Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. Ava gave me money to buy clothes, she said. Reckon we better do it soon.
—We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ’em inside out.
She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. You always have to be a shit?
—It was a fucking joke! Jesus!
She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.
—I swear, I said.
She held the stare a second longer. Damn! she said. Why do I like you?
—You want a honest answer?
—Naw, I know why. She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.
—No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?
—She showed me her badge! Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
—Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.
Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. You wanna hear this or not?
—Sure. Lemme have it. I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.
—She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ’em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.
—Want me to say what I’m thinking?
—I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!
—You see the money?
Leeli gave a vigorous nod. I get five now, the rest after.
—Well, shit. I rolled onto my back. I guess this is goodbye.
—Not necessarily.
—Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks.
She sat up crosslegged and muted the TV. Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.
—That ain’t what I think, I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.
—Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.
The word us punched a hole in my overcast.
—I don’t trust Ava, Leeli said. But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.
—What’d she say?
—She said it’d be okay ‘long as you don’t get crazy ’bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.
I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. I don’t know, I said. I get these mood swings.
—Oh, really! I couldn’t tell. She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. Can you deal with it? ‘Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.
I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. You a bad woman, ain’tcha?
—Goodness me! She batted her eyelashes. I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.
In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.
—You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.
—That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?
—Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.
—Maybe.
—Maybe my ass!
A polite room-service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.
—I got no cash on me, I told him.
—You can add it to the bill, sir.
This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.
—I was you, hoss, I said, I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.
I guess he wasn’t a total candyass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.
—Rock on, dude, I called after him.
I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking for a while, then she said, It might be true what Ava told me. ‘Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.
—One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.
She diddled the fork in her eggs. I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.
I had to talk around a bite of steak. To make herself look like a big deal.
—People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.
—If they’re freaks they do. I finally got the bite chewed. Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.
Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. Nothing this good ever works out, she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ‘tween the two.
—Yeah, well, I said. There is that.
With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.
Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word Jellybean embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, Isn’t that amazing. He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.