WHEN MURIEL WOUND a sheet around Sam’s shoulders, he did not even make a face. When she started coating his wet hair with pink sticky goo from a big pot, he stayed so still that Muriel called him “little lamb.”
At five past one, the two peculiar grown-ups were winding curlers into his hair, bumping into each other, arguing, pulling his head this way, pushing it the other. He watched them share their pack of M&M’s. It was now four hours past his bedtime, but Sam Kellow was wide awake, as cunning as a fox.
In this way he learned that his kidnappers were professionals in the Perfecto Kiddo game. If there was a contest in Rome or Vienna, they were there, buying the Perfecto products, collecting the coupons, filling out the forms in German or Italian, dressing up their child in grown-up clothing, making all their money from chubby little Wilfred, who had gone back to sleep in his foldaway bed. They were like circus owners with a performing bear, and the bear was their child.
“It’s one-thirty and we’re only halfway through.” George yawned. “We’re crazy to do this now. We should do it in the morning.”
Sam craned his neck to look at what they’d done to him. But when he caught sight of himself in the big gold-framed mirror, he hardly recognized himself. He looked like a woman who’d gone to the supermarket with her hair in curlers.
“There’ll be no time in the morning,” Muriel said,
“Muriel, sweetie pie, just relax.”
“Relax?” Muriel’s face started to go red.
George began to sigh and pat his hands in the air as if this might calm her.
“Relax?” Muriel’s voice became a shriek. “If we were both as relaxed as you, we’d still be entering dog food contests.
“Relax!” she muttered and unzipped a big canvas bag. Out of it she wheeled a big domed-looking thing. It was like a big plastic hat, like a huge egg on a shining metal stand. It was like something you would see in a space movie, for stealing your thoughts or letting you see into the future.
They wheeled this over and fitted it over Sam’s head. His skin prickled. His heart thumped. Now, for the first time, he was scared.
Muriel turned on a switch, and a loud roaring noise filled Sam’s ears. He nearly panicked. He almost slid out from under and ran. Then he felt the heat and realized the big dome was a hair dryer, the kind his mother sometimes sat under in the beauty salon.
“Relax,” he told himself as the hot air circled his head.
Indeed, it was kind of nice inside the hair dryer. For one thing, he could not hear George and Muriel. If he shut his eyes, he did not have to look at his nasty red nose and her goldfish eyes.
Eyes closed, he thought of happy things, things far from here. In his mind he went back to the door marked CLEANING 201. He opened the door. But this time he walked along a white-tiled passageway. And then he was asleep, lost in a happy dream where his mother and the molelike Mr. de Vere were eating Bombe Alaska at a glass-topped table.
It was the silence that woke him. The hair dryer was turned off. He opened his eyes to feel Muriel lifting the hair dryer off his head. He shut his eyes again, but the dream would not come back. Muriel was removing the curlers from his hair.
“There,” she said. “Now, don’t you want to see your handsome face?”
Sam opened his eyes as Muriel held up the mirror.
He looked into the glass. Wilfred looked back. Except it was not Wilfred, it was Sam Kellow, and his hair was big and curly like the choirboy in the Perfecto commercial. They had turned him into a Wilfred.
“He’s beautiful,” Muriel cooed. “The little grub is beautiful!”
Crazy Muriel and Droopy George embraced each other. They did a sort of dance around the room.
“Oh, you’re a genius,” said George. “You’re a genius.”
“I am,” said Muriel. “I am. I am a total genius.”
Sam looked across at Wilfred and saw he was awake. He was watching his parents dancing around Sam and two big tears ran down his cheeks.
“He’s going to win my money,” he said. “That’s what’s happening. He’s going to win my money.”
It was then, while watching the tears course down Wilfred’s spotty face, that Sam saw he did not need to find Mr. de Vere.
One door had shut, but another had opened. His dad had been right. Sam had found what he had been looking for: the power to win ten thousand dollars. The Big Bazoohley.