Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

So the first chance he had he took his manuals and sought Gale out.

“What do you mean?” Gale said. “You’ve got William Henry Harrison there. You’ve got Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Van Buren. Warren Harding, James Knox Polk. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats. I gave you a Whig! I made up a nice assortment.”

“A lovely assortment.”

“I picked it out myself,” Matthew said.

Fags, Colin thought, and had a vagrant image of Matthew Gale’s toes curled in his shoes, smitten, shy and sly beneath the shoelace line. The penny-loafer line, he corrected, and realized Gale was in love, and wondered again if he were holding out on him.

“Matthew?” Colin said.

“What?”

“Are you holding out on me?”

“Holding out? Did I last night?”

“I’m not talking about last night.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

Fags, he thought. High-minded fag-aristocrat syntax-flourish. “I’m talking about the manuals. Really, Matthew! ‘The Lowdown on Central Heating in the Magic Kingdom!’ ‘Secrets of Mickey Mouse’s Loo Revealed!‘”

“Do you know what would happen if they found out I was giving this stuff away?”

“Trading it,” Colin Bible said.

“Oh,” Matthew Gale said, “we’re KGB, are we? We’re CIA, we’re MI-Five.”

“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.”