When Goose first saw that Mergenthaler Linotype, you could have knocked his eyes off with a stick. A machine six feet wide and seven feet tall, weighing around three thousand pounds! As if Pa’s big old 1940 Diamond T pickup truck had reared up on its hind end to beg like a ginormous coonhound. The Linotype had thousands of moving parts clacking and clicking like clocks all keeping different times. And around the machine was this enticing smell of hot lead and fresh newsprint and sticky black printer’s ink. The signs blared Danger! Danger!

Goose was magnetized. He felt like he was falling right into that clattering Linotype. Falling in love. He didn’t realize that he’d gotten too close until he felt Mr. Sol’s hand on his shoulder pull him back a little. Then Mr. Sol put his mouth next to Goose’s ear and shouted, “Our type compositor is so fast he can hang a line of type before the last line is ejected. On good days he composes at ten thousand ems per hour.” Goose had no idea what that meant. But he knew he wanted to be that man, that king, the master of that huge, noisy monster.

The type compositor, a tall, muscular man with a dark crew cut, perched lightly on a swiveling stool. His blue cotton work shirt had the sleeves cut off at the shoulders so Goose could see the tattoos on his sweating biceps. One tattoo had the letters “USMC” under an American eagle standing on a purple heart (a Purple Heart!), and the other had “Semper Fi” under a cartoon bulldog chomping a cigar and wearing a spiked collar. His big hands were all over that machine, doing many things at once, like those Hindu gods with all the arms. No wasted motion. He and the machine had clearly been dancing together for a long, long time.

That man could not have been a patient at the leprosarium. Operating a Linotype was too dangerous for people with Hansen’s disease because they could get burned or cut but wouldn’t feel pain. Then they’d get infected and need amputations. So this was somebody else--somebody who didn’t scare easy, who didn’t mind working in a leprosarium, who knew that HD could be contracted only in childhood.

The man was so busy with his work that he didn’t realize Mr. Sol and Goose were watching him. Mr. Sol waited until the man paused in his keyboarding and turned to toss the line slugs into the hellbox for remelting. Then he rolled forward in his wheelchair and put his hand on the man’s arm to let him know he had company.

The man turned around, and Mr. Sol introduced him. “Begay, this young man wants to learn the Linotype business. Meet Waylon Beaufort Boudreaux, called Goose for his amazing gooseberry-green eyes.”

Goose opened his mouth in greeting, but nothing came out. The man looked neither white nor colored, so Goose didn’t know how to address him. Sir, mister, boss, brother, what? Goose waited for the clue to come from the man’s mouth: boy or child or son would tip him off.

As Goose had gotten familiar with the leprosarium, his amazement at the patients’ symptoms had been overtaken by amazement at their colors. The doctors and most of the nurses were white, of course, but the patients were all the colors of the world. One man was very pale pink; one lady was so dark that her skin reflected shimmering blue light. There were people from Barbados, Hawaii, Nigeria, Morocco, Honduras, and a dozen other places. Mr. Sol had given Goose a big world map to tape up on the wall in the leprosarium’s social room so folks could stick a pin in the places they were from, and that map bristled.

Even more astonishing than the colors of the patients was their disregard of those colors. Sure, they divided themselves up by similarities: ladies with other ladies, or Spanish-speaking folks, or giggling adolescents. But they never divided up by color. Dark and light folks always ate lunch with each other and sat talking together in the social room. When Goose had asked Mr. Sol about this, he laughed and said, “Well, we’re probably in the only place in Louisiana where something trumps race. It’s just too bad that something has to be Hansen’s disease.”

Now, when Mr. Sol noticed that Goose was puzzled about how to address the man, he said, “Begay here comes from the big Navajo reservation in the Southwest.”

So. A red Indian. Goose had never seen one in person. Never given them much thought. They existed in picture books, history books. Most of them lived on the other side of the country, which might as well have been the other side of the moon.

