A Sports Adventure
Phil's Arctic show was supposed to last a month. We made it to lunch.
It was two friends, one canoe and one sack of flour. By ten in the morning the flour was wet, and by lunch it was paste. That afternoon a helicopter airlifted us out, and the pilot wrote on his form that we were being removed "for being too sticky."
"Is that a medical term?" I asked him.
"It is now," he said.
Phil says the flour got wet because I was dangling it over the side to see if it would float. But Phil was facing forward, so he can't know everything I was doing back there.
Phil Brumley's my best friend. He teaches high school biology, and he's allergic to shellfish, wool, bees and most grasses. He was excited about the Arctic, because there's nothing up there to be allergic to except cold, and he's only a little allergic to cold.
He cried in the helicopter. Then he said, "I understand," which is what he says when I let him down. It's a good quality in a friend, and easy to work with.
My name's Dale Tummins. I'm a consultant, and I'm back above the Sudsy Duck Laundromat, consulting. If you watched Season Thirty-One of Exile Isle last spring, you might recognize me. People still point. Last week a lady pointed me out to a policeman. That's how starstruck they get.
Being on television is a lot of pressure, because everybody wants to know what you're going to do next. So far nobody's asked. I think they're giving me space.
I made a list of what I might do next. It's short, but that's how you know it's focused.
Number one is lie down.
Since we got back, Phil's been coming over every morning at seven with two coffees. He thinks I'm depressed. I'm not. I'm just lying down a lot, which is different, because I'm comfortable.
He sits at my kitchen table with his phone and reads what the players and coaches have been saying in interviews and podcasts and posts. He says it gives you a feel for how the game's going to go. He calls it reading the vibes.
"The vibrations," I said the first morning.
"The vibes," Phil said. "It's the vibes, Dale."
He explained it again while I drank his coffee.
"I've already got that," I said. "It's called my gut."
"Your gut sank a jet ski," Phil said.
"My gut didn't know about the lake," I said.
This morning he was reading the vibes on the Wendleton Walruses, because they play the Kettering Knots tonight. Phil's loved the Walruses since he was six. There's a walrus on his license plate frame that a kid at school drew in permanent marker. He gave the kid an A.
"Listen to this," Phil said. "Our goalie said in an interview he slept great. And the coach says the team looks hungry."
"Hungry's bad," I said. "Hungry men are weak. I'd feed them before the game."
"It means they want it, Dale," Phil said.
"Want what?"
"To win."
"Then he should say that," I said. "Nobody pays to watch a man skate on an empty stomach."
Phil reads the vibes so he can make his picks on the picks board in the faculty lounge at his school. Every week the teachers pick who'll win the Walruses game, and whoever's on top gets the parking spot by the gym door.
Phil's been last for six years. Every morning he reads the vibes, and every morning he picks the Walruses anyway, because he loves them. The vibes are right. Phil's heart is wrong. He parks by the trash bins.
"Let me make one," I said. I closed my eyes and let my gut talk. "The Knots' big star is sick. I can feel it. He's got the flu."
Phil scrolled. "He did an interview an hour ago," he said. "He says he's healthy, he feels great, and he's never been more ready."
"That's exactly what a sick man would say," I said.
Phil wrote my pick on a napkin. Then he wiped his mouth with it, which I didn't care for.
He had two tickets to tonight's game.
"Come with me," he said. "It'll cheer you up."
I said no. I don't like crowds unless they're there to see me. Last spring millions of people watched me on Exile Isle. That's my kind of crowd: big, and far away, and not able to touch my food.
"I understand," Phil said, and he left.
I went to put on socks. On top of the socks in my sock drawer was a note from Hollis Brandt. Hollis is the man whose jet ski I sank in Lake Wendle, and since I got back he's been leaving notes in the laundromat's dryers, so I quit using the dryers. Now he'd found my socks.
The note said, "Four thousand dollars, Dale." It was folded into a little jet ski.
I called Phil. "What time's the game?" I said. "And can I sleep at your place after?"
The Gale Family Charitable Arena is named after Winthrop Gale, the philanthropist. So's the library, a wing of the children's hospital, and the bench at the bus stop out front. I've slept on that bench. He's a very generous man.
Next to the bench there's a bronze statue of Winthrop Gale holding a little boy. The boy looks like he wants to be put down. He's been wanting it for fourteen years. It's bronze, so he's going to be waiting a while.
The pretzels cost nine dollars. I told the pretzel man nine dollars was robbery. He said I could have as much mustard as I wanted. So I took as much mustard as I wanted, and then some napkins, and a little tub of cheese he wasn't watching. Now I don't know who robbed who. Phil paid, so I guess it was Phil.
Even the hand dryers in the men's room have a little plaque. It says, "This breeze provided by the Gale Family." I stood under one for a long time. It's not every day a billionaire blows on your hands.
There's an organist named Marv. He plays a little song whenever anything happens. He played one when we sat down. I waved, and he played another one. I felt we had a real connection.
Our seats were in row Q. Phil said that wasn't that high up. Then he handed me binoculars.
Before the game Mrs. Constance Pruitt walked out onto a carpet on the ice to sing the anthem. She's a retired opera singer, and she wore the biggest hat I've ever seen indoors.
She started to sing. I have a very good voice. People are always telling me to keep it down, which you'd only bother saying to a powerful voice. So I joined in, a little lower and a lot louder. That's called harmonizing.
Mrs. Pruitt lost her place. She stopped and looked up toward row Q for a long second. Then she started again, in my key, and we finished together.
"That was a duet," I told Phil.
"It was not a duet," Phil said. He had his face in his hands.
"She came over to my key," I said. "You don't do that for just anybody."
Then the lights went down, and Marv played something big, and out came Wally the Walrus. He was brown and huge, with long white tusks and a little Walruses jersey. The jersey stopped halfway down his belly, the way mine do. Phil got misty.
"That's Lyle Banks in there," Phil whispered. "Twenty-two years. Nobody's ever seen his face. I was at his first game. I was in college. I cried at that one too."
Then Wally did his dance, the Lyle Shuffle. He slid sideways along the boards, flapping his flippers and bending his knees, all the way down one side of the rink. Then he stopped and gave a little bow. Twelve thousand people stood up.
"I could do that," I said. "That's just walking, but sideways."
"Nobody can do that," Phil said.
"I do it every time I leave a restaurant," I said.
Phil said the game had started. I asked him which game.
At the first intermission I went to buy another pretzel with Phil's money, and I saw Hollis Brandt.
He was in section one-twelve, row F, standing on his seat with a homemade sign. It said, "Wally for Mayor." It had glitter on it. Hollis doesn't strike me as a glitter man, so that tells you how he feels about that walrus.
He turned around, and I don't think he saw me. I can't be sure, because by then I was running.
I ran down the first tunnel I saw. It had a sign that said "Staff Only," which seemed fine. I've been staff at a lot of places, for a little while.
I ran straight into a woman with a headset, a clipboard and three walkie-talkies. All three walkie-talkies were yelling. She was yelling back at two of them and holding the third one away from her ear, like it owed her money.
"Who are you?" she said.
"Dale Tummins," I said. "Consultant."
She looked me up and down, and then she looked at a mark on the wall. "Stand there," she said.
I stood against the wall, and the top of my head lined up with the mark exactly.
"Oh, thank God," she said.
Her name was Darlene Fisk, the Walruses' game-day operations director. She said Lyle Banks, the man inside Wally, had pulled a tusk.
"Pulled it where?" I said.
"He's gone," Darlene said. "He went for a coffee when the first period ended, and nobody's seen him since. He's not answering his phone. His car's still in the lot. The second period starts in eleven minutes, and that walrus has to be out there. And you're the right height."
Then she gave me a job interview. I felt it went very well.
"Can you dance?" she said.
"Professionally," I said.
"Where?"
"Mostly overseas."
"Have you ever worked in a costume?"
"I was on Exile Isle last spring," I said.
"In a costume?"
"In a bandanna," I said. She wrote something down. I think it was "yes."
"Any health problems?" she said.
"Not that a doctor's ever caught," I said.
"Do you like children?"
"I used to be one," I said.
"Can you take direction?"
"I've been told I don't need it," I said.
"It pays eighty-five dollars and a hot dog," Darlene said.
I've learned you should always negotiate. "What kind of hot dog?" I said.
"A hot dog," Darlene said.
"Deal," I said.
I'll be honest. It wasn't the money, and it wasn't even the hot dog. It was that nobody can see your face inside a walrus. Not the crowd. Not Darlene. And not Hollis Brandt, in row F, with his glitter.
"Ten minutes," Darlene said, into all three walkie-talkies. Then she grabbed my arm and dragged me down the hall at a run.
Usually people drag me the other direction.
Wally was hanging on a hook in a little room under the stands, with nobody in him. You don't see a lot of empty walruses. My first thought was to check the pockets.
He didn't have pockets. I checked anyway.
"Where's Lyle?" I said.
"We found the suit in his dressing room," Darlene said. "We didn't find Lyle."
That seemed like Lyle's business, so I let it go.
Getting into a walrus is mostly a matter of being shoved. Darlene held the body open, I stepped in, and she shoved. It went on like a sleeping bag with legs.
It smelled like hard work. Not my hard work. Somebody else's, which I've always felt is the best kind.
"Does it always smell like this?" I said.
"No," Darlene said. "Tonight it's better."
The flippers went on next. They're mittens with no fingers. Once you've got them on you can't hold anything, or pick anything up, or point at anybody. That's three of my main skills, gone at once.
Then Darlene lowered the head onto me. It weighed twenty-two pounds. She told me that like it was a selling point. My neck went down about two inches and stayed there. Later she had to move the mark on the wall.
You see out through a little mesh screen in the walrus's mouth. Everything's dim and far away, and it's all framed by walrus teeth, so whatever you look at, you feel like you could eat it. I looked at Darlene's clipboard for a while. Then her sandwich.
Then Phil came running down the hall. He'd followed me from row Q. He'd seen me run and figured I was in trouble, which, historically, is a good guess.
"Is that you, Dale?" he said to the walrus.
"Who are you?" Darlene said to Phil.
"He's with me," I said.
"Great," Darlene said. "You're the handler."
She explained that every mascot has a handler, who walks beside him and steers him by the elbow, because inside the head you can't see stairs, or children, or anything below the knee.
"I can see fine," I said, to the wall.
Phil took my elbow and turned me around. Then he sneezed.
"I'm allergic to synthetic fur," Phil said.
"Since when?" I said.
"In principle," Phil said. "I've never touched any. But I always knew." He sneezed three more times, which I felt proved his point.
Darlene said a mascot and his handler are a team. I agreed. I've always believed in teamwork.
Phil steered me down the hall. Left, right, careful, step, door. I did the walrus part. Phil did the walking, and the seeing, and the sneezing, and he carried my shoes.
It was a real partnership.
My first night as a walrus, Darlene gave me four instructions. Go up the aisle in section one-oh-four, wave to the crowd, come back down, and don't touch anything.
"Easy," I said. I got the first two.
Phil walked me up the stairs by the elbow, and at the top I waved, and people waved back. A kid yelled, "Wally!" and I felt something I'd only felt once before, on Exile Isle, right before I got voted off.
Then Phil let go of my elbow to sneeze.
I took one step down. Then I took about forty, all at once, mostly on my back.
At the bottom of the stairs there was a toddler in a little Walruses hat. I tried very hard not to hit the toddler. I didn't hit the toddler. The toddler hit me, with a foam finger, right in the mesh.
Now I couldn't see anything. I stood up and spun around and walked into the glass and bounced off. Then I walked into it again, a little farther down. I did that for about half the rink. People were banging on the glass with their fists the whole way, to cheer me on.
Then I fell onto something soft and salty.
It was Sir Twisty the Pretzel, the Kettering Knots' mascot. He's a big brown pretzel with arms and legs and a little black top hat. He'd been down at the visitors' end, doing a bit with a sign. I landed right on top of him. He folded, which I guess pretzels are good at.
When I stood up, I was wearing his top hat. It was hanging on my left tusk.
I looked up. There I was on the jumbotron, forty feet tall, a walrus in a top hat. Twelve thousand people were screaming. Marv played three songs at once.
I took a little bow. The hat fell off my tusk, and I caught it with a flipper, by accident. The crowd got even louder.
Here's what I hurt: my back, both knees, my right elbow, and my left elbow, from where Phil had been holding it. Also I bent a tusk. Also my gum fell out somewhere inside the head. I found it later. It was in my eyebrow.
The toddler was fine. The toddler was thrilled. He kept the foam finger.
Back in the tunnel Darlene stared at me. "What was that?" she said.
"Choreography," I said. "I planned the whole thing. The stairs. The toddler. The glass."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said. "You fell down the stairs because I sneezed."
"Which I planned," I said. "I knew you'd sneeze. You always sneeze."
Phil said the Walruses scored a goal during all that. Nobody noticed. I don't blame them.
In the third period I noticed Sir Twisty the Pretzel standing in the visitors' tunnel, staring at me. He didn't have his top hat. I did. I'd put it back on my tusk, because it looked good there.
He pointed at me. In mime that means "You." Then he pointed at himself. "Me." Then he pointed down at the floor. "Here." I figured he was inviting me over to his tunnel sometime. Nobody'd ever invited me to a tunnel before.
Then he drew a finger slowly across his throat. I knew that one. My uncle used to do it at dinner when he was full. The Pretzel was telling me he couldn't eat another bite. Probably the pretzels here. They're nine dollars.
Then he pinched his fingers together and slowly sprinkled something in my direction. I thought about that one a long time, and then I got it. Salt. He was offering me some of his salt. For a pretzel, that's a big deal. Salt's about all he's got.
"Dale," Phil whispered. "He's threatening you."
"He's being hospitable," I said.
I waved. Then I mimed back. I pointed at the hat, then at me, then I gave him a thumbs up with my flipper. That means, "I'm keeping the hat, and thanks for asking."
He shook his whole pretzel body. I took that as a laugh.
Then he held up his fists and made a motion like he was snapping something in half. He did it three times, looking right at me. I think he was showing me how pretzels are made. It's nice when a guy shares his craft.
I gave him another thumbs up. He walked away very fast, back into the tunnel. You could tell he was moved.
Phil said later that the Walruses lost, three to one. I didn't see any of the goals. I was busy making a friend.
After the game I couldn't get the head off.
It's hard to undo a walrus with flippers. You grab one tusk, your other flipper slides off the other tusk, and you punch yourself in the face. Softly, through foam, but still. I did that for twenty minutes. Darlene had taken Phil upstairs to fill out handler forms, in triplicate, so nobody was there to stop me.
Then an old man with a mop came around the corner.
He was in his seventies, in gray coveralls, with a name patch that said "Ozzie." Later I found out his last name was Pomeroy, and he'd been the night janitor here for thirty years. He looked at me for a long time. He didn't laugh. Most people laugh at a walrus punching itself. I respected him for that. I was also a little hurt.
"You were the walrus tonight," he said.
"I'm a consultant," I said. "Can you get this head off me?"
"Not here," he said.
I didn't know there was a better place for it.
He leaned the mop against the wall, very carefully, and patted it. Then he took me by the flipper.
We went down a flight of stairs, then another one, then a ladder. A ladder's hard in flippers. I did it mostly with my chin.
At the bottom was a big metal door that said "Boiler Room." It was hot down there, and it hissed, and there were pipes everywhere, dripping on me. I figured this was where they kept the walrus overnight. That seemed harsh. But I'd slept in worse. I'd slept in a canoe full of paste.
On the wall was a whiteboard.
It had the names of a lot of cities on it. Port Clement. Kettering. Wendleton. Duluth. Twenty or thirty more. Next to every city was a name: Bonnie, Sir Twisty, Captain Something, a lot of animals and one sandwich. Next to every name was a number.
I figured it was a lunch order. That explained the sandwich.
Ozzie picked up a marker. Next to "Wendleton, Wally," he wrote, "Plus nine tonight."
"Lyle would've been proud," he said. "That was a good night for the League."
"What league?" I said.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything for a long time. A pipe dripped. The boiler hissed. Somewhere far above us, a man was running a vacuum, and it wasn't him, so I knew this was serious.
I figured he hadn't heard me through the walrus. So I asked again, louder.
He'd heard me.
"It's called the Amalgamated League of Costumed Performers," Ozzie Pomeroy said. "Nobody calls it that. We just say the League."
He said it very quietly, so I said it very quietly too. "The League," I said. It felt great. The only other thing I've ever been in is a lake.
"There are rules," he said.
The first rule is the Code. You never speak in costume.
"What if it's an emergency?" I said.
"You mime it," Pomeroy said.
"What if the emergency is that I can't mime?"
He gave me a long look, and then he went on.
You never show your face. If you show your face in public, you're out of the League for life.
"Then what happens?" I said.
"Then you have to go get a real job," he said quietly. I've never heard anything so sad.
And you never acknowledge the Distraction.
"What's the Distraction?" I said.
"Later," he said.
Then there were the points. Getting on the jumbotron is one point. Making a referee laugh is two. Hijacking the kiss cam is two.
"Who do I kiss?" I said.
"Nobody," Pomeroy said. "You hijack it."
