W. P. KINSELLA
W. P. Kinsella is the author of Shoeless Joe, famously adapted into the film Field of Dreams. His other novels include The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Box Socials, and Butterfly Winter. He has also published more than a dozen-anda-half collections of his short fiction, most recently The Essential W. P. Kinsella. Kinsella, widely considered one of the greatest fiction writers about baseball, is as well known in his native Canada for his award-winning and controversial First Nation stories, humorous and gritty tales of the complex lives of indigenous Canadians. He has won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Kinsella has been celebrated with many other honors, including the designation of the Orders of Canada and British Columbia. He currently lives near Vancouver.
“Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated” is a very rare feat, a first-contact story about baseball. The story first appeared in Rosebud.
The five p.m. news is doing a feature story on me. Jean Enersen, the beautiful Channel Five anchorwoman, is reading from her TelePrompTer.
“Mike Street, the man inside the Seattle Albatross costume for the past five years, has announced his retirement,” she is saying.
“Albatross flies the coop” was how the headline of the Post-Intelligencer sports section read.
The camera cuts to the smiling but vacuous face of Buzz Hinkman, the Seattle Mariners’ coordinator of public relations.
“The only reason we’re making a statement at all is because of the bizarre rumors that have been circulating,” says Buzz. “Mike joked that it was time for him to seek visible employment. He’s left Seattle and is taking a long holiday while he mulls over a number of employment offers.”
In that way of news broadcasters, Buzz goes on talking, mouthing his pompous platitudes while the voice of Jean Enersen lists a few highlights of my career and wishes me well. The final word, however, belongs to Buzz: “I want to assure the press, our own Seattle Mariners fans, and the baseball world at large that reports concerning the death of the Seattle Albatross are somewhat exaggerated.” Here Buzz smiles his empty but winning smile for at least the tenth time, and Channel Five moves on to a story about a baby orangutan.
Buzz probably believes what he has just said. And if he doesn’t believe it he’s not a bad actor. I’m sure the word has been passed down to him from the general manager, perhaps even the owners, who in turn have been briefed by higher powers as to what to say.
The first thing I have to admit is that our people did not understand the civilization of Earth very well. I’m afraid the bureaucrats on our planet aren’t very bright, which shouldn’t come as any surprise, except that everyone here on Earth accepts as fact that other civilizations are far more intelligent. About the only advantage I have over people on Earth is a built-in ability to engage, with considerable help, in teleportative space travel. If our politicians and military bureaucrats had been smarter, they would have investigated conditions much more thoroughly before packing me off to Earth.
One of the first things we saw when we began intercepting television signals from Earth was the San Diego Chicken.
“Look! Look!” our prime minister chortled. “They have an integrated society. It appears that fifty thousand people on Earth are gathered together to worship one of our own.” I have to admit that that is what it looked like.
As the TV signals became clearer, the prime minister and the joint chiefs of staff spent a great deal of time watching baseball, not that they understood the game. I’ve been here for five years and I barely understand it. But what they did understand was popularity, and mascots were popular. The San Diego Chicken was most like one of our own, but B. J. Birdy from Toronto, Fredbird the Redbird from St. Louis, and even the Phillie Phanatic could walk down the street in any of our major cities without being stared at.
“They even have economically disadvantaged segments of the population,” enthused the prime minister, after viewing the bedraggled set of mascots fielded by the Chicago White Sox.
I have to admit I was a natural for the job. I am a bit of an exhibitionist; I had also studied theater, where I majored in pantomime and clowning. Unfortunately, for once the bureaucrats decided to move with extreme haste. Almost before I knew it, I was teletransported to New York City, where, I was informed, there was a school for mascots.
Most of the officials on our planet understood that on Earth mascots weren’t real, but just as some children believe cartoon characters really exist, a number of politicians and most of the military believed the mascots were really long lost descendants of ours.
“The thing you’re going to have to get used to,” one of the bureaucrats said to me, “is that you never take off your costume.”
“I don’t have a costume,” I said.
I was given some curious looks by the joint chiefs of staff, the head of External Security, and perhaps even the prime minister.
