Ice Festival
	Chapter 9 One Event After Another

The official called out, "Pitchers ready!" and I choked out, "Huh? Team rep pitcher? Me?"

"Naturally you," Dillon said. "Your pitching has never been better."

"My pitching has always been terrible. Never better than terrible is still terrible."

The official out on the ice adjusted the target a couple of inches. I wanted to yell, "McBride, you're backing out of this because you think it's beneath your dignity to pitch to a target instead of a real live catcher!" Before I got a chance to yell that or anything else, an amplified voice sent me halfway to the bright blue sky. The official-looking person by the pitcher's mound had gotten on a microphone and called out, "First pitcher for the Snowball Slow Pitch will be the representative from the team from Diamond Hill!"

We all turned to watch Gregor step into place while an official gathered up five softball-sized snowballs. Gregor looked slick and confident. I wanted to ask him how his dog was lately, but I thought I'd better keep quiet.

I'll make this brief. Gregor smacked the bull's-eye with four out of his five pitches, but one of his bull's-eye throws was called flat. He had a high score, but not perfect.

Through a nervous blur I watched other pitchers in other age divisions. Some were okay and some were terrible, but none as terrible as I was going to be. Then I heard it: "Next pitcher up is the team rep for the Jackpine Pointers."

I hadn't noticed it, but the target out on the ice had moved away a considerable distance. It was now approximately as far off as Pluto and looked almost as friendly.

I stepped up to the mound. For the first time I felt the wind coming off the land pretty briskly. Having that wind at my back would help my distance, though not my accuracy.

I stared out at the target. I stared past it at the stock car track where bright-painted cars were spinning around on the ice. I stared beyond to the horizon where ice met sky. Horizon, I thought. Hor-i-zon-tal-ly.

Of course!

If nothing else, this year's Winter Fun Frolic would be the time in my life when I finally got horizontal and vertical straight.

My first pitch went wild and sailed past the target toward the horizon.

Dillon ordered, "Calm down! Take a deep breath!"

"Take several!" Marmy added.

I won't bore you with the details of how my next pitch hit the second ring out and I hauled in a couple of deep breaths and frosted my lungs and looked out at Pluto and imagined it was Dillon and hit the bull's-eye the next two times and barely outside it the final pitch. The other Younger Youth team reps didn't do as well, and the Pointers were in second place in our age division.

My face felt hot with the stress and excitement. I couldn't wait to get back to the apple stand and find out what event was next, not to mention downing a snow apple.

That's something the orchard makes at every Fun Frolic. They pour apple juice on snow and mold it into an apple shape and stick a tongue depressor in it and dip it in caramel and set it out to freeze. Your fillings come out when you eat it and maybe even your teeth if they happen to be fake.

Back at the booth, Brownie's dad handed me an extra-large snow apple. I wavered between bragging to him how great I'd pitched and burying my teeth in the caramel. Before I could do either he said, "Be sure and check in at official headquarters. They'll be setting up the ice blocks early in the morning, and you've got a choice whether yours gets set up vertically or horizontally."

"I'll tell them," I said, exercising self-control because once I bit into my snow apple, I wouldn't be able to talk for a while. "Our dragon's standing up on its hind legs, right?" "Of course it's standing on its hind legs," Cathy answered. "Our dragon is standing upright and flashing fire with his eyes and daring the rest of the world to"

Marmy shrieked and pointed at the sign. "They've changed everything! Look! Things are crossed out and there's arrows and lines going everywhere! What's it mean?"

Cathy analyzed the sign. "They've shortened up the schedule. Snowshoe Sprints and the B'Icicle Race will be run simultaneously at once. Why would they do that?"

"Never mind why," Dillon said, "let's just make sure we're all in the right places at the right times."

The right place for the Snowshoe Sprints was the park a short distance down the bay front. The right place for the B'Icicle Race was where the park met the bay. The schedule change put both events very soon, so we gobbled our snow apples and some other apple goodies and ran for the park.

Halfway there, I noticed we lacked something important. Snowshoes. Wanting to be helpful, I pointed this out.

