The Big Bazoohley

by Peter Carey

  “Perfecto Boy thirty-two, Perfecto Girl thirty-two, present yourselves immediately at the judges’ podium.”

  “You’re dead, Mr. Peanut,” said the boy with the jet-black hair. “You are totally executed.”

  SIXTEEN

  PHILLIP LOPATE DID not want to be a judge.

  But he had signed a contract when he agreed to play the part of a general in his most recent film, Invasion Force. This contract had two signatures on every page except the last, which had six signatures on it. In this contract he had promised not just to learn his lines and act in the movie, but to do “all things possible” to promote it afterward.

  So if the film company told him to go to a shopping mall and draw marbles out of a barrel for a contest, he had to go. If they told him to get up at four in the morning to appear on a TV talk show, he had no choice but to do it. And if they told him he had to fly to Toronto in the middle of a snowstorm and judge some dumb contest for Perfecto Kiddo (whatever that was), he had to do as he was told. And so he had packed his bag and gone to Toronto and tried to be pleasant to everyone.

  But it was so hard to be pleasant when the very idea of the contest made him want to throw up.

  The representatives of the Perfecto Company who had met him at the hotel were humorless and self-important. They showed him a tape of the Perfecto Kiddo commercials before they showed him to his room. He hated the commercials. They made his skin crawl.

  Finally, he had escaped from the Perfecto executives and stepped into an elevator full of kids who reeked of soap, shampoo, and perfume. They were Perfecto Kiddos and he was embarrassed to be a part of their exploitation.

  Phillip Lopate had kids of his own, a boy and a girl who were now grown up. He liked kids, the way they are in real life. But this bunch … it was hard for him to even look at them without his feelings showing in his face.

  And so he took his place on the judges’ podium feeling nauseous. He pretended to make notes, but all he was doing was making doodles on his pad, and that was what he was occupied with when he first noticed Sam Kellow walking into the hall.

  Phillip Lopate was an actor, and actors are always thinking about different walks for when they need to use them in their acting. It didn’t take the old movie star long to figure out why the kid walked the way he did—his shoes were tight. Also his jacket was too small—it affected how he swung his arms.

  He peeked sideways at the scorecards of his fellow judges. The woman with all that jewelry (was her name Delia or Deborah? he forgot) had already marked a minus two next to boy number thirty-two. This made Phillip Lopate like boy number thirty-two. He was interesting to watch.

  He watched Sam Kellow try to dance. He saw two things—that he had not danced before, but also that he had some talent. He liked his attitude. He gave him three out of three for dancing. He was the chief judge; he could do it if he wanted to.

  He watched the girl. The girl was nice to the boy and the actor liked her because of it. He thought about how grown-ups had pushed these kids into this situation and he did not like the grown-ups for doing that. If there had been a score for grown-ups, it would have been a minus. He gave the girl three out of three for her attitude. He was starting to have a good time.

  He was supposed to watch all the children, of course, but he found that rather painful to do. He had two judges, both very serious product managers from the Perfecto Company, one on either side of him, and these two earnest folk were going to tell him who should win, according to their scoring.

  He would have preferred to have been at La Fenice lunching with his grown-up son. But he was obliged to stay, and so he got his pleasure from watching Sam Kellow.

  When the spaghetti comet flew across the air, the chief judge laughed out loud, right into his microphone. “Ha-ha!” He had not meant to, but he was so astonished, so shocked, so pleased, really—that was the truth—to see someone do the sort of thing he would have liked to do himself.

  Have you ever heard Phillip Lopate’s voice? It’s big and deep and when he laughed at Sam Kellow into his microphone, the laugh boomed out across the ballroom, as loud as rolling thunder.

  He saw Sam look at him. He saw his hurt face. He was so sorry he had laughed. He felt his embarrassment. He would have done anything to take that laugh back.

  Then there was a great commotion as the child’s parents ran across the floor. Phillip Lopate thought, They’re upset he’s not going to win. He shook his big lion’s mane and scowled.