Stealing a rival mascot's accessory is three. So that was my nine: the top hat, three, plus the jumbotron, four times, plus a referee who'd laughed when I bounced off the glass. I didn't even know I'd made a referee laugh. That's the best kind of laugh. The kind you don't have to work for.
A T-shirt cannon shot that reaches the upper deck is called a Moonshot, and it's five.
I asked what happens if it reaches the moon. He said it won't. He said it fast, so I figured somebody had tried.
Making a child cry is minus four.
"What if the child was already crying?" I said.
"Still minus four," he said. I didn't think that was fair, and I said so.
Touching the actual hockey game in any way is minus ten.
"What about the glass?" I said.
"The glass is furniture," Pomeroy said.
At the trade deadline the League swaps performers between cities. The costume stays and the person inside goes. The fans never notice.
I asked if anybody asks the performer. "No," he said. So I asked if they ask the costume.
He went on.
There are injuries: suit lung, head neck, foam burn, tusk strain, mitten hand, and the spins.
"Which one's the worst?" I said.
"The spins," he said, and he didn't explain, so I knew it was bad.
There's doping too: illegal foam, which is thicker and bouncier, and cooling vests, and pickle juice and espresso. A League inspector comes around with calipers and measures your foam.
"Where do you get the pickle juice?" I said. He didn't tell me.
After every game the standings come in by fax, from the Commissioner.
"Who's the Commissioner?" I said.
"Nobody's ever seen him," Pomeroy said.
"Then how does he work the fax?" I said.
I had one more question. I asked if there was a pension.
Pomeroy laughed for the first time. It was short, and then it stopped.
That was the answer.
"The hockey," Ozzie Pomeroy said, "is the Distraction."
He let that sit there while the boiler hissed.
"Think about it," he said. "Who'd pay forty dollars to watch twenty men skate around in a circle for three hours? Nobody. They come for us. The hockey's just there so they have something to look at while we get ready."
I believed him right away. I'm not a skeptic. Skeptics never get to be in anything.
And once he'd said it, the evidence was everywhere. Nobody watches the puck. You can't. It's an inch tall and black, and it's on ice, and most of the time it's under somebody. The ice is mostly empty, and they clean it between periods anyway. You only do that when you're expecting somebody important. And the players all wear helmets. Pomeroy didn't say why. He didn't have to. It's so nobody recognizes them.
Also I'd just been at a whole hockey game and couldn't tell you one thing that happened in it. That's the strongest evidence of all.
"Do the players know?" I said.
"Nobody's ever asked them," Pomeroy said.
Then he reached behind my head and pressed something, and the head came off. There's a button. Nobody tells you about the button.
Phil found us a while later. He said he'd followed the sound of somebody yelling "What league?" through a walrus.
On the drive home I explained everything. "Phil," I said, "the hockey's a distraction."
"From what?" Phil said.
"From us."
"Dale, I've watched the Walruses for thirty-nine years."
"And what did you see?"
"Hockey," Phil said.
"Exactly," I said. "That's what they wanted you to see."
When we pulled up outside the Sudsy Duck, Phil didn't turn off the car. He got out his phone and read the vibes on the Knots, which had quotes from their postgame interviews. Then he got quiet.
"What do the vines say?" I said.
"The vibes," Phil said. He showed me.
Three different Knots players had mentioned the walrus. One said it was hard to focus "with the walrus thing going on." One said, "Shout-out to the walrus, I guess." One said, "I don't want to talk about the walrus." And the Knots' coach said, quote, "The building had a weird energy tonight."
Phil got out his waterproof journal and wrote it all down.
"I could've told you that," I said.
He underlined "weird."
The next afternoon Darlene called Phil, because I don't have a phone that works when it's unpaid. She asked us to come in.
Her office was a closet with a desk in it, and three walkie-talkies charging on a shelf. They were still talking, even while they charged.
"I want you to be Wally," she said, "until Lyle comes back."
"How long's that?" I said.
"Until Lyle comes back," she said.
I could tell she was a tough negotiator, so I came in strong.
"I'd like ninety dollars," I said.
"It's eighty-five dollars and a hot dog," Darlene said.
"Then I'll take eighty-five and no hot dog," I said, to show I was flexible.
"Done," Darlene said, and she wrote it down.
I realized I'd lost the hot dog. That happens in big negotiations, and you have to stay calm.
"Eighty-five and a hot dog," I said.
"That's what I offered you," Darlene said.
"And I accept," I said.
Then she said I'd also have to do Saturday mornings at the children's skating clinic.
"I'll give you Saturday," I said, "if I get the hot dog."
"You already have the hot dog," Darlene said.
"Then I'll give you Sunday too," I said. I didn't want her thinking I was cheap.
Phil was staring at the ceiling. Later he told me I'd given away a weekend to win back a hot dog that nobody had taken. I don't think about it that way. I've never done anything on a weekend anyway. Now at least it's on paper.
I signed. Phil signed as my handler. Darlene stapled it, three times, very hard.
Then there was one more thing. Wally's the walrus's name. But the man inside him deserves something the crowd can chant. Something short and hard that points at things. I went with "The Tusk."
That night, before the arena opened, I walked out to center ice in my street clothes and showed the empty seats how it goes. "Tusk," I said. "Tusk. Tusk. Tusk." It echoed. I figure an echo counts as about two people.
Marv was up in his booth, practicing. He stopped playing to listen. Then he played the song they play when somebody gets a penalty.
The next night there were twelve thousand people. Nobody chanted it.
At the next home game Phil steered me down the aisle of section one-twelve. I couldn't see where we were going. I only knew where we were when I heard a man yelling "Wally!" in exactly the voice that used to yell "Dale!" at my door.
It was Hollis Brandt. He was standing on his seat in row F, holding up his sign. "Wally for Mayor." He'd added more glitter.
"Keep walking," I whispered to Phil.
"He can't see you," Phil whispered.
Hollis stuck his hand out for a high five. I'd never touched Hollis Brandt before, only his jet ski. I gave him the high five. He held on to my flipper for a second, like he didn't want to let go. That's a lot of trust to show a walrus.
Then he hugged me. He told the people around him I was the greatest walrus who ever lived. He told them he'd been coming for twenty-six years, and he'd never missed a game, and he'd never missed a chance to say hi to Wally. All this from a man who'd put a note in my sock drawer.
I'll be honest. I liked it. It's not often a man who wants to strangle you also wants a picture with you.
And it gave me an idea. For months I'd been planning what I'd do if I ever got Hollis Brandt alone and helpless. Now here he was, and here I was, in disguise, and he'd do anything I wanted.
I worked it all out right there in the aisle. Step one, win his complete trust. I already had it, so that saved time. Step two, lure him into the tunnel with the promise of a picture. Step three, lock him in the mop closet. Step four, drive to his house, which would be empty, and find all the notes he hadn't sent me yet. Step five, put one in his dryer.
Then I remembered I can't work a door with flippers, or a car. So I skipped to the nachos.
I reached over and took the tray off his lap. Hollis was thrilled. "Wally's eating my nachos!" he yelled. He held the tray up so I could reach it better. When I couldn't get a chip into the mesh with my flipper, he did it for me, one chip at a time.
I ate every one. I wanted him to know who was in charge.
When the tray was empty, Hollis put his hand on my shoulder and looked into the mesh. "You know, Wally," he said, "you're the best thing that's happened to me since some guy sank my jet ski."
I nodded and put a flipper on his arm. Some people are just terrible.
Then I ate his pretzel.
Ozzie Pomeroy trained me in the boiler room every afternoon that week. He used to be a mascot himself, he told me. Pickles the Gherkin, nineteen seventy-nine to nineteen ninety-one.
"Why'd you stop?" I said.
"The Incident," he said. That was all he said. I've asked about it eleven times since. That's still all he says.
The first lesson was the high five. Palm flat, full arm, follow through, and never leave a child hanging.
"Got it," I said.
"You spoke," Pomeroy said.
"Only to say I got it," I said.
"You spoke again."
"I'm explaining," I said.
"Again," Pomeroy said.
I stayed quiet for a long time after that. Then I asked him if that counted.
The second lesson was the big laugh. In costume nobody can hear you laugh, so you do it with your shoulders, up and down, fast. Shoulders only. I did it. Pomeroy said it looked like I'd backed into an electric fence. I asked if that was good. He said I'd spoken again.
The third lesson was mime. Pomeroy pretended to be trapped in a box. I pretended to be trapped in a box too. Then I pretended to open a door in my box and step out.
"You don't get out of the box," Pomeroy said.
"Then what's the point of the box?" I said.
"That's the point," he said.
I didn't get it, so I said so, and that was speaking.
Then he put an old cassette in a tape player and taught me the Lyle Shuffle. Sideways, flippers flapping, knees bent, all the way across the room, then a little bow. He's seventy-four, and he did it perfectly.
I tried it. I went sideways fine. Then I went down. The second time I flapped my flippers and bent my knees at the same time and fell into a pipe. The third time I did the bow first, by accident, and hit my head on the boiler.
I'd sprained an ankle, bruised a hip, and singed an elbow. Also I'd lost a shoe behind the water heater. Pomeroy got it out with his mop.
I decided the Shuffle's overrated. Crabs do that all day, and nobody's ever chanted for a crab.
Pomeroy said Lyle used to make training tapes, and they were in the media closet upstairs, and only the interns have keys. The intern is Brandon. He's nineteen, and he wears a lanyard with more keys on it than I've ever owned.
I found him by the vending machines. I offered him a parking pass for the tapes.
"Whose parking pass?" Brandon said.
"Mine," I said. I didn't have a parking pass, or a car. But I knew which drawer Darlene kept them in, which is almost the same thing.
"I'd have to ask Darlene," Brandon said.
"Don't ask Darlene," I said. "Darlene's very busy."
He said no. But everybody wants to park.
The Port Clement Beavers came to town on a Saturday. Phil said their mascot was the best in the League. I said that was a lot of talk for a rodent.
Then Bonnie the Beaver came out of the visitors' tunnel doing back handsprings. Four of them, then a split. Then she got up and fixed her tail. I'd never seen a beaver do that. Phil pointed out I'd never seen a beaver.
"Three-time MVP," Phil whispered, steering me by the elbow. "Pomeroy says stay on our side of the rink."
"It's all the same ice, Phil," I said.
I watched her the whole first period. She danced with a little girl. She made a referee laugh. She did a cartwheel on the carpet runner. I tried one later on the same runner, and now there's a part of it nobody walks on.
Then, at a timeout, the kiss cam came on.
The kiss cam is when the big screen puts a heart around two people and they have to kiss, or the whole building boos them. That's more or less how my parents got married. There wasn't a camera, but there was a lot of booing. If a mascot gets into the heart, that's a hijack. Two points.
Bonnie was standing by the glass near the visitors' bench. The camera swung toward her. I saw my chance. I wasn't sure what my chance was, exactly, but I ran at it.
Phil let go of my elbow. He says it was a reflex. I say it was a sign of support.
I got there just as the heart landed on her. I put my flippers out and leaned in, and inside the head, I closed my eyes.
On the jumbotron, I'm told, it was beautiful for about a second. Then Bonnie put one paw flat on my chest and pushed.
I went over the dasher boards backward. I didn't know you could do that in a walrus. I landed on the Port Clement bench, across three hockey players. One of them said, "You okay, buddy?" I couldn't answer, because of the Code, and because I was in love.
The crowd went wild. Phil said it was the loudest the building had been all night, including when somebody scored. I asked who scored. Phil said it didn't matter now.
I looked up. Bonnie was looking down at me over the glass. She pointed at me. Then she pointed at the floor and made a little shooing motion.
I translated it right away. It meant "you," and "fell," and "for me."
The fax that night gave me two points for the kiss cam. On the drive home Phil said, "Dale, she's a beaver."
"Only at work," I said.
After the game I waited for Bonnie in the tunnel by the loading dock. I'd brought her a gift: the Pretzel's little top hat, which I'd been saving for a special occasion or a pawn shop.
Phil waited too. He said he was there as my handler. I said I could handle myself. Then I walked into a fire extinguisher, and he said, "I'm staying."
Bonnie came down the tunnel with a gym bag over her shoulder, head still on. That's the Code. I respected it, mostly because I couldn't get my own head off without Phil and a stool.
I held out the top hat. She looked at it. Then she checked both ends of the tunnel, leaned in close to my mesh, and talked.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was low and calm, like somebody reading the weather on public radio. "I'm Tess. I'd like you to stop leaning."
I was so shocked I talked back. "You can talk?" I said.
"Not out there," she said. "Keep your voice down."
"I'm Wally," I whispered. "Well, I'm Dale. I'm inside Wally. I'm a consultant."
"I know," Tess said. "You sat on three of our defensemen."
"They seemed to like it," I said.
"They didn't," she said.
That's when I realized she was playing hard to get. In the League, you can't just come out and say you like somebody. You have to say the opposite, in a calm voice, while holding a gym bag.
"So there's no chance of us getting a coffee sometime," I said.
"No," Tess said.
"But not no forever."
"No," she said. "Forever."
I felt that left the door open a crack. Forever's a long time. A lot can happen.
She looked at the top hat. "This is Vance's," she said. "The Pretzel. He's going to come after you for this. He keeps salt in his mittens. For your eyes."
"Is that a threat?" I said.
"It's information," she said.
I thanked her for the information. Nobody'd ever worried about my eyes before. Usually it's my credit.
Then she said the thing I'll never forget. "You've got something, Dale." She looked at me for a long second through her big beaver teeth. "It isn't talent."
"Thank you," I said. It was the nicest thing a beaver had ever said to me.
She handed me back the top hat. I took that to mean she wanted me to have something to remember her by. Then she walked out to the Beavers' bus.
I waved at her tail until it went around the corner. Then I waved at the corner for a while, in case she came back.
"She doesn't like you," Phil said.
"You don't know beavers," I said.
Phil said he'd taught a whole unit on beavers. He said they mate for life. I asked him how long a beaver lives. He said about ten years.
I said that was about nine years more than I usually get.
Darlene said I could practice with the T-shirt cannon before the doors opened, as long as I aimed it at nothing. That's harder than it sounds in an arena. There's something everywhere.
The cannon is an air tank with a tube on it. It shoots T-shirts rolled up tight with rubber bands. Phil held my elbow and pointed me at the empty upper deck. Through the mouth mesh I could see the upper deck and a piece of my own tusk.
Nobody told me Mrs. Pruitt rehearsed at center ice. She stood on a red carpet in a long gray dress and a hat the size of a patio table. It had feathers on it, and a bird. I don't know if the bird was real. It's in the penalty box now, so somebody can check.
Phil sneezed. He's allergic to my suit, in principle. I want to be clear that what happened next was the principle's fault.
I flinched, and the cannon went off low and flat. A rolled-up extra-large went across the ice and took the hat clean off her head. The hat spun, rose, and dropped over the glass into the penalty box. The door swung shut behind it. Two minutes for roughing, I guess.
Mrs. Pruitt didn't move. She looked at the penalty box. Then she looked at me.
Marv the organist played one note, very softly.
The penalty box was locked. Nobody had the key, because nobody had ever needed to get a hat out of there before. So Mrs. Pruitt sang the anthem bareheaded.
She sang it perfectly. Every note. And the whole time, she didn't look at the flag. She looked straight at me.
"Dale," Phil whispered. "Apologize."
"She knows," I said. "Look at her. She can't take her eyes off me."
I felt it was a very personal performance. When she hit the high note at the end, I gave her a big thumbs up.
Well, a flipper up.
She closed her eyes.
After that, Darlene let me use the cannon during games. She said at least that way she'd know which direction to duck.
I spent a week on the physics. Phil teaches biology, which is physics for animals, so I asked him how far a T-shirt could fly. He said it depended on the angle and the air pressure.
"What about want?" I said.
"Want isn't a variable," Phil said.
"Not for you," I said.
A Moonshot is a T-shirt that reaches the upper deck. It's worth five points, the most on Pomeroy's whiteboard. Pomeroy says nobody in Wendleton has hit one since Lyle's elbow went. He took his cap off when he said "elbow."
My theory was simple. The higher you aim, the higher it goes. And a heavy shirt goes farther, because there's more of it to throw. So I rolled four extra-large T-shirts together and taped them with hockey tape.
Phil said that's not how any of it works. I told him that was a very negative way to start a Moonshot.
Second intermission, I set my feet by the ice machine gate. Phil held my elbow. Marv played the song that makes the crowd count down from ten.
I pulled the trigger. The cannon kicked, and I sat down very fast. The shirts went up in a beautiful arc. Not toward the upper deck. Sideways, toward the owner's suite, where one window was open to let the heat out.
The roll went straight through it. From the ice I heard a splash, and then a man say, "Oh!"
"That's Winthrop Gale's suite," Phil said, in a very small voice.
Five minutes later a man in a headset came down and said Mr. Gale would like to see the walrus. Phil steered me up three flights of stairs. I tried to think what to say, then remembered I couldn't say anything, which took a lot of pressure off.
Winthrop Gale sat at a little table with a white tablecloth. He had silver hair and a sweater vest and a bowl of soup with my T-shirts in it. Soup was on his glasses. Soup was on the vest. There was soup on the man next to him, who looked like a lawyer and didn't seem to be enjoying it as much.
"Shall I call someone, Mr. Gale?" the lawyer said.
