Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  From the inside pocket of the suit, probably from a leather holster, Bluestein produces a sheaf of papers that I suppose are as deadly as any weapon. I hear him explain that they have some kind of court order giving them what amounts to protective custody of the farm. If the mortgage payments are not brought up to date within seventy-two hours, the farm belongs to them. “But while we have custody of it,” Bluestein says, his malevolent black eyes coming close to smiling, “we’re going to knock down that eyesore of a fence and that pile of rubble you call a bleacher.” He waves the ax, the blade sparkling dully under the lights.

  I try to imagine how Bluestein and Mark must view the stands. Their eyes are as blind as newborn kittens’. All they can see is the single battery of floodlights behind left field, and the empty stadium cooling in the sunset.

  “Who are they?” Bluestein says, pointing the sheaf of papers toward the spot where Richard, Gypsy, and Karin sit on the bleacher. When I don’t answer, he says, “Tell them to get down.”

  “Tell them yourself,” says Annie.

  He looks at me, but I’m not going to make things easy for him. The three figures on the green bleacher have moved closer together.

  “Hey you!” Bluestein shouts.

  Richard looks up, a mildly startled expression on his/my face. He still cannot see. He still will not admit to me that a voice of unknown origin has spoken to him. Sometimes he claims to see things—shadowy outlines, perhaps of the stadium, perhaps of players—but I suspect it is only because the rest of us have told him so often about what is there. The ballpark remains shadowy to him, he says, as if it is obscured by leaves and foliage.

  “Get down off there!” bellows Bluestein.

  Richard and Gypsy stare down at the group of us standing in an uncertain pattern, like chess pieces knocked off their squares.

  “Why?” says Richard.

  “Never mind why. Just get down.”

  “I don’t do nothing unless Ray or Jerry says it’s okay.” I notice that Gypsy is holding a green furry monkey on a fuchsia-colored stick.

  “I’ve got a court order,” Bluestein insists.

  “What do you say, Ray?” asks Gypsy, pointing the monkey in my direction.

  “Stay where you are,” I cry. “Everybody.” I bolt for the yard and my car. I recall Annie’s words to me as I left on my odyssey a few weeks ago: “Ray, it’s so perfect here. Do whatever you have to, to keep it that way.” The stands part magically, as if I am running into a television picture. Behind me, I hear Bluestein saying, “Then I’ll chop it down with them on it. The court is with me.”

  I feel my cap ripped from my head as I crash through the honeysuckle near the house. As I yank the keys from my jeans, I break the little beaded chain that holds them together, and they fall silently into the warm dust.

  I retrieve only the one for the trunk of my car, slam it open, and rip my gun from a scuffle of rags, where it has slept since I purchased it in Des Moines. In my hand the gun is heavy, but warm as a sun-toasted rock. Its oily smell surrounds me as I race back to the field.

  Everyone is still, seemingly arranged in a tableau, and I am reminded of the soldiers raising the flag over Iwo Jima. Richard, Karin, and Gypsy still sit in the stands, but their backs are a little straighter, Gypsy’s monkey-cane pointing downward like a magic wand. Jerry stands with his back to the bleacher, facing Bluestein. He has his arms folded across his chest and is nose-to-nose with Bluestein—nose to chin, rather, for Bluestein is a full foot shorter than Salinger, even with his platform shoes. Behind them, Mark keeps grasping at Annie’s arms, holding her at bay as she aims kicks at his shins. The ballplayers congregate in groups of two and three, patiently waiting, seemingly unaware of the drama being enacted around them.

  Then I come running out of the stands, like a character leaping fully alive from an oil painting, holding the gun over my head like a starter’s pistol.

  I intend to fire a shot in the air, to let everyone know I mean business. I squeeze the trigger, slowly increasing the pressure, as I read somewhere you should do. Nothing happens.

  I keep trotting forward, trying to disengage the safety; but not having handled the gun for months, I have forgotten exactly how to do it.

  Then there is a loud pop like a fast ball hitting a catcher’s mitt, followed by the smashing of glass and the whang of metal off metal. My hand feels numb, as if I’ve been hit a sharp blow on the elbow. I see fragments of one of the floodlight bulbs from my own light standard drift to the ground slow as feathers, sparkling orange and blue. The tableau freezes. At least I have captured their attention.

  Annie stops kicking, and Mark releases her arm. In the stands, Karin fastens on to Gypsy’s denim-covered leg like a baby monkey clutching her mother. Bluestein steps away from Salinger and faces me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The gun feels hot in my hand, as if firing it has raised its temperature. I imagine it turning a rosy hue like the lids of my mother’s wood stove did, long ago, when I was a child in Montana.

  “I’ll shoot again,” I say, my voice cracking. “Get off my property!” I yell at Bluestein. I lower the gun and wave it unsteadily in his direction. Everyone makes an effort to get out of the line of fire: Salinger moves a few steps to his left, Mark moves closer to Annie. Only the threesome in the bleacher remains stationary. I concentrate on waving the gun at Bluestein, who is still babbling about having a court order, and is pushing the papers toward me squashed tightly in his clenched fist.