“Need I remind you that on Earth only people in elaborate costumes look like me?”
“Of course,” they said.
My natural colors are blue and white, so it was decided that after I oriented myself to New York and attended mascot school, I’d align myself with the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team that didn’t have a mascot.
New York was a great place to start my life on Earth. In the theater district, where the mascot school was located, no one gave me a second glance as I walked the streets. I was given a more than adequate supply of currency, including one delightful hundred-dollar bill that reproduced itself on command. I was able to live in a comfortable hotel and eat at quality restaurants, although my greatest joy was to go to a fish market, buy a tub of sardines, toss them in the air one at a time, and catch them in my mouth.
At the ballpark, after I officially became the Seattle Albatross, I used to use fish in my act. I’d go down to the Pike Street Market and buy a couple of pounds of smelts, then run around the stands tossing fish in the air and swallowing them. Kids would stop me and ask, “You don’t really swallow those raw fish, do you?” or, “Are those real fish, or are they made of something else?”
“They’re real,” I’d say. “Want me to breathe on you?” The kids would shriek and pretend to be afraid of me as I puffed up my cheeks. Then I’d reach way down into my mouth and pull out a smelt. “Have a fish,” I’d yell, and chase the kids along the aisles, holding a fish by the tail.
The only recognizable foreign object I brought to Earth with me was my communicating device, a sophisticated sending-receiving set, which, once I was settled in Seattle, lived under my kitchen sink, mixed in with a bag of potatoes, looking exactly like a potato except that it felt like chamois to the touch.
There must have been sixty people at mascot school.
“I never take off my clothes in public,” I wrote on my application, for I had decided to remain mute until I became acclimatized. “It’s my way of getting into character.” The school officials were more interested in the hundred-dollar bills I produced to pay the tuition than in my idiosyncrasies. The other students thought I was showing off at first. But I was good at what I did and they soon accepted me. The result was that while a roomful of people in jeans, track suits, and leotards practiced pratfalls and somersaults, I performed in full costume.
What did I look like? Picture the soulful expression of the San Diego Chicken, but picture real feathers, sleek, a brilliant white, like sun on hoarfrost, violet tail feathers and bars of violet along my folded blue wings, and sturdy legs the color of ripe corn. I always wore furry shoes, big as pillows, covered in blue velvet, to keep my bird’s feet hidden from the curious.
The thing the Mariners were most interested in was that I would work for free. All they asked me to do was sign a waiver to the effect that if I was injured while performing they would not be liable.
“To what do you attribute your huge success?” the press repeatedly asked me. “You have replaced the San Diego Chicken as the most in-demand performer of your kind in America. What is the secret of the Seattle Albatross?”
“The mystique of the Seattle Albatross is the very elusiveness of my character. None but a select and specific few have ever seen the Mike Street who resides inside this costume. That makes me a mysterious entity and automatically doubles or triples the interest in me.”
“Don’t you ever secretly yearn for the fame and publicity Ted Giannoulas receives as the San Diego Chicken?” asked Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times. “He’s a celebrity even when he appears out of costume.”
“Oh,” and here I would giggle my high-pitched laugh-shriek for which I was famous, “just yesterday I spent a lovely day at the Pike Street Market, and just walked around downtown Seattle, relaxing, being myself, not having to be a celebrity every minute. I enjoy the private side of my life very much. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
“What about your personal life?”
“I keep my personal and professional life completely separate. My friends guard my privacy with great loyalty and determination.”
What the reporter was trying to establish, in a none-too-subtle way, was my sexual situation. The rumors about me were legion. The most prevalent, of course, was that I was gay. I do have a high speaking voice and a girlish giggle. Apparently at least two young men in Seattle’s gay community claimed to be me, and since there were never any denials—“The private life of the Seattle Albatross is private” was my final word on the matter—they are to my knowledge still claiming it. What they will do now that I’ve officially left Seattle is not my problem. My problem right now is much more serious than that.