  And yet when he looked at the parents, he could not dislike them. He liked how they hugged their boy, how they smiled and laughed and wept.

  Beside him Deborah (or was it Deidre?) sniffed. “That’s not Wilfred,” she said. “He’s number thirty-two but he’s not Wilfred Mifflin.”

  “Those are not Wilfred Mifflin’s parents,” said the other judge. “What will I do? They’re impostors.”

  “Give me your scores,” said Phillip Lopate.

  They both looked at him and hesitated.

  “I am the chief judge,” said the actor. He was already acting. He was speaking like the army commander in Invasion Force.

  “Yes, sir,” said the judge in the blue suit.

  “Give me your scores,” said Phillip Lopate. He was the army commander still. “And I will make my decision.”

  “Your decision?” asked the judge with the gold jewelry.

  “I am the chief judge,” said Phillip Lopate. “Isn’t that what you told me? You make your recommendation to me. But I am the one who makes the final decision.”

  “Yes, but it is customary for the chief judge to endorse our recommendations.”

  “It is customary for me,” the actor said, using a line he had had to learn for Invasion Force, “it is customary for me to do things my way.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the judges.

  Phillip Lopate rose to his feet. Suddenly he was feeling very good.

  “Perfecto Boy thirty-two,” he called, “Perfecto Girl thirty-two, present yourselves.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO go,” his mum said. His dad held Sam’s hand firmly and looked him in the eye. “We can walk right out of here,” he said. “You don’t have to do a thing.”

  But Nancy was already standing up. She was drenched, bedraggled. As she began to walk across to the podium, a nasty buzz of whispering rose up inside the ballroom.

  “It’s okay Dad,” Sam said.

  He had to go with Nancy. This mess was all his responsibility. It was his fault she was being whispered about by all her so-called friends, by all their parents up in the gallery.

  Sam looked up at the gallery, and there she was. Muriel. She stared down at Sam with her wild and angry bright blue eyes swimming behind her spectacles.

  “Up here,” the chief judge’s voice boomed out across the ballroom. “One culprit on each side of me.”

  It seemed like the judges’ podium was a mile away. And once he was there, there were steps to climb and wires to trip on. Finally, Sam sat down in the chair next to the chief judge. It was like some kind of dreadful nightmare. The judge put his big brown hand across the microphone. Up in the gallery George lifted his two hands in the air and wrung them, as if he was twisting Sam’s neck.

  “Now,” the judge whispered to Sam, “what’s your real name?”

  “Sir?” Sam was looking at George. He had put his long white fingers around his own neck and was throttling himself.

  “What is it? Your real name.”

  “Sam Kellow.”

  “Not Wilfred Mifflin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your parents here?”

  Sam pointed to the table where he had disgraced himself. His father sat in Sam’s wet chair, his mother in Nancy’s, while Sam and Nancy sat up here, on the podium, in their dripping clothes.

  Sam looked down and found, on the desk in front of him, the scorecards the Perfecto product managers had left in plain view.

  There was one chart for boys and one
for girls. Sam looked at his number. This judge had given him minus two for dancing, minus four for deportment. Then she had written Disgrace.

  “Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, children,” boomed the voice of the chief judge. “My name is Phillip Lopate and when you first saw me tonight I was not pleased to be here.”

  At this point Sam stopped listening. He heard the big voice booming out, but he could not bear to listen to the words. He could not look at his parents, either. He shivered inside his wet clothes and looked at that big word Disgrace.

  “I was pretending to be pleased,” the chief judge said, “but as many of you know, I am an actor. Now, however, I am in the happy position of saying what I really think. Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the Perfecto Kiddo, or rather, two of them. Look at them,” he said.

  He was looking at Sam and Nancy, but Sam had his head bowed and did not notice. Disgrace, he thought, that’s right.

  “If by ‘perfecto,’ we mean to suggest perfect, then these look pretty perfecto to me,” the chief judge said. “These are not fake. These are the real McCoy. No one would mistake them for adults. They have been into mischief. They have messed up their hair. One has spaghetti sauce on his face. Who cares?” the judge boomed. “WHO CARES? I have seen smiles on these two faces that would, in the words of the great poet, light up the heavens.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I announce the winners of the Perfect Kiddo Competition to be Sam Kellow and Nancy See.”

