” Rena had said, and Benny, air in his cheeks, all his lumpish, lopsided, potholed face puckering, “Yeah, too right,” he said — and then returning to one of the restaurants, where Benny told the hostess that friends were waiting and, taking Rena’s arm, strode businesslike — they were that innocent, innocent enough to believe they had to carry themselves in some special way — past her and on into the kitchen.

“Our compliments to the chef!” Benny announced grandly.

Three men in tall hats looked up.

“To all of you,” he said.

“Yes, everything was delicious,” Rena said.

“Except the ice,” Benny said.

They stared at the two children.

“The ice was tasteless. Tasteless ice. Didn’t you think so, my darling?”

“Get outa here,” one of the men said.

And stopped outside the Spa, the health club where at that very moment the chap from the Haunted Mansion was ambling up to Colin Bible.

“It’s not open to the ladies at this hour,” Benny said, reading the notice on the door.

“You go, Benny, I’ll wait. You can tell me about it.”

“What, go into a health spa? Me? Not bloody likely. I could be sued.”

“Oh, Benny,” Rena Morgan said.

It wasn’t until they’d been gone nearly an hour that he remembered Mary Cottle. Even then, even as he introduced the idea to Rena, even then he was playing.

He said he thought he’d seen her that very afternoon at the hotel’s monorail station.

“Crouching behind the automatic doors, she was.”

He hadn’t said anything. Not because Colin and the boys — not Mudd-Gaddis; Mudd-Gaddis was still out of it, lost in whatever private nightmare had set him off — hadn’t noticed her absence or expressed concern, but because, even if it wasn’t calculated on his part, information was information, fed edge, and gave a punter like Benny — and this wasn’t calculated either, merely that same combination of hope, fantasy, and the real which drove his life — the whip hand should anyone go the gamble with him. Besides, he wasn’t sure it was she. And he’d had to pee, was moving along full lick at the time.

And he didn’t say anything now, only that bit about the doors. (Because he was that innocent as well, on his best behavior with his new pal, striding past his own misgivings as he’d stridden past the hostess in the restaurant. He had to be wrong not to have mentioned a thing like that. And that calculating. Even though he never suspected it. He wasn’t giving anything away.)

Indeed, he wouldn’t have brought it up at all except that suddenly he added two and two together.

Because Bale had split them up that afternoon and because of what happened at the Haunted Mansion, they had had to return to the hotel early.

They had lost Mary Cottle. Moorhead and the Carp woman had not come back yet with the girls. Colin Bible had no key to Tony’s room, and the children hadn’t been entrusted with one. They’d come all the way up to their floor before anyone realized there was a problem. When Colin told them they had to go back down again, they groaned. “Can’t be helped,” Colin said. “You’re going to have to shower, then I want you all in bed. You can’t stay by yourselves. We’ll have to go back and get a key to Miss Cottle’s room.”

“That’s the adjoining room,” Benny said. “I bet it’s unlocked.”

“You’re on, sport. I’ll give you odds.”

“What’s the odds then?” He hadn’t even peed yet.

“You say.”

Benny considered. “No bet, Colin,” he said. “It’s that Miss Carp’s room too.”

“You’re learning.”

“But I can watch them,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to it.”

“Where am I?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

“Ta, mate,” Benny said, and went off to the W.C. to relieve himself.

Which was just as well, because while Colin was explaining the situation to the room clerk at one end of the long counter, Benny thought he spotted Mary Cottle accepting a key from one of the registration clerks at the other.

He couldn’t be sure. A bus had discharged a load of holiday makers who were just now registering and who literally surrounded her. If it was her.

“Come on, then,” Colin had said, “we can go up now. I’ve got it.” He never got a second look, but twenty minutes later she still hadn’t come back.

“Let’s find out what she’s up to,” he said now to Rena, making a mystery where even he wouldn’t have taken the heaviest odds there was one.

“Miss Mary Cottle’s room, please?” he asked the room clerk.

“You’ll have to use a house phone.”

“Benny,” Rena Morgan said.