Begay. Strange name. First or last name? Did he have only one name? Goose still didn’t know how to address him. Was a red Indian an honorary white person or an honorary colored person?

The man stuck out his big hand and shook Goose’s smaller one, squeezing a little. Goose’s finger bones compressed uncomfortably. The man said “Pleasure, kid,” and nodded, looking through slits so narrow that Goose couldn’t even see what color the eyes were. He didn’t smile, so that was like a white man.

Kid. That was a new one. Goose played it safe. “Bonjour, boss.”

The big man lowered his eyebrows and looked at Mr. Sol, who said, “Just call him Begay, Goose. Not boss. He’s been a type compositor for fifteen years, since he was about your age. He was wounded at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, but his main job was sending and receiving coded messages. Came here after the war to help me start up The Argus.”

Now Goose knew how to talk to the man. Everyone liked to tell war stories. He had already milked Pa and all the other veterans he met dry, including the ones in the leprosarium. So he was confident of a friendly reception when he said, “Honored to meet a war hero, sir. I’d love to hear about your time at Guadalcanal.”

But those eyebrows went down again. Begay shook his head and said, “Nope. No stories.”

Goose didn’t know what that meant. Did the man have no stories to tell? Did he have stories but not want to tell them? Did he just not like Goose? Goose took a step backward, rebuffed, feeling stupid. He learned later on that Begay had a reputation around the leprosarium for not talking much. Maybe something had happened in the war to make him like that, or maybe he’d always been like that.

Mr. Sol eased the awkward silence by asking Begay if Goose could sit and watch him work for a bit. Begay looked at Goose pretty hard for a minute, eyebrows down, no smile, and then nodded.

***

That night after Pa signed the paper giving his permission for Goose to work in the leprosarium’s print shop, he handed it to Goose and said, “What is it, child?”

Goose inhaled and said, “It’s--well, it’s the boss. I suspect he thinks I’m a dog that won’t hunt.”

Pa laughed and said, “If he didn’t want you, you wouldn’t be going to work for him.” But Goose looked at the floor.

So Pa said, “Son, liking or not liking folks ain’t as important as you might think. What’s important is everybody working together to get the job done. Your boss was in the war; he knows that. You work as hard as you can for the next four years, and then you won’t ever have to see him again. You learn and you stay out of his way, then you’ll be a journeyman printer and have your pick of jobs. Better’n driving a truck like me.”

Goose raised his head and nodded. He would do it.

All the work in a print shop is dirty, but Goose began with the dirtiest. Mr. Sol told him the name for the job he was doing was printer’s devil. A lot of famous folks had done this same job when they were young: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, even President Harding. Mr. Sol said that the very first printer’s devil was from Africa, a colored boy (like Goose!) who worked in Italy a long time ago. So Goose learned to mix ink and fetch type and take slugs from the hellbox to be melted and recast and clean up the squirts and spills of lead. Begay didn’t make many of those squirts and spills, but when it did happen, Goose wondered whether he had maybe done it on purpose. Just to show Goose who was who.

Begay aside, Goose liked the job. He kept busy doing different things and getting to know the folks who came in and out of the print shop and the newspaper office. He especially liked Miz Satou, a young lady from the Philippines. She was Mr. Sol’s secretary, and she could type almost as fast as Begay could set type. Now, Miz Satou did have Hansen’s disease. She still had all her fingers and toes, but her eyebrows were gone, and her nose was pretty flat. (When people with HD didn’t get the sulfa drugs in time, the disease sometimes made their faces look like lions’ faces. That’s why the patients called their baseball team the Lions. A joke.) But she wore bright red lipstick and perfume anyway.

Mr. Sol told Goose that Miz Satou had saved the lives of a bunch of American soldiers by carrying secret messages across Japanese lines. When the Belleville patients had heard that she couldn’t get good medical treatment in the Philippines, that she was lying on a bamboo mat on a dirt floor all day, they ganged together and took up a collection to get her to Louisiana.

