Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  “This is a home-run ball hit by Shoeless Joe Jackson,” I’ll tell him. That should be sufficient to shift his blood into overdrive.

  What I won’t mention, right away, is that the ball was hit over the left-field fence of my stadium, clubbed by Shoeless Joe off a ghostly relief pitcher during an extra-inning game, a blue darter of a line drive that thudded into the stands a few seats from Karin and me. Karin leapt from my lap and chased it down as it ricocheted off the bleacher seats like a rabid pool ball.

  When she returned with it, it had a darkish bruise on one side, from being hit by Joe’s immortal bat, Black Betsy.

  The disappointment of Chicago fades away as I take to 1-80 again, headed for Cleveland. But my experience in Cleveland turns out to be little better, hardly the kind of adventure I would have chosen.

  A meager crowd, scattered at random throughout the cavernous Cleveland ballpark on a blustery afternoon, watches as the Indians lose. Many of the fans carry radios, as if hoping the crowd noise will somehow be amplified and the game will be more interesting secondhand than in person.

  After the game I go to a café near my hotel for supper. It is a plastic restaurant so archetypal of twentieth-century America that it could have been created by the motion of a cookie cutter: a counter, two rows of booths; the booths separated from the counter by a row of plastic foliage growing out of a divider full of white stones that look like they, too, were manufactured.

  I am sitting at the counter eating a synthetic veal cutlet covered in a bland, tasteless gravy when the holdup man comes in.

  The owner, a swarthy Greek with hair like tufts of black quack grass, is behind the counter. I am staring directly into his apron, which is a Rorschach test of grease spots. The holdup man walks the length of the counter and stops behind me and to my right. In fact, I don’t even notice him until I hear the Greek give a strangled cry that sounds like “Wan … graaaaaaaach!”

  Raising my head from my cutlet, I look directly into the Greek’s stricken face. I peer over my right shoulder. The holdup man is short and wiry and has his right hand buried in the pocket of a dirty brown windbreaker; his chinless, ferretlike face has not seen a razor for several days.

  “I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the holdup man says clearly, with what I take to be just a trace of a southern accent.

  The Greek continues to stand directly in front of me. I can see a field of tombstones emerging from the stains on his apron. He raises his hands palm out, at ear level, and makes the sound again, a rasping gasp as though he were swallowing his false teeth.

  “I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the holdup man says again, louder. He is looking only at the Greek. Behind him, behind the divider full of geraniums and rubber plants with Tupperware leaves, some customers are padding rapidly toward the exit. I edge one seat to my left; the Greek moves with me, keeping me between him and the gun.

  I wonder what would happen if I edged my way all the way down the fifteen or so empty stools to the door. I move one more. The Greek moves with me.

  “Sit still,” the holdup man says.

  Unaccountably, I reach back two stools and drag my congealing cutlet after me. I consider bolting and running, but as I stare at the Greek’s belly I imagine the holdup man pumping a number of bullets into my escaping back, and, simultaneously, an Iowa highway patrolman, his boots blood-colored in the glow from the porch light, informing Annie that I have been shot.

  A woman emerges from the metallic-colored swinging doors at the end of the counter to my right. She looks around, tosses her head, rearranges her hair like a horse shaking away a fly. She walks toward us, stopping beside the Greek, again right in front of me, only three feet or so from the gunman.

  “Put your hands down, Demos,” she says to the Greek in a nasal twang. “This creep ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  She wears a thin grayish-white uniform with two front pockets at waist level. A red cigarette pack shows clearly through the sparse material of one, a yellow order pad is in the other. Above her left breast is a white plastic name tag with the word WANDALIE impressed in black letters.

  “What are you doing?” Wandalie says in a whiny yet contemptuous voice.

  “I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the man says as an answer.

  “Like hell you are,” says Wandalie. She is about thirty-five with steam-straightened black hair, a wide face with a very small nose, and a large mouth with spaces between her teeth.

  Wandalie steps even closer to the gunman. “Frank, you haven’t got a gun in there,” she says, her upper lip curling into a genuine snarl, “and even if you did, you wouldn’t have the guts to use it.”