My problem then was acute loneliness. And frustration, both sexual and otherwise. No one on my home planet knew exactly the kind of information they wanted me to channel back to them. One high official had the nerve to ask me to bring back Ronald McDonald’s autograph. Opportunities for sexual contact were everywhere, but I was unable to make even a close friendship for fear of giving away my secret. I kept an apartment on Union Street, which I visited once a week to pick up mail. I occasionally invited a friend or reporter there. I kept canned food in the cupboards, kept the closets full of human clothes, left Willie Nelson albums lying about on the carpet. When I was alone I was able to contrast my position to that of a famous television character. There was an alien named Mork who made wonderful, insane jokes and had a very beautiful woman in love with him. The woman knew what he was but loved him anyway. Mork was always in a lot of trouble, but he was never lonely. Except when I was performing, I was utterly lonely.
And even performing had its risks. The closest call I ever had was on an evening when Phil Bradley, Seattle’s best outfielder, hit a mammoth home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to bring Seattle a come-from-behind victory. The fans were jubilant, raucous, their adrenaline running high. A whole contingent of them were waiting for me as I made my way down a ramp toward the dressing rooms. It had been a difficult evening for me. While children always loved me, were able to accept the fantasy of me, teenagers were wary and distrustful, somehow aware that I was too real. One had snatched a feather from my wing about the sixth inning. Others had, in more than a joking tone, spoken of tearing off my costume and revealing the real Mike Street.
“Let’s get him,” several of them screamed.
“Hit him high and hit him low,” someone else said.
I tried to run, but I’m not very speedy. Those pursuing me were the same ones who had taunted me earlier, sensing my strangeness. They backed me into a corner. I considered flying. I could soar to the roof in an instant. Better to reveal my identity than die.
“Help!” I yelped, my voice high and shrill. I flapped my wings and tried to fly over their heads. My wings made monstrous beating sounds. Some of them retreated. I scraped my back on the sprinklers in the ceiling of the passageway.
One of them grabbed my legs. I shrieked like a macaw. I struck one hard with my left wing, knocking him down. But they overpowered me.
“Twist his head off,” yelled one.
“Wring his neck,” cried another. And they fully intended to.
I was scuffling my feet together, trying to expose one scaly foot with its long, razorlike spur. I was going to do several of those barbarians serious damage.
But at that instant two Kingdome security men appeared and rescued me.
From that day on, whenever there were fans in the Dome, there was a security person somewhere close to me.
In 1981 there was a mascots convention in Cleveland in conjunction with the All-Star Game. The San Diego Chicken and I stood out as the class of the field. The minor-league mascots were there too: a real live dog from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whose stock in trade was to stand frozen, leg in the air, forever in anticipation, in front of a plastic fireplug. What that act had to do with being the mascot of a baseball team still puzzles me.
There was a character there called the Eel, a very thin man who wore a plastic and rubber suit and a bulletlike helmet with red, blinking eyes. He had batteries of some kind hidden inside his flippers and would pass charges of blue electricity from hand to hand as he stood along the baselines. He was, he explained to me, an electric eel.
The men and boys inside those costumes were a strange lot, furtive and uncomfortable when their disguises were peeled away. Several congratulated me for my fortitude in never taking off my costume. Each intimated that he wished he could do the same. Outside their costumes the other mascots were as pale and sad-eyed as velvet portraits, whispering, gentle men happy only when hidden.
But the women. They were everywhere, bright as freshly cut flowers. They couldn’t keep their hands off us. Room keys and slips of paper emblazoned with lipsticked phone numbers were thrust into our hands, wings, flippers, beaks, mouths. It must be a significant comment on American masculinity that thousands of women are ready, willing, and able, and aggressively pursue the opportunity to go to bed with men whose physical features are perpetually hidden from sight by the costume of a chicken, bear, eel, cardinal, or some other grotesque caricature of a stuffed toy.
I wonder what these girls and women thought when they stripped away the costume of the Birmingham Bear and found a man of fifty-five, an ex-jockey, his face the color of concrete, his mirthless mouth like a crack in a sidewalk.