  There was a shriek from the gallery. A great dreadful shriek of rage. it was so dreadful that Sam’s mother never forgot it. It was what Sam’s mum and dad mentioned first when they told the story of the day Sam Kellow was called a Perfecto Kiddo—the sound of Muriel shrieking as she rose unsteadily into the air above the gallery.

  Five feet she rose, shrieking, pointing with her finger at Sam Kellow.

  Sam could tell the story, too, but the truth was he didn’t see the whole of Muriel’s ascent. When he finally realized he had won the Big Bazoohley, he fainted and fell off his chair. He did not see Muriel’s flight come to a dead stop as she bumped her head against the gallery ceiling. He therefore missed her curse, her fall, her broken leg. Indeed, he could never quite believe it had happened.

  By the time he woke, Muriel had been rushed to the hospital. Sam had also been carried from the ballroom. When he awoke, he was lying on a sofa in a strange room with soft light. Nancy was bending over him, holding a piece of pink paper. On it was written “Pay to the order of Sam Kellow Ten Thousand Dollars.”

  EIGHTEEN

  BY THE TIME SAM’S mother found her son again, she did not really care where Mr. de Vere was. She had her son, and that was all that mattered. Sooner or later she would find someone else to buy her painting.

  When Sam went to the black-suited cashiers and paid the hotel bill, she was proud of him. When he phoned the private detective in the Yellow Pages, she was amazed at how grown-up he had become. But when he announced that he was taking his mum and dad out to dinner, she burst into tears and kissed him.

  Vanessa Kellow put on her best evening dress and carried the embroidered clutch bag that had belonged to her mother. Earl put on his tux.

  The snowstorm had finally ended and all of Toronto was out again in the bustling streets, all bundled up against the cold. Sam and his mother and father took the subway to Osgoode and walked beside the six-foot snowbanks to a cozy little restaurant on King Street.

  When Sam saw that Nancy and her parents were sitting at the next table, he felt the happiest he could ever remember.

  This was chance. Completely chance. But before long they had pushed the tables together, and then they were all talking about Jamaica and looking at the brochures Nancy had brought for her parents, and by the time they had finished the main course, they were all planning to take the trip together.

  And then Sam’s mother gave a little squeal and stood up, holding her napkin across her mouth.

  Sam turned and saw three people standing at the doorway. The first two he knew—the judges from the Perfecto competition: the young man in the navy-blue suit and the older woman with all that clanking jewelry. But when he saw the third person, the hair on his neck stood on end.

  “Mr. de Vere!” his mother cried.

  Could this peculiar little person be the famous Mr. de Vere? The man who was now emerging from the huge black fur coat had a long snouty face and soft gray eyes. He was shorter than Sam and he was dressed in a gray striped suit which revealed the curve of a splendid little belly. As he handed over his coat, he perched a small pair of wire-framed spectacles on the tip of his shining black nose.

  “Mr. de Vere,” Vanessa said, half whispering.

  She was interrupted by the man in the navy-blue suit pointing his finger at Sam. “That’s him,” he hissed to Mr. de Vere. But Mr. de Vere was looking at Sam’s mother and shaking his head.

  “Vanessa,” he said, “thank heavens!” He was now smiling broadly. Just behind him, the judges were furious—snapping and squalling like seabirds.

  “It wasn’t a majority decision,” said judge number one.

  “It has to be a majority decision,” judge number two said. “The rules state it clearly.”

  But Mr de Vere was not listening to the Perfecto judges. He was walking toward Sam’s mother, his small jeweled hands outstretched. “I want my beautiful painting,” he said. “I want it now.”

  “You weren’t there,” Sam’s mother said to Mr. de Vere. “We all searched for you, but your door wasn’t there.”

  “My dear, I sent you a change-of-address card in Australia.”

