“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.”
“Why?”
“Ask me another,” he said.
“Why?”
“They’ve got to find out how many beans make five, don’t they? It’s only your ordinary level pegging, merely keeping abreast. There’s a ton of niff in this world, you know. There’s just lashings and lashings of death. Hark!” He broke off. “Watch what you think you’re going to miss. Hush! Squint!” The man with the mustache and sideburns was passing in front of them.
And now you couldn’t have dragged them away. You couldn’t have rolled Janet Order’s or Mudd-Gaddis’s wheelchair downhill.
“Uh-oh,” Colin Bible said, “we’ve been sold a pup.”
“Snookered!” said one of the children.
“Skinned!” said another.
“Socked!”
“Some mothers have ’em,” Benny Maxine said.
Because they saw that Colin had been wrong.
The man was not young, after all. He could have been in his fifties. He wore cowboy boots, the cheap imitation leather not so much worn as peeling, chipped as paint and mealy and rotten as spoiled fruit. His high raised heels were of a cloudy translucent plastic. Flecks of gold-colored foil were embedded in them like sparks painted on a loud tie. Up close he had the queer, pale, lone, and fragile look of men who cut themselves shaving. Of short-order cooks, of men wakened in drunk tanks or beaten in fights. A bolo tie, like undone laces, hung about a bright pink rayon shirt that fit over a discrete paunch tight and heavy as muscle. A chain that ran through a wallet in the back pocket of his pants was attached to his belt.
Nor were his broad sideburns dyed. They were tattooed along his ears and down his cheeks. His mustache was tattooed. The actual gloss and sheen tattooed too — like highlights in a landscape. Everything only indelible, deep driven inks among the raised scars of his illustrated whiskers.