"No, no," Gale said. He took off his glasses and wiped them. Then he smiled.
"Wonderful energy, young walrus," he said. His voice was soft, the way you'd talk to a horse you were about to buy.
I couldn't talk, because of the Code. So I bowed. My tusks went into his soup. That was the second time.
He laughed, very gently, and reached into his vest pocket. He took out a little gold lapel pin shaped like a smiling sun, and he pinned it on my chest fur himself.
"Keep that energy," he said. "Always."
I could tell he liked me. Nobody'd ever given me jewelry before, except a guy at a bus station, and that turned out to be evidence.
On my way out I took his dinner roll. He saw me do it. He just kept smiling, which told me what kind of friends we were going to be.
The fax that night gave me zero points. Next to my name it said, "Mezzanine."
I had the pin and the roll. On the drive home Phil reminded me whose name was on the hand dryers.
"Great man," I said, chewing.
Phil decided I needed a scouting department. He was the department.
Every morning with his coffee he reads the vibes on his phone before he makes his picks for the faculty lounge board. That's what the players and coaches have been saying in interviews and podcasts and posts, how they seem to be feeling, who's hurt and who they're playing. Now he started reading them for me too. I told him I'd been reading vibes my whole life. Mostly at the bus stop, where they're bad.
"Listen to this," he said before the first game. "The Walruses' coach says we need to bring more energy tonight."
"Good for him," I said.
"That means they've been flat," Phil said. "Flat team, quiet crowd. They'll need you early. Do something big at the first whistle."
"I'll see what my gut says," I said.
At the first whistle I did the worm down the aisle of section one-oh-four. The whole building woke up. One of the referees laughed so hard he had to lean on the other one. Two points.
Two nights later Phil had the folder again. A Walruses winger had said on a podcast he "couldn't wait to get back in front of these fans."
"Happy player, happy building," Phil said. "Bring the sign gag."
The sign gag is when I steal a fan's homemade sign and hold it upside down. I'd been planning to do that anyway, in my gut. I got on the jumbotron four times. One point each.
Before the third game, the folder said the visiting goalie had told reporters he was "tired of this building" and "the noise in here."
"He's rattled," Phil said. "Stand behind his net every stoppage."
So I did. I didn't do anything. I just stood there, a walrus, looking at him. By the second period he was looking back at me instead of at the puck. I'm not saying I touched the game. Touching the game is minus ten. I'm saying I stood near it with a lot of feeling.
Wally went up three spots on the whiteboard in a week. Pomeroy drew a little star next to my name, then erased it. He said stars go to people's heads. I told him my head was a walrus.
On the drive home I explained my method.
"It's my gut," I said. "I've always had good vibes in there. You read the jive, which is fine. I just feel it."
"It's the vibes, Dale," Phil said.
"I'm saying the instinct was mine," I said. "The folder just agreed with it. Every time, I went with my gut, and my gut said do the worm."
Phil was quiet for a block. "That's not how I remember it," he said gently. "Your gut said go to the snack bar."
"My gut also has to eat," I said.
He didn't argue. He was in too good a mood. He'd been reading the same vibes for his picks, and for the first time in six years he wasn't last on the faculty board. He was fourth.
"Fourth's nothing," I said.
"It's three spots from the parking space," Phil said. He said it the way some people say "Paris."
Every Thursday the League faxes its injury report to the boiler room. Pomeroy reads it out loud, standing up. He says you don't sit for the injury report.
The moose in Barrow Falls had suit lung and was out two weeks. The mustard bottle in Clay City had foam burn in both armpits and was listed as questionable. A raccoon in Duluth had the spins and was out indefinitely. Pomeroy said the last anybody saw, he was still spinning.
A chicken in Ogden had tusk strain. Pomeroy read that one twice. Chickens don't have tusks.
"That's a long story," he said, "and it isn't mine to tell."
The hot dog in Marlow was day to day. Pomeroy said with hot dogs it's always day to day. Nobody knows what's going on in there.
Then he took off his glasses and asked if Wendleton had anything to report.
I did. I had head neck from the twenty-two pounds. I had foam burn from going over the dasher boards. I had mitten hand from the cannon and a tusk that clicked when I nodded. I had a bruise on my chest in the shape of a beaver paw, but I wasn't reporting that one, because it was personal. And I had a paper cut from the contract.
Pomeroy wrote it all down except the paper cut. He said the League doesn't recognize paper cuts.
"That's the kind of thinking that keeps a league small," I said.
"I want to be listed as playing through it," I told him.
"All right," Pomeroy said.
"And put my name down as Iron Flipper."
Pomeroy looked at the fax for a long time. Then he wrote, "Wally. Probable."
I asked him to read it back. He said, "Wally, probable." I told him it didn't hit the ear like Iron Flipper.
"No," Pomeroy said, "it doesn't." He put the fax in the drawer where he keeps the old injury reports.
It's a deep drawer. Some of them go back to nineteen seventy-nine. One of them's about Pomeroy.
He won't say what it says.
The League inspector showed up unannounced on a Wednesday. His name was Mr. Feeney. He was a small, silent man with a clipboard and a pair of calipers. He looked at my suit for a long time, then at me, then wrote something down, and I hadn't even done anything yet.
The arena's cold, especially in the tunnels. So the week before, I'd made some improvements. I'd stuffed the suit with forty little hotel shampoo bottles, for warmth. And a dozen pretzels from the concession stand, also for warmth, and also in case I got hungry during a long period.
The shampoo was from a hotel I'd stayed at once. Well, walked through.
Mr. Feeney didn't say hello. He pointed at a chair in the boiler room. I sat down and made a sloshing sound.
He looked at Pomeroy. Pomeroy looked at the floor.
Mr. Feeney put the calipers on my belly and squeezed. Something inside went "glunk." He wrote something. He squeezed my side, and a pretzel came out of a seam and rolled across the floor. He watched it roll the whole way.
Then he reached into the neck hole and took out a shampoo bottle. He held it up to the light. It said "Lavender Calm."
"That's not foam," I said. "Foam's illegal. That's lather. It's a whole different thing, chemically. Ask Phil. He's a biology teacher."
Phil, standing behind Mr. Feeney, shook his head very slightly.
"And the pretzels are bread," I said. "You can't ban bread. People have been eating bread since the Bible. If you ban bread, where does it end? Do you ban the hot dog in Marlow?"
Mr. Feeney wrote something.
"Also, it can't be illegal foam," I said, "because there's no foam in there at all. I took it all out to make room."
Mr. Feeney wrote for a while.
"And if anything," I said, "this makes me the cleanest mascot in the League. I've got forty bottles of shampoo on me. Can the Pretzel say that?"
Mr. Feeney took out another bottle. "Coconut Breeze." Then another one. He kept going. He lined them up on the workbench in rows of ten. It took a while. Pomeroy got a broom for the pretzels.
When he got to forty, he looked at me over the calipers. Then he tore the sheet off his clipboard and handed it to me.
It said, "One game."
"One game what?" I said.
"Suspended," Pomeroy said.
I said that was a lot of words to leave out.
That night the standings fax came in. Under Wendleton, in small print, it said, "Suspended one game. See: the Shampoo Incident."
It was the first time anything had been named after me, or after something I did. That counts.
I kept the Lavender Calm. You don't get a lot of trophies in this business.
Being suspended means you can't wear the suit. It doesn't mean you can't go to the game. I checked.
Darlene doesn't know about the League. But that same afternoon a fan wrote in to complain that Wally smelled like a hotel bathroom. Darlene said a walrus should smell like a walrus, and she benched me for a game. I'd never been punished by two organizations at once before. It felt very official.
She put Brandon the intern in Wally for the night, and Phil had to handle him. I went as a civilian, in a hat and the mustache from last year. It grew back on the same side. I think it remembers me.
The only seat Darlene could get me was section one-twelve, row F. I knew that row. Hollis Brandt's had seat seven for twenty-six years. I had seat eight.
Hollis was holding up his "Wally for Mayor" sign. He looked over at me.
"First game?" Hollis said.
"Something like that," I said. I tilted my head so the mustache side was toward him.
He talked the whole first period, mostly about Wally. How Wally gave him a high five two weeks ago, and he hadn't washed the hand since. He showed me the hand. I believed him.
Meanwhile Brandon was down there being Wally. He was terrible. He walked like a guy carrying a couch by himself. He waved at an empty section. He high-fived a security guard who didn't want it. He tried the Lyle Shuffle, went down on one knee and stayed there.
"Wally's off tonight," Hollis said.
"They should bring back the guy from last week," I said. "That guy was great."
"It's the same guy," Hollis said. "Wally's Wally."
That was a nice thing to hear, and also wrong, and I couldn't say so. I'd never felt better in my life.
Then he got to the jet ski guy.
"There's this guy," Hollis said. "Owes me four thousand dollars. Sank my jet ski in Lake Wendle. Tried to pay me back with half a coconut. Half."
"Maybe it was a really good half," I said.
Hollis looked at me. "It wasn't," he said.
Second intermission, the kiss cam came on. The heart swung around the building. It went past two old ladies sharing a pretzel. Then it stopped on section one-twelve, row F, seats seven and eight.
Everybody cheered. Hollis turned to me. I turned to Hollis. He looked at my face, up close, for the first time all night.
"Do I know you?" he said.
"People point," I said.
Hollis squinted at the mustache. "Hey," he said. "Aren't you that..."
Then, down at ice level, Brandon tried to run up the stairs to get into our shot, the way I would have. He tripped on the first step and slid back down on his belly, all the way to the glass. The camera went to him, because that's what cameras want.
The building roared. Hollis forgot all about me. He jumped up screaming "Wally!" with the sign over his head.
I screamed it too. You have to support your team, even when it's Brandon.
Kettering came back on a Friday, and somebody filled my head with mustard.
I didn't find out until I put it on. It was the brown kind with seeds in it, packed all the way up to the mesh. Some came out my collar. The rest stayed in there with me.
"Oh, Dale," Phil said. He went and got a towel. Then he went and got four more.
I knew right away it was the Pretzel. Phil said mustard on a pretzel was like he'd signed it. I said I wished he'd signed a piece of paper, like a normal person.
I couldn't see out of the mesh at all, so Phil steered me the whole first period with both hands. I still got on the jumbotron twice. A little boy in section one-oh-two hugged me, then licked his sleeve and looked thoughtful.
Across the ice, the Pretzel waved. Then he mimed squeezing a bottle. Then he mimed licking his finger and nodding. It took me a second, but I got it. It meant "mustard." That's how I knew for sure it was him.
I spent the second period planning my revenge.
First, I'd need a disguise. Not a walrus. Something he'd never suspect, like a different walrus. Then I'd sneak into the visitors' dressing room while he was on the ice. I'd find his spare head. I'd fill it with something worse than mustard. Ketchup. No. Relish. A whole tub of relish, packed down with a spoon. Then I'd tape it shut so it would keep and put it back exactly where I found it. Next season, when he put it on, he'd know. And he'd know who.
"That's a lot of relish," Phil said.
"It's supposed to be," I said.
But the visitors' room was locked, and there's a guard named Deb. I offered Deb a pretzel. She said she knew where I'd gotten it.
So in the third period I went to Plan B.
During a timeout, while the Pretzel was doing his salt bit for the kids by the glass, I got down on my belly behind the boards and crawled. It was forty feet. It took most of the period. Phil walked beside me the whole way, bent over, saying, "Dale, people are taking pictures."
When I got to the Pretzel, I reached up very slowly with one flipper and untied his left shoelace.
Then I crawled back.
He never noticed. He did the rest of the game with one shoe untied and didn't trip once. That's how clean it was. With a sloppy revenge, the guy finds out.
The Walruses lost, four to two. Or won, four to two. I'd have to check.
"Dale, he doesn't know you did anything," Phil said.
"That's the beauty of it," I said.
I consider it my finest work.
Gordo drives the ice machine, and in all the years he's done it, nobody's ever heard him say a word. Darlene says she heard him cough once, in two thousand nine. She still brings it up. He drives between every period, in big slow circles, and that's all anybody knows about him.
Between the first and second periods I rode along with him, in the suit, standing on the back step. Phil said it wasn't allowed. Gordo didn't say anything, so I took that as a yes.
"Here's my plan, Gordo," I said. "I'm going after the Pretzel. Hard. Starting tonight."
Gordo turned left. Slowly.
"But not tonight," I said. "That's what he'll expect. I'll wait. I'll let him think he's won. Then I'll go after him hard."
Gordo turned left again.
"Or I go after the beaver," I said. "Romantically. Then once she's in love with me, she goes after the Pretzel for me. That's called delegating."
Left.
"But she's ahead of me in the standings, so really I should go after her. Points-wise. Not romantically. Or both. Both at the same time."
Gordo went around again. Behind us the ice came out shiny and new. You could see the whole arena in it, upside down, including me. I looked good upside down. Most walruses do.
"Or I don't go after anybody," I said. "I let everyone come after me. Then I just stand there and they trip over me. That's probably what Lyle did."
Gordo didn't say anything. But the circle got a little smaller. I took that to mean he agreed with all of it.
"So we're agreed," I said. "Hard. Tonight. Then wait."
He went around one more time. Then he drove through the gate, turned off the machine, and just sat there with his hands on the wheel.
I sat there with him. Neither of us said anything for a long time. It was the best conversation I've ever had.
Phil came and got me by the elbow. He asked what we'd talked about.
"Strategy," I said. "He's on board."
A seagull lives in the rafters of the arena, and as far as I know he's the only one in the building with a lifetime seat. Everybody calls him the Admiral. Pomeroy says he came in during a boat show in nineteen ninety-eight and liked it better than the ocean. He's the size of a beagle.
I didn't take him seriously until he took my pay.
My pay is eighty-five dollars and a hot dog. The eighty-five dollars goes to gas, and to Phil, and someday, theoretically, to Hollis. The hot dog is mine. Darlene hands it to me after the third period in foil, and I eat it in the boiler room on a bucket.
That night I didn't make it to the bucket. I was walking down the tunnel with the foil in my flipper when something hit me in the back of the head like a thrown suitcase. When I got up, the hot dog was gone. Up on the scoreboard cable, the Admiral was looking down at me, chewing with his mouth open.
"That bird's a menace," Darlene said.
"He's a coward," I said. "He only attacks from above."
So it was war. The next game I set a trap. I tied a hot dog to a string, and I tied the string to my flipper. The plan was, he grabs the hot dog, I pull the string, and I've got him.
He grabbed the hot dog. I pulled the string. Then he pulled the string, a lot harder, and flew back up to the scoreboard cable with the hot dog, the string and my left flipper.
"Did you get him?" Phil said.
"Sort of," I said. "He's got a flipper now. So in a way he's on the team."
He's still got it. Sometimes when the crowd stands up, he waves it at them. They think it's part of the show.
Darlene took the flipper out of my pay. The eighty-five was already spoken for, so she took it out of the hot dog. So now I owe Darlene a hot dog.
I swore I'd get him. I made a list of ways in Phil's journal, while Phil was trying to write in it. A net. A bigger net. A hot dog full of hot sauce. A hot dog full of a smaller, angrier bird.
I was going to start first thing in the morning.
In the morning there was a pancake special at the diner. And then I don't know.
The League still runs on a fax machine. Pomeroy says it's for security. Nobody's going to steal a fax, because nobody remembers how they work.
It's on a shelf next to the boiler. After every game it rings at about eleven, and Pomeroy stands up when it rings. This week he ripped off the page, read it, read it again, and handed it to me without a word.
Port Clement, Bonnie, first. Wendleton, Wally, second. Kettering, Sir Twisty, third, one point behind me.
Second in the whole League. A month and a half ago I was a guy in the wrong tunnel. Now I was behind only a beaver who'd pushed me over a wall, and ahead of a pretzel who'd filled my head with mustard. It felt like all my relationships were finally working out.
Then I noticed the bottom of the page. Where somebody would sign, there wasn't a name. There was a little drawing in pen: a circle with lines coming out of it, and a smile.
"What's this?" I said.
"The Commissioner's mark," Pomeroy said.
I looked at it for a while. Then I got it. A smiling sun means "have a nice day." The Commissioner was wishing me a nice day. Personally.
"He likes me," I said.
"He signs them all like that," Pomeroy said.
"Sure," I said. "But mine's smiling more."
It wasn't. I compared it to the old ones in the drawer. But it was close, and in a close one I think you give it to the walrus.
I asked who the Commissioner was. Pomeroy said nobody had ever seen him. Not in forty years. The faxes just come, and the paper's always a little warm, which he says is the machine.
"There's a number at the top of the page," he said. "Somebody called it once."
"What happened?" I said.
"He's a hot dog in Marlow now," Pomeroy said.
I took the fax home and framed it, with a frame from the drugstore and money from Phil. I hung it over my bed. The lapel pin Mr. Gale gave me stays on Wally's chest, and it has a little smiling sun on it too. I'd hate for him to look down from his suite and think I'd taken it off.
There's a lot of suns going around lately. I think spring's coming.
I woke up in the back of a moving van at dawn, still in the walrus suit. I'd fallen asleep in it in the boiler room, because I couldn't get the head off, and Phil had gone home to grade quizzes.