Goose got on famously with ladies of any color. They always told him how smart he was and how pretty his eyes were and so forth. But he particularly liked Miz Satou because she was a lady and a war hero. Unlike Begay, she was happy to tell Goose her war stories. Whenever he could, he brought her a few pecan pralines or a beignet to sweeten the conversation. But if he saw her taking a smoke break with Begay, he waited until later. It riled him a little the way they put their heads together. The way they smiled. Begay never smiled at him.

Goose’s favorite part of the job was learning to operate the Linotype. Mr. Sol said Goose was a natural for the job, and Goose reckoned it was so. He was particular with his fingers, fast and careful, and he knew all about punctuation. And when he was setting type, that’s all he could see. You could set off a cherry bomb right behind him and he wouldn’t flinch.

And he could spell. He’d won his elementary school spelling bee two years running. Usually, the school gave the winner a dictionary as a prize. But because they’d already given Goose the dictionary in the fifth grade, they had to give him a thesaurus in the sixth grade. Goose still loved both books. Sometimes, he’d stick a finger into one and try to memorize the page it landed on. On the rare occasions when he wasn’t sure how to spell a word, he wrote it out both ways, either on paper or with his finger in the air. He could tell by looking whether it was supposed to be license or licence, independent or independant. Writing a word out both ways took a few seconds, but that didn’t matter in school.

But it did matter for the Linotype work. And Begay never had to write words out to know how to spell them. He . . . just . . . knew. Always.

Goose worked like a dog. Within a year, he had achieved a best speed of seven thousand ems per hour. (Now he knew that an em was a unit of measurement the width of a capital M.) That was lickety split, especially for a beginner, and Mr. Sol often told Goose what a great compositor he was getting to be.

But Begay never complimented Goose. And he continued to work at a best speed of ten thousand ems per hour.

Goose managed to follow Pa’s advice and stay out of Begay’s way until one day: Boom! Goose’s ears rang, and orange flames instantly swarmed up the front of the Linotype. Goose just sat like a bump on a log, staring at the blaze.

But Begay was running toward Goose faster than any big man had a right to run. And Goose felt an impact like he’d been hit by Pa’s truck. Then Begay dropped him ten feet away and ran back toward the fire to cut the fuel supply and the pressure. Miz Satou hustled in from the editorial office and sprayed the Linotype with the chemical fire extinguisher.

Three minutes later, the ruckus was all over. Goose began to understand that a gasket in one of the fuel pipes connected to the Linotype had given way and a spray of gasoline had shot out, igniting the machine’s metal heater. He started to shiver when he realized that Begay and Miz Satou had saved Mr. Sol’s precious newspaper office. Maybe saved the leprosarium. All the doctors and nurses and medical equipment. The two hundred patients who lived there.

And Begay had saved Goose. Saved his life.

Unbelievably, Begay and Miz Satou were standing there laughing. Their faces and hands and clothes were black and oily--but they were laughing. And then they looked at Goose, and Miz Satou said, “Are you all right?”

Goose’s teeth were chattering. They were heroes, and he was a yellow dog. A capon. A coward.

He waved his hand at them, turned away, and walked down the hall. Left the building and stood there in the sunshine for a minute. Walked the two miles home and went to bed. When Pa got home that evening and asked how his day had been, he said fine. He also said he was tuckered out and needed to stay in bed for the next day or two.

The Linotype wasn’t damaged. It just needed cleaning up. So three days later, when Goose came back to work, there was Begay, setting type at ten thousand ems per hour, like always. He and Goose nodded to each other, and then Goose began quietly emptying the hellbox.

That’s when Goose began to listen a little more carefully to the rumors about Begay, rumors whispered by the town’s porch-sitters. Goose had mostly just waved at these folks as he made his rounds, but now he stopped more often to natter and let the conversation come around to Begay. He learned that Begay had left a wife and children behind. Begay was a souse . . . on the lam . . . a no-account. Nothing specific, but Goose marked the rumors.