  “Does it say we have to leave the land?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” says Bluestein, “but we have control of crops and equipment and buildings. You can’t sell or move anything.”

  “The only thing that’s going to move is you and him,” I say, and I point the gun toward Mark, who moves closer to Annie, so I have to point back toward Bluestein.

  “Be careful with that thing,” says Jerry, and he is about to say something else, perhaps to remind me of my mechanical incompetence, when a sound and movement from the stands attract us.

  Gypsy, Richard, and Karin have risen. Gypsy taps her black cowboy boot on a green board to give them a beat, and, waving the monkey-on-a-stick as a baton, she conducts the three of them. Richard, with the bill of his cap pulled down so far his face is invisible, and Karin, in her green-and-gold sunsuit, dancing like a cheerleader, waving her half-eaten hot dog—they look like a surreal rock group about to assassinate the national anthem. “The world’s strangest babies are here. This gallery of human oddities. You owe it to yourself to see these strange babies. Mothers bring your daughters. Fathers bring your sons. See the baby born to a twelve-year-old mother …”

  “You’re crazy,” Bluestein rages. “You’re all crazy. You build baseball fields in the middle of nowhere. You … you dress funny … and you sit around with your weird friends and stare at … nothing.”

  “I’ll count to three …”

  Bluestein and Mark begin backing slowly toward the house.

  “One!” They begin backing a little faster.

  And then it happens. I see everything out of the corner of my eye. Seeing me advancing and Mark and Bluestein backing away, Karin apparently decides to join us. As she takes her first step down, her foot skids on the spilled orange drink and she is falling forward as if she is diving from the side of a pool. I feel as if I have a steel egg stuck in my chest as I watch helplessly. She appears to fall in slow motion, and it takes forever for her body to come down with a sickening sound on the hard green boards. Her hot dog flies off, the bun and wiener separating in midair. One small sandal bounces end over end and lands at the foot of the bleacher.

  Seconds later, everyone is standing around her where she lies on her back on one of the bottom rows of seats. Jerry is staring down at her, his long face as white as his hair. Annie hovers, her hands opening and closing, reaching in close, then moving back. Mark and Bluestein are rooted to their spots at the foot of the bleacher, as if they’ve been driven into
the ground like pins in a map. Bluestein’s ax leans impotently against his leg. We are all afraid to touch her.

  “Should we move her?” We each say the words, all of us looking around wildly, hoping for advice from some nonexistent authority.

  “You can use my car,” says Mark, all the arrogance and pomposity gone from his voice. I look at my hand and find I’m still clutching the gun. I turn and hurl it in a high arc and watch as it disappears over the back of the bleacher, landing somewhere in the soft earth of the cornfield.

  Annie and I reach our hands out toward Karin, then withdraw. She is unconscious, fighting for breath. Our eyes meet, and the anguish I see in Annie’s expression chills me. I hope the terrible fear that grips me like steel bands around my middle does not show in my eyes, but I know it does.

  I curse myself for not knowing anything about first aid; for not knowing any medical techniques, for not even having read about any. Initials like NBC, FDS, CPR, STP flash across my brain like subliminal advertising blurbs. One of them is a rescue technique, or mouth-to-mouth, or at least for heart attacks. I don’t know. My brain is numb as a piece of liver.

  “We’d better not move her,” I hear myself saying. “They never move anyone on TV shows.” I realize as I say it that it must qualify for the inane-statement-of-the-year award.

  Karin’s lips are bluish and her eyes are open, the pupils rolled back to reveal a bloodshot whiteness ugly as beef fat. She gasps for air, and it seems to me that she is convulsing.

  “Call an ambulance,” I say to Annie, and she sprints for the house, happy to have a task to take her mind off the tragedy. Gypsy follows along behind her. Richard stands silently behind me.

  “How long?” asks Jerry.

  “It’s a twenty-minute drive from town.”

  In the silence, we can hear the corn rustling behind the fence. What if I am wrong? What if I’ve made a decision that will kill my daughter? I look furiously at Jerry, who reads my face.

  “You had to make a choice,” he says quietly.

  Most of the players have gathered below us on the left-field grass and stand staring up, silent, as if waiting to hear a speech.

  I kneel on the step below Karin, my hands wavering above her in indecision. Her nose and one side of her face have been severely scraped by her fall. Blood trickles from her nose, across her cheek and down her neck. She is becoming bluer and her cough is faint, as though she is in another room. Her arms appear pale through her tan, her freckles look as if they are resting on snow.

  I glance over my shoulder to see that Bluestein has taken off his $300 pale-green velvet corduroy jacket and is wordlessly holding it out toward me. Our eyes meet, and for an instant we share the grief of losing a beloved child; our other pursuits, whether they be baseball or land acquisition, become insignificant. Jerry takes the jacket and covers Karin gently, as if she were made of flower petals.

  Though it seems like hours, only a couple of moments have passed. Annie is probably only now reaching the phone, may at this moment be calling the ambulance. I am beginning to feel that I have made the wrong decision, and consider clutching Karin in my arms and running for the car, starting on a mad drive to Iowa City.

