Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  Salinger—Jerry—looks at me over his plate of moussaka. I am eating Greek salad out of a bowl large enough to wash in, the lime-white feta cheese resting heavy on the crisp lettuce and tomatoes.

  “I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all? Isn’t it enough? Serenity is a very elusive quality. I’ve been trying all my life to find it. I’m very ordinary. I’ve never been able to understand why people are so interested in me. Writers are very dull. It’s people like you who keep me from achieving what I’m after. You feel that I must be unhappy. A neurotic, guilt-torn artist. I’m not unhappy. And I have no wisdom to impart to you. I have no pain for you, unless”—and he smiles mischievously—“you and your family were to be plagued with strangers lurking in your bushes, trampling your flower beds, looking in your windows, or, in your case, skulking about your baseball park, crushing your corn sprouts into the ground, and stealing your doormats. Once someone stole the valve caps off my jeep. I suppose he sold them or displays them under glass in his library. I don’t deserve that!” he suddenly shouts. And at the next table, two young men in Red Sox T-shirts look up from their food to see what the commotion is about.

  “I’ve done nothing to deserve that. I’ve had twenty-five years of it—strangers gawking at me like I was a two-headed baby bobbing in a specimen jar.” He eyes me up and down, waiting for my reaction. The lines have been delivered with actorlike precision and projection.

  The inside of Aegean Fare is very Old World—heavy, varnished tables and chairs, some of the tables covered with red-checked tablecloths. The walls are mirrored, and high on each wall are pink neon phrases written in Greek. Hoping to ease Salinger’s tension, I point them out and begin speculating on what they might mean:

  “No trespassing.”

  “Don’t pinch the waitresses,” says Jerry, but without enthusiasm.

  “Why are you looking up here?” I suggest.

  A small boy about tabletop height, who has been weaving in and out among the tables in a private game of some sort, pulls a chair out from our table, circles it a couple of times, then slides onto it, trying to coil his lithe little body around it. He has straight dark hair, delicate features, and eyes the color of Coca-Cola.

  “I know something you don’t know,” he half sings.

  “I’m sure you do,” I say, smiling.

  “Car wash fifty cents,” says Jerry.

  I look at him blankly.

  “The sign.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I had strawberry pie,” the boy informs us. “The strawberries were this high.” He raises his slim-fingered hand about six inches above the table.

  As Salinger and I prepare to leave, the boy skips along behind us.

  “Ah, so he’s with you,” the bullet-headed man behind the cash register says to us, and points a fat white finger at the boy who stands scuffing one shoe on the other.

  “Not us,” I say.

  “You sure?” says the cashier. “He had pie and milk, and he’s been walking around for about an hour.”

  “His folks must be here somewhere. He’s too well dressed and well fed to be abandoned,” I say. I look back as we leave, and the boy is staring after me as if I’d just kicked his cat.

  I wait until we are settled in our seats at the stadium—good seats directly behind the Sox on-deck circle (although the seats are much too close together and we are hunched knees close to chins, as if we were passengers in the rear seat of a foreign car)—before attempting to discuss Salinger’s life with him again.

  “If I’d known, I’d have bought three tickets so we could sit one seat apart and angle our legs,” I say, laughing a little too loudly.

  Jerry keeps his eyes mainly on his program, occasionally staring furtively around. He is still a little worried about being recognized. The incident with the police officer was not enough proof for him.

  At one point on the drive down, I had suggested stopping for coffee when we gassed up.

  “I don’t think so,” Jerry said, looking around like he was the criminal.

  “Why?”

  “Well, what if people recognize me and make a fuss?”

  “I didn’t recognize you, and I have a special interest in you. I can almost guarantee no one else will.”

  “Almost.”

  “That’s the best anyone can do,” I said.

  The game begins and the Red Sox are in trouble early. The last notes of the national anthem have barely faded on the wind before Mike Torrez is bombed. Ken Landreaux homers; Roy Smalley homers; Bombo Rivera triples to deep center field.

  Don Zimmer, the Boston manager, trudges to the mound. The crowd erupts in a chorus of boos. Booing Don Zimmer appears to be a favorite pastime of Boston fans.

  “Hey Zimmer! Whatcha doin’ out? They cleanin’ your cage?” screeches a man with a beer belly and a Boston baseball cap. Zimmer is round and heavy and built close to the ground; his beady eyes are buried deep in a jowly face.

  “Ya joibal!” the man yells. “Whatatheydoin’ with a joibal managin’ a baseball team?” The man looks around for approval. He draws a few scattered smiles.

  It is difficult to imagine that Zimmer was once a pretty good second baseman, that he scooted after sizzling grounders like an unattended lawn mower.

  As a long-reliever warms up, I speculate on how best to draw Salinger’s pain out in the open. I’ve got him here in the proper surroundings. I want to be a metaphorical poultice applied to his wounds, but so far it has been like trying to open a seamless tin can with only my fingernails.

  “I wrote a sonnet to you once,” I say, staring across at his large ear; his profile that emphasizes a fleshy nose.