Brownie gasped, "I'll run back to the stand and get the antique pair! Since only one person gets to race, it will logically be me."

I was thinking it would logically be me because I'd been practicing so much, but I'd had my moment of glory in the Snowball Slow Pitch. Nobody else volunteered to be our snowshoe rep. They probably remembered that pileup in the woods with Sugar diving off them.

Brownie ran off into the crowd and I started looking around for my parents. They hadn't seen me pitch. Maybe they knew the rules and had expected Dillon, not me, to pitch. But they did expect to see me in the B'Icicle Race, which I fully intended to run. I mean pedal.

Brownie came back clutching the old wood snowshoes. Across the white stretch of park, besides the usual playground equipment, a series of fences and stakes and low walls sprouted out of the snow the obstacles. Brownie put on his snowshoes.

There were a lot of people our age getting ready to snowshoe, and they looked serious. I couldn't hang around to see the race; I had to show up for my own event. We argued about who would watch what. Finally Dillon and Marmy said they'd stay and cheer for Brownie, while Cathy came to the bay edge to cheer for me, or possibly to make sarcastic remarks.

We arrived at the starting line for the B'Icicle Race in time for me to catch on to three facts:

First, there weren't many bikers entered in the race, so I had a decent chance of finishing well.

Second, my parents were there to see me ride to victory.

And third, I had never remembered to pick up my bike from Dillon's house. My bicycle that I was supposed to ride to victory on was five miles away in a snowdrift!

"Two minutes to race time!" said one of those guys in orange vests that I was starting to despise.

My mom said, "McBrides didn't bring your bike?" and I panicked. "No! It's still didn't will you go get it?"

"Bikers ready!"

"What'll I do? What'll I do?" Nobody was giving me an answer. I heard Cathy yelp "Ow!" Whatever her problem was, I couldn't waste sympathy on her. Then I heard her ask, "Where did this materialize from?"

I turned to see her grasping a bicycle by the handlebars, much like a bull-wrestler grasping a bull by the horns. When I say "bicycle," don't imagine an ordinary bicycle. This one was pink. A girl's model pink bicycle with pink streamers coming out the ends of the handlebars and a pink plastic basket on the front and pink fenders and even pink pedals.

"Where did you get that?" I asked her.

"It hit me in the back and practically knocked me down. Nobody was on it. Somebody must have rolled it at me."

"One minute! One minute to race time!"

I looked all over the crowd and didn't see anybody who looked like they would shove a pink bicycle at anybody. Wait. I did see a person who jolted something in my brain, a person whose face was hidden in a parka hood

Cathy said, "David, you have no choice! You'll have to race with this bike!" My parents agreed. Riders were lining up to start. Kristin from Diamond Hill waited on a classy bike, one foot on the ground, focused out at the horizon.

Hesitantly I reached for the pink bike with its pink streamers and pink basket. In my humiliation I was looking downward, and I saw that even the valve caps were pink.

"I can't," I told Cathy. "I just can't!"

She shoved the bike at me. I stepped back and it fell over. She said, "David, this bike appeared out of nowhere. It's a miracle! God must have sent it to you! You believe in God, don't you?"

She was changing the subject and besides that, she was sounding alarmingly like Miss Wainwright.

I protested, "My picture will be in the paper. Brownie's picture will be in the paper holding a pair of antique snowshoes and my picture will be right alongside his riding an all-pink girl's bicycle. I can't. I can't. I can't!" My face felt so hot I whipped off my hat and my scarf.

Cathy jerked the bike upright and pushed it toward the starting line. I saw a flag go up. She said, "All right, all right, I'll do your dumb B'Icicle Race," and she started to run with the bike and I heard her shout to an official, "Cathy Knutson riding for David Malloy for the Jackpine Pointers!" and she hopped and landed on the pink bike seat and a gun fired and a flag fell and they were off.

Most of the riders spun their tires and slipped left and right as they accelerated too fast on the ice, then they settled into steady pedaling toward a vertical orange pole far out on the bay. The wind was helping,

pushing at their backs, but they'd have it in their faces on the way back. Cath was holding her own somewhere about three-fourths back in the pack. A snowmobile followed alongside pulling a sled, to pick up casualties I guess. This was going to take a while. I wondered how Brownie was doing.