  Then I feel compelled to look at the baseball field. In order to do that, I stand up and walk a few steps up the bleacher. What I see is Moonlight Graham loping in from right field, lithe, dark, athletic: the same handsome young man who played that one inning of baseball in 1905. But as he moves closer, his features begin to change, his step slows. He seems to become smaller. His baseball uniform fades away and is replaced by a black overcoat. His baseball cap is gone, supplanted by a thatch of white hair. As I watch, his glove miraculously turns into a black bag. The man who without a backward glance walks around the corner of the fence—a place where none of the other players will venture—is not Moonlight Graham, the baseball player of long ago, but the Doc Graham I spoke with on that moonlit night in Chisholm, Minnesota, when I flew softly across the dimensions of time.

  As he walks toward us, I recall how a former nurse of his said that he never carried his black bag when they went on a call, but insisted that she carry it.

  “What have we got here?” he says matter-of-factly.

  “She fell,” we all say together, even Bluestein.

  “This child’s choking to death,” says Doc, and picks her up with one hand under her shoulders and the other under her knees. He seats himself on the bleacher, shaking himself a little to get his coat out of the way. He turns Karin face down, with her head pointing toward the floor. He supports her chest with one hand, while with the heel of the other he delivers a series of sharp blows between her shoulder blades. Annie and Gypsy come running back.

  “Who?” says Annie.

  “A doctor,” I reply. I can see some of the pain retreat from her face.

  Doc repeats the process, and I can suddenly see Karin’s diaphragm expand as she sucks in air. Doc reaches around and pries her mouth open, releasing a sizable piece of hot dog and bun.

  As he turns her over, I can see the blueness disappearing from her face as she continues to breathe deeply. Doc peels back each eyelid in turn, stares at the pupil for a few seconds, and lets the eye close.

  “Looks to be okay,” he says. “She should be coming around in a minute or two.” He re-covers her with Bluestein’s jacket.

  “The ambulance?” says Annie.

  “Won’t do any harm to have her checked, but I’d bet she’ll be fine.”

  The relief that washes over me is like a flood of warm water.

  His medical work done, Doc looks around him. He scratches his head. His eyes light on me and hold. “Why, you’re the young fellow who was waiting outside my house the other night!”

  “Ray Kinsella,” I say. “My daughter.” I point to Karin, whose eyelids are beginning to flutter. “My wife.” I point to Annie. Then, for no reason I can fathom, I introduce everyone, even Abner Bluestein.

  “Well now, it’s lucky I happened on the scene, Ray Kinsella. That little girl wouldn’t have lasted very much longer.” I look at him, smiling from ear to ear, and I recall someone saying of Doc, “He was always the first at the side of an injured player in any sport.” But I wonder how much he has sacrificed to save Karin’s life. It seems to me that he will never be able to walk back onto the ballfield as Moonlight Graham. He has violated some cosmic rule that I vaguely know exists, and do not even attempt to understand.

  I reach out and take his hand, holding it with both of mine. “Thank you,” I say.

  “Now you were the fellow who was talking about a baseball wish, weren’t you?”

  “I was.”

  “You drop down to the school one day, Ray Kinsella, and we’ll talk some more about that. Not that I believe you could do it at all. I’d best be getting back,” he goes on. “Alicia will be expecting me.” He walks briskly around the corner of the bleacher, into the dark summer cornfield.

  Karin blinks her eyes and raises a small brown hand to rub at her head. “Oh, honey, we’re so glad you’re okay.” Annie and I are both kissing her small freckled cheeks.

  “Boy, Daddy, you counted at that fat man just like you do when I don’t eat my turnips,” she says excitedly.

  I have spent close to two hours explaining to Richard what has happened to me since the voice of the baseball announcer first boomed out, “If you build it, he will come.”

  But finally I arrive at the spot where I become bogged down like a car stuck in sand. “Richard, what would you do if you … You know, Dad played some semipro baseball … in Florida and California. What if he made the big leagues?”

  Richard sits on the other side of the insect-legged table in his camper. The tension lines between his brows are deep as ditches as he frowns at me in the orangey light.

  I stumble on. “What if you had a chance to meet Dad—to meet our father?”

  “You mean you’ve brought him back to life, like you brought Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life?”

&
nbsp; “Not me, but somehow … but he’s out there, Richard. Not like we ever knew him. He’s twenty-five years old and he’s catching for the White Sox, and he has his whole life in front of him and doesn’t know about us.”

  “But I can’t see it—your ballfield,” says Richard, “though Gypsy can, and I know she wouldn’t put me on about something like that.”

  In the front of the camper, the part that rests over the cab of the truck, I can see Gypsy’s slight form curled up on the bed like a child, like the remnants of a thirteen-year-old who ran away from her parents’ home in Kellogg, Idaho, and discarded layers of her identity in secret places all across the face of America, in the process becoming very wise.

  The silence is long, and I am beginning to feel ill at ease when Richard says, “I’d go to him. I don’t know what I’d tell him, but I’d become his friend. Ray, people toss around the phrase ‘Heