Ninety-six degrees inside the corn
Sunday doubleheader · 96°F · 2 ice packs, 1 working
It was ninety-six degrees in Twin Rivers today and about a hundred and twenty inside the corn.
Captain Corny is eight feet tall. Most of him is husk. The husk is foam and the foam does not breathe. Inside, there is a little fan, which runs on four AA batteries and the hope of a better world. The batteries went at the top of the third.
You see the game through a mesh panel in Captain Corny’s mouth, which is where his smile is. So everything I have seen for six seasons I have seen through a smile. I think about that more than I should.
Captain Corny is not allowed to speak. This is in my contract, in bold. A child of perhaps six asked me today, quite seriously, whether I was a vegetable or a person. I could not answer. I gave him a thumbs up. He looked at the thumbs up for a long time and then he said “both,” and walked away, and I have not stopped thinking about it.
The seventh-inning dance is to a song about corn that the marketing intern wrote. It has eleven verses. Nobody has ever heard all eleven verses because the inning ends. But I know them. They go round my head at night like moths.
In the bottom of the eighth a teenager tried to pull off one of my leaves. They’re velcro, so they come off, which I think was a mistake in the design. I did what Captain Corny does, which is a big, wounded, silent stagger, and the crowd laughed. The teenager kept the leaf. I am now an ear of corn with a bald patch.
Between games I sit in the equipment room in the bottom half of the costume with the top half beside me, like a man next to his own headstone. Someone left an ice pack in the freezer with my name on it. I don’t know who. I would like to thank them. I can’t, because I’m not allowed to talk in the costume and they’re always gone by the time I’m out of it.
We lost both games. The second one by eleven. Captain Corny is not allowed to look sad. I danced the corn song for the people who stayed to the end, all three of them. One of them clapped. It was the boy from earlier, the one who decided I was both.