Back at the Snowshoe Sprints starting line, somebody in the Younger Older Division was having trouble getting his snowshoes on. Brownie was trying to do jumping jacks. It turned out they would race one age division at a time, but nobody could tell me when our division would go.

I ran to the headquarters booth and told them the Jackpine Pointers wanted our ice block set up vertically.

I ran back to the scene of the Snowshoe Sprints in time to see the last racers in our Younger Youth Division snowshoeing across the finish line. All except Brownie. He was somewhere out among the obstacles, walking slowly, dragging his feet, kicking snow. People were yelling at him to hurry up so the next division could go.

Brownie's head was drooping from his neck. His arms were drooping from his shoulders. Worse, his snowshoes were drooping from his hands, rawhide lacings dangling.

He crossed the finish line. "Broke," he mumbled and kept walking, followed by Dillon and Marmy, whose faces were scrunched up with anger.

I could have said "I told you so" or "That's what you get for insisting on using those old things" or "If you'd let me race, I'd have won." I didn't say any of the above.

Dillon grumbled, "Matthew from Diamond Hill came in way ahead of everybody. I'll bet he cheated," though how anybody could cheat in a snowshoe race, he didn't say. Marmy asked, "Does anybody know where we stand in the standings after this disaster?" Meanwhile Brownie was heading toward the apple stand. I knew he was trying to figure out what to say about breaking the orchard owner's antique snowshoes.

I thought about that snowmobile running alongside the B'Icicle riders and I wanted to do that for him, to pick him up like a casualty. I wished I'd helped him make those four snowshoes for Sugar. She'd probably have done better in the race than he did.

"I'm sorry, Brownie," I told him.

He looked at me and blinked twice. "Is the B'Icicle Race over already? Don't tell me you won."

"Well, no, and, well, no. I sort of didn't have a bicycle and Cathy sort of substituted for me. Let's go down there they're probably coming in now."

As we got close to the shoreline, the crowd was clapping and yelling. The four of us pushed our way through, helped by Brownie running interference with his broken snowshoes. One bike was still out there struggling against the wind. A bright pink bike, moving so slowly you wondered how it stayed upright, weaving left and right but heading more or less toward the finish line.

Cathy was coming in dead last. At least the crowd had the decency to cheer her in. I felt terrible for her like I felt terrible for Brownie, and I started shouting for her to keep going, and so did the others, with Brownie even pumping his broken snowshoes over his head.

She pedaled across the finish line, hit a chunk of ice and fell over. Her face was bright red. It clashed with her pink bicycle. At least she wasn't encased in ice.

"I won!" she gasped over and over. "I won! I won!"

"She's got hypothermia!" I told the official guy. "Help her! She's delirious!"

"No," he said, "she really did win. It's so rough and gusty out there, practically everybody else fell down. A lot of them bent up their bikes or got flat tires."

I squinted toward the horizon. The sun was bright on the ice, but far out I saw people walking beside bikes or zig-zagging all over. Something was on the sled behind the rescue snowmobile. It wasn't nice of me, but I hoped it was Kristin and her expensive bike.

Marmy grabbed the handlebars of our pink victory bicycle and yelled, "This is hers! How did you get hold of her bike?"

"She loaned it to us," I answered. I had no idea who "she" was and didn't much care right now. What mattered was that the Pointers had actually won a Winter Fun Frolic event! We helped Cathy to her feet. She whipped off her breath-frosted scarf and gulped air. "We're still in good shape for Singin'-in-the-Snow!" she raved when she got her wind back. "It's not until this evening and meanwhile I am on the edge of

starvation after that terrible experience which you, David Malloy, forced me to endure. Let's get something to eat and find ourselves a place to practice the song."

So I would forever get blamed for making Cathy enter the B'Icicle Race, the very same race which she was congratulating herself for winning. And so much for my hopes that the race had pushed "Let It Snow" out of her head. She sounded more determined than ever to win that detestable singing contest.