But we were not all trailed by women. There was a boy in a fish costume, his tail flapping in the dust, who must have given off an odor to betray that when, as part of his act, he kissed umpires and third-base coaches, it was because he liked umpires and third-base coaches.
In spite of the numerous temptations to sexual pleasure, I never wavered. Sometimes when I was very lonely I would take one or two of my admirers to dinner, but I always went home alone, turning aside, with as much kindness as I could muster, the invitations. For almost five years I behaved impeccably, denied my sexuality. Until I met Virginia.
Most of the players tolerated me. Some even considered me a good luck charm, good-naturedly rubbing my head for luck before going to the plate. Coaches and managers who had not known mascots in their playing days were less accommodating.
“Stay away from the third-base coach,” the players warned me my first year with the team. “He has no sense of humor.”
One part of my act was to stand behind the third-base coach’s box and parody the signs he was giving. Eventually he was supposed to turn and hit me with a roundhouse right, whereupon I would fall as if unconscious, legs and wings spread wide.
“Maggie,” as the players called the third-base coach, was surly and uncooperative from the start.
“Listen, shithead,” he said to me, “I only do this because management says I have to,” and he smiled a wicked little smile, showing his snuff-stained teeth. I expected an elaboration, but none was forthcoming, until one evening during a pitching change he stalked to the dugout, returned with a bat, and went for my head as if it were a ball on a batting tee.
I think he believed I was somewhere deep within the costume, that my feathered head was empty, my blinking pink eyes controlled by a battery. Otherwise I doubt that he would have tried to kill me in front of twenty thousand fans.
The bat flattened my ruby-red comb. I was in terrible pain, but tried not to let on. I danced like a maniac. The fans loved it. I flew to the top of the dugout and leapt into the arms of the best-looking woman in that section of the stands.
“Kiss it better,” I wailed.
The woman obliged. I massaged her breasts with my free wing. She didn’t object, in fact she clutched me to her. I love the smell of perfume. It has not yet been invented on my planet.
The fans roared their approval. But if the bat had struck a half inch lower it could easily have disabled me. What would have happened if a doctor had attempted to remove my head in order to examine me?
How I got the name Mike Street. When I walked into the Mariners corporate offices at 100 South King Street and went to introduce myself, my mind went blank. Martin Gardiner was the name the bureaucrats had chosen for me. It was the name I had used in New York, but in New York I had pretended to be mute. For the first time, my speech would be monitored. Suffice it to say that speech on my home planet is fraught with zs and vs and a sound, uuvvzz, that is not quite comparable to anything in English.
“Good morning,” I said. “My name is . . .” and I panicked. All I could recall was an advertisement I’d seen for the Pike Street Market. “. . . Pike Street, I’d like to—” but the secretary cut me off.
“About ten or twelve blocks straight north on First Avenue,” she said, assuming I was asking directions.
“No, no,” I said, “my name.”
“Your name is Pike Street?”
“Yes. No. Mike Street,” I said in desperation. And so it was. I didn’t get to see management that day. In fact, they were down-right rude to me.
“The contest isn’t until Sunday,” the secretary said, eyeing me up and down, her eyes getting large as I riffed the indigo feathers around my neck.
“Contest?” I said.
“The Mascot Contest,” she said, her voice incredulous. “Sunday afternoon at the Kingdome. Here are the rules.” She handed me a mimeographed page containing several paragraphs of dark print below the Mariners logo.
A contest. I was going to have to compete for a job.
“You shouldn’t wear your costume now,” the secretary was saying. “You’ll get it dirty before Sunday.”
I wandered out onto the street, where, instead of trying to be inconspicuous, which was impossible, I flaunted myself, nuzzling children and attractive women, taking pratfalls, pretending to swallow a parking meter.
On Sunday there was a large crowd at the Kingdome. A mascot’s costume was good for free admission. There were about forty of us, from children dressed in Halloween costumes to two or three dressed in elaborate and expensive getups that rivaled my own real self. There were also three or four very odd individuals who, I suspect, were inmates, escaped or otherwise, from some institution.