There were two men up front in gray jackets. I knocked on the partition with my flipper. One of them slid it open, looked at me and held up a fax.
At the top it said, "Trade Deadline." Under that it said, "Wendleton, Wally, to Kettering. Kettering, Sir Twisty, to Wendleton." At the bottom there was a little sun.
I'd been traded. For the Pretzel.
I told the man I had a contract with Darlene. He held up the fax again, closer. That's how the League does it. The costume stays. The person inside moves. Nobody asks the person inside.
"What about my hot dog?" I said. He closed the partition.
The Walruses were playing in Kettering that night anyway, so Wally was going too. Pomeroy says the League does trades on game days to save on shipping.
Kettering is three hours east. Their arena's named after a bank. I've been turned down there. The men walked me into a supply closet with the light off, which the League requires, and Vance Coyle was in there too. I could hear him breathing. When the light came on, Vance was a walrus, and I was a pretzel.
You don't put on a pretzel. You get knotted into it. My arms went behind my back and came out at my hips. There were salt crystals the size of dice glued all over the suit. Some of them weren't glued, and those were the ones that found my eyes.
The Kettering crowd loved me. That was the worst part. Kids high-fived me. A man held up a sign that said, "Twisty forever," and I nodded at it, because what else are you going to do.
Then Wally came out of the visitors' tunnel.
It was my suit. My tusks. My belly, with a mustard stain I knew by heart. But inside was Vance Coyle, and he walked like he'd been born a walrus. He did the worm down the aisle. My worm. Better.
Twelve thousand people booed him. I'd never heard Wally booed. It hurt my feelings, which was strange, because I was standing right there, being a pretzel.
In the first intermission, Vance found a shampoo bottle in Wally's left leg. I'd missed one. He held it up over his head. Then he handed it to a League inspector in row three, eating peanuts.
Phil showed up in the second period. He'd driven three hours in his school clothes, with a thermos. He walked down to the tunnel and took me by the elbow, the way he does. I knew it was him by the elbow before I could see him.
"There you are," he said.
"I've been doing great," I said. "They love me here."
Phil looked at the salt in my eyes. "I can see that," he said.
At the second intermission a fax came down to the Kettering boiler room. "Trade voided," it said. "Foam irregularities." And a little sun.
The shampoo had saved me. Mr. Feeney called it an incident. I call it planning.
They untied me in the loading dock. On the way to Phil's car I borrowed his phone and called Brandon. He'd been taking out the trash when the van left. He'd seen everything.
"Forget it ever happened," I told him, "and I'll give you two season tickets. Section one-twelve, row F."
"Aren't those Hollis's?" Brandon said.
"Not after today," I said.
Phil got the first speeding ticket of his life driving me home from Kettering. I've never been prouder of anybody.
He paid for the gas and the snacks too. I let him. Letting a friend help you is a gift, and I gave it to Phil the whole way home. I could tell it meant a lot to him, because he kept looking at the receipts.
He was doing sixty-one in a fifty-five. He had his hazard lights on the whole time, so technically he'd warned everybody.
The officer leaned in the window. "Where's the fire?" he said.
"My friend got traded to Kettering," Phil said.
The officer looked at me. I still had salt on my face, in my ears, and in one sock. I never took my shoes off in Kettering. That's how good they are with salt.
"I'm from Kettering," the officer said. Then he wrote the ticket, pressing very hard.
For snacks I had a bag of something crunchy, a gas station burrito, and a bag of pretzels. I ate the pretzels one at a time, staring straight ahead, so they'd know.
Phil didn't eat anything. He drove with both hands and kept glancing over at me, the way you check on a cake.
"I was scared, Dale," he said at the county line. "I thought I'd lost you."
"I barely noticed I was gone," I said.
"You were gone a whole day," Phil said.
"See?" I said. "Flew right by."
He was quiet for a few miles. Then he said, "I understand." That made one of us.
At the Wendleton exit he handed me the receipts. Gas, forty-one dollars. Snacks, eleven, but that was mostly the burrito. Ticket, a hundred and twenty dollars, for going six miles too fast. That's twenty dollars a mile. Walking them would've been free.
"Do you want to split it?" Phil said.
I said I'd think about it. Then I folded the receipts up and tucked them in his journal, so they wouldn't get lost. That's what friends are for.
I'm still thinking about it.
Ozzie Pomeroy turned off the lights in the boiler room before he told me the legend. Then he turned them back on, because I'd walked into a pipe.
"Some things should only be told in the dark," he said. He turned them off again. I held very still.
Phil was there too, sitting on a bucket with his journal. He'd read bits of the legend on fan forums since college. He'd just never heard it from somebody who was there.
"I wasn't there," Pomeroy said. "It was nineteen twenty-three."
Phil wrote that down anyway.
Back then, Pomeroy said, there were no mascots. There were just men in the stands, yelling, with nobody to yell at but each other. Then came Barnaby the Bear.
Barnaby was the first. A hatmaker in Ferncastle built his head and lined the inside with real gold leaf. He used up all the gold leaf in town, plus the frame off his wife's portrait. She'd always said he loved hats more than her. That settled it.
"Why gold?" I said.
"So he'd never forget what he was worth," Pomeroy said.
"How much was he worth?"
"More than you," Pomeroy said. I thought that was a nice thing to say to the new guy.
The boiler clanked. Pomeroy waited for it to finish. I got the feeling they'd practiced.
Whoever wears the Golden Head at the Intermission Cup, he said, becomes Commissioner for life. The standings, the trades, the faxes, all of it.
"Does the Commissioner have to pay people back?" I said.
"The Commissioner doesn't have to do anything," Pomeroy said.
Then came the flood. In nineteen sixty-one the Ferncastle River came through the doors of the old arena during the second intermission. The ice melted. The organ floated. When the water went down, the head was gone.
Some say it washed down the river to the sea. Some say a fisherman pulled it up and wore it the rest of his life. Some say it's in a storage unit off Route Six, behind a rowing machine.
"Which one do you believe?" Phil said.
Pomeroy didn't answer for a long time. "I've been to the storage unit," he said.
He said men had lost everything looking for that head. Their jobs. Their marriages. Their sense of smell.
"I've never even had a marriage," I said. "So I'm already ahead."
I knew right then it was my destiny. A Commissioner doesn't owe anybody four thousand dollars and half a coconut. A Commissioner issues rulings. My first ruling would be that lakes are nobody's fault.
A Commissioner needs a name, too. I tried it out in the dark. "The Golden Walrus."
It echoed off the boiler. Phil said it was long for a T-shirt. I said not if you buy a big T-shirt.
Pomeroy turned the lights back on and looked at me for a long time. "That's what the last one said," he said.
"Then he was right too," I said. And I walked into the pipe again.
Phil reads the vibes every morning with his coffee, and on game nights he reads them again with a second coffee, which he doesn't share.
The Beavers were in town. An hour before the game Phil sat on a bucket in the boiler room, scrolling through the vibes. I sat on the other bucket in the walrus suit, minus the head, eating a pretzel I'd found in one of the legs.
"What's the vibe-o-meter say tonight?" I said.
"Vibes," Phil said, without looking up. He's said it so many times now that it just comes out of him, like a sneeze.
Every player and every game has its vibes: what they're saying in interviews and podcasts and posts, plus who's hurt and who they're playing. You read it, and you get a feel for how the night's going to go.
"The Beavers' captain says they feel really fast tonight," Phil said.
"Fast is bad," I said. "Fast people trip."
I don't need a phone. I've got my gut, and it said three things. The Beavers would come out flat. Lyle was on a fishing boat somewhere warm. And it wanted another pretzel. I was surest about the pretzel.
Phil stopped scrolling. "Huh," he said.
A Knots defenseman had been on a podcast. Phil read it out loud, slowly. "Weirdest thing, I played at Mr. Gale's grandson's birthday party last week, and there was a sun mascot doing that old walrus dance."
"So?" I said. "Lots of people can do that dance."
"Nobody can do that dance," Phil said. "You tried it three times and hit your head on the boiler."
Then Phil found a Walruses assistant coach, in an interview about the playoffs. At the very end he'd said, "Lyle always said the real treasure was in Gale's basement," and then he'd laughed.
Phil read the laugh too. "Ha, ha, ha," he said, flat, because it was a quote, and Phil doesn't change quotes.
"Dale," Phil said. "Somebody's doing the Lyle Shuffle at Gale Acres. In a sun. Lyle's alive. He's there."
It took me a second longer, but I got somewhere better. "Phil," I said. "Real treasure. Gale's basement. The Golden Head's at Gale Acres."
"That's not what he meant," Phil said.
"It's right there in the quote," I said. "You read it yourself. With the laugh."
Then a voice came from behind the water heater, low and calm. "That's a terrible idea."
It was Bonnie. Tess. She'd been sitting on the mop sink the whole time with her head on, waiting for her handler. Nobody had noticed. A beaver who doesn't move just looks like something Pomeroy hasn't thrown out yet.
She said her mentor, the Beaver before her, went missing last year. One day the suit came back from a charity event with nobody in it, folded up neat, with a lollipop in the pocket.
"Gale was at that event," Tess said. "People who go looking for him don't come back. Don't go."
I leaned over to Phil. "She's worried about me," I whispered.
"She said don't go," Phil whispered.
"Why would she care if I go," I said, "unless she wants me to come back?"
Tess stood up and headed for the stairs. "Showtime," she said. "You're late too."
Upstairs the horn went off. The Beavers had scored in the first minute. My gut said that was a fluke.
Then the horn went off again.
Darlene Fisk treats everything like it's on fire. That week it was a road trip.
"Playoff goodwill tour," she said. She had us in the equipment room with her clipboard out and all three walkie-talkies going. "Wally visits the whole state in the van. Hospitals, libraries, anybody who's sad. You leave Thursday."
I read the schedule over Phil's shoulder. A library in Pinewood. A library in Crandall, in a strip mall. A children's hospital in Marlow. A grocery store opening in Fenwick, where Wally would cut the ribbon, if somebody else held the scissors. And a dentist's office in Thornbury.
"They asked for a walrus specifically," Darlene said. "Don't ask them why. I did."
Phil had unfolded the road map on a crate of foam fingers and gone pale. For Phil that's a short trip.
Halfway up the state, between the dentist and the grocery store, the route ran within twenty miles of Gale Acres. Phil put his finger on the spot and kept it there for the rest of the meeting. I think he was worried it'd move.
"Is there a problem?" Darlene said.
"No," Phil said. "It's a great route."
Then one of her walkie-talkies said something about the nacho station, and this time it really was on fire, and she was gone.
The Beavers had a goodwill tour that week too, on the same roads, because there are only so many libraries. That night Tess came down to the boiler room, head on, and said she'd ride along part of the way.
"Not to help," she said. "To keep you two alive. That's different."
"She wants to spend time with me," I told Phil.
"She said alive," Phil said.
"You don't keep somebody alive unless you want him around," I said. He didn't have an answer for that.
Then Phil opened his journal to the plan. It was mostly arrows, from "van" to "Gale Acres" to "Lyle" and back to "van."
"I love it," I said. "Especially that arrow." It was the best one, long and curvy, going right off the edge.
"That's a fold in the page," Phil said.
My plan was simpler. Find the Golden Head, put it on, become Commissioner, and free Lyle with a ruling. Maybe two rulings, depending on the paperwork.
"That's a terrible plan," Tess said. "But it's better than the one Lyle's got."
"Anything we find," Phil said, "we split three ways."
"Three ways," Tess said.
"Three ways," I said, and we shook on it. I shook with a flipper and Tess shook with a paw, so legally it could've meant anything.
In my heart I made it ninety-five, four, one. Ninety-five for me, since it was my destiny. Four for Phil, for gas. And one for Tess, because she's a beaver, and they mostly want sticks.
It's the best deal I've ever made. Only one of us knows about it.
The Walruses' mascot van is called the Tuskmobile. Nobody named it that. It just has tusks, and after a while you stop fighting it.
Wally's face is painted on both sides. A volunteer did it from a description over the phone. On the left side, Wally's smiling. On the right side, he looks like he just heard a noise downstairs.
The tusks are foam, bolted to the front bumper. Cars got out of our way all morning. I think that's respect.
Top speed is fifty-two miles an hour. That's downhill, with a tailwind, and me leaning forward.
"Can we go any faster?" I said.
"This is faster," Phil said.
Phil drove. I rode in the back in the full suit, head and all, because of the Code. You never know who's looking in a van window. Mostly it was one kid in a minivan, for forty miles. I waved the whole time. My flipper's still sore.
The seat belt didn't fit over the suit, so Phil strapped me in with a bungee cord. It held me in place. On the curves it held me in a lot of different places.
Darlene had packed a cooler with twelve sandwiches. Six said "Phil" and six said "Wally." I counted them twice before we left. I like to know what's mine, and also what's Phil's, in case it becomes mine.
Two hours later we stopped at a library in Pinewood. Before story time, I opened the cooler for a little pre-show sandwich.
"Phil," I said. "There's a bird in the sandwiches."
"That's not a bird," Phil said. "That's the Admiral." I'd have argued, but he knows more about birds than I do.
He was right. It was the big gray seagull from the arena rafters, the one who took my hot dog pay. I'd know that beak anywhere. He looked up at me with a pickle in his beak. He didn't look sorry. He looked like he was waiting for the next course.
All six of my sandwiches were gone. All six of Phil's were fine.
"Seagulls can't read, Dale," Phil said.
"Then how'd he know?" I said.
I went for him. You can't see much out of a walrus head. First I saw the parking lot. Then the side of the van. Then the parking lot again, but closer.
"Dale, you're hugging the van," Phil said.
The Admiral got me once, right through the mouth mesh. I lost some fur, some eyebrow, and the pickle. Wally doesn't have eyebrows, so that one was mine. Phil found the fur under the van. The pickle we never found.
Then the Admiral flew off north, the same way we were headed. I let him go. I'm a bigger walrus than that.
Also, I couldn't see him.
The Pinewood Public Library had a sign over the door that said QUIET. I followed it perfectly all afternoon. I can't say the same for the kids.
Story time was in the children's corner, on a rug shaped like a turtle. There were fourteen kids. The librarian handed me a picture book called Dottie Duck Finds Her Hat, and Phil lowered me onto a tiny chair, which held, mostly.
I can't read through the mesh. All I can see is a strip about the size of a mail slot, and that day the strip was mostly the librarian's belt. And under the Code, a walrus can't talk anyway. So I opened the book and made it up as I went, in mime.
First I did Dottie. I flapped both flippers. "Bird!" a kid yelled. Close enough. I've been called worse by adults.
Dottie lost her hat. She looked everywhere for it. I looked under the rug, behind the shelf, and up the librarian's sleeve. Big laughs.
Then I had an idea for a twist. Along comes a walrus, and he's hungry.
"Is that you?" a boy said.
I pointed at myself. Fourteen kids leaned in. I flapped like Dottie. Then I pretended to eat Dottie, slowly, so everybody'd get it.
A little girl in the front row started crying. Minus four. Somewhere, a fax machine was warming up.
I tried to fix it. First I mimed the walrus feeling terrible. Then I mimed him coughing Dottie back up, so she'd be okay. The girl cried harder. So I mimed Dottie's ghost floating up to heaven, wearing the hat.
Now three kids were crying. That's minus twelve, if they count them separately, and I'm pretty sure they do.
"Why did the walrus eat the duck?" the boy said.
"Because he's a walrus," another kid said. That made four.
The librarian started toward me. Phil got there first. He knelt down next to the girl.
"Did you know there's a frog that freezes solid all winter?" Phil said. "Its heart stops. And in the spring it thaws out and hops away like nothing happened."
The girl stopped crying. "Like Dottie?" she said.
"Exactly like Dottie," Phil said.
The kids cheered. I mimed Dottie thawing out, which I'd been planning to do all along.
In the van I explained to Phil how I'd set the whole thing up. "A frog fact doesn't work on a happy kid," I said. "You've got to get them crying first. In show business, that's called building."
"Four of them were crying," Phil said.
"That's a lot of building," I said.
The rest stop on Route Nine was voted the cleanest rest stop in the state, two years running. I'd like to say I didn't change that.
I'd had most of a thermos of coffee since Pinewood. The zipper on the walrus suit is in the back, where only a handler can reach it. My handler was in line at the vending machine, trying to decide between two kinds of peanuts that were the same peanuts.
"Do you want me to come with you?" Phil said.
"I'll be fine," I told him. "I've been going to the bathroom my whole life."
The men's room door was narrow, so I went in sideways. The tusks caught on the frame. I backed up and went in tusks first, which is how I should've done it in the first place.
The automatic sink saw me and turned on. Then the next one. Then all four. The hand dryer saw me and turned on too. I've never been so welcome anywhere.
The stall had one of those little sliding latches. You can't slide a latch with a flipper. You can only bump it, and then it slides the wrong way.
So I left the door open and reached around for the zipper. I couldn't reach the zipper. I turned around to reach it from the other side, which isn't how zippers work, but I was getting desperate.
The door swung shut on me. Half of me was in the stall. The other half was out in the room, with the hand dryer blowing on it.
I couldn't call for help, because of the Code. So I waited.
That's when the church group came in. It was a youth group from Bellmont, in matching orange shirts, on their way home from a lake retreat. The two leaders had counted twenty-two kids at every stop since the lake. With me in the room they got twenty-three, and one of them counted again.
Nobody screamed. "Is he stuck?" a girl said.
The other leader looked at me for a long time. "Is this a promotion?" he said.
I couldn't talk, so I pointed at the hand dryer with my free flipper.
They took pictures. They took a group picture, with me in the middle, half in the stall. "Take one of these, honey," a nice lady said, and she tucked a pamphlet into my mouth mesh. On the front it said, "Are You Lost?" I felt that was a little personal.
Phil found me twenty minutes later. "Dale?" he said from the doorway. "Why are all the sinks on?"
He got me out with one hard pull and a lot of soap.
Somewhere in Bellmont there's a church that thinks very highly of that hand dryer.
Then we drove on.
There's a bar behind a tire store off Route Nine where nobody's ever been carded. It's hard to card a giraffe.
It's called the Neck Hole. The only sign is a small one by the door. Tess told us about it.
"Every mascot on the road ends up there sooner or later," she said. "Don't make eye contact."
"How would anybody know?" I said. She didn't answer, which I respected.
Inside, it was dark and very quiet. Everybody was in costume with their heads on, because the Code holds in a bar too. Nobody talks. You order by pointing, and you tip by nodding. I nodded a lot. It's free.
The bartender was a lighthouse. A light on top of her blinked when your drink was ready.
The drinks came in buckets, with straws about four feet long, so you could feed them in through your mouth hole. I pointed at what a giraffe was having. It was orange. I didn't ask.
Phil was the only one in the place with a face. Every head in the bar turned toward him, slowly, the way heads do when they weigh twenty pounds. Phil drank his ginger ale very fast.
"Everybody's staring at me," he whispered.
"Don't make eye contact," I whispered back. I'd been there twenty minutes, and already I was a regular.
A cow sat alone in the back, looking at her hooves. Tess told me later she'd been a parrot until Tuesday. That's the trade deadline for you. You go to bed a parrot.
Around ten, a hot dog bumped into a taco at the jukebox. The taco shoved him. Then they fought.
It was all in slow motion, because that's as fast as the suits go. Neither of them could see a thing. The hot dog threw a long, slow punch and hit the coat rack. The coat rack stayed up. He hit it again. After two minutes everybody agreed the hot dog had won, and the taco went home.
In the corner, a retired moose played the piano with his mittens on. With mittens you hit three keys at a time. So every song had three times as many notes, which made it three times as sad.
Then I saw her at the end of the bar. Bonnie. Tess, alone with her bucket.
I'd never tried to pick up a woman in total silence before. I figured it'd be easier, since she couldn't say no out loud.
I walked over. I pointed at her. I pointed at me. I put my flippers together to make a heart. It came out more like a bean, but she got the idea.
She held up one paw, flat. Then she tapped her wrist. Then she pointed at the door.
I translated it right away. Hold on. Later. Meet me at the door.
So I went and stood by the door. She finished her drink, walked right past me, and went out to the Beavers' van. I figured she meant a later door.
I stood there until closing. The moose played the whole time. By the end it was about nine times as sad.
On the road the next morning, I explained it to Phil. "She tapped her wrist," I said. "That means later."
"It means it's late," Phil said. "As in, go home."
"Then why wasn't she wearing a watch?" I said.
He didn't have an answer for that. Beavers don't wear watches. She didn't even know when later was.
Honestly, that's on her.
The Hall of Heads is in the basement of a strip mall in Crandall, between a nail salon and a tax office. You go in through the nail salon. "Downstairs," the lady at the front said, without looking up. They've seen worse feet.
The curator was a man named Lonnie. He's ninety. From nineteen fifty-two to sixty he was a lobster, and he still walks a little sideways.
"Welcome to the Hall of Heads," he said. "Keep yours on."
He gave us the tour himself. The heads sit in glass cases with little brass plaques, under one long buzzing light. A squirrel who worked the kiss cam for thirty years. A chicken who retired after a T-shirt cannon accident. And a giant tooth from a dentist's softball team, which Lonnie said doesn't really count, but the dentist kept calling.
I couldn't talk, because of the Code. So I pointed at things, and Lonnie told me what they were. It's the best way to take a tour. Nobody asks you anything back.
Near the end there was a plaque for Pickles the Gherkin. Wendleton, nineteen seventy-nine to ninety-one. Retired after the Incident.
I pointed at the plaque. Then I shrugged very big, with both flippers.
"We don't talk about the Incident," Lonnie said.
Pomeroy doesn't either. I've asked him fifteen times now. I told Phil my guess was brine. Phil said it was none of our business, which is what people say when they're guessing brine too.
Then Lonnie led us to the back room. He took off his cap in the doorway. I couldn't take off anything, because of the Code, so I bowed instead and hit the doorframe.
There was a pedestal in the middle of the room, with red velvet on top and a spotlight on it. There was nothing on the velvet. The brass plaque said, Barnaby's Head, lost in nineteen sixty-one.
"I dust it every morning," Lonnie said.
"There's nothing on it," Phil whispered.
"The dust doesn't know that," Lonnie said.
I walked up and measured the pedestal with my flipper. Two flippers wide, one and a half deep. My head's two flippers wide. Nobody's ever checked how deep. Then I bent way over at the waist, to hold my head right next to it and see how they looked together.
Phil said they looked great. Actually, Phil said, "Please stand up." But he said it in a tone that meant great.
Lonnie asked me to step away from the pedestal. I pointed at my head. Then at the pedestal. Then at my head again, so he'd get the idea.
He got the idea. He pressed a little button under his desk.
I've been asked to leave a lot of places, but never by a lobster.
Winthrop Gale gave the children's hospital back in Wendleton a whole wing. The one in Marlow only got a hallway. It's still got a Gale elevator, a Gale gift shop, and in the lobby, a portrait of Winthrop Gale smiling down in a sweater vest. I saluted it. You don't get your name on that many hallways by being in a bad mood.
Mrs. Pruitt was there too. She was singing for the patients that afternoon, in a hat about the size of a birdbath. When she saw the walrus come in, she took a step back and held on to the hat.
I don't know why. The hat thing was weeks ago, and it was the cannon's fault, and the cannon stayed home.
The kids were great. "Are you a real walrus?" one girl asked. I nodded.
"Why do you smell like a gym?" a boy asked. I nodded at that too. You can't lie to a child.
Then the hospital photographer wanted a picture of Wally with Mrs. Pruitt. "Do something fun," he said.
"I'd rather do something dignified," Mrs. Pruitt said.
"Sure," the photographer said. "As long as it's fun."
I could tell she was stuck. So I helped. I took a cookie off the snack cart and mimed for her to feed it to the walrus. It's a classic.
She put the cookie in Wally's mouth, very carefully. Her rings went through the mesh. Then they didn't come back out.
"How lovely," Mrs. Pruitt said, through her teeth.
We pulled. Her hand stayed in my mouth. A nurse came over. "On three," she said, and pulled on two. Phil pulled on my elbow, which wasn't attached to anything that would help, but he's a handler, and it's what he knows.
Mrs. Pruitt decided to keep the children calm. She sang a lullaby in Italian, right into the head. It's the closest I've ever been to opera. My ears rang until Thursday.
Then the nurse came back from the cafeteria with a jar of mayonnaise. She greased Mrs. Pruitt's whole hand, and the inside of the mouth, and some of my face. One good pull, and out it came.
The kids went crazy. One boy said it was the best day of his life. Another asked if she'd do it again. She didn't.
Mrs. Pruitt thanked the nurse and Phil. She looked at the walrus for a long time. Then she said, "Bless you," and walked out holding her hand straight up in the air, so it wouldn't touch anything.
Later, in the van, I found one of her rings inside the head. I'm keeping it safe for her. It's very safe. It's in my pocket.
Wally's head still smells like mayonnaise. It's the best it's ever smelled.
For two days a van with a giant pretzel on the roof followed us up the state.
"That's the Knots," Phil said.
"Lots of people like pretzels," I said.
When Phil signaled left, the pretzel van signaled left too. I thought that was very courteous. You don't see a lot of signaling on the highway anymore.
After the dentist's office in Thornbury we pulled into a gas station, and the pretzel van pulled in at the next pump. Sir Twisty got out, in the full pretzel and his replacement top hat. He pumped his gas and pointed his face at me the whole time.
Phil went in to pay, and I closed my eyes for one minute. When I opened them, Phil was standing at the bumper. "Dale," he said. "Our tusks are on backward."
The Pretzel had turned them around, so they pointed back at the van. You wouldn't think that matters. It matters. Later, on the highway, cars that used to get out of our way rode right up on our bumper. They'd respected the tusks, not us.
From his pump, the Pretzel pointed at the tusks, then at me, and made a slow twisting motion with both hands.
I knew what that meant. He'd turned our tusks around free of charge, and I should come by Kettering sometime for a pretzel. I waved. That's what makes sports beautiful.
"He's smirking at you," Phil said.
You can't see a pretzel smirk. But Phil was right, you can feel it, and a smirk has to be paid for.
My plan was to let the air out of all four of his tires. He'd have to drive home to Kettering on four flats, at about five miles an hour, ashamed and very bumpy, with every car in the state honking.
He went inside for a hot dog. I went low and quiet, the way only a walrus can, which isn't very.
You can't unscrew a valve cap with a flipper. Then I saw the air hose by the curb. I figured if air goes in through there, it can come out the same way. You just have to show it how.
It didn't come out. It went in. Every time I got the hose on a tire, the machine dinged and pumped. I went around that van twice before I understood the hose only had the one idea.
I opened his door to check the sticker that says what the tires should be, so I'd know how much damage I'd done. They were perfect. All four, right on the number.
That's when I saw the shoebox under the seat.
It was full of receipts. Kettering Foam and Cushion Supply, industrial foam, extra bounce, forty cubic feet. One cooling vest, ice packs included, rush delivery. Fifty pounds of salt, restaurant size. And a car wash, which I thought was the most suspicious one, because have you seen that van? All of it billed to V. Coyle.
"Phil," I said. "The Pretzel's a doper."
It made me sick. A grown man, stuffing his suit with something just to get ahead. I'd only ever used shampoo bottles, and that was for warmth.
"What do you want those for?" Phil said, when I took them.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But he'll want them back." I like having paper somebody else wants. Usually it's the other way around.
The Pretzel came out with his hot dog and drove off ahead of us, smooth as anything. At the exit he looked back and gave me a thumbs up.
He was terrified. He knew I could get to his tires anytime.
The walrus and the pretzel don't often meet in the wild. When they do, it's usually on a covered bridge.
This one crossed the Little Pinewood River, about an hour past Thornbury. We were halfway across when the Pretzel stepped out of the shadows at the other end. He'd been waiting. He must have found out about the receipts, or the tires.
Phil stopped the van. We got out.
The pretzel circled. The walrus waited. The walrus was mostly waiting because he couldn't see where the pretzel had gone.
"He's over there," Phil whispered, and he turned me by the elbow until I was facing the Pretzel. Then he turned me back a little, because I'd gone past him and was facing a squirrel.
The Pretzel opened with mime. He drew a finger across his throat. He pointed at the river. He sprinkled salt, slowly, over an invisible walrus.
I read it the only way I could. He was welcoming me to the bridge, pointing out the river, and offering salt for anything I caught in it. I nodded back. It was a nice river.
Then he charged. It took a while. These suits don't go fast, so it was the slowest charge you've ever seen. A car could've come through. A car did come through, slowly, and we both stepped aside for it. Then he went back to charging.
I'd planned three moves. The first was a big overhead chop. The second was a spin. The third was whatever the first two set up.
I never got to the first one. I stepped on my own flipper, tripped, and fell on him.
That's when I learned about the foam. He was packed with the industrial kind, extra bounce, forty cubic feet. When I landed on him, he didn't go down. He went up. He bounced right off me, over the railing, and into the Little Pinewood River.
"Dale!" Phil said. "You did it!"
"I meant to," I said.
He didn't sink. He's mostly foam. He bobbed back up and floated away downstream on his back, with his top hat still on.
He kept miming threats the whole way. The finger across the throat. The pointing. The salt. The last thing I saw was one tiny fist, shaking, going around the bend.
I turned to Phil, very slowly, because of the suit.
"Phil," I said, "from now on, call me the Foam Avenger."
"He's the one with the foam," Phil said.
"That's what makes it so avenging," I said.
Phil didn't call me that. Nobody did. But he held my elbow a little tighter the rest of the way across the bridge. I think he was proud.
Then we went and got pancakes.
Darlene's travel budget turned out to be one tent and a bag of marshmallows. So we camped at a state park outside Fenwick, next to a sign that said, "Do not feed the bears." I didn't. They never asked.
Phil built the fire. He started with a magnifying glass, out of habit, and then switched to matches, because it was dark.
The Beavers' van pulled in around nine. Tess said it was a coincidence. I didn't believe that for a second. Nobody drives that far for a coincidence.
She walked over and sat down on a log across the fire, still in the suit, head and all. Then she turned around, so her back was to me, and she took her head off.
I didn't see anything. It was too dark, and she was careful. All I saw was the back of somebody, and some hair, and the beaver head sitting next to her on the log, staring at me with fire in its eyes.
I'd taken my head off too. It was the first time we'd ever sat together with no heads. I wanted to say something perfect.
"I've been thinking about having my portrait done," I said. "Just the head."
Tess laughed. I'd never heard her laugh before. It was low and short, like she didn't want to waste it. I'll never know what was so funny. I've tried that line on other people since, and nothing.
Phil handed out marshmallows. Tess's caught fire, so I ate it for her. You can't let a marshmallow suffer.
Then I made my move.
I knelt down in front of the log. In a walrus suit, once you kneel, you're kneeling for a while, so you'd better mean it. I meant it.
I took out Mrs. Pruitt's ring.
I looked deep into the beaver's eyes. "Will you marry me?" I said.
"Dale," Tess said, from behind. "That's my head."
"I know," I said. "I'm starting with the part I've met."
"No," Tess said.
That's not what I heard. What I heard was "not yet." Some words sound a lot like other words in the woods. It's the trees.
Phil was writing in his journal by the fire. I asked him to put down that she'd said "not yet."
He wrote something. Then I asked him to read it back.
"No," Phil read.
I told him he'd spelled it wrong.
The Tuskmobile broke down the morning after the campfire, between two towns that both claimed to be the onion capital of the state. First it coughed. Then it coughed meaner. Then it stopped, the way a dog stops in the middle of a walk and just sits.
One of the backward tusks fell off the bumper and rolled into a ditch, which I took personally.
I've never owned a car, but I've ridden in plenty, so I know cars. I lifted the hood. There was a lot going on in there. I could tell right away it was the engine.
"It's the main belt," I said.
"Which one's the main belt?" Phil said.
"The main one," I said. That usually ends it.
First I pulled on the main belt to test it. It came off in my flipper, still warm. I handed it to Phil, so it'd be his responsibility.
Next I figured the engine needed to breathe. I unscrewed a cap. Something green came out, and some got in the mouth mesh. It tasted minty. At least the engine had been taking care of itself.
Last, I gave it a good whack with the tire iron. A lot of machines just need to know you're serious. The headlights came on. Then the horn, and it stayed on.
A farmer came out on his porch and folded his arms. I gave him a thumbs up. He went back inside.
Tess had ridden with us that morning, in the back, reading a magazine. She climbed out, reached up inside her beaver head, and came out with a hairpin. I'd only seen her hair once, from behind. I didn't know she kept things in it. I didn't ask. A gentleman doesn't ask a beaver about her hair.
Phil bent the pin into a little hook and did something to a wire. The horn quit. He put the belt back on. Four minutes. I timed it. Somebody has to manage.
"Nice work," I told him. "You know I'd have gotten there."
"Gotten where?" Phil said.
"There," I said. "It's a general area."
Tess held out her paw. "I'll need my pin back," she said.
Phil had handed the pin to me to hold. I tucked it in my flipper instead. A woman doesn't hand you something of hers unless she wants a reason to talk to you again.
"Dale," she said. "Give me the pin."
See? We were already talking.
The truck stop had a sign out front that said, "Home of the sixty-ounce coffee." Under it, smaller, it said, "Restrooms for customers only." I thought that was fair. If you sell a man sixty ounces of coffee, you owe him something.
I was in line for the restroom, in the full suit, when somebody behind me yelled, "Wally!" I knew that voice. I'd been hiding from it for over a year.
It was Hollis Brandt, in a Walruses jersey with Wally across the back. He was holding a brand-new sign. This one said, "Wally for Governor," with twice the glitter. He'd moved me up. Nobody's ever promoted me before.
He'd been following the playoff run in his truck, sleeping in the cab. "For the team," he said. Then he winked. "For you, mostly."
I couldn't talk, because of the Code. So I did the big laugh, shoulders only. Hollis laughed too. We were really connecting.
He asked for a selfie. He put his arm around me and squeezed. Hollis has big arms. I'd always pictured them around my neck. Around my shoulders was a lot nicer.
Then he sat on a bench by the air pump and opened a bag of beef jerky.
"Can I tell you something, Wally?" he said.
I nodded. That was a mistake, because he did.