  Under her flimsy uniform, like a twenty-dollar bill stuffed in her bra, Wandalie apparently harbors a death wish.

  It becomes apparent that I am in the middle of a domestic dispute of some kind, not a holdup. The Greek lowers his right hand, keeps his left at ear level. Among the spots on his apron, I see silhouettes of Annie and Karin dressed in black. The police hate domestic disputes worse than holdups. I decide to move one stool closer to the door.

  “Sit down!” Frank says to me. “I have so got a goddamned gun,” he says to Wandalie.

  They play “Yes I have,” “No you haven’t,” for a few moments. As they do, they let little bits of their life loose like items of I.D. pulled from a billfold.

  Frank is Wandalie’s boyfriend, live-in lover, maybe even an ex-husband. Wandalie keeps baiting him. I wait for him to indeed produce a gun and splatter Wandalie and the Greek against the mirrored wall, then start looking around for witnesses.

  Suddenly the Greek says, “Hey Frank, what you think of the Indians losing again today? I hear it all on the radio,” and he points to an ancient brown radio with a fret-sawed design on the front.

  “I was at the game,” I say hopefully.

  Wandalie has been seeing someone on the side. Frank doesn’t know who, though I’d guess it is Demos, by the way he keeps his left hand in the air.

  “Slut!” shouts Frank.

  “Why should I stick around you, you can’t even get it up anymore.”

  If he has a gun, he’ll use it now. I consider fainting. Surely he wouldn’t shoot an unconscious man.

  There is a trick to fainting. Annie taught it to me. In her high school senior play, at West High School in Iowa City, Annie played the mother in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was required to faint about five times during the play. You just cross your right leg behind your left and let yourself down onto the floor, sideways on your right side. When Karin or I tell Annie something of earthshaking importance, she still sometimes clasps her hand to her forehead and executes a faint.

  “Oh, Mommy,” Karin will say in exasperation, “you’re not really dead.”

  The Greek, who has been inching his right hand closer to the counter utensils, sees his chance. He picks up off the counter one of those glass sugar containers shaped like a small white rocket, and, with deadly aim, at close range, bounces it off Frank’s forehead.

  Frank pulls his right hand, white and gunless, from his jacket pocket, and tests his forehead where blood is emerging in a bright semicircular brand near his temple. He turns and runs staggering from the restaurant.

  “I told you he didn’t have a gun,” says Wandalie, standing triumphant, hands on hips.

  Next time he will, I think, almost say.

  “On the house,” says the Greek, pointing to my sad cutlet and cold coffee, as two burly police officers, summoned, I suppose, by departing customers, rush in, guns drawn, then rush out again as the Greek points in the direction in which Frank has fled.

  Outside, a woman in a black kimonolike dress, body big as an oil drum, her head a wild tumbleweed of hair, her cheeks like halves of a black grapefruit, cuddles to her flabby chest what must surely be an albino baby, its skin the blue-white color of skim milk, its head covered in a crocheted bonnet woolly as a lamb’s back.

  I stop at a motel near Pittsburgh.

  “Only got a
family unit left,” says the bored old woman who sits sideways on a chair watching a microscopic black-and-white television, “but I’ll give it to you at regular price.”

  The outside of the motel is finished in gray imitation brick. Inside are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a bath—enough room for a large family dragging along an ailing grandmother. The building is old and depressing: swaybacked linoleum floors, a brown hulk of a space heater, dead flies on all the windowsills. The place has obviously been rented out on a permanent basis over the winter months, as I discover when I look in the freezer compartment of the squat yellowish fridge and discover some frozen fish. There is a bottle of Dr. Pepper on one of the shelves, and some brown lettuce in the crisper. I move to the kitchen cupboards and find a half-package of graham crackers, an unopened box of Minute Rice, and a plastic bag half-full of potatoes growing slender feelers the cold color of ivory.

  I wonder how these things came to be here. Where did the winter tenants go? Did they steal off in the dead of night, rent unpaid, carrying only essentials in brown shopping bags?