We were herded in a flock, or whatever a collective of mascots would be called. Perhaps a plush of mascots would be appropriate, for many were direct imitations of the San Diego Chicken, the Phillie Phanatic, or B. J. Birdy.
The contest was a fiasco. The majority of participants had no stage presence whatsoever, and, after we were admitted to the playing field, merely plodded across the outfield toward second base.
Besides myself there was a man on stilts dressed as the Space Needle, a magnificent and imaginative creation, but he was not cuddly or lovable, and was ill-equipped to run or take face-first dives into the infield dirt.
Perhaps the most unusual was an entry I called Mr. Baby, a middle-aged, bald, pudgy man, who was dressed in a massive diaper with the Mariners logo stenciled on the back, and a frilly bonnet. We talked briefly while we waited to be admitted to the playing field.
“A dream come true. A dream come true,” he kept repeating. “It has always been my fantasy to appear as a baby in front of the whole world. I dress like this in private all the time. My wife is really very understanding. Sometimes she dusts me with talcum powder while I lay back on my blanket and kick and gurgle. Tell me, do you wear your costume in the privacy of your own home? Does it have sexual meaning for you?”
“I do wear it at home,” I said, “and I suppose it has as much sexual meaning as any other costume.”
“I think perhaps we understand each other,” Mr. Baby said, with what I interpreted as an ominous tone.
When the limping, slovenly parade of mascots began, Mr. Baby dropped to his hands and knees and crawled slowly, like a grotesque toy, toward the infield. Unfortunately, the sharp bristles of the artificial turf soon proved too much for Mr. Baby’s tender hands and knees, and he began to bleed. Our bedraggled troupe of would-be clowns was not monitored in any way. While I and several others in our group, including a girl dressed as Raggedy Ann, waited for someone to intercept Mr. Baby and say, “That’s enough,” he continued to crawl like a huge slug across the toothbrush-like carpet until he began leaving a trail of blood behind him on the pale green surface.
“I think you should stop now,” I said to him, but he stared up at me, his big baby eyes overflowing with tears, but filled also with pain and ecstasy.
“A dream come true,” he repeated over and over as he crawled beside me, a fine spray of blood spattering on my plush feet.
A man wearing a moth-eaten satyr’s head and a canvas raincoat stopped along the third-base line, and, flinging open the coat, exposed himself to six or seven thousand fans. The fans booed his efforts until eventually a couple of security guards appeared and escorted him off the field.
The judges were Miss Elliott Bay, a toothy girl in a blue and white bathing suit and a Mariners cap, and a disc jockey named Dr. Slug, whose stock in trade was slime jokes: “What is a slug’s favorite song?” Slime on My Hands. “What is a slug’s favorite novel?” Slime and Punishment. “Who is a slug’s favorite playwright?” Neil Slimon. “What creeps slowly toward the new year?” Father Slime.
The judges chose seven of us and lined us up at second base, where the baseball fans were to choose a winner by means of applause. There were prizes to be won, with the final winner getting to be Seattle mascot for one game.
The applause set three of us apart: me, the Space Needle, and something called the Kitsap Carp, a person of indeterminate sex dressed in a fish costume. A large and vocal group of fans kept chanting, “We want the flasher,” and I couldn’t help but feel that he was the people’s choice, for after all, what is it we value most but when people expose themselves unashamedly to us, though we also fear them for it?
I could tell that in spite of my alabaster feathers, my endearing pink eyes as big as sunflowers, and the indigo and violet shading along my neck and wings, that I was not going to win the contest unless I did something spectacular. In the first round the Space Needle had received more applause.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve narrowed it down to three finalists,” intoned Dr. Slug, who was short, with slick hair, piano legs, and an obscenely protruding belly.
He then proceeded to introduce each of us briefly. The Kitsap Carp turned out to be a woman with a thick accent who said her ambition in life was to make people happy and bring peace to the world. The Space Needle, a professor of economics at Western Washington State University, was active in Big Brothers and a currently fashionable branch of evangelical Christianity. The only all-American thing he hadn’t done was give birth.