  “So you’re a writer,” he replies accusingly.

  How can I be so adept at saying the wrong thing? I wonder. “No. No. It was in a college English course I attended, oh, ten years ago. I had forgotten it completely until right now. Everyone had to write a sonnet. It was horrible, really, sentimental and melodramatic, but it was a plea to you to hurry and publish more stories. The sonnet was a cheap imitation of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That’s the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You’ve touched my soul. I’m sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-autographing session. Your writing has drawn me nearly fifteen hundred miles, allowed me to make a fool of myself, actually made me a criminal. That’s what I call having influence.”

  “But I didn’t ask you to do it,” says Salinger. “I didn’t ask for you to feel the way you do. You’re influenced by an illusion. Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them. I don’t write autobiography. I’m a quiet man who wrote stories that people believe. Because they believe, they want to touch me, but I can’t stand to be touched. They would have been chipping little pieces off me before I knew it, as if I were a statue, and pretty soon there wouldn’t have been anything left of me. That’s why I chose to drop out.”

  We are loaded down with orange drinks, ice-cream bars, peanuts, and hot dogs. The hot dogs at Fenway Park are the smallest in the majors, scarcely bigger than cocktail franks. “Designed for midgets,” is the way Jerry describes them. I have a sense of déjà vu as I look at Jerry and the scene around me, for it is exactly as I envisioned it so many months ago in the October sunshine.

  “Haven’t you been lonely? Aren’t you lonely?” I ask. “That was one of the reasons I did what I did… I’ve been alone.” Surely I can’t be wrong on all counts.

  Jerry looks crossly at me, having been engrossed in the antics of a base runner striding arrogantly toward second then lunging back in a c
olored blur and pouncing on the base as if it were a chicken trying to escape becoming Sunday dinner.

  “It was just a question …”

  “I don’t know any answers,” he almost shouts, and slams his hands down on his knees.

  “Look, I’m not trying to bleed you,” I say, spreading my hands to show my innocence. “I want to renew you. I want to do something nice for you. I don’t think I’m doing this for myself. I drove all the way from Iowa. I made stops along the way. I had to have the right odors about me before I could approach you.

  “I consider myself happy. I’m one of the few happy men in the United States. I own a farm. I grow corn. I have a wife who not only loves me but understands me; and a daughter who has red hair and green eyes like her mother.

  “I love to stand in my yard at dawn, smell the dew, and watch the sun come up. I’ve built a magical baseball diamond at the edge of the cornfield, and I spend my evenings there watching …”

  “Watching?” says Salinger, as if he has been called back from another world.

  “You know—baseball games. I’d like to take you there. We could sit in the bleacher I built behind left field. The hot dogs are like they were in the old days, long and plump and fried on a grill with onions, and you smear the mustard on with a Popsicle stick, and there are jars of green relish. But Boston is the best I can do right now. Unless …”

  “It’s not possible,” he says, a stern set to his jaw. “You’ve made it up. It’s too preposterous to believe. You’re probably not even from Iowa.”

  Suddenly I am the one who is shouting. People are turning to stare at us. “Watch the game,” somebody says, but the voice is far off, like a vendor two sections away extolling beer.

  “Open up your senses!” I shout. “I’ve come fifteen hundred miles to drag you to a baseball game. Stretch the skin back from your eyes! Take in everything! Look at Yaz there in the on-deck circle. Look at the angle he holds his bat. There isn’t another player in the majors can duplicate that stance. Look at that left-field fence, half as high as the sky. The Green Monster. Think of the men who patrol that field, the shadow of that giant behind them, dwarfing them.” It is ironic, I think, that the place chosen for me to bring Salinger has no left-field bleachers, while in my own park I have only a left-field bleacher.

  “This one idea has run like a colored thread through all my thoughts for all these months. ‘Ease his pain. Ease his pain.’ I have repeated it ten thousand times, in my dreams, in my fantasies, to my wife, to my daughter, to myself as I drove a tractor over my black fields. Well, I’m doing what I can. Look! Look at the yellow neon running up the foul poles. You won’t see that anywhere else in the majors. Watch the players, white against green like froth on waves of ocean. Look around at the fans, count their warts just as they count ours; look at them waddle and stuff their faces and cheer with their mouths full. We’re not just ordinary people, we’re a congregation. Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual. The only difference is that most of us realize that it is a game. Good writing is a ritual, I’ve been told, so many words or so many pages a day. You must know that…”

  The people around us have pretty well dismissed us as eccentrics of some kind, perhaps drunks. Except for an occasional “Shhhh,” they have turned their attention back to the game. Someone doubles, tries to stretch it. I don’t watch the play at third but keep my eyes on the pitcher as he scuttles over behind third base to back up the play.

