hand.
“When can I start?” he asks.
Chapter Four
Gabriel Fuller hates Pooch.
He hates his boundless enthusiasm and his good-natured idiocy and his desire to chase every ball that’s thrown his way. He hates his lack of pedigree, his complete renunciation of anything that might’ve, once, harked back to his wolf ancestry. He hates the simplicity that dictates that Pooch loves Gordo and Betsy and All Kids; hates that he goes crazy when offered a bone but is nowhere allowed to piss, shit, or fuck. He hates the fact that, even after all this time, he cannot be certain if Pooch is a boy or a girl.
Every Friend who portrays a character in WilsonVille has “allowed behavior,” which is another way of saying “things you must and must not do.” Some are general rules, applicable to every employee in the park: for instance, under no circumstances are they allowed to strike a park visitor. Self-explanatory, but good to remember on days when the fifth little tyke in a row has vomited on your paws or climbed onto your back and then taken a tinkle. Some are specific to character: for instance, Lily is forbidden to remove her antlers in public view. Doing so can result in immediate dismissal for “violation of character.”
Pooch’s rules are very simple. One, Pooch is a dog. Two, as a dog, he walks on all fours. Three, as a well- trained dog, he does tricks, and he does them on command: Pooch can fetch; Pooch can hop up on his hind legs for hugs and to dance about; Pooch can walk on his forepaws for short distances, to indicate excitement or approval; and, in the ultimate hypocrisy, Pooch can sign his name.
But he has to sign with his mouth.
This means that Gabriel Fuller, wearing eighteen pounds of Pooch costume, including a headpiece that stinks of sweat and shed skin cells, spends most of his days in the park walking on all fours. And when he’s not doing that, he’s pretty much guaranteed to be walking on his hands as often as his legs, because that’s what the masses have come to see. Sometimes, Gordo gives a kid a ball, and he gets to fetch it.
Signing autographs is actually the easiest task, though it requires some balance to execute properly. The headpiece is such that control of the mouth and tongue are accomplished by a wire system in the forepaws. When signing, Gabriel Fuller takes the offered pen into his mouth, closing it, then frees one of his hands-being right- handed, his right-from the paw and moves it up his front, to the inside of the mask. In this way, he can sign his name using his hand. But this also means that, while on all fours, he has to support most of his upper body on his left hand. His upper body plus the weight of the costume. Sometimes he’ll sit on his haunches to do it, but it’s a hard posture to hold for more than thirty seconds or so at a time.
At least management understands that the costumes are physically taxing, and for every thirty minutes he spends in the park Gabriel Fuller gets to spend sixty on break. By the time he’s made it to one of the employee areas and gotten out of his headpiece and freed enough of his upper body to effectively use his hands, he has forty minutes left. He’s drenched with sweat and dying of thirst, especially if it’s been a hot day (and almost every day seems to be a hot day). He sits on a bench in one of the common areas that anchor the theme park’s tunnel system, and sometimes he gets to chat with other Friends, but most of the time he’s given a wide berth, because he reeks. The female performers, in particular, avoid him, especially the Flower Sisters.
There’s prestige in whom you’re wearing. Right now, Gordo, Pooch, and Betsy are at the bottom of the ladder, though it’s anybody’s guess who’s in last place of the three. Probably Gordo, who has steadfastly refused to grow with the times, it seems; Betsy, at least, got to move “tomboy” in the last few decades, out of her floral print dresses and into cutoffs and sneakers. For the men, though,
All this means that, more often than not, Gabriel Fuller is left alone when he’s not out in public, not chasing Gordo’s goddamn oversize soft foam baseball or dancing in circles around Betsy or having someone pee on his back. He’s left alone, and even if he’s wearing half a giant mutt costume, he’s often unnoticed. This suits him fine. It’s time he’s used well in the last couple weeks, mapping the service tunnels and marking the generator locations and the pump rooms and generally getting the lay of the parts of WilsonVille that sixty-plus thousand people a day don’t even pause to consider. The apparatus within the apparatus; the world that allows the park to exist.
Gabriel Fuller has been doing prep, and it’s almost complete. Gabriel Fuller has set eight charges, loaded a cache with the equipment he’ll need when it all goes down. He’s done this because it’s what the Uzbek told him to do. He’s done this because, when it all goes down, he’ll be on the inside, he’ll be running the show on the ground.
Gabriel Fuller is ready in mind, if not in heart.
Gabriel Fuller is not Gabriel Fuller’s real name.
He still doesn’t know who he works for, even after all this time, even after nearly seven years.
That was a different life ago, and a far different world from one where places like WilsonVille could even be imagined. At that time, his world was what he had been able to make of it, mostly through cunning and to a lesser extent through strength, and it had been those two traits that had brought him, before he was Gabriel Fuller and still called Matias, to the Uzbek’s attention.
They’d met at a party Matias was throwing for his crew, back in Odessa. He and his boys had brought over half a ton of raw heroin from Afghanistan the previous week, and already most of it had made its way to Moscow. Even after the bribes, the cuts, all the hands that had reached out for their share, it had been a dynamic haul, and there was reason to celebrate. Normally, Matias ran a tight ship, but this time he’d let loose the reins for one night, thrown the party himself. There was booze and cigarettes, some pot, and a lot of girls, all of them pretty and most of them young.
The Uzbek’s appearance came as a surprise; he was uninvited but not unknown. Matias had seen him a handful of times before, had heard some stories, had asked some discreet questions. The stories were broad-stroke myth, about how the Uzbek had done this thing or that thing, like how he’d cut the balls off some UN guy and fed them to him, or how he’d taken the ringleader of a gang moving black market gasoline and made him drink a gallon of the stuff, then cut him open and thrown a match. The stories backed the answers to Matias’s questions, even if the stories weren’t true; in no uncertain terms, the Uzbek was Not to Be Fucked With. Connected, he’d been told, and Matias had said something about the big players in Russia, gotten a head shake in return. Not just Moscow, no, bigger than that.
Matias didn’t, couldn’t conceive of something bigger than the power in Moscow, but he got the message, and he passed the word: his boys, they stayed the fuck out of the Uzbek’s way, out of the Uzbek’s business. Twice already, Matias had killed jobs that could’ve been lucrative, just to stay on the safe side.
So Matias’s first thought on seeing the Uzbek walk through the door in his tailored suit and his long hair and those wire-rim round-frame glasses with the tinted lenses was pretty much, Oh, fuck me running, we cut into his score. And his second thought was to wonder how quickly he could get out of the country, and how much of his money he might be able to take with him. If the Uzbek was as connected as all that, then killing him wasn’t going to help; killing him would only make things worse, and would mean Matias would be that much longer for the dying. Although he had done some dark things in his short life already, he didn’t fancy being turned into a flambe.
It was Vladimir, the biggest of his boys and not the nicest by a long shot, who came to him.
“This guy, he says he wants to talk to you.”
Matias hadn’t taken his eyes from the Uzbek since the man had arrived, watching where he stood perfectly still just inside the door to the condo, letting the pretty girls and tough boys party around him. The Uzbek watching Matias the same way Matias was watching him.
“He say what about?”
“No. He’s that guy, the one you told us-”