When my turn came, I pantomimed an inability to speak. I spread my wings to their full span, ruffled my neck feathers, and did a jigging, spinning dance from second base to the pitcher’s mound. Flapping my wings, but being careful not to give the impression of actual flight, I ran toward the backstop and leapt—actually I flew about eight feet in the air—and clutched onto the wire mesh. I scaled the screen gracefully, all the time making birdlike whirring sounds. The fans at first cheered my exploits, then became silent as they do in the presence of a daring circus act. I climbed the screen until I could reach a guy wire and proceeded up it claw over claw—or at least I hoped I gave that impression, for I was actually flying. I climbed up to theconcrete roof of the Kingdome. Giving my loud natural call, “Uuvvzzz,” I leapt from the guy wire to another that controlled the raising and lowering of the baseball scoreboard. The crowd gasped. From there I jumped and, with one flap of my delicate wings, was able to grasp onto a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hung down from the compression ring at the top of the Dome.
I then made a complete circle, swinging from one piece of bunting to the next. I must have looked like a feathered monkey. I crowed loudly as the fans cheered and applauded. The circle finished, I leapt back to the guy wire and descended, claw over claw again.
When the applause was monitored I was virtually a unanimous winner.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mike Street, the Seattle Albatross,” cried Dr. Slug.
It was a woman who was my downfall, or perhaps I should say it was her downfall that led to my downfall. Her name was Virginia and she was much more persistent than most of the young women who flaunted themselves and fluttered after me like butterflies.
She was waiting for me after a game, in the passageway behind the Mariners dugout. How she got there was anybody’s guess. She wanted to take me to dinner. She flattered me. Residents of my planet are all susceptible to flattery. I finally agreed. Without asking, she chose a fish restaurant, pointing it out as one of the many things we had in common. And we did have common interests. What she had that interested me was intelligence, something one seldom encounters in players, fans, or mascot groupies.
“Why do you like me?” I asked.
“You’re mysterious,” she said.
“So are a lot of people who don’t hide in albatross costumes. What if I took this off and you found me horribly disfigured? What if I was really an alien with skin the color of chianti, several eyes, and a tail?”
“You have a cute lisp, Mike,” she said. “Your trouble is you’re just shy. I can tell. I can also tell when someone is very lonely.”
She was certainly right about that. I was desperately lonely. And she was extremely pretty. She was twenty-two years old, with blue eyes and a beautiful tan, and she also wore an exotic perfume that made my heart beat like a motorcycle engine. Her dress smelled freshly ironed, and she wore tiny white shoes with her red toenails peeping out.
It had been three months since I had heard from my home planet. After my first dinner with Virginia, I went against rules and contacted them. Someone unknown to me answered. The line was full of static, like a million throat clearings.
“We’ve updated our equipment,” the voice told me. “Your communicator is obsolete.”
“Then bring me home.”
“There seems to be a problem,” the voice went on. “Someone is working on it. We’ll be in touch in due course.” I demanded to speak with my previous contact. “He is no longer with us.” I asked for any of the joint chiefs of staff, for the prime minister. “All gone,” I was informed. “Retired or replaced. Space exploration is not a priority with this administration.”
“Then send me a female for company,” I pleaded. “I could live here if I had a partner. We could work as a team—”
“Impossible,” replied the voice. “We suggest you attune yourself to interstellar living for the foreseeable future. And, incidentally, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
I had no sooner hidden the communicator among the sprouting potatoes when Virginia came tapping at my door. I was charmed by her. She talked in bright bursts of sound like splashes of bird song. I didn’t let her inside, but I took her out for ice cream. All the time we were together I was rationalizing that since she was sweet and intelligent I might be able to forget for once that I was an alien. I mean, our method of sexual gratification is not that different from what is engaged in here on Earth.
We had dinner for three consecutive nights. Virginia was a public relations trainee for Boeing. She wrote optimistic press releases in what she called “media-oriented language.”
Each night, at the end of our date, I clowned a bit in the lobby of her apartment building, bowed, hugged her in a friendly, brotherly way, pecked her cheek, and bolted out the door before I lost control of myself.