  “But we weren’t in Australia,” Earl Kellow said. “We’ve been traveling, Eddie.”

  “Mr. de Vere,” said the female judge, pushing forward and pointing at Sam. “That’s him, the party who was wrongly given the prize.”

  “This is not a party,” said Vanessa. And she put her hands on Sam’s shoulders and held him as if someone wished to steal him from her. “This is my son, Sam Kellow.”

  Mr. de Vere pushed his wire-framed spectacles all the way back from the end of his nose to his small, mild, blinking eyes.

  As Mr. de Vere studied him, Sam could smell a damp earth smell, not dirty, but really rather nice-smelling.

  “This is the villain who won my contest?” Mr. de Vere asked at last.

  “Yes, that’s the boy,” said the woman. “That’s the girl, too. Drinking that red drink.”

  But Mr. de Vere did not look at Nancy, only at Sam. “Ha-ha …” he said. He clapped his small jeweled hands together. “Your son,” he said, smiling at Vanessa. “The very woman I’ve been looking for everywhere. And it is your son that is causing this catastrophe in my business. My people are upset,” he said to Earl.

  “Your people?” Earl Kellow said.

  “My Perfecto product managers, my marketing people.”

  “You don’t own Perfecto,” said Earl. “You don’t.”

  “Who else, kiddo? I didn’t get rich licking stamps. My people were furious. You know, young fellow,” the odd little man said to Sam, “you’ve just ruined my entire worldwide marketing plan.”

  “That Perfecto Kiddo stuff is yours, Eddie?” Earl could hardly believe it.

  “It is the source of all my wealth.”

  “It’s kind of disgusting, isn’t it, Eddie? Did you ever meet the parents?”

  “Well,” said Mr. de Vere, “I do admit that many of the contestants are not my sort of people…. But then, who is?”

  He looked at Sam, blinking rapidly. Sam could not stop staring at him. He was so odd. He looked like nothing so much as a mole. Indeed, when you studied him closely, you could see that he had soft, sleek gray fur all over his face.

  “I myself,” said Mr. de Vere, looking down at the backs of his own small furry hands, “am hardly perfecto.”

  There was a long sad silence in the room.

  “You are warm and alive,” Vanessa said at last. “You are curious and intelligent and you have a gr
eat eye. That’s what perfecto should mean—not name-dropping and meanness and cheating.”

  “Sadly,” said Mr de Vere, “sadly, people are affected by one’s appearance.”

  The silence this time was shorter.

  “Not so deeply as they are by kindness,” said Vanessa firmly, “or courage. Mr. de Vere, this is my son, Sam. He went off to find you, in his sleep, and then he was kidnapped, and then he set out to make the money his family needed.”

  Mr. de Vere put out his strange little hand and patted Sam on the shoulder. Sam looked at the glistening gold rings and smelled the damp earth smell again.

  “If it was up to me, Vanessa, the Perfecto commercials wouldn’t be like this.”

  “But it is up to you. You own the company.”

  “It is just that he isn’t the type our customers would identify with,” said the man in the navy-blue suit.

  “He is the type who would chance everything for his family,” said Earl. “Who wouldn’t want to identify with that?”

  “I would,” said Mr. de Vere, looking suddenly sentimental, wiping a tear from his furry gray cheek. “Oh yes, I would. There is nothing to beat that. Not anything.” He looked at the two judges and seemed to be waiting for their comments.

  “In human terms,” said the man from Perfecto, “who could argue?”

  “In human terms,” said the woman, and she suddenly blew her nose.

  “Well,” said Vanessa, “that is what I’d like to think, too. Sam took a big chance. That’s what life is, don’t you think, Mr. de Vere? You absolutely have to take a chance.”

  “Oh, life is a gamble,” said Mr. de Vere. “There is no doubt about it. Love, business, art—you have to take a chance. You took a chance,” he said to Sam, “and it seems …” He looked at Vanessa and then at the floor. “It seems … well, it does appear that he has won.” He looked over his shoulder toward the judges. “In human terms,” he said, his eyes twinkling.