“Max, the law of the land does not require gereuthanasia of the old or pedeuthanasia of pre-personhood infants. It only permits it under certain circumstances.
“I know, but—” says Max.
Group falls silent.
“No way,” says Bob Comeaux softly.
“Very well,” I say, picking up the photos and Lucy’s printouts from NIH’s mainframe. “I’ll be going.”
“What you got there?” asks Bob Comeaux quickly, eyes tracking the printouts like a Macintosh mouse.
“You know what these are, Bob.”
“What you going to do with them?”
“Return them to Dr. Lipscomb. They’re her property. She in turn will be obliged to notify NIH, ACMUI, and the Justice Department.”
“But we haven’t signed you out!” exclaims Bob Comeaux, actually pointing to the torn paper in my student wastebasket.
“In that case I’ll just hand them to Warden Elmo Jenkins, who is familiar with the case and will pass them along to Lucy.”
“Ah me,” muses Max.
I’m halfway to the door. “Hold it, old son,” says Bob Comeaux, uttering, in a sense, a laugh, and clapping a hand on my shoulder. “As L.B.J. and Isaiah used to say, Let us reason together.” And, to tell the truth, he looks a bit like L.B.J. back at the ranch, in his Texas hat, smiling, big-nosed, pressing the flesh.
2. ELLEN LOST OUT in Fresno. Cut off from Van Dorn and heavy sodium, she got eliminated in Mixed Doubles and came limping home.
We were all glad to see her. She wouldn’t talk to anybody but Hudeen. They exchanged a few murmured syllables which no one else could understand.
The children, out of school, stood around either picking at each other or moony and cross as children are when something is wrong. But Chandra is good with them, playing six-hour games of Monopoly. Between times they’re on the floor in front of the stereo-V, as motionless as battlefield casualties, eyes glazed: back to six hours of Scooby Doo and He-Man.
My practice is almost nil. People are either not depressed, anxious, or guilty, or if they are, they’re not seeing me.
I begin dropping by the Little Napoleon and having a friendly shooter of Early Times with Leroy Ledbetter.
Ellen is puzzled, distant, and mostly silent. At night we lie in our convent beds watching Carson without laughing and reruns of M*A*S*H and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
What to do?
Leroy makes his usual suggestion, after one of his all-but-invisible knockings-back of a shot glass as part of the motion of wiping the bar and leaning over to tell me.
“Why don’t y’all take my Bluebird and go down to Disney World? Y’all will like it. There is something for all ages.”
I thank him as usual, hardly listening, since Disney World is the last place on earth I would choose to go.
But as I look at the moony, fretful children and puzzled silent Ellen lying in the silvery glare of the tube watching cockney Robin Leach and Carson and Hawkeye between her toes with exactly the same dreamy, unfocused expression, the thought occurs to me: Why not?
As it turns out, it is a splendid idea, and Leroy is right: Disney World is for all ages.
We find ourselves in the Bluebird parked in Fort Wilderness Resort next to the Magic Kingdom. Fort Wilderness is a pleasant wooded campground with hookups for motor homes. Our campsite is on Jack Rabbit Run.
The Bluebird is a marvel. It cost Leroy over a hundred thousand dollars secondhand, and he’s spent another ten on it. He lives in a room over the Little Napoleon. It is like giving me his house.
We go spinning along the Gulf Coast in the fine October light as easily as driving a Corvette, but sitting high and silent as astronauts. The children are enchanted. They spend days exploring the shiplike craft, opening bunks, taking showers, folding out tables and dinettes, working the sound system and control panel and the map locator, which shows us as a bright dot creeping along I-75.
The four-speaker stereo picks up the Pastoral symphony. We’re a boat humming along Beethoven’s brook. I would be happy, but Ellen, in the co-pilot seat, is still abstracted, brows knitted in puzzlement. I take a nip of Early Times both in celebration and for worry.
Ellen gets better the second night out in a KOA campground in the pine barrens.
While I’m hooking up, figuring out where the plugs go, Ellen disappears.
Oh, my God. But the kids are not worried. They’ve already found the playground. Neighbors come ambling over, offering a beer, inspecting the Bluebird. They think Meg and Tom are my grandchildren. They show me pictures of theirs. The American road is designed for children and grandparents. Oh, my God, where is Ellen? Have a drink. I have a drink, three drinks. Nobody else is worried. Neighbors assure me she has gone to the commissary.
She has. She’s back with groceries. No more Big Macs and Popeyes chicken.
Now in the violet October light after sunset, the air fragrant with briquet and mesquite smoke perfumed by lighter fluid, there is Ellen at the tiny galley cooking red beans and rice, not my favorite boudin sausage but Jimmy Dean sausage and — humming!
I do not dare signify to her that anything is different, let alone approach her from the rear, as I used to. Instead, in celebration and gratitude I step outside in the violet dusk and take three nips like a country man.
We sleep aft in a kind of observation bedroom — Meg has discovered how to slide back the roof, making a bubble under the stars — the kids amidships in complex fold-out astronaut pods. The bed is king-size, bigger than Sears Best. I am having bouts of nervousness and so take a nip for each bout. To keep the key low — no grand epiphanies, thank you — I turn on the tube. Leroy’s stereo-V is a pull-down screen big as a movie. There’s Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and supertolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, they were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.
But if Ellen likes them—
But Ellen turns them off.
There we lie in the Florida barrens in a bubble of a spaceship as close to the stars as Voyager V, I not quite drunk but laid out straight as an arrow, feet sticking up, hands at my side, eyes on Orion.
She too.
Presently her hand comes down lightly on my thigh, stays there.
“Okay then,” says Ellen.
“Yes, indeed.”
“I — good.”
“Sure.”
“Soon — better.”
“Right.”
Ellen is still too stoned on sodium ions to talk right.
I am too drunk for too long to make love.
But it’s all right. Soon she’ll talk better and I won’t have to drink.
Disney World is indeed splendid — though I could not stand more than one hour of it.
After one day of the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Mickey and Goofy, Spaceship Earth, the World of Motion, the Living Seas, I take to the woods.
The children love it. Ellen seems to like it in an odd, dreamy way. Tommy and Margaret are the only kids around — everybody else is in school. They’re laid out, paralyzed by delight, when they shake hands with Mickey and Goofy (though they don’t really know who Mickey Mouse is).
But it is splendid. The kids run free and safe, catch the tram, launch, monorail, quasi-paddle-wheeler in a quasi-river, go where they please.
Ellen makes friends with other ladies in Jack Rabbit Run, plays some bridge, not too well, no better than they.
We’re there a week.
I am quite happy sitting in our private little copse in Fort Wilderness reading Stedmann’s History of World War I. A little vista affords a view of the great sphere of spaceship earth and the top of the minaretlike tower of Cinderella’s Castle.