“Can we go back to your place?” Virginia asked after our fourth date. We had been interrupted about ten times during our meal as I signed menus, napkins, scraps of paper, and children. Adults produced cameras from unlikely places on their bodies and then thrust reluctant older children into my arms for picture-taking purposes.
I should have turned Virginia’s request aside with a joke, but I didn’t. I was thinking with my reproductive system.
“Rather than my apartment, why don’t I show you my special place? I’d like you to see the very top of the Kingdome at night.”
Though I kept the apartment for show, I actually had lived for four years in the compression ring at the top of the Kingdome. It was a perfect aerie for a large, solitary bird.
Inside the Kingdome, two dim night-lights burned.
“Once your eyes become accustomed, it’s like deep twilight,” I said to Virginia.
“You mean we’re going up there?” she said, after I pointed to the compression circle at the top.
“It’s two hundred and fifty feet,” I said. “But my nest is there. I’ve never told another soul about this, Virginia.”
She laughed prettily.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what you really look like.”
“Then let’s not wait,” I said.
“How do we get up there? Is there an elevator?”
“There is a traditional mechanical way to get there. But let’s not be traditional.” I scooped her up in my wings. “Hang on tightly to my neck,” I said. I ran a few steps to gain momentum, then my long blue wings flapped like blankets snapping in a strong wind, and we soared toward the roof of the Kingdome. I landed with great agility, not even ruffling Virginia’s hair.
“How did you do that?” Virginia squealed.
“It’s all done with mirrors,” I said.
“Wow!” She looked about at my few possessions. Unfortunately, there was rather a mess below the pole I used as my roost. I hadn't been expecting company.
“God, it looks like a giant bird lives here,” said Virginia, and then the significance of what she had said struck her. She stared at me with a new curiosity, a curiosity mixed with fear.
“I was hoping you’d roost with me,” I said, knowing as the words escaped how strange and futile I must have sounded. Virginia stared searchingly at me a moment longer; her expression changed; she stepped back two steps and screamed. Her voice reverberated eerily through the empty dome, which frightened her even more.
I could see that she would be in serious danger if she stepped any farther back. I lunged at her. She, of course, misinterpreted my movement as one of hostility. An instant later, she was hurtling toward the baseball field, her death scream a small, sad sound in the heavy air.
I launched myself after her, but there was no way I could catch up with her falling form. When I reached the artificial turf, she lay dead near second base, blood seeping outward from her grotesquely sprawled corpse.
I knew at once that I couldn’t risk involvement. Panic-stricken, I ran, not even thinking that my secret living quarters would surely be discovered, that Virginia’s small, red-and-white striped handbag was lying on the floor of the aerie.
At first, the police were very nice, cordial even. I was contacted routinely about Virginia’s death. But I am a very bad criminal, or at least I am very bad at concealing information. I didn’t have a story.
“Do you know Virginia Knowlton?” they asked. “We were good friends,” I said.
The police had the Kingdome maintenance people take them to the top of the dome. There they found my roost, the evidence that I used the space as living quarters. But for some reason the connection was not made. Police deal with cold facts; the fantastical seldom crosses their mind.
Virginia’s death was given sensational treatment by the press. I was dogged by reporters, radio and television crews. It is very difficult for someone as colorfully unique as I to hide, anywhere.
I maintained silence. I shrugged my shoulders at all questions. I pecked at microphones and licked the lenses of probing TV cameras.
At my apartment, I went against orders and contacted my home planet. If anything, the static was more tenacious than ever. I explained my predicament.
“Carry on as usual,” came the reply.
“Bring me home,” I wailed.
“We find your situation interesting,” the garbled voice replied. “We will study your request and get back to you in good time. Please don’t try to contact us again. We are changing frequencies to something beyond the capabilities of your communicator.”
I was interviewed a number of times at police headquarters. They were very nice. I think they believed me. I admitted to taking Virginia up to see the top of the Kingdome. She was overcome by the height, fell before I could save her. I panicked and ran.
