Testing whether a fast, funny story can still hold something back

It is ninety-four degrees and I am a vegetable.

Not, like, spiritually. Literally. I am seven feet of foam sweet corn with a husk that flops over my eyes when I run, dinner-plate kernels down the front, size-nineteen sneakers, and a grin somebody molded into my face in 2011 and never once regretted. I have been Cornelius the Cob for the Delph River Silos for two summers. Cornelius has been Cornelius for fifteen. He is beloved. He is undefeated. There is a banner.

The banner says CORNELIUS: 431–0 and it is the single most important object in this ballpark, more important than the actual baseball, which tonight is going badly. It’s the top of the fourth and we are losing eleven to two to the Marion Muskies, who have a pitcher throwing actual heat while I am inside a thermal envelope slowly becoming soup. My cooling vest gave up in the second inning. There are supposed to be four frozen panels against my ribs and a little fan by my collarbone pushing air up into the head. The fan is dead. I have made peace with the fan. The fan and I are no longer speaking.

Here is the first rule of being a giant corn: you do not talk. Ever. Cornelius does not have a voice; Cornelius has a vibe. You say everything with your hips and your enormous foam hands, and if there is a true emergency you go into the tunnel, take the head off, and you can talk there, in private, like a normal person, before you screw the grin back on and go be a legume again. (Corn’s a grass, technically. I looked it up. Nobody at a ballpark wants to hear that a mascot is a grass.)

Here is the second rule: you never break character. Cornelius could be on fire and Cornelius would put himself out to the beat of “Cotton Eye Joe.” I have seen a four-year-old walk up and punch Cornelius directly in the reproductive region of the cob and I did not flinch, I did a little bow, I gave that kid a fist bump the size of his head. That is professionalism. That is the job.

The third rule isn’t written down anywhere. The third rule is that between the third and fourth innings, a child races Cornelius from the left-field foul pole to home plate, and Cornelius wins. Always. Cornelius has won 431 times. It is the most reliable event in the sport. The sun will expand and swallow the earth and somewhere in the ash a giant corn will be beating a six-year-old in a footrace, and the six-year-old will love it, because getting smoked by a vegetable is somehow the best night of your entire small life.

My spotter tonight is Trevor. Trevor is sixteen and Trevor is on his phone.

A spotter, if you’ve never done this, is the person who stands next to the mascot and steers, because a mascot cannot see. I see the world through a mesh panel behind Cornelius’s front teeth. It’s like looking at your life through a screen door in a sauna. So there’s supposed to be a guy (a good guy) who taps your left elbow for left, right elbow for right, grabs your foam wrist before you walk off the dugout roof, which is a real way to die. Trevor taps nothing. Trevor is watching a video of a man reviewing knives.

“Trevor,” I say, from inside the head, in the small furnace where only I live. He can’t hear me. Nobody can hear me. That’s the whole deal.

Top of the fourth ends. The Silos go down in order because of course they do. And the PA guy — Big Ron, who has been announcing here since before I was born and treats every promotion like it’s the moon landing — Big Ron leans into the mic, and I feel it in my sneakers before I understand it, the way you feel a truck.

“AND NOW,” says Big Ron, and the little crowd, maybe four hundred people melting into the aluminum, stirs. “THE MOMENT. YOU’VE. BEEN WAITING FOR.”

Oh no. It’s the race. It’s race time and my legs are jelly and my fan is dead and I cannot see and Trevor is learning about a knife.

“CORNELIUS,” Big Ron booms, “IS FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE. AND OH.”

Four hundred people go “OHHHH” like it’s a heavyweight bout. Somewhere a foam finger waves. I have to do this. I put my hands on my hips (Cornelius’s signature move, the Corn Flex) and I strut out toward the left-field line, and to Cornelius’s eternal credit he struts, he does not stagger, even though the girl inside him has stopped being able to feel her own face.

My opponent is waiting by the foul pole.

I can just make her out through the teeth. She is small. She is smaller than small. She is maybe five, in a Silos jersey four sizes too big that goes to her shins like a dress, and she is holding her mother’s hand with the specific grip of a child who has made a terrible mistake. Her name, Big Ron informs the county, is Ruby. Ruby from Delph. Ruby is here to race the corn.

And Ruby is crying.

Not tantrum-crying. Quiet-crying. The kind where the kid isn’t even asking for anything, they’ve just been marched onto a professional baseball field in front of four hundred strangers to run against a seven-foot monster with a permanent grin, and the whole size of it has landed on them at once, and their little face has just — gone. She’s looking up at me. At Cornelius. This enormous smiling thing the color of a school bus, breathing (I am breathing so hard, you can probably hear it, a giant corn wheezing), and she is trying to be brave and she is losing.

Here’s what’s supposed to happen. The horn sounds, the kid runs, Cornelius does the bit (the big theatrical lead, the look-back, the slow-motion showboat) and crosses first, and does the flex on home plate, 432 and oh, and everyone laughs, and the kid gets a coupon for a free cone and a story. That’s the machine. That’s the 431. That’s the banner.

I look at Ruby through a screen door in a sauna, and I think: not tonight, Cornelius.

