That was two weeks ago. It was still too early for Winder to compare the new job with the one at Disney World. Certainly Disney was slicker and more efficient than the Amazing Kingdom, but it was also more regimented and impersonal. The Disney bureaucracy, and its reach, was awesome. In retrospect Joe Winder wasn’t sure how he had lasted as long as he did, six months, before he was caught having sex on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and fired for not wearing his ID card. Winder felt especially bad that the young woman with whom he’d been dallying, a promising understudy to Cinderella, had also been dismissed over the incident; she for leaving Main Street during Mickey’s Birthday Parade.
During the job interview at the Amazing Kingdom, Charles Chelsea had told him: “You work for us, you’d better keep it in your pants, understand?”
“I’ve got a girlfriend now,” Joe Winder had said.
“Don’t think you won’t be tempted around here.”
Winder hadn’t been tempted once, until today. Now he was thinking about Carrie Lanier, the fearless beauty inside a seven-foot raccoon suit.
This is what happens when you turn thirty-seven, Winder thought; the libido goes blind with fever. What else could explain his attraction to Nina? Or her attraction to him?
Being a newspaper reporter had left Joe Winder no time for such reckless attachments. Being a flack left him all the time in the world. Now that he was forbidden to write about trouble, he seemed determined to experience it.
He finished his omelet and opened a beer and slumped down on the floor, between the stereo speakers. Something had been nagging at him all afternoon, ever since the insufferable Chelsea had drafted him to help with the robbery crisis. In the push toward his deadline, it was clear to Joe Winder that none of his writing skills had eroded—his speed at the keyboard, his facile vocabulary, his smooth sense of pacing and transition. Yet something from the old days was missing.
Curiosity. The most essential and feral of reporters’ instincts, the urge to pursue. It was dead. Or dying.
Two strangers had invaded a family theme park in broad daylight and kidnapped a couple of obscure rodents from an animal exhibit. Winder had thoroughly and competently reported the incident, but had made no effort to explore the fascinating possibilities. Having established the what, he had simply ignored the why.
Even by South Florida standards the crime was perverse, and the old Joe Winder would have reveled energetically in its mysteries. The new Joe Winder had merely typed up his thousand words, and gone home.
Just as he was supposed to do.
So this is how it feels, he thought. This is how it feels to sell out. On the stereo, Warren Zevon was singing about going to the Louvre museum and throwing himself against the wall. To Joe Winder it sounded like a pretty good idea.
He closed his eyes tightly and thought: Don’t tell me I’m getting used to this goddamn zombie job. Then he thought: Don’t tell me I’m getting drunk on one lousy beer.
He crawled across the carpet to the phone, and tried to call Nina at the service. The woman named Miriam answered instead, and launched into a complicated fantasy involving trampolines and silver ankle bracelets. Miriam was struggling so valiantly in broken English (“Ooooh, bebee, chew make me comb so many time!”) that Joe Winder didn’t have the heart to interrupt.
What the hell, it was only four bucks. He could certainly afford it.
FOUR
On the morning of July 17, Danny Pogue awoke in a cold sweat, his T-shirt soaked from neck to navel. He kicked the covers off the bed and saw the lump of gauze around his foot. It wasn’t a dream. He limped to the window and from there he could see everything: the Olympic-sized swimming pool, the freshly painted tennis courts, the shady shuffleboard gazebo. Everywhere he looked there were old people with snowy heads and pale legs and fruit-colored Bermuda shorts. All the men wore socks with their sandals, and all the women wore golf visors and oversized sunglasses.
“Mother of Christ,” said Danny Pogue. He hollered for his partner to come quick.