Because Mr. Sol now had two type compositors, he was able to change The Argus from a monthly newspaper to a weekly. And Goose got Pa to give away copies free as he made his deliveries around town. That way, the townies learned all about the leprosarium--learned that the HD folks were just folks, not rabid cannibalistic zombies. Some of the ladies from the white and colored churches began to visit, bringing in old clothes to give away or baskets of cookies and jellies and suchlike. When Mr. Sol told Goose what a difference Pa’s deliveries had made in the townsfolks’ attitude towards the patients, he said, “Goose, if my tear ducts still worked, I’d weep for joy,” and they both laughed.

***

Later that year, Mr. Sol’s health took a turn for the worse. His skin lesions got more hurtful, his breathing got harder, and his fingers curled in like claws. He hated to do it, but he had to cut back on his newspaper work. Miz Satou got other patients to write some of the articles, and she and Goose wrote a few themselves.

What Mr. Sol did when he was feeling punk was to wheel into the big social room where there was this big old Wurlitzer radio. He’d listen to music and news and especially baseball games. That was his big thing, baseball. He loved to tell baseball stories, like about how he saw President Wilson throw out the first ball to open the 1916 season and how Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs in 1919. Mr. Sol was only a kid when he saw these things, but he remembered them like they happened yesterday.

It wasn’t only the score, he said. It was the sound of the bat cracking the ball and the way the new grass and fresh air smelled after you’d been cooped up inside all winter and the way everybody sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” all swaying together side to side. And the ice cream. Although the song says peanuts and Cracker

Jack, Mr. Sol hadn’t eaten that junk. What he did was wait for the ice cream guy to come around during the seventh inning stretch. That guy rode a big tricycle that pulled a freezer cart and had an umbrella over it and a big silver bell with a long chain that he pulled to ring it. The cones were different then, bigger and made with a lot more sugar, not these modern little dinky things that fall apart after one bite and taste like crunchy air. Mr. Sol never got chocolate or strawberry, always vanilla. He said that people who think vanilla doesn’t taste like much haven’t had the real thing, and he felt sorry for them.

Now even though relations between the townies and the HD patients were improving, relations between the HD patients and the businesses weren’t. The food companies were especially afraid of doing business with the leprosarium. Didn’t want word to get around that they served lepers, or they thought their equipment would be contaminated, or some such flapdoodle. Coca-Cola refused to deliver to the leprosarium for years, until Pepsi came around, and then Coke did. But both companies let the HD patients have only the chipped bottles that weren’t going to be used again.

No one had ever agreed to deliver ice cream.

Goose decided it was time. There was a big game coming up on June 12, and Mr. Sol would surely listen to it on the old Wurlitzer: the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds. Goose was determined that Mr. Sol and everyone else would have ice cream for that game. He wanted the whole shebang: ice cream, waffle cones, and a day’s rental of a freezer cart that he could pedal around the social room. He’d get Miz Satou, who knew origami, to fold him one of those ice cream hats.

Goose spread the word around the leprosarium that he was making a big surprise for Mr. Sol and needed folks to help him out with whatever cash they could spare. Most everyone pitched in, some a little, some a lot, all in change and small bills. Goose had never organized a big shindig like this before. One of the HD patients joked that Goose was moving faster than a one-legged leper in a butt-kicking contest. There was a lot of hoo-hah and shushing and whispering and giggling, but it all happened while Mr. Sol was listening to the radio or snoozing, so he never suspected. Goose was so busy he never did get around to asking Begay for a donation or telling him about the party.

No ice cream company would send one of their precious freezer trucks to Belleville if they knew that Pa was going to drive it out to the leprosarium, so Goose had to send a purchase order from a rural business. The ice cream company’s driver would bring the truck to the vacant lot behind the Belleville grocery store, then set a spell in the diner to eat his lunch while Pa took over the driving for the rural route. Common procedure. Only the local drivers knew those dusty back roads.