  I eat the crackers and drink the Dr. Pepper in front of a fuzzy TV as full of moving shadows as a prisoner’s past.

  Before leaving, I check the cupboards again—I have already packed the Minute Rice and consider absconding with the potatoes.

  In New York the weather is warmer, and an unusual thing happens to me at Yankee Stadium.

  I stand in a long line for tickets.

  “Right-field bleech-has is all we got fo-ya,” I hear the ticket seller intone to those in front of me.

  I plunk down my Master Charge and say, “One of your best, please.”

  I sign for the $7.50 ticket and am surprised when the man at the turnstiles directs me toward the lower box seats.

  By some miracle, my seat is ten rows directly behind home plate. The man next to me has paid a scalper thirty dollars per ticket for him and his family. His wife is surly and disinterested, his sons too small to concentrate for long. He spends the game trekking back and forth to the concessions.

  I am so close to the game that when Thurman Munson tosses his mask and charges back to the screen after a pop-up, he is nearly close enough to touch. I’m glad I got to see him. No one knows that he will be dead before the leaves turn.

  I drive on to Boston even though it is out of my way. I want to have the tickets in my pocket when I travel to New Hampshire; I want to feel them in my hand, solid as passports with convictlike photos. Perhaps secret codes will be punched in them.

  I park the car and walk in the sun along the sleazy street outside Fenway Park, where winos, unkempt as groundhogs, sun themselves and halfheartedly cadge quarters, supposedly for food.

  “I’m a little short for a meal, Mac. Can you help me out?”

  “I’m eighty cents short of the price of a ticket,” says a tiny bald wino with a sunburned head. He eyes me carefully, smiling sardonically from a toothless mouth. He must know from the way I hitch my jeans that I’m not a local, or perhaps he can tell by my green and white cap with the red letters ORKIN on the peak.

  I give him a dollar and say I hope he enjoys the game. He winks at me.

  Again I am fortunate. Two tickets in Section 17.

  “Right behind the Sox dugout,” the elderly ticket seller assures me; his right eye is sightless, rolled back, and what is visible looks like a mixture of milk and cherry blossoms.

  I drive as far as the intersection of highways 90 and 91. A little more than an hour of traveling upward along a vermilion line that parallels the Vermont and New Hampshire borders will bring me to Windsor, Vermont. Salinger country. My project seems more absurd all the time. What in the world am I going to say to him?

  Salinger’s twenty-five-year silence has bred rumors that rise like mosquitoes from a swamp and buzz angrily and irritatingly in the air. And I’ve collected them, as a child might collect matchbooks and stash them in an unruly clamor in a dresser drawer already full of pens, tape, marbles, paper clips, and old playing cards.

  “He hasn’t eaten anything but soybeans for fifteen years,” I recently heard an American Literature professor say authoritatively when we were at Mark’s home in the University Heights area of Iowa City, Annie and I the only non-academics present. Tired of answering the question, “How is your corn crop coming?” I had mentioned my interest in Salinger, to let them know I read more than International Harvester repair manuals.

  Mark’s house is wide and spacious, with a lot of windows and much glass and chrome furniture. In fact, the living room looks a little like a furniture-store display window, and smells of new fabric, plastic, and waxed floors.

  Our own sofa was plucked from the front lawn of a frat house in Iowa City, not long after we were married. It has rounded arms and is covered in a ferny green cloth soft as a plush toy. It has endured abuse. I lifted a cushion one day to find an atrophied doughnut in among the Lego, pencils, matchbooks, and Karin’s lost socks. I looked at the doughnut for a while, feeling very happy, and covered it up for posterity.

  “He arrives at the store every afternoon at three-thirty and he speaks the same words every single day, ‘Three pounds of soybeans, please,’ unless of course a long weekend is coming up, then he orders five pounds.” Mark’s party is bulging with tweed and intellect. As I steer Annie toward the door, she informs me brightly that she has just learned that Chaucer died of cancer of the testicles.