As we headed back toward the food stands, I pulled Marmy aside and reminded her, "We're still in the running! So it isn't necessary for you to carry out your you know."

"My what?"

"The thing you're planning."

"What am I planning?"

I decided the girl was hopeless or she was deceiving me or both. We caught up with the others and gobbled hot dogs and checked the schedule again, and by then it was dark.

Cathy went from booth to booth asking "Do you happen to have a piano?" as if Bell Harbor people packed pianos everywhere they went. When it was close to the time for Singin'-in-the-Snow, she got some cardboard boxes from the apple stand and we made our way to the stage which had been set up on the ice, facing the shore and all lit up.

In front of the stage was a long table that said "JUDGES." Three people were sitting there, not on the three chairs provided but on the table. They looked displeased. A crowd of people was shuffling around grumbling. Officials in orange vests were racing around yelling at each other. One was on stage talking into a microphone, except you couldn't hear what he was saying.

"Sound system's dead," somebody explained when Dillon asked what was going on. "Can't find the problem. Looks like we'll have to cancel Singin'-in-the-Snow."

Cathy's face, back to regular color now, looked disappointed, but she has a technical mind and I think she understands that these things have glitches. But for Marmy Albright the words were a match introduced to a firecracker.

Marmy grabbed a box, scooped snow into it up past the top, climbed up onto the stage, and started singing "Let It Snow," microphone or no microphone.

Those three judges sat down in their chairs hard and fast, exactly like Sugar does when Brownie says "Sit!"

Marmy didn't need a microphone. Everybody could hear her. They could probably hear her clear out on the stock car track even with all their engines running. She kept singing and if anything she got louder the longer she sang, and when she got to the part where we were supposed to throw snow on the audience, she threw her boxful of snow and missed the audience. Instead she hit the judges' table square in the middle and the pile of snow exploded and showered all three judges in the face.

The crowd gasped. Then the judges started laughing, and the crowd started laughing and applauding, and Marmy Albright for the Jackpine Pointers was declared the winner of Singin'-in-the-Snow because nobody else dared to get up and sing after that and she was the only entry.

Jackpine Point had seized the lead in the Younger Youth Division!

Then came the big letdown. We had absolutely nothing to do before tomorrow morning's Ice Sculpture Contest.

There was some kind of fancy evening event in the Civic Center that all our parents went to, but we weren't interested. We wandered among the booths and watched people closing up and turning off their propane heaters and packing away their stuff for the night, even the orchard booth.

We walked out onto the bay to where the ice blocks would be set up in the morning. We'd been told that the Younger Youth Division ice blocks would be in their own special section, I guess so we wouldn't distract the Old Youth and the Young Olds and so forth from what they imagined was their superior work. It was dark out there, really dark, and we almost walked into an orange tape barrier.

"We'd better stand guard over our spot," Dillon suggested. "In case they really do try something nasty."

I asked, "You mean stand guard all night? Our parents will report us as missing persons."

"We can stand guard for a little while," Marmy suggested, as if the bad guys only worked part-time. But we didn't have anything else to do, and I think we were all nervous about the next day, and at least the five of us were together.

We marched back and forth along the orange tape for a while and finally sat down in a circle. We had heavy jackets on, but sitting on ice is still sitting on ice.

"Let's tell jokes to keep our minds off the cold," Dillon suggested. "I'll go first. Okay. There's these two polar bears, and they're walking down the street, see, and one of them says to the other"

"Polar bears can't talk," Cathy's voice came from somewhere down deep inside her parka hood. Or deep inside her down parka hood.

"Well, let's say these can. Where was I? Oh, yeah. These two polar bears are walking down the street, and one of them says to the other"

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

I jumped a foot straight upward off the ice and found the air wasn't any warmer up there. Marmy was laughing hysterically, sending round puffs of icy breath floating over our heads.

Dillon protested, "It's not funny yet, I'm not finished," and at that instant a flashlight flooded us with light, but unfortunately not with warmth. On the far side of the light a rough voice demanded, "Who's there?"

"Nobody but us polar bears!" Brownie answered.

And then came the sound of breaking ice.