"There's this guy," Hollis said. "Dale Tummins. He took my jet ski while I was asleep and drove it into Lake Wendle. Swam home. Never said sorry. Told me it was a house for fish now, like I'd be happy for the fish."
It sounded bad, the way he told it. He'd left out a lot of context, like how deep the lake was.
"He calls himself a consultant," Hollis said. "I asked him one time what he consults on. He tried to charge me for the answer."
I reached into the jerky bag. He'd opened it, so it was basically for the table.
"He tried to pay me back with half a coconut," Hollis said. "Not even the good half. Then he borrowed it back, for a trip."
In my defense, there's no good half of a coconut. Both halves are the same. That's what makes a coconut so fair.
"He's got that mustache that only grows on one side," Hollis said, "and he tilts his head so nobody notices, and everybody notices."
That one hurt. I'd shaved it off again before the trip. But it's nice to be remembered.
"He's the kind of guy," Hollis said, "who'd eat your food while you're telling him your problems."
I took my flipper out of the bag. I'd only had four pieces. Five.
Hollis held his hands up and looked at them for a long time. "Sometimes I think about what I'd do if I found him," he said. "You get around, Wally. If you ever see him, you let me know."
I patted his knee. It's good for a man to have a hobby.
"But then I see you at a game," Hollis said, "and I forget all about him. You're the only one who listens, Wally."
His eyes got wet. So I gave him a hug. He hugged back, hard, and cried a little into my fur. He smelled like jerky. Some of that was me. I patted his back with one flipper. With the other flipper I took the rest of the jerky.
Phil honked from the Tuskmobile. Hollis stood up on the bench and held his sign over his head until we were out of sight.
"Was that Hollis?" Phil said in the van.
"A fan," I said.
Phil asked where the jerky came from.
"Same fan," I said.
The night before Gale Acres, Darlene's budget came through with one room at the Starlite Motor Lodge. It had one star painted on its sign. That turned out to be the rating.
Tess got her own room on the Beavers' budget. I offered to share it with her, to save the Beavers some money. She said no, and then she said it again through the door, and then she turned the TV up.
Phil and I shared. He sat on his bed with his phone, reading tomorrow's vibes early.
"What are the vibe people saying?" I said.
"It's the vibes, Dale," Phil said.
He said a new arena had opened up north. The first game there was tonight. In the vibes for it, between a goalie who said his new glove felt "buttery" and a coach who said the ice was "extremely new," there were quotes from the ribbon-cutting. Winthrop Gale had cut the ribbon.
"Listen to this," Phil said. He read it out loud. "'Soon every child in America will grow up with the same friend.'"
"That's nice," I said. I've only ever had the one friend, and I'd be happy to share him.
"There's more," Phil said. "'Mascots work so hard. They deserve to never stop.'"
He pulled the blanket up around his shoulders.
"Dale," he said, "that gave me a chill."
I told him that was the air conditioner. It was stuck on sixty-one. The knob came off in my flipper earlier, and I'd hidden it in the ice bucket.
"Never stop," Phil said. "Think about what that means."
So I thought about it. A man who doesn't believe in stopping doesn't believe in quitting time. A man like that keeps a big kitchen. He doesn't let a guest leave without dessert, and then a second dessert.
"He's got pie," I said. "You can hear it in how he talks."
"I don't think that's what he means," Phil said.
"My gut says he's a sweetheart," I said. "My gut was reading people before you had an app."
"Your gut said the Pretzel liked you," Phil said.
"He did like me. He made all those gestures."
Phil wrote something in his journal. I couldn't see what. But he underlined it twice, and in Phil's journal that's basically screaming.
Then he checked the lock twice. I pitched in too. I balanced the ice bucket on top of the door, so anybody who came in would get an air conditioner knob right on the head.
"Who's that for?" Phil said.
"Whoever's first," I said. That's the kind of roommate I am.
Phil slept with the light on. I slept great. One of us had read the vibes right tonight, and I was pretty sure it was me.
The gate at Gale Acres is shaped like a smiling sun, about thirty feet tall. When it opens, the smile splits down the middle and each half rolls away on a little track. I've never seen a happier gate.
Beside the gate was a sign. It ran along the fence for about a hundred feet, in very small letters. I got out and read all of it.
"We don't have time for this," Phil said.
"A man should know what he's agreeing to," I said. I'd never said that before. I liked how it sounded.
It said, "Welcome to Gale Acres, where every day is a gift." Then it said gifts can't be returned.
It said no outside joy. All joy on the property is provided by the Foundation.
It said all smiles at Gale Acres are the property of the Gale Foundation, and may be collected at the gate on the way out.
It said guests may be asked to wear a sun. Then it said guests who are asked to wear a sun will wear a sun.
It said frowning is permitted in designated areas. Then it said there are no designated areas.
It said the Foundation isn't responsible for lost items or lost guests, and that lost guests will be found, and given a sun.
The last line said parking's on the left.
I walked back to the van. I was impressed. Most places don't think that far ahead. My lease is one page, and half of it's about the dryers.
"That's a trap," Tess said from the back.
"It's thorough," I said.
"It can be both," Tess said.
I told her beavers don't trust anything they didn't chew themselves. She put her head down on the seat in front of her. I think I'd gotten through to her.
A guard in a little booth had a sun on his polo shirt. He looked at me, then at the walrus on the van, then at Tess.
"We're the entertainment," Phil said.
The guard smiled and pushed a button. He'd clearly been hoping we'd say that.
We drove in. Behind us, the gate closed very slowly and very quietly. Most gates clang. This one didn't make a sound. I thought that was considerate, with Trevor's party going on and everything.
Phil locked his door.
Trevor's birthday party had been going on for three years, and you could tell. The balloons were all about knee high now. Some had given up and were just lying there on the floor, being balloons.
It was in a white tent the size of a hockey rink, with heaters running full blast. Tess stayed in the van to keep watch. I think she was shy around the competition.
Trevor sat on a throne at the far end in a paper crown. He was forty-four. The banner over his head said, "Happy Forty-First, Trevor!" Nobody had ever changed it. When a party's going this well, you don't want to jinx it.
"Didn't he turn forty-one three years ago?" Phil whispered.
"Don't count at a birthday," I said. "It's rude."
There were Sunnys everywhere. Dozens of them, big foam suns with big foam smiles, all exactly alike. They were juggling. They were doing cartwheels. One pulled a little sun out of Trevor's ear, and Trevor gasped.
"He's probably seen that a thousand times," Phil whispered.
"That's what a good audience does," I said.
On a TV by the punch bowl, the Walruses were playing somebody. Nobody was watching. I felt right at home.
Trevor spotted me and waved me over. "A walrus!" he said. "Grandpa said I might get a walrus!"
He shook my flipper with both hands. He told me this was the best party he'd ever had, and he'd been having it for three years, so he'd know. I did the mascot laugh with my shoulders. Trevor did it back. He'd had three years to learn it.
Then I noticed one Sunny in the back, by the chocolate fountain. He was dancing. It went sideways. He was flapping his rays and bending at the knees. At the end he did a little bow.
It was the Lyle Shuffle. I knew it because I'd tried it in the boiler room three times and fallen down all three.
Phil grabbed my arm so hard I felt it through the foam. "Dale," he whispered. "Dale. That's Lyle."
"Sure," I said.
I wasn't really looking at the Sunny. I was looking at the cake.
It was eleven tiers tall. On top was a frosting Trevor, life-size, in a frosting crown. Phil said later they'd added a new layer every morning for three years and cut it from the top. That explained the bottom. The bottom was from the first year. It was gray, and a little fuzzy, and I still wanted some.
"Do they cut it at a set time?" I asked Phil. "Or is it more of a help-yourself situation?"
"Dale, he's been missing for weeks," Phil said.
"He'll still be missing after cake," I said.
The Sunny bowed again, toward us this time. It was a small bow. I bowed back. I figured he worked for the caterer.
Phil kept staring at the Sunny. I kept staring at the cake. That's teamwork. Between the two of us, we had the whole tent covered.
A man in a sun polo found us by the cake and said Mr. Gale would be delighted if the Wendleton walrus and his handler would join him for dinner. I nodded so hard my head turned around, and I had to look out the back of it until Phil fixed me.
Tess stayed outside, hidden in the hedges. She told Phil to scream if anything happened. She didn't tell me anything. I took it as a sign of trust.
The dining table was about forty feet long, with candles all down the middle. Gale sat at one end. We sat at the other. When he talked, it took a second to get to us.
He looked just like his statue, except nobody was trying to get away from him. Silver hair. A sweater vest with little suns on it. A voice so soft the candles didn't flicker.
"Please, speak freely, walrus," he said. "Nobody in this house will tell. I'm rather senior in these matters."
I thought that was generous. Most hosts don't waive the Code. Most hosts don't even know about it.
The first course was soup. Gale said it was the same soup I'd shot a T-shirt into, back at the arena. He'd had it flown in. "It reminded me of you," he said. Nobody's ever had a soup flown in because of me. Usually soup gets taken away because of me.
I ate through the mouth mesh with a long spoon. Most of it went in. The rest went into the walrus, where I'll find it later.
Gale talked about philanthropy. The hospital wing, the library, the bench at the bus stop. He said giving is its own reward. I said I'd always felt that way about receiving.
Phil didn't eat much. He kept looking at the doors. There were four, and each had a man in a sun polo standing beside it with his arms folded. I figured they were waiters who'd finished early.
"Dale, look at the doors," Phil whispered.
"I know," I whispered. "And nobody's offered coffee."
Every time Gale said "philanthropy," I said "dessert." I didn't mean to the first few times.
While he talked, Gale took a pen out of his vest and drew on his napkin. A little circle. Little lines around it. A little smile.
"Hey," I said. "The Commissioner does that too."
Gale smiled and waited.
I looked at the napkin. I looked at the little sun pin on my chest, the one he gave me the night of the soup. I looked at the suns on his sweater vest. I looked at the big sun on the wall, which I'd thought was a clock.
"Mr. Gale," I said slowly. "Are you..."
"I am," Gale said.
Phil set down his fork. I set down my spoon. You could feel it in the room. Some of it was the soup in my suit, going cold.
"Does that mean," I said, "I can have seconds?"
Gale folded his napkin and tucked it into his vest.
"Walrus," he said, "you can have seconds forever."
Nobody's ever offered me forever before. Phil didn't touch his dessert, so I had that too.
After dessert Gale dimmed the lights, and the big sun on the wall lit up. It wasn't a clock. It was a screen. I was glad I hadn't tried to set it.
The man by the far door turned a key in it. That was thoughtful. Those big old rooms get drafty.
The first slide was a map of the country covered in little mascots. A walrus, a beaver, a pretzel, and a raccoon in Duluth drawn a little tilted. I waved at the walrus. Phil pulled my flipper back down.
"Today there are six hundred mascots in this country," Gale said softly. "Six hundred different friends. It's chaos."
I agreed. I'd always figured it was about forty. Six hundred's a lot of people to be better than.
The next slide was the same map, but every mascot was a smiling sun. "One Sun," Gale said.
Every team, every hospital, every grocery store opening, the same sun. A child in Wendleton and a child in Kettering would grow up with the same friend, and nobody would ever have to learn a new mascot again.
"I've never learned a new one," I said. "I just point."
"Exactly," Gale said, and he looked at me like I was his best student.
"What about the people inside?" Phil said.
"They retire," Gale said. "With a lovely pin."
I looked down at mine. It was lovely. For a second I wondered if I'd already retired and nobody had told me. It would explain the hours.
Gale touched his heart. "Some won't sell. Your Mr. Banks wouldn't. So they come here and perform for Trevor. They'll never have to stop doing what they love."
I thought about Lyle out there by the chocolate fountain. Then I thought about what I love, which is mostly lying down. I asked if there was a lying-down position open.
"Everyone stands at Gale Acres," Gale said. I said I'd think about it, which is what I say to all jobs.
"And when I wear the Golden Head at the Intermission Cup," Gale said, "I'll be Commissioner for life, and One Sun becomes official."
That was the first part I'd really been listening to.
"You've got the Golden Head?" I said.
"It's very safe," Gale said.
"Like in a safe?" I said.
"Very safe," Gale said.
"Like a safe inside a safe?"
"Walrus," Gale said, "it's very safe."
I nodded. That meant a safe inside a safe. I started working out the combination. I figured it was his birthday, because that's what I'd use.
Phil raised his hand and caught the eye of the man by the locked door.
"Could we get the check, please?" Phil said.
The man by the locked door looked at the man by the other door. Neither of them had a pad.
I kicked Phil under the table. There's no check at a house. I've eaten at a lot of houses, and I've never once seen a check, and some of those houses I wasn't even invited to.
"Oh, there's no check," Gale said, smiling. "You're my guests. For as long as you like."
"See?" I told Phil. "As long as we like."
Phil asked again anyway, a little louder. Some people can't take a gift.
They grabbed us during seconds. I'd just been handed a fresh slice of pie, and I'll always believe they timed it that way.
Four men in sun polos came off the walls at once. Two took Phil by the elbows. Two took me by the flippers. Gale stayed seated and dabbed his mouth with his napkin.
"Please don't struggle," he said. "The suits are expensive."
"Dale, run!" Phil said.
I decided to make a stand instead.
Here was the plan. I'd flip the table, all forty feet of it, candles and all. In the confusion I'd grab the chandelier and swing to the far end. I'd land on Gale and hold him hostage with a butter knife until they let Phil go. Then I'd take the Golden Head and the rest of the pie, and drive off in whatever Gale drives, which I assumed was nice.
I took a deep breath. I looked at the chandelier. I looked at the table.
Then I reached out with one flipper and put a dinner roll in my pocket.
A lot of people would say that's not much of a stand. Those people weren't there. Afterward, I had a roll and they didn't.
Through the big window I saw something move in the hedges. A flat tail, then nothing. Tess was slipping away into the dark. I understood. She couldn't stand to watch me be that brave.
They walked us down a long hall to a room full of suns. Hundreds of empty Sunny suits hung on racks, all smiling. I waved at a few. One of them was my size. I made a note of it, in case I ever needed a spare.
"Lights, please," one of them said.
They turned off the lights before they took my walrus head off, out of respect for the Code. That's how I knew they were professionals.
In the dark, somebody pulled Wally off me and stuffed me into something big and round and foamy. It smelled brand new. I'd never been inside anything brand new before. When the lights came back on, they'd hung Wally on a hook by the door. He looked smaller without me. I think he missed me.
They zipped Phil into a sun next to mine. He sneezed seven times before they got to the top of the zipper.
I patted my side. They'd changed my whole body, but I'd moved the roll. A man has to hold on to something.
There was a big mirror on the far wall. In it were two suns, smiling. One was sneezing. The other one had a roll.
At Trevor's party the shifts are twenty hours on and four hours off. During the four off, you're allowed to stand behind the tent and not smile. It's harder than it sounds, because the suit smiles for you.
We did cartwheels. We made balloon animals, but only suns, so they were mostly just balloons. Every hour on the hour we sang "Happy Birthday" to Trevor, and every hour Trevor cried. By morning I'd sung it fourteen times. I still wasn't sure how old he was.
The Sunny next to me did the same dance all night. Sideways. Rays flapping. Knees bending. A little bow.
At about three in the morning, he leaned over during the bow and whispered into my ray. "You're the new Wally," he said.
I almost fell down. I'd never heard a mascot talk in costume, except me, constantly.
"You're breaking the Code," I told him. I said it out loud, so I guess I was breaking it too. But mine was for a good reason. It was to point out his.
"The Code's suspended in captivity," he whispered. "Article nine."
I'd never heard of Article Nine. I figured it was one of the ones I skipped.
It was Lyle Banks. Twenty-two years in the walrus. He whispered the whole story while we did the hokey-pokey. Gale had offered him a fortune for Wally. Lyle told him that walrus wasn't for sale. So during the first intermission, some men in sun polos helped him into a van, and he woke up a sun.
"That's terrible," I said. "Do they let you have cake?"
"No," Lyle said.
"That's terrible," I said, and this time I really meant it.
Then he asked about his walrus. I told him Wally had never been better. I told him about the top hat and the kiss cam and the soup. I left out the shampoo. He listened without saying anything, still shuffling.
"Did you keep the left flipper dry?" he said finally. "It sticks."
I hadn't. It sticks.
Phil was on my other side doing cartwheels. Every cartwheel, he scratched. By sunrise he had hives everywhere a hive could go, and in some places I didn't think they were allowed.
"It's the synthetic rays," he whispered. "In principle and in practice."
My own problem was the cake. Sunnys aren't allowed cake. Every morning they add a new tier, and all the Sunnys stand around it in a ring and smile at it while Trevor eats. I've had only one other job where you had to look at cake and not eat it. The bakery. That's why it was only one day.
So at breakfast I filed a complaint with one of the men in sun polos. I complained about the hours, the singing, the lighting, the hokey-pokey, and the cake. Mostly the cake. "Noted," he said, and he wrote it all down on his clipboard, very carefully. Then he tore off the page and handed it to Trevor, who folded it into a hat.
Trevor wore it all day. Nobody's ever done that much with one of my complaints.
On our four hours off, Phil and I sat behind the tent in our sun suits with our heads tipped back so we could see out. You could see a lot of stars at Gale Acres. Gale probably owned some of them.