  Mark, besides being a burgeoning business tycoon in partnership with a dishonest-looking accountant named Bluestein, is a minor celebrity in the university community. He had been written up in a number of learned journals, has had articles published, and is often invited to give lectures to government officials, farm marketing boards, and Future Farmers of America conventions. Mark’s theory is that the impudent corn weevil is bent upon conquering the world.

  When Annie first told me about this, she looked me straight in the eye and warned me not to snicker about it, especially in the presence of my brother-in-law, who wrestled as a light-heavyweight during one of the numerous years when Iowa won the NCAA wrestling title.

  “University people treat that kind of thing very seriously,” she said, exploring my forearm with her small freckled hand. She added that it was probably wise never to snicker in the presence of my brother-in-law, who holds atheists, Catholics, Democrats, and the University of Oklahoma wrestling team in equally low esteem.

  “But if you want to snicker when we’re alone, it’s okay,” said Annie, throwing herself into my arms, sitting on my lap, her denimed legs bracketed around my thighs. “Imagine, devoting your life to corn weevils.” Annie buried her face in my shoulder as we laughed and rocked back and forth.

  “It can’t be as bad as selling life insurance,” I said, and told her about selling a $5000 policy that week to a Portuguese house painter who thought he was insuring his half-ton truck.

  “I’m Ray Kinsella,” I’ll say confidently, after I’ve rung his doorbell and he has answered. Then I’ll just stand and wait for his incredulous reply.

  At the same time I can picture myself sitting for days in his driveway, while my chin stubbles and the car interior begins to smell of orange peels and stale bread.

  I have breakfast at a Motel 6 near Holyoke, Massachusetts. It has rained in the night, and the parking lot is peppered with pink petals. As I drive toward Windsor, Vermont, I remember once driving through Iowa City with Karin at my side, over streets where trees formed a dizzying arch of pink and white. Petals fell silently on the car as we drove.

  “Don’t run over the flowers,” she said to me.

  We stopped the car and Karin and I walked on the tender grass between sidewalk and street, Karin gathering the velvet droplets, pressing them to her face, scattering them over her head.

  I had to go to Iowa City again that night. As I tucked Karin into bed in her room with curtains covered in kittens and ballerinas, I said, “Is there anything I can bring you?” figuring on an ice-cream bar, a Dr. Pepper, or a sl
ice of cheese pizza, which, incredibly, she likes to eat cold for breakfast.

  “Bring me the flowers, Daddy,” she said. “I want some to touch when I wake up in the morning.”

  That night, after my meeting, I drove back to the spot we had visited by day. It was like a cathedral, the filtered light of stars and streetlights peeking through the thatch of blossoms and leaves.

  From the jumble in the back seat, I took a large Styrofoam cup that had once held a cherry Coke, and, walking along the dark street rather sheepishly, scooped handfuls of petals from the overflowing gutters, wondering how I would explain myself if someone chanced to ask.

  I carried them home on the seat beside me like an urn of ashes, and placed them on the night table beside Karin’s bed. I watched her sleeping; she slept on her back, her right-hand palm up beside her head. She looks like Annie run through a copying machine that reduces things in size. I bent and kissed her freckled nose. I will probably never love her more than I did at that moment.

  A tiny sound, like a soap bubble bursting, pops me back to reality. I stop at a rest area and try to regroup. I feel like an eighth grader bringing home a bad report card. In daylight, when I’m alone, what I am about to do seems so ludicrous. I don’t have Annie to reassure me, to put her arm around my waist and her head on my shoulder and say, “Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it.”

  This land is foreign to me. The hills are blanketed with trees and foliage. I am used to being able to see for miles in any direction, and, if I’m able to find a hill, being able to count the houses on nearby quarter-sections. I grew up in Montana under the Big Sky, where the landscape outruns the vision. Here, I am surrounded. Perhaps I won’t be able to find him. The sky is clear, with a rumble of clouds on the horizon. I walk into the woods—oak, maple, white birch, conifer, poplar, the ground clothed in green crawling vines decorated with tiny purple flowers. Acorns cover the ground like pebbles. The trees are a golden-green; spring bristles all about me. There is more rock than I imagined, although the mountains, compared to the real mountains of the West, are only green hills.