Goose decided on a malt shop. What should he call it? Milkshakes and More? Ice Cream Heaven? Floats and Fun? He decided on Solly’s Sodas--in honor of Mr. Sol, of course. For the delivery address, he used the grocery store, like Pa said other companies did.

One of Pa’s sayings that Goose didn’t like was, “You’re a smart boy school-wise but sometimes you don’t got the sense God gave a monkey wrench.” So printing up a fake purchase order was against the law? If the company got its money, what was the harm?

When the big day came and Mr. Sol was in the social room fiddling with the knobs of the Wurlitzer to get it tuned right, all the other HD patients and the doctors and nurses snuck into the hall to hide. Ten minutes before the first ball got thrown out, Goose made his big entrance, feeling as tall and important as Rex, the Mardi Gras king. He pedaled into the room on that grand tricycle with Miz Satou’s origami ice-cream hat on his head, ringing the bell and singing out, “Mr. Sol, will you have vanilla as usual?”

Then everyone crowded into the room laughing and cheering and yelling flavors out: Strawberry! Chocolate! Vanilla! Strawnilla! Chocoberry! Vanolate! And they danced around Mr. Sol’s wheelchair, using feet, crutches, wheels, whatever they had.

In all the uproar, Mr. Sol’s mouth opened like he wanted to speak, but nothing came out.

So Goose said, “Well, sir, I take it that’s a yes!” and put this huge sugary waffle cone with two big scoops of vanilla into Mr. Sol’s hand. And Mr. Sol opened his mouth and took a little lick like he wasn’t sure what to do. But then he definitely remembered what to do: he took a big bite and closed his eyes and groaned, “Oh, no, a headache!” And everyone laughed again and cheered for Mr. Sol’s first ice cream headache in thirty years. Then they all crowded round to get their cones before the first ball was thrown out. Of course, Goose offered ice cream again during the seventh inning stretch, and everyone got as full as a tick and didn’t want supper. And those twenty runs that the Dodgers scored against the Reds that day didn’t taste any better than that ice cream did.

Whenever Goose noticed Miz Satou looking around for Begay, he turned his head away.

***

The headline of the next morning’s Belleville Bugle read LEPER ARRESTED IN ICE CREAM SCAM.

When Miz Satou handed him the article, Goose’s stomach lurched up into his craw. First, the word leper. Nasty as the word nigger. A hating word. Terrible word for a newspaper to print. And anyway, Begay wasn’t a patient. Second, Goose had never meant to scam anyone. He’d handed over the money for the ice cream fair and square. Third . . . Begay. And him a wanted man.

He wasn’t Goose’s favorite person, but without him The Argus might have to fold. And that newspaper was important. Mr. Sol used it to help the HD patients understand their disease better, but he also used it to connect them with the big world, running articles on the war and the World Series and Hollywood. And it was because of that newspaper that the leprosarium finally got the sulfa drugs, the post office, the telephone, the paved road, and so on. Even the vote. Until a few years ago, people with HD couldn’t vote. It had really burned Mr. Sol how you weren’t only sick with HD, you were legally punished for being sick, like a criminal.

As Miz Satou looked out the window with her arms folded tight, Goose read the article and realized his mistake. He’d collected the money and given it to Pa to hand over to the Carvel driver. Pa had kicked a bit--he wasn’t used to handling money--but Goose persuaded him that as long as the company got paid, everything would be hunky dory. (He didn’t tell Pa about the fake purchase order.) But after Pa had driven off to deliver the ice cream to the leprosarium, the article said that the Carvel driver got to wondering. Cash? Businesses always paid with checks. And those checks got mailed to the company’s finance office, not handed to a driver. So instead of going to the diner to eat his lunch like Goose expected, he’d gone into the grocery store to show the manager the purchase order and ask about this Solly’s Sodas place.