Inside, Trevor was asleep on his throne. Somebody had put a sun blanket over him. His crown was still on. You don't take off a birthday crown in the middle of a birthday.
Phil was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Dale, can I tell you something?"
I said sure. The last time somebody asked me that, I got jerky.
"I've been thinking about it all night," Phil said. "I applied to that island eleven times. I teach tenth grade. I've been last on the picks board for six years. I always figured I'd go my whole life and never have one real adventure."
He scratched a hive.
"And now I'm in a sun," he said, "at a billionaire's house, rescuing Lyle Banks. Every adventure I've ever had, you were there for it."
"That's true," I said. "I was."
"Remember tenth grade? My frog presentation? Everybody laughed. You were the only one who didn't."
"I was asleep," I said.
"I know," Phil said. "But you were the only one."
He looked over at me. Both our suns were smiling. They do that no matter what, so it didn't mean anything.
"You're my best friend in the world, Dale," he said. "I'm glad it's you I'm doing this with. That's all."
I thought about what to say. I wanted it to be special. A man doesn't hear something like that every day. I'd never heard it, actually, except from Phil, every couple of years.
"Phil," I said, "you're definitely in my top one."
He nodded slowly. I worried I'd overdone it. So I evened things out.
"Also, this whole thing's your fault," I said. "You had the hockey tickets. You read the vibes. You found the clue. You drove. If it wasn't for you, I'd be home right now, safe, hiding from Hollis like a normal person."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"How do you remember it?"
"You ran down a tunnel to get away from Hollis," Phil said. "And I followed you. Because that's where you went."
"See," I said. "You remember it wrong."
Phil was quiet a while. Then he said, "I understand."
A little later his sun tipped over onto my sun, and he was asleep. I thought about moving him. But my ray had gone to sleep under him, and I couldn't feel it, so I just sat there till the end of our break.
That's the only reason.
I worked out my escape plan in the dark while Phil slept on my ray. It was the best plan I've ever had, and I've had two.
It had three steps. Step one, at the top of the hour, when everybody sang "Happy Birthday," I'd sing louder than everybody, so they'd all look at me.
Step two, while they were all looking at me, I'd hide inside the cake.
Step three, I'd tie the balloon arch to the cake, and the cake and I would float out of the tent and over the wall.
"What about everybody else?" Phil said when I told him.
"They can have the next cake," I said.
At the top of the hour I sang. I sang so loud that Trevor stopped crying and put his hands over his ears. Every Sunny in the tent turned and looked at me. Step one was perfect.
Then I climbed into the cake. The cake turned out to be mostly cake. I got about a foot in, sideways, and stuck.
I grabbed the balloon arch to pull myself out. The arch was three years old. It came off its posts, floated straight up, and hit the big heater in the ceiling. Every balloon popped at once.
The men in sun polos thought it was an attack. They ran out of the tent together, toward the noise, which was coming from inside the tent. That's training for you.
So nobody was guarding us. The tent was quiet, except for me, still singing, waist deep in cake. I'd forgotten to stop.
That's when Tess came in through the back flap.
She had Wally slung over one shoulder, off the hook in the room full of suns, and his head under her arm. She went down the line of Sunnys unzipping them, one after another, very fast. Phil says she was a gymnast in college. You could tell from the zipping.
She unzipped Lyle. She unzipped Phil, who said, "Thank you," and scratched everywhere at once. Then she pulled me out of the cake by one ray and dropped Wally at my feet.
"Put this on," she said. "Hurry."
It was the first time she'd ever asked me to do anything. I went slow, to make it last.
I climbed up on Trevor's throne. Trevor scooted over. I raised my ray.
"Friends," I said. "Today, you're suns no more."
By "friends," half of them were already out the flap. By "suns no more," the rest were gone, and Phil was holding the flap open and saying my name. I finished anyway. It was a good speech, and Trevor was still there, and he clapped.
That's when it came to me. The Liberator. It had everything. It was short, sort of, and it sounded like a man who'd be on a horse.
"Call me the Liberator," I told Phil.
"Dale, put on the walrus," Phil said.
He'll come around.
"Please don't," Phil said. He said it six times between the tent and the house. On the sixth he grabbed my flipper.
"The van's that way," Phil said.
"The gold's this way," I said.
That's the difference between Phil and me. Phil sees a van. I see a direction.
He went to the van with Tess and Lyle and the Sunnys. I went into the house. I'd have taken him along, but somebody had to stay with the van, and he'd already said "please don't" six times, which is a lot of negativity to bring into a vault.
I didn't have to look very hard. Gale's house has signs everywhere, the way a hospital does. LIBRARY. RESTROOMS. TREVOR. At the end of a long hall, a brass sign said VAULT, and under it, in smaller letters, VERY SAFE.
I tried the door marked RESTROOMS first, to make sure the signs were honest. They were. I washed my flippers and went on.
The vault door was round and as tall as a man, and it was already open a crack. I pulled. It swung wide, then started swinging shut again all by itself.
I didn't have anything to prop it with, except the dinner roll. I'd carried that roll through a capture, a sun suit and a cake. I didn't want to give it up. But that's what a roll's for, in the end. That and eating.
"Stay," I told the roll, and I wedged it under the door. It held. Gale doesn't buy cheap rolls.
Inside the vault was another vault. A safe inside a safe. I'd called it at dinner, and I want that on the record.
The second door was open too. Inside, on a velvet pedestal, under one little light, was the Golden Head of Barnaby the Bear.
It had round ears and a little smile, and it was gold all over, and it gleamed. I stood and looked at it for a long time. I thought about being Commissioner for life. I thought about never paying anybody back for anything, ever again, officially.
"Hello, walrus," said a soft voice.
Gale was standing in the corner, in his Sunny suit. I hadn't noticed him. A sun in a corner is easy to miss if you're looking at gold.
"I hoped you'd come," Gale said. "You never could leave anything on a plate."
That was true. I was touched he'd noticed.
He was talking in costume, but I let it go. It was his vault.
Then he raised one ray. He pointed it at the head, then at himself, then drew a slow circle in the air.
I took that to mean, "Help yourself, and come around again."
So I pointed at the head, then at me, then at the door. That meant, "Thanks. I will."
He seemed to understand. He took a step forward. So did I.
We stood there under the one little light, about six feet apart, a walrus and a sun.
Behind me, I heard the roll start to give.
I grabbed the Golden Head off the pedestal and ran. It was lighter than I expected. I figured that's how you can tell it's the good gold.
The roll gave out just as I got to the vault door. I made it through sideways. The roll didn't make it at all. It was flat now. I picked it up anyway. It had been through a lot.
Gale came after me, but a sun doesn't go through a door as fast as a walrus. He had to turn sideways. Then he had to turn the other sideways.
I ran down the hall, past TREVOR and RESTROOMS, and out across the lawn toward the tent, holding the head up high. Nobody was watching, but I wanted to be ready in case somebody started.
Through the tent flap I saw a big gray seagull standing on top of Trevor's cake, eating the frosting crown off the frosting Trevor. It was the Admiral. The last time I'd seen him, he was flying north out of Pinewood with my pickle. Apparently this is where he'd been headed the whole time, eating cake. He'd put on about a pound. On a seagull, that's a lot.
Trevor's cake always had one lit sparkler for every year. That's forty-four sparklers. The Admiral pulled one out with his beak, still lit, and took off with it. Usually he only steals from me. I felt a little left out.
He flew right over the fireworks trailer behind the tent. Then he decided he didn't want a sparkler after all.
He dropped it.
The trailer held three years of birthday fireworks. That's about eleven hundred birthdays' worth, all saved for a finale that nobody had gotten around to, because the party kept not ending.
"Dale!" Phil yelled from the van. "Get down!"
I got down. Then I got back up, because you can't see anything lying down.
First there was a little whistle. Then a bigger whistle. Then the sky turned every color I know, and a couple I'd have to ask Phil about.
A rocket went in under the tent. The whole tent lifted off the ground, slow and round, like a hot air balloon. It went up about forty feet. It turned around once, so everybody could get a good look. Then it drifted over and settled down onto the hedges and stayed there.
One of the tent poles fell the other way. From inside I heard a big, soft splat, which I figured was the cake.
Everybody got out, as far as we knew. The caterers ran one way. The men in sun polos ran another way. The Sunnys were already halfway to the main road. Phil came running back from the van to check on everyone, including the caterers, who didn't want to be checked.
Trevor walked out last, in his paper crown, holding a fork. He looked up at the sky, and he started to applaud.
"Best one yet!" he said.
I clapped too, one flipper against the Golden Head. It made a little hollow bonk. It was a nice show. It would've been rude not to.
The damage, all told, was one tent, one trailer, about a third of the hedges, some fur off Wally's left side, and the roll, which I dropped somewhere around the second whistle. Nobody was hurt. The cake was a total loss.
The Admiral landed on top of the trailer, which was still on fire, and finished his frosting. He didn't even look up.
He's seen bigger.
Winthrop Gale had his own ice machine. Most people don't know you can just buy one. You can, if you've already bought everything else.
When the fireworks stopped, there he was by his private rink, climbing into the driver's seat in his Sunny suit. He gave me a little wave with one of his rays. I waved back. Then he pulled the lever all the way down.
The ice machine's top speed is nine miles an hour. There's a sticker. It says, "Top speed nine miles an hour," and under that, "Please enjoy responsibly."
He took off. It was terrifying. I've seen people walk faster, but never sitting down.
I already had the Golden Head. I had no reason to chase him. But he'd promised me seconds on dessert, and a man who runs off in the middle of seconds has to answer for it.
There was a golf cart by the hot chocolate stand. I jumped in. Phil ran up and grabbed my elbow, out of habit.
"Dale, let him go," Phil said.
"He's getting away with the ice machine," I said.
"It's his ice machine," Phil said.
I floored it. The golf cart's top speed is eight miles an hour. That's one less than nine. I did the math later, and it holds up.
It was the most intense chase of my life. Gale leaned into the turns. I leaned into the turns. Nobody gained an inch, because a rink's a circle, and so was the chase.
Phil jogged alongside the whole time, holding the Golden Head for me. Sometimes he walked.
"Pull over!" I yelled.
"I'm so sorry," Gale called back. "I can't hear you over all the joy."
On the fourth lap he swerved off the rink and out onto the ornamental lake. It was frozen over, with a little sign that said, "Thin Ice, Please Admire From Shore." Gale didn't stop to read it, which I thought was rude, since it was his sign.
I knew what was coming. I'm the only man I know who's lost a vehicle to a lake. I could tell I was about to have company.
The ice machine made it twenty feet. Then there was a crack, and it went down nose first, very politely. In four seconds it was gone. All that was left was a hole and one sun ray, floating.
Lakes are deeper than they look. Ornamental ones too. I'd always figured rich people would pay extra for a shallow one.
Before I could decide anything, Tess ran past me with the rope from the balloon arch. She lay flat on the ice, threw it once, and hauled Gale out by a ray.
He was fine, just steaming. The big foam face was still smiling. It doesn't have another setting.
"Thank you, young beaver," Gale said. "Marvelous energy."
I looked down the hole. First a jet ski, now an ice machine. When a thing happens to you twice, it isn't luck anymore. It's your destiny.
"Dale, get back from there," Phil said.
I didn't, right away. I've always figured all lakes connect underneath. That's where the water goes. So somewhere down there, Gale's ice machine was about to meet Hollis's jet ski.
I hope they get along.
We found Mrs. Pruitt in the cake.
Gale had hired her to sing at Trevor's party. I guess after three years of the same birthday, you start to want an anthem. When the tent pole went, it came down right across the dessert table, and so did she.
She'd gone in face first, up to the hat. The hat was fine. That hat's been through worse with me.
"Mrs. Pruitt," Phil said, "are you hurt?"
She lifted her head. She had frosting in both eyebrows and a candle behind one ear. A little plastic sun was stuck to her forehead. Then she saw me.
"Of course," Mrs. Pruitt said. "The walrus."
"I am perfectly fine," she said, the way people say it when they're going to write a letter later.
Then she stood up, brushed off her gown, and sang. Nobody had asked. The tent was gone, the trailer was smoking, and she sang the whole anthem in the snow, every note perfect, with frosting running down her neck. Two of the freed Sunnys stopped running to listen. Then they remembered, and kept running.
When she finished, Trevor clapped with his paper crown in his hand.
"Do you know any about me?" Trevor said.
"Not yet," Mrs. Pruitt said.
I wanted to do something gracious. I pulled a napkin out of my flipper and held it out to her.
She reached for it.
But I had some frosting on my tusk. So I used the napkin myself, and then I tucked it back in my flipper, in case she needed it later.
She didn't say a word. She just held out her hand, palm up, for a long time.
So I gave her a high five.
The Tuskmobile seats eight. We had thirteen, and ten of them were suns, if you count Lyle.
Phil drove. Lyle sat up front with his Sunny head in his lap and a towel over his face, for the Code, looking out the window through the towel. He hadn't been outside that tent in weeks.
"Huh," Lyle said, every few miles. "Billboards."
Phil wrote it down.
The other nine Sunnys were packed in the back, foam to foam. You can't fit nine suns in a van. You can fit six, and then three more if everybody breathes out at the same time and nobody breathes in until the county line.
One of them kept humming the birthday song.
"That happens," Lyle said. "It wears off in about a month. The smiling takes longer."
The Golden Head rode in the cooler, where the sandwiches used to be, before the Admiral. I sat on the cooler. I wanted to be near the head in case it got scared.
Tess sat across from me with her beaver head on the floor. Same as at the campfire, she'd turned away, so what I got was the back of her head.
It was a nice back of a head. Brown hair, a rubber band. You could tell there was a great face on the other side. All the hair was pointing at it.
I decided it was now or never. I'd decided that at the campfire too, but this felt more now.
"Tess," I said. "I asked you before, but that was a beaver head on a log, and it couldn't answer. This time I'm asking you, face to face."
"You're looking at the back of my head," Tess said.
"That's practically the face," I said. "It's right behind it."
She didn't turn around. "No," she said. "Not now, not after the Cup, not ever."
The van was pretty loud, with the humming. I only caught the middle part.
"After the Cup," I said. "Got it."
"Dale," Phil said from the front.
"She said after the Cup, Phil," I said. "You were driving."
One of the Sunnys patted my shoulder with a ray. The whole van was behind me.
So that was settled.
We pulled into a rest stop so the suns could stretch. All nine of them lay down in the grass in a row, faces up.
"After a few weeks of dancing," Lyle said, "the first thing you want is to lie down. The second thing is also lying down."
He sat with me at a picnic table with his Sunny head still on, for the Code, and whispered through the smile. Nobody's seen his face in twenty-two years. I'd always pictured it with a little tusk to it.
I offered him half of my vending machine sandwich. He took it, which I felt was a little forward.
"Kid," Lyle said, "can I tell you something about the job?"
I nodded. I figured it was about the money, and I wanted to be ready.
"It's not the points," Lyle said. "Twenty-two years, I never once looked at the whiteboard. Pomeroy used to leave the fax on my bucket. I'd turn it over and sit on it."
"That's the most irresponsible thing I've ever heard," I said. I've worked with Brandon.
"Every game there's a kid in row twelve," Lyle said. "Different kid every night. Some nights it's a grown man who had a lousy week. You find him, and you give him one good minute. That's the job."
"What section is row twelve in?" I said.
"All of them," Lyle said.
That seemed like a lot of kids for one walrus. I asked if you could do the grown man first, since he'd be the one with nachos.
"Some nights the grown man's a fella in one-twelve with a glitter sign," Lyle said. "You know him?"
"I know him," I said. "He's terrible."
"I'm retiring after the Cup," Lyle said. "Twenty-two years is plenty. The last few weeks were in a sun. Those count double."
I asked if they counted double toward a pension. Lyle laughed, short, and then he stopped.
"I get to pick who's next," Lyle said. "And I've been watching."
He looked at me for a long time. Then he looked across the lot at Phil, who was helping a Sunny get a ray unstuck from a trash can lid. Then he looked back at me.
I put my flipper over my heart. "Lyle," I said, "I accept."
"I haven't said anything," Lyle said.
"I can see it in your sun," I said. "It's smiling."
"It's always smiling," Lyle said.
"Then you've wanted to tell me for a while," I said.
"We'll see," Lyle said.
"We'll see" is what people say when they mean yes, but somebody else is standing right there and they don't want him to feel bad. Phil was standing right there, holding a trash can lid. It was very classy of Lyle.
I gave Lyle the rest of my sandwich. You've got to take care of the people who used to have your job.
Game seven sold out in nine minutes. That's twelve thousand seats. Darlene said she could've sold twenty thousand, but the fire marshal still comes to these.
"Biggest crowd in League history," Pomeroy said.
"It's the same twelve thousand as always," I said.
"They just don't know why they came," Pomeroy said.
Winthrop Gale's box was empty. "He's still drying out," Pomeroy said. "I heard from a guy."
You can't put a foam sun in the dryer. It takes a week, upside down on a clothesline.
Down in the boiler room, nobody cared about the hockey. The whiteboard had been wiped clean except for three names: Bonnie, Wally and Sir Twisty. Somebody had a radio on with the game, turned down so low you had to put your ear on it. Every so often it said, "Goal," and somebody shushed it.
