“Yeah, well,” Benny Maxine says, “thanks for the grand bloke-to-bloke chat.”
And, when Maxine has gone, Eddy Bale wondering aloud, and not for the first time, “Am I mad? Am I mad?”
(Because he was bursting with it: his discovery. Because, if his hunch was right, he figured he’d found the real Magic Kingdom. And, should they be caught, the ancient kid making such a good front and all. And because he thought the old boy was past it anyway. Wouldn’t remember. Certainly not where he’d taken him. Not where they’d been.
(And his hunch had been right.
(And Benny blessing his god-given, gambler’s gifts: his luck, his attention to detail, all his boon instincts.
(So the unlikely pair, the one, dying from some Old Testament curse which, since he wasn’t bar mitzvah, he couldn’t even begin to understand, pushing the chair down the hotel corridor, and the other, riding in it, dying of all his squeezed and heaped natural causes, nattering away from the depths of his old-age-pensioner’s, unpredictable, golden-aged, senior citizen’s cumulative heart. “Ahh,” Mudd-Gaddis had said from his congested chest, taking the air, “I do love a stroll about the decks of a morning. Thank you so very much for inviting me, Maxine.
(“What’s a shipmate for?” Benny had said.
(“The stabilizers these days, you’d hardly suspect there’s a sea under you.”
(“Steady as she goes.”
(Mudd-Gaddis had chuckled. “Quite good, that. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Not like the old days,” he added wistfully.
(“No,” Benny had said.
(“No. Not at all like the old days.”
(“No.”
(“Not like any HMS I ever sailed aboard.”
(“I’ll be bound,” Benny had said.
(“Not like the East India Company days. Not like the tubs H.M. sent us out in to encounter the Spanish Armada.”
(“Really.”
(“’Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,‘” Charles Mudd- Gaddis had sung in his high, reedy voice.
(“You could probably have used stabilizers like these on the Titanic,” Benny had said, “or when you went off with Captain Cook to discover the Hawaiian Islands.”
(Mudd-Gaddis gave Benny Maxine a sharp look. “I never sailed with Jim Cook,” he told him quietly.
(“No, of course not. After your time,” Benny mumbled, wondering if the little petrified man was having him on.
(“Still,” Mudd-Gaddis said, “it’s not all progress. The sea air, for example. The sea air doesn’t seem quite as bracing as it used to.” Through his thick glasses Mudd-Gaddis stared at the corridor’s blue walls. “Indeed, it seems rather close out here. Even a little stuffy, in fact.”
(“Not like the old days.”
(“No. Not at all.”
(“It is stuffy,” Benny Maxine said suddenly. “Say, why don’t we duck into this lounge for a bit? It’s probably air-conditioned.” They had come to room 822. Benny knocked forcefully on the door and, hearing no answer, folded Mudd-Gaddis’s chair and hid it beyond the fire doors at the end of the corridor. Returning to 822 and working with one of the cunning tools on his Swiss Army knife, Benny had made short, clever work of jimmying the door.
(“Quick,” he said, “in back of the drapes.”
(“Behind the arras?”
(Benny glanced at his little wizened buddy. “Ri-i-ight,” he said.
(“It’s stuffy here too,” his old friend complained.
(Though, as it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. Hardly any time at all. But something as outside the range of ordinary luck — though Benny recognized a roll when he saw one — as the two boys were beyond the range of ordinary children. His gambler’s gift for pattern, design. His feel for all the low and high tides of special circumstance, his adaptive, compensatory fortune. All opportune juncture’s auspicious luck levers, its favorable, propitious, sweet nick-of- and all-due-time sweepstakes: its bust-the-bank, godsend mercies and jackpot bonanza obligations. No fluke, Benny had thought, only what’s coming, only what’s owed. And Benny blessing his money-where- his-mouth-was heart.
(And when Benny Maxine heard Mary Cottle at the door he didn’t even have to shush Mudd-Gaddis. Who’d evidently been, to judge from his transformed eyes, beyond an arras or two himself in his time.
(She came into her hotel room — she seemed nervous, she seemed irritable — shut the door behind her, and dropped her purse on a chair.
(It wasn’t stripping. It wasn’t even undressing. It was divestment, divestiture. Orderly and compelled as the speeded- up toilet of some fireman in reverse, or the practiced discipline of sailors whistled to battle stations, say. There was nothing of panic in it, nothing even of haste, just that same compelled, rehearsed efficiency of all mastered routine, just that workmanlike, functional competency, know-how, tact, skill, grace, and craft of adroit forte. Just that same shipshape, green-thumbed, known- rope knack and aptitude of all veteran prowess. She might have been pouring her morning tea or buttering her morning toast or returning home along a route she’d taken years.
(And Benny, both children, amazed who’d only meant to spy on her, astonished who at the outside could only have hoped to trap her in — again, at the outside — some only stiff and formal tryst, some only stilted, silly dalliance with Colin Bible or Eddy Bale or Mr. Moorhead; or, more like it, to catch her smoking what she oughtn’t, in privacy; phoning a boyfriend in England or ordering liquor from room service or bingeing on ice cream, on sweets, and on biscuits; stunned who all along could have hoped only to gather the familiar gossip of their imaginations or, behind the closed bathroom door, to have heard her tinkle, heard her poop. Who hadn’t expected, who, counting only on the auspicious and favorable, the opportune and propitious, even could have expected, this gusher of bonanza, this ship-come- in, sweet-sweep-staked, bank-broke, jackpot boon. They were flies on the very walls of mystery, and this went beyond what was coming, beyond what was owed. This was out-and-out hallmark fluke!
(Later Benny wouldn’t even remember the order in which her clothes had come off. Only that blur of no-nonsense, businesslike efficiency. One moment she had dropped her purse on a chair, the next her clothes were hanging neatly in the closet — and when had she removed her panties or, folding them, laid them carefully on the chair beside her purse? and when had she kicked off her shoes? rolled down her hose and set them across the back of the chair? — and she was completely stripped, uncovered, bare, naked, nude, starkers. She stood before them without a stitch, in the buff, the raw — it was, Benny thought, an apt word; she looked in her nakedness nude as meat in a butcher shop — and he was struck by the rare, pink baldness of her body, by its unsuspected curves and fullnesses — and, oddly, oddly because he would never actually remember seeing her like this, she would become a paradigm for all women, up to her thighs in silk stocking, sitting on underwear, a buried treasure of lace and garter belt, all the lovely, invisible bondages of flesh, her pubic hair bulging her panties like a dark triangle of reinforced silk, her sex like a box of unoffered candy, hoarded fruit — and they see her breasts, they see her cunt. She lies down nude on top of the still made bed. She raises her long legs, spreads them.
(Then she rolls over on her side, turning away from them. They can’t see what she’s doing but they see her ass. Her left arm goes down, over and across her body, and it looks from their angle as if she’s clutching a second pillow to her, getting ready for a nap. They watch her behind as it pumps back and forth on top of the bedspread. She’s nestling in all comfy for her bye-byes, thinks Benny Maxine. She’s ’aving a bit of a lie- down. The two boys stare at her ass, study its dark vertical, the two discrete, hollow, brown shadows within her cheeks like halved darning eggs, like healed burns, like hairy stains.