Since there were no other marks or wounds on her body, and since we were known to be good friends, the police finally announced they were closing the case, marking it as “death by misadventure.”
“There is one thing,” a detective named Art said to me. “You’ll have to let us have a look at the real you. You know, just in case you fought or something. Wouldn’t want to find you with scratches all over your body.”
“But this is the real me,” I said plaintively.
“It’s only a formality,” said the detective. “Please don’t give us any trouble at this late date, Mr. Street.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean won’t.”
“I never let anyone see me. I carry pictures . . .” I fumbled for the ID I kept taped out of sight.
“Sorry,” said Art, and he and his partner moved toward me. His partner grabbed me firmly by the shoulders.
“Just take off the top of the costume and let us see your head. We promise not to tell anyone what you look like,” said the big detective.
He grabbed my neck and began looking for snaps or buttons.
“Does this thing screw on and off?” I could tell by the tone of his voice as he said it that he was beginning to be suspicious.
“No! No!” I shrieked, and slipped from his grasp, his hands sliding down my feathers as though I were greased. The door to the room was closed, and Art stood, arms folded across his chest, blocking any escape.
The window. I reverted entirely to my natural state. I flew against the window, hard. I chittered and squawked. I kicked off one of my plush boots; the talons on my feet, which had never been unfurled in my five years on Earth, slashed the air, striking anything within their reach.
A detective clutched at one of my legs. I struck, ripping away a lapel from his jacket and gashing his chest with the same movement. Blood appeared, bright as neon. But I could not escape. The big detective broke one of my long wings with a karate blow. I crashed, hissing and screaming, to the floor.
Both men had guns trained on me. I remained still.
“I think we’d better call the chief in on this,” the big one said.
The chief called the FBI. The FBI called the Pentagon.
I am being held in an isolation cell, somewhere inside Fort Lewis military base outside of Tacoma.
Buzz Hinkman is now fielding questions from a collective of reporters. It is interesting to me that the disappearance of a baseball team’s mascot should be news. Buzz is smiling and repeating the phrase about my opting for a visible occupation. Buzz is not smart enough to have thought of that himself, and the FBI and military types I have been subjected to the past few days are totally humorless. Perhaps the FBI employs a joke writer.
My wing is healing nicely. I have refused to talk with any of the men in tight suits from the FBI, or the finger-pointing military men with crew cuts, who fire questions at me in a staccato whir.
“We have recovered everything from your apartment,” a steely eyed officer told me this morning. “So as not to create a suspicious situation, we hired Allied Van Lines to go in and pack everything. Even had them move it all to an address in San Francisco before we seized it.”
He stared at me in silence for a long time, as though expecting a compliment from me for his intelligent behavior.
They obviously have my communicating device, though they haven’t mentioned it to me. I’m sure it is sitting on a velvet pillow in some airtight, germ-free, anti-explosive box.
I like to imagine that every other baseball mascot in the nation has been whisked out of his apartment in the dead of night and is, somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, being dusted, tested, poked, and prodded. Perhaps right now whole truckfuls of Ronald McDonalds, Mr. Peanuts, and all the characters from Sesame Street are being interrogated by a paranoid military. In fact, a few hours ago, one of my interrogators made the word association—Mike Street—Sesame Street—smiled cunningly, and slipped out of this heavily locked room.
The interview with Buzz Hinkman is over. The Channel Five news team are all on camera. Tony Ventrella, the sportscaster, is about to deliver his segment of the news, but before he does he produces from under the anchor desk a reasonable likeness of my head, done in plush and papier-mâché.
“Jean and Jeff,” he says, “I’ve been keeping something from you all these years. I’m really the Seattle Albatross.” The three of them smile their charming smiles.
“That’s quite a confession, Tony,” says Jean. “I suppose it’s rather like getting an albatross off your neck.”
The three of them laugh charming laughter.
“Back in a moment with all the sports,” says Tony. Then, as his face fades into a lawn-and-garden fertilizer commercial, he adds, “Good luck, Mike Street, wherever you are.”