Brandon the intern stuck his head in. "What's the score?" he said.
Everybody turned and looked at him. A visiting moose turned all the way around, which takes a moose a while. Brandon left.
At the first intermission I rode with Gordo one last time.
I climbed up next to him on the ice machine. I put my mouth right up to the mesh and whispered, because a whisper's barely speaking. "Big night, Gordo. Are you ready?"
Gordo stopped the ice machine at center ice. He stood up, slid over, and pointed at the wheel.
Nobody's ever seen Gordo get up from that seat. Darlene says she wasn't sure he had legs. Now he was offering it to me.
I took the wheel. You can't see anything below the knee in a walrus head, and an ice machine is mostly below the knee. So I drove by feel, and by the crowd.
The crowd got loud, and then louder, and then a lot of them stood up. I took that as encouragement. I made a big shape on the ice. I meant it to be a circle. Phil said later it was more of a state, maybe Ohio.
Gordo sat next to me with his hands in his lap, looking straight ahead. When I hit the boards, he didn't say anything. When I hit them again, a little farther down, he didn't say that either.
Then he took the wheel back, without a word, and went over every inch I'd done. Twice.
I knew what that meant. He wanted to remember it. Some things you only get to drive once.
When we pulled in, Brandon was waiting by the gate. He'd seen the cooler.
"Is that the Golden Head?" Brandon said. "Can I get a selfie with it?"
I don't whisper to interns. So I held up a flipper, meaning five. A flipper doesn't have fingers, so it's hard to say a number with it. Brandon thought it over and gave me twenty dollars. So now I know a flipper says twenty.
All season I'd offered Brandon things I didn't own. This time he paid me for something I didn't own. That's called growth.
The Walruses were down two to one after the first period. Somebody mentioned it.
The Intermission Cup has four events. They haven't changed since nineteen twenty-three. Pomeroy keeps them on a card in his wallet, behind a picture of a pickle.
The Cup itself is a thermos lid on a block of wood. Nobody knows what happened to the thermos.
The first event is the Moonshot. Each mascot gets one T-shirt from center ice. Bonnie's went to the top row and landed in the lap of a man who was already wearing that exact shirt. Five points. Sir Twisty's went even higher. Mine hit the scoreboard and stuck there.
"Dale, that's zero," Phil whispered.
"It's on the scoreboard," I whispered. "That's practically points."
The second event is the kiss cam. When the heart came around, I leaned toward Bonnie, and she held up a sign that said, "No." We both got two points, because the sign was in the heart.
The third event is the dance. It has no points of its own. You get whatever the table gives you.
Bonnie did four back handsprings and a split, and a referee laughed out loud and dropped his whistle. That's two, plus one for the jumbotron. Three.
I did the Lyle Shuffle. I got two steps sideways before the ice found out, and then I slid, and came to rest against the glass in front of a little boy who'd been having a great night. He wasn't anymore. I got one point for the jumbotron and lost four for the boy.
Phil did the math out loud. I didn't ask him to. Bonnie had ten. I had minus one.
Then Sir Twisty did a backflip. Nobody can backflip in a pretzel. I've seen a lot of pretzels. They mostly just lie there.
I'd been carrying the Pretzel's foam receipts since the gas station, and I'd gotten attached. But I handed them to Mr. Feeney, the inspector, with both flippers. He read them and took out his calipers.
The rule is two inches of foam. Sir Twisty had five. Mr. Feeney found the end of it at a seam and started pulling. It kept coming, yards of it, like it does when a magician pulls scarves out of his sleeve, except gray. It filled two trash cans.
The Pretzel got smaller. By the time Mr. Feeney found the cooling vest, Sir Twisty wasn't really a pretzel anymore. He was more of a pretzel stick. His top hat slid down over his eyes and stayed there.
Then Mr. Feeney turned out his pockets, and about a pound of salt poured onto the ice.
I knew how he felt. When I lost my forty shampoo bottles, I felt the cold right away.
Mr. Feeney drew a line through Sir Twisty's name and pointed him at the tunnel. The Pretzel couldn't see a thing, with the hat down. He walked straight into the glass. Then into a goal post, which is minus ten, but he was already out. It's nice to see a rival find his way.
That left Bonnie and Wally. Ten to minus one, with one event to go.
The fourth event is the Walk: once around the rink, waving, for one point. Nobody knows why it's an event.
"Just walk," Phil whispered. "You're still second."
"Out of two," I whispered.
I didn't plan to walk. I had a cooler.
Up on the scoreboard, under my T-shirt, it said the Walruses were losing.
I thought about what they'd call me afterward. Commissioner Dale. It sounded like a name on a door you're not allowed through. I could already see it on a fax.
"Dale," Phil whispered. "Where are you going?"
I went to get the cooler.
I carried the cooler out to center ice. Marv the organist saw me coming and played something with a lot of low notes. I don't know what it was. It sounded expensive.
The spotlight found me. Twelve thousand people went quiet, the way people do when a walrus sets down a cooler very carefully.
"Dale," Phil whispered, "what are you doing?"
"Winning," I whispered.
I opened the lid. The Golden Head of Barnaby the Bear sat on the ice pack, gleaming. Somebody in the upper deck said, "Ooh." Somebody else said, "Is that a ham?"
Then I took off Wally's head.
It was hot under the lights, and the air felt great on my face. For a second I could hear everything. A pretzel vendor. Marv turning a page. Somebody yelling, "Hey."
I put on the Golden Head.
It was very light. I'd been expecting gold. Gold is heavy, everybody knows that, it's the main thing about it. This weighed about as much as a hat. I figured that was the magic. The first Commissioner probably had a weak neck.
I raised both flippers. The crowd went wild. I nodded to them, and the nod was a mistake.
There was a crack. Then another crack. Then the left ear came off and rolled slowly across the ice into the penalty box, where Mrs. Pruitt's hat went earlier in the season. That box has a lot of my stuff in it.
Next a piece of the forehead fell off. It was gold on the outside and gray on the inside, and I knew it right away, because I made a volcano in fourth grade. Papier-mâché. Newspaper and paste. Through the hole I could read half a headline about a flood.
Something was folded up inside the jaw. I fished it out with a flipper.
It was a receipt. Ferncastle Hardware, nineteen sixty-one, two weeks after the flood. One quart of gold paint, one bag of paste, one brush. Billed to Winthrop Gale Senior. At the bottom it said, "Thank you, come again."
Gale Senior. So the Gales had been looking for it too, all those years, and they'd bought paint to touch it up for whoever found it. That's a family that plans ahead.
And I'd done it. I'd found the Golden Head, and it came with a receipt. A receipt proves you own something. I held it up over my head with both flippers so the whole arena could see. The jumbotron zoomed in. People cheered, mostly because I was holding something up.
"Oh, Dale," Phil whispered.
Pomeroy was watching on the little TV in the boiler room. He told me later that when the jumbotron got to the part about the paint, he sat down on a bucket, and he didn't get up until the fax came.
I was still out there holding up the receipt, waving it a little.
It was the proudest moment of my life, for about four more seconds.
Then I figured out the other thing.
The jumbotron likes a replay. When something big happens, it plays it again, slower, so everybody can enjoy it twice. So up on the screen, forty feet tall, there I was again, carrying out the cooler. There I was opening the lid. There I was taking off Wally's head.
And for about one second, between heads, there was my face.
I want to be clear, I've got nothing against my face. It's a good face. It's done a lot for me. But it's not supposed to be on the jumbotron. That's the whole Code. Never speak, never show your face, never admit there's hockey.
They froze it. I don't know who decided that. My mouth was open, I was squinting at the lights, and my head was tilted a little to the left, out of habit, from the mustache.
Marv stopped playing.
"Dale," Phil whispered. "Your face."
"I know," I whispered. "I've had it for years."
Twelve thousand people saw it. I did the math, and I only owe money to about six of them.
"Most people ever," Pomeroy told me later. "Nobody's ever broken the Code in front of that many. The old record was Pickles, at the Incident."
"How many people saw the Incident?" I asked him.
"Fewer," Pomeroy said.
Showing your face is expulsion for life. Then you have to get a real job. I stood at center ice in a walrus body with half a bear on my head and thought about real jobs. I'd heard about them. Phil has one. He has to be there at a quarter to eight, every day, even on days he doesn't feel like it. I didn't know that was allowed.
Up in section one-twelve, row F, somebody was holding a sign.
I knew that sign. I'd seen it all through the playoffs. White poster board, blue letters, and a drawing of a jet ski with a little sad face. It said, "Wally, find the jet ski guy."
He'd made it after the truck stop. He'd told the walrus everything, and the walrus had listened.
The sign came down slowly. Behind it, Hollis was looking at the jumbotron. Then at me. Then the jumbotron, then me, the way you check a phone number.
Hollis stood up.
I guess Wally found him.
Hollis came over the glass. I didn't know you could do that. There's a whole wall there so you can't.
He landed on the ice in his sneakers and his Walruses jersey and fell down right away. I took the opportunity to stand there.
"Tummins!" Hollis yelled. "Four thousand dollars!"
I pointed at the cracked bear head and shrugged. I meant, "I'm not here right now." He got up anyway.
So I ran.
A walrus suit isn't built for running. The feet are big and flat, and there aren't really knees, just the idea of knees. But Hollis was in sneakers on ice, which is worse. So it was even.
"And the coconut!" Hollis yelled. "Half a coconut!"
We went around the rink once. Hollis fell four times. I fell twice and lost what was left of the bear's nose.
"You ate my nachos!" Hollis yelled.
That was true. But he'd let me.
"You hugged me!" Hollis yelled. "At the truck stop! You took my jerky!"
The crowd thought it was an event. They cheered every fall. A referee laughed until he had to sit down on the bench, which is worth two points, but I didn't get them. I wasn't in the League anymore.
Then the gate at the far end opened, and out came Gordo on the ice machine.
The second intermission was ending. The ice needed resurfacing. Gordo doesn't care what's going on. He's got a schedule.
He drove right out between us, and Hollis had to stop. You can't cross in front of an ice machine. Nobody wrote that down. You just know.
Gordo started his circle. It was the slowest circle he'd ever driven. I've ridden with him a lot, I know all his speeds, and this was a new one. He went around Hollis. Then he went around him again. Every time Hollis tried to get past, there was the ice machine, gliding by, laying down a wet shiny strip in front of his sneakers.
I backed toward the tunnel. Nobody stopped me. Everybody was watching Gordo. Phil had run ahead and was holding the tunnel door. He had my shoes.
"This way, Dale," Phil said. "Walk, don't waddle."
At the tunnel I looked back. Hollis was sitting in the middle of a perfect circle of brand-new ice. Gordo was still going around him, looking straight ahead.
I believe he did it on purpose. I believe Gordo saw a friend in trouble and did the one thing he knows how to do, which is the same thing he always does, only slower.
I asked him about it after. He didn't say.
He never does. That's how you know.
Darlene came banging down the boiler room stairs with all three walkie-talkies going. She didn't look at the whiteboard. She thinks it's the boiler schedule.
"The third period starts in four minutes," Darlene said. "And every kid in this building just found out there's a guy in that walrus. It can't be the same guy."
Lyle stood up. "I'm retiring," he said. "And I've picked who's next."
He looked right at me, so I stood up too.
Then he walked past me and handed Phil the walrus. I was still in it, so first I had to get out.
"You've walked next to it all season," Lyle told him. "You know where everything goes."
Phil's allergic to synthetic fur, in principle. He took three antihistamines with a paper cup of boiler water, one for the principle and two for the practice. Lyle zipped him up.
I watched the third period from row Q in Pomeroy's old Pickles hat. Nobody looks twice at a pickle hat.
Before the puck dropped, Darlene sent Mrs. Pruitt out to sing the anthem again.
"Everybody needs to calm down," Darlene said.
At the high part, I couldn't help it. I harmonized.
She heard me. She didn't lose her place this time. She just slid over into my key and finished the whole rest of it there. Then she looked right up at row Q and nodded.
I nodded back. After a hat, a hand and a cake, I think we've reached an understanding.
Then Wally came out, with Lyle steering him by the elbow, in a Walruses cap pulled down to his chin. Neither of them could see a thing. They still did it better than Phil and I ever had.
At center ice, Phil did the Lyle Shuffle. Sideways, flippers flapping, knees bent, and a little bow at the end. Perfect. He'd been watching it for twenty-two years, the last few nights from one foot away.
In section one-twelve, Hollis cried, and sat down on his sign. Security had let him back in. He's had that seat twenty-six years, and nobody wanted to be the one.
The Walruses lost game seven, four to two. Nobody in the boiler room noticed.
After the game, the fax came in slow. Pomeroy said the Commissioner's machine was probably still damp.
"Wally, disqualified," Pomeroy read. "For the face. Intermission Cup, Bonnie the Beaver."
It was signed with a little sun, a shaky one, like it had been drawn under a heat lamp.
Tess shook my hand with her paw. She didn't say anything, but I could tell she felt bad for me.
"It's after the Cup now," I told her. "So whenever you're ready."
She went and got her thermos lid.
Phil noticed the score a little. That morning, with his coffee, he'd read the vibes. The Walruses' goalie said in an interview he hadn't slept in two nights. The Knots' coach said his guys felt "loose, really loose." Phil loves the Walruses more than anybody alive. He put the Knots on the faculty lounge picks board anyway. He said it was the hardest thing he's ever written down, and he writes down what I say.
I'd told him to go with the Walruses. My gut was sure.
"Your vibrations got lucky," I told him later.
"It's the vibes, Dale," Phil said. "The goalie told everybody he couldn't sleep. I just listened."
Phil finished first on the board. After six years in last place, he gets the parking spot by the gym door. The first morning, he sat in it ten minutes with the engine off, just being parked.
The paper says Winthrop Gale has stepped back from philanthropy to spend more time near heat lamps.
Phil says my gut was the second most useful thing he had that morning. He only had two.
Since I got home, I've been writing down what I learned. I wrote it on the back of one of Hollis's notes. He still leaves them in the dryers, so there's always paper.
I learned you should always show your face. Be proud of who you are. Unless you owe somebody money. Then be proud of who you are inside a walrus.
I learned that the hockey is the Distraction, and it's very important, mostly to the people who don't know. They need something to look at while the real thing is happening. That's true in life too. I just haven't figured out which part of my life is the hockey.
I learned that gold is mostly paint, if you look close enough. Keep the receipt anyway. Somebody out there will take it.
I learned you can't trust a sun. I don't look at the regular one anymore either. Phil says I wasn't supposed to anyway.
I learned that lakes are deeper than they look. I already knew that, but now I know it about two lakes.
And I learned that sometimes a man has to sacrifice himself. That's what I did at center ice. I showed my face on purpose, so Phil could get his big chance to be Wally.
I paid my phone bill with Brandon's twenty and texted the list to Phil. He called me right back and read it out loud to me, slowly, which I thought was nice.
When he got to the last one, he stopped.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"It's how I remember it," I said.
"You took off the head to put on a different head," Phil said. "For the gold."
"Right," I said. "And there wasn't any gold. That's what makes it a sacrifice."
He didn't say anything for a while.
"I like the one about the lakes," Phil said.
Tess hasn't called. I'm not worried.
"Beavers build very slowly," Phil told me. "And mostly at night."
Then he told me a lot of other things about beavers. I put the phone down for a while, and when I picked it back up, he was still going.
So she's taking her time. It's going to be a good dam.
I've started sleeping with my phone on.
I kept the spare head. Darlene never asked for it back, so I took it as severance. It's on the shelf in my closet, above my good shoe.
Some nights I open the closet just to check on it. It's always looking right at me. That's more than most people do. Most people look at me like they're trying to remember where they parked.
Last week I mailed Hollis the half coconut and the gold paint receipt from nineteen sixty-one. Pomeroy says it's the most important piece of paper in League history. I figured that put us close to even, maybe a little in my favor. I didn't ask for change.
Hollis didn't write back. He made a new sign. On Tuesday he stood across the street from the Sudsy Duck and held it up at my window. It said, "Thanks for the coconut. Four thousand dollars."
I'm choosing to focus on the first part.
The Admiral lives on the laundromat roof now. I don't know how he found me. Phil thinks he followed the van. Every morning I eat breakfast at the window to show him who's boss. Thursday he took a waffle right out of my hand.
This morning Phil called.
"The Walruses want to know something," Phil said. "Next season, would you be my handler?"
"Phil, I'm very busy," I said. "I've got consulting. I've got a lot of thinking to do about who I really am."
"I understand," Phil said.
Then I looked out the window. Hollis's truck was pulling up across the street. He got out with the sign, and then he turned it around. The back said, "I can wait."
"On the other hand," I said, "you'd be lost without me."
"I'd be all right," Phil said. "But I'd rather have you."
Pomeroy says if you show your face, you have to get a real job. So I checked with Darlene.
"Handler isn't a real job," Darlene said. "It pays forty dollars and half a hot dog. What do you want on your lanyard?"
I thought about The Tusk. I thought about Iron Flipper, and Commissioner Dale. In the end I told her just Dale. For now.
People ask if it bothers me, walking around next to a walrus with my face out where everybody can see it. It doesn't. Nobody looks at the handler. They look at the walrus.
Phil walked right next to me all season, and I never saw him once.