After that, things must have happened pretty fast. Begay had been arrested in the print shop, right about when the first ball was being thrown out. He’d spent the whole night in jail.

As Goose was reading, Mr. Sol rolled his wheelchair into the office. As with Miz Satou, the disease had turned his face into a lion’s face. Just now it looked mighty fierce. He said in a thick, heavy voice that Goose had never heard before, “I think there’s been a mistake here, don’t you?” And he looked real hard at Goose.

Goose’s face was hot. He said, “Well . . . I . . . well . . . but he’s a . . . wanted man. Isn’t he?”

Mr. Sol lowered his lion’s forehead. “Oh, you heard about that, did you? Do you know the details?” Goose shook his head, and Mr. Sol said, “Kurumi? Please tell this boy.”

Miz Satou’s voice was low and sad. “Begay is wanted for assault and escaping arrest. While he was away at the war, another man moved into his house and took over his wife and kids. Where Begay comes from, the women own everything, the houses and livestock and all. So he returned from the war and found no wife, no children, no home, no nothing.”

Goose tried to imagine how he’d feel if he went home one day to find that Pa had taken in another boy. Had given that boy all of Goose’s clothes and books and other things. Had said that he didn’t want Goose around no more. It was such an ugly thought that he closed his eyes trying to shut it out. His breath came quick and shallow as he listened to Miz Satou say the rest. “He didn’t know what to do, so he went on a bender--the only time in his life he ever got drunk. Then he returned and tried to stab his wife’s new man with a pocket knife. The man was only scratched. When the tribal police came to arrest him, he ran.”

Mr. Sol was still looking pretty fierce when he said, “So, Goose, I think you’ll agree that this isn’t quite the same situation that we have here, is it? Not the same thing as intent to defraud and commit larceny, is it?” Goose’s head, its eyes closed, lowered.

Mr. Sol’s voice softened a bit, and he put a hand on Goose’s arm. “Do you need to take off work this morning to see Sheriff Cooley?”

Goose held quiet a minute. Pa and Mr. Sol and Miz Satou had been so proud of him. And he had worked so hard to learn compositing. It still hurt to open his eyes, but he inhaled and did it. He looked at Mr. Sol. “Yes, sir. I do.”

Mr. Sol’s face looked friendly again. He squeezed Goose’s arm and said, “Well, you might want to walk into his office on your own power. You don’t want him knocking on your Pa’s door.” Goose closed his eyes again and nodded.

Begay had surely figured it all out by now and told the sheriff anyway. Goose might as well get it over with. Do it and don’t be dreadin’ it. That’s what Pa always said.

***

Sheriff Cooley looked up from writing at his desk and said, “What’s up, boy? You need something?”

Goose took a big breath, gave his name and address, explained that he worked at the leprosarium’s print shop, used all the sirs he had, and confessed.

Sheriff Cooley didn’t react as Goose expected. First, he smiled. Then he said, “Boudreaux, eh? You must be Jackson’s boy. I’ve knowed your Pa since we was kids. Good driver, Jackson. Finds his way into and out of all the hellacious holes we got around here.”

Now humbled below Pa in addition to being humbled below Begay and Mr. Sol and Miz Satou, Goose looked at the ground and waited to be arrested.

But the sheriff’s surprises weren’t finished. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Look here, son. I don’t know what’s got into you, but we already know who done it. Mr. Begay done signed a confession.”

Goose’s eyes widened. “But . . .” Silence.

The sheriff looked at him curiously.

Goose said, “May I speak to Begay--to Mr. Begay for a minute, sir?”

“Sure. No reason why not. I’ll take you in directly.”

Sheriff Cooley escorted Goose upstairs to the holding cell. Begay was sitting on the bunk in the cell, his back against the wall, smoking one of Sheriff Cooley’s hand-rolled cigarettes. When he saw the two come in, he nodded politely and said, “Nice smooth shag, Sheriff.” That was the first time Goose ever remembered Begay speaking without being first spoken to.