  “I’ve thought about you and baseball,” I go on. “I haven’t thought about much else for months. What does he have in common with a baseball player? I ask myself. He dispenses joy, I answer. He has fans—hundreds of thousands of them. Almost every North American boy has played baseball, so we know what has been accomplished, are able to appreciate it when we see someone like Freddy Patek or Rick Burleson scoot like a motorcycle after a grounder, capture it, and make the long impossible throw to first. I know I can’t duplicate their feats, and I applaud them for being able to do what they do. I’d like to meet them, shake their hands, tell them how I appreciate their ability. With you it is the same. You’ve captured the experience of growing up in America, the same way Freddy Patek corners a ground ball. The Catcher in the Rye is the definitive novel of a young man’s growing pains, of growing up in pain. Growing up is a ritual—more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time. But baseball can soothe even those pains, for it is stable and permanent, steady as a grandfather dozing in a wicker chair on a verandah.

  “Open up your senses, Jerry. Smell the life all around you, touch it, taste it, hear it. You may not get a chance for another twenty-five years.”

  Salinger takes a bite of his hot dog, cups his hand to catch a fleck of green relish as it falls.

  “Watch the game,” he says, a half-smile on his face.

  And I think of where we are, banked around this little green acreage. The year might be 1900 or 1920 or 1979, for all the field itself has changed. Here the sense of urgency that governs most lives is pushed to one side like junk mail shoved to the back of a desk. We can take time out from the game almost as if we were participants, and run toward the umpire as a play ends, holding up our hands in the recognized signal for calling time.

  The game has moved along, gentle and unhurried as a brook in a pasture. The Sox are chipping away at Jerry Koosman, the veteran Twins’ pitcher. They only trail by two runs.

  We stare at the feather-green field in silence. But after coming so far, I am not prepared to abandon what I am doing. I decide to keep on probing. I dig into my bag of tricks, my mind as rumpled and disorganized as a duffel bag after a two-week road trip.

  “Why have you never written about baseball?” I ask.

  Salinger turns his head slowly and his sad eyes rest on me, a forlorn question mark bobbing corklike in their dark centers. He does not answer, so I chatter on.

  “I can’t remember Holden Caulfield ever talking about baseball—though the story takes place in December, doesn’t it? He wouldn’t have any reason to … The World Series had been over for a couple of months. You even had him end up in California, but at the time you wrote it the Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.” Salinger continues to stare as though memorizing me, perhaps so that I’ll appear exactly as I am in one of his stories.

  “Buddy never mentions that he’s a fan. Never says that Les took the family to the Polo Grounds on Sunday afternoons. Sorry, I don’t mean to keep bringing that up. Seymour, as a little boy, made that statement in ‘Hapworth 16, 1924.’ But that’s all… I mean, I shouldn’t be asking, it’s your business, but if you love baseball so much, how can you keep from writing more about it?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Salinger irritably.

  “Oh, but you did, you did.” I am bouncing up and down on my seat. “Allie had a left-fielder’s mitt with poems written all over it in green ink. How could I forget that? Holden wrote an essay about it for Stradlater. I had a glove with green writing on it when I was a kid. I was a lousy baseball player, if you want to know the truth. Sorry. But there has to be something significant about it being a left-fielder’s glove. Don’t you see that? And, oh, Holden talking about a cabin in the woods and hiding his children, and the way you live—and I have a cabin, except it’s a big cookie box of a house, with an iron fence in a square shape at the very top and a lightning rod in the middle like a spike on a soldier’s helmet, and I have my own baseball stadium, but I’ve told you that story.”

  “Do you always babble like this?”

  “I don’t know how else to convince you.”

  “Of what? That I’m really Holden? I’ve told you about that. I am a very ordinary man. I want to be treated like a very ordinary man. I just want to stay home and be left alone.”

  “But don’t you owe your public something?
I remember reading a sociological study when I was in college, all about ex-cons who do stupid things so they’ll be sent back to prison because they can’t make it on the outside. No matter how much they protest, they really want to be on the inside. It’s the only place that they can be big shots.”

  “Are you saying I can’t make it on the outside? That’s a lousy parallel. I stay to myself because I make it too big on the outside.”

  “Too big. Too little. It looks like a logical comparison to me. Think about it.” Why am I baiting him, posing these questions he must hate?

  “You don’t understand,” Salinger says, his voice rising. “Like everyone else, you take everything at face value. It baffles me how supposedly intelligent people can be so dumb. Once and for all, I am not Holden Caulfield! I am an illusionist who created Holden Caulfield from my imagination.”

  A number of people turn their heads. One or two point. But they soon lose interest.

  “Look, on the drive in here do you remember passing a square white church with a big sign that said CHURCH OF THE EVANGELICAL COVENANT? We commented on the size of the sign, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I know absolutely nothing about that church. But in half a day, I could do enough research to do an article that would make the members of that church weep with pride. And everyone who read the article would assume that I was a dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong, devout member of that church. And that is as it should be.

  “Writing fiction is the same, only instead of culling facts from reference books at a library and putting some life and love into them, I create everything out of my imagination.” He taps his forehead.

  “You’re too good at it,” I say. “No one will ever believe you, including me.”

  “You should know about imagination,” he says. “You imagine you own a baseball field where strange and wonderful things happen. You imagine you heard a voice that told you to come here. Suppose you wrote all that down and people believed you and started snooping around your farm looking for the real field …”