The horn goes.

Here’s the thing about a costume you can’t talk in and can’t really be seen in: there’s just the corn, and what the corn decides. And the corn has decided to lose the most important race of its life.

Ruby takes off. Little legs, jersey flapping, dead sprint, arms going like an eggbeater. And I go too: I explode off the line, I give it everything, I pump those foam arms, I am a locomotive of corn. In exactly the wrong direction. I trip over my own size-nineteen shoe. It’s the greatest trip in the history of tripping. I sell it to the back row. I windmill. I go down in the grass in a heap of husk, flat on Cornelius’s molded grin, sneakers in the air, and the crowd makes a sound I have never heard them make in two summers: a real one, a whole-body OHHHH-NO that turns into a laugh that turns into something better than a laugh.

I get up. I stagger. I run three steps and trip again, slower, more tragic, a corn undone by fate. Ruby is halfway home and she has stopped crying because she is winning, she is actually winning, she keeps glancing back at this catastrophe of a vegetable and her face is doing the thing (the thing you’d never in a hundred years see from inside the head except that I am looking right at it through the teeth), her whole face is coming back on, lighting up section by section, disbelief into delight, and she pours it on, this five-year-old, she smells blood.

I make it to my feet for the last act. I run. I am gaining: I have to look like I’m gaining or it’s not a race, the whole art of losing is that it has to cost. And I reach out one giant foam hand toward home plate as Ruby’s sneaker comes down on it a full second ahead of me, and I collapse across the plate behind her in operatic defeat, spread-eagle, one arm reaching for a victory that will never come.

Four hundred people lose their minds.

Big Ron completely abandons the bit. “SHE GOT HIM,” he’s yelling, no script, just a man who’s called this race maybe eight hundred times watching it end the only way it never has, “RUBY GOT HIM, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE STREAK — THE STREAK IS OVER.”

And I lie there on home plate, dying, actually genuinely dying of the heat, sneakers up, and I feel the whole stadium through the ground. That’s how I hear it, mostly: my feet. Four hundred people stamping the aluminum, and it comes up through Cornelius’s giant shoes and into my legs like the whole place has a heartbeat and it’s going off. The Silos are down eleven to two. Nobody cares. Nobody in Delph, Ohio cares about the score anymore. A little girl beat the corn.

They give Ruby the microphone. Big Ron holds it down to her. She doesn’t say anything for a second (she’s got the same not-talking problem I’ve got, except hers is real) and then she looks at me, at Cornelius flopped dramatically on the plate, and she says the only thing she says all night, in a voice too close to the mic so it booms across the whole melting county:

“Are you okay?”

And I — I cannot talk, that’s the first rule, Cornelius has no voice — so I lift one enormous foam thumb off the dirt, up toward the sky, and hold it there. Thumbs up. From the ground. From a defeated corn. And she laughs, this five-year-old, she throws her whole head back, and the sound of it comes down through the mic and out over the speakers and I get it twice, once through the air and once, half a second later, up through my sneakers with everybody’s stamping, doubled, so that for one full second the biggest thing in the world is a little kid laughing and I am inside the reason.

Trevor helps me up. Trevor has put his phone away. Trevor is looking at me (at the head, where he knows there’s a face he’s never seen) with something like awe. “Dude,” Trevor says. “You dumped the streak.”

I give Cornelius’s hips one more flex for the road, 431 and one, and I strut off toward the tunnel where I’m allowed to be a person again, past the banner nobody’s going to bother changing, and I do not fix it, the number’s wrong now and it can stay wrong, that’s the best 431 ever threw.

In the tunnel I get the head off. The air hits me: regular July air, ninety-four degrees, and it feels like a mountain lake. My hair is soaked flat. I drink half a water bottle in one go through the straw I forgot was even there. Somewhere out on the field they’re trying to play the rest of a baseball game nobody’s watching.

A little face comes around the corner of the tunnel. Ruby. Escaped from her mom for four seconds, four-sizes-too-big jersey, still catching her breath. She sees me (a regular teenager sitting on a milk crate holding a giant corn head in her lap) and she stops. She looks at the head. She looks at me. She’s doing math no five-year-old should have to do, and I watch her decide not to do it, decide to let it stay magic, which is the smartest thing anyone’s done all night.

“You’re fast,” I tell her. First words Cornelius has ever said to anybody. My voice is a wreck. “Nobody’s ever beat him. Four hundred and thirty-one people. You’re the only one.”

She considers this with total seriousness.

“He fell,” she says.

“He did,” I say. “He really did.”

She nods, satisfied, the whole thing filed away correctly forever, and runs back to her mother. And I sit there on the crate in the cool dark with the head in my lap and its dumb painted grin pointed up at me, and I think: worst game of the season, hottest night of the year, dead fan, eleven to two, and I have never once in my life been this happy to be nobody.

Deja, my name is. Not that it matters. Out there I’m a grass.

I screw the head back on. My cue’s coming: seventh-inning stretch, I dance on the dugout, it’s a whole thing. Trevor’s waiting with a fresh water and, God help him, actual eye contact. I put my hands on my hips.

Four hundred and thirty-one and one. Best record in baseball.