The second time was when he looked at Goose and said, “Kid, I’ve already got a rap sheet. You don’t. Let’s keep it that way.”

Goose was thunderstruck.

***

After Begay was extradited to Arizona, Goose was the only type compositor for The Argus. The newspaper didn’t fold, but Mr. Sol did have to cut it back again to a monthly. Goose worked hard and kept his nose clean and earned more money than Pa ever had. And everyone kept on saying they were proud of him.

It should have made him happy, and it mostly did. But there was this black lump in his chest all the time.

He asked Pa what would happen to Begay, and Pa said, “I don’t know, child. He’s got to work things out with his own folks in his own way.”

He asked Mr. Sol what would happen to Begay, and Mr. Sol said, “I don’t know, Goose. He’ll probably be all right. He’s a resourceful fellow.”

Goose didn’t feel any better after these conversations. He didn’t ask Miz Satou. Didn’t want to make her feel bad by mentioning it.

But about a month after Begay left, Miz Satou came into the newspaper office waving three picture postcards and saying, “Gentlemen! Take a break!” Mr. Sol put down his blue editing pencil and Goose swiveled his stool around and left the Linotype purring. Goose and Miz Satou crowded around Mr. Sol’s desk so they could see all the cards.

The card addressed to Miz Satou showed a black and white cartoon of a tall cactus under a night sky with a full moon and lots of stars. A hammock slung from the cactus’s arms held a sleeping man whose legs sprawled over the sides and whose open mouth emitted a string of Zs. A smaller hammock held a long-eared jack rabbit emitting a tiny string of Zs. A buzzard perched on top of the cactus like a Christmas tree angel, and a steer skull sat on the ground below. The caption read “At the end of the trail.” On the back of the card was a three-cent stamp postmarked Chinle, Arizona. Written in the message space, in a handwriting so forceful it indented the card, was just one word: Begay.

Miz Satou said, “Well, he’s home, anyway.” She smiled at Goose and Mr. Sol, and Goose felt the black lump in his chest melt a little.

The card addressed to Mr. Sol showed a mountain lion sitting on a big rock against a blue sky crossed by a bright rainbow. The lion’s huge round paws looked the size of dinner plates. Its tawny neck was stretched long, its black-backed ears were flattened, and its black-lined eyes were closed. Its mouth was opened wide to show the pink tongue and knife-like incisors. But it wasn’t growling or yawning. It looked like . . . was it singing?

It couldn’t be, of course. But that’s what it looked like. Written in the message space in the same forceful handwriting was the same single word: Begay.

Mr. Sol laughed. “This lion is absolutely me! Having a great day! The best portrait I’ll ever have!” Goose and Miz Satou laughed with him. Goose’s black lump melted a little more.

The post card addressed to Goose was captioned “Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly National Monument.” It looked like no landscape Goose had ever seen. No buildings, no people, no animals, no water, no trees, no grass, no flowers. The horizon was flat as a table, with a huge cloudy sky pressing down like it weighed more than the earth. Enormous anvil-shaped rocks, layered like red and white flapjacks, jutted up to that cloudy sky. A few dry greenish-gray shrubs huddled against the base of the rocks. One tiny, lonely dirt road wandered through the picture like it was so lost it couldn’t even find itself.

And in the center of the photograph stood a tall, tall rock split vertically down the middle, with one half of it a little shorter than the other. Like a man standing next to a boy--not touching, but together. Facing in the same direction.

Goose was expecting the same Begay in his message space as on the other cards. But instead, there were three different words: Beshiltheeni--Metal Master.

With Mr. Sol’s help, Goose sounded it out: bay-sheelt-hay-ay-nee.

Did Begay have a first name after all? A secret name, never to be spoken? A nickname, like Goose? Or was this a title he was handing on to Goose?

Whatever it was, Goose had it now. Metal Master.

Now he needed to work to earn it. Ten thousand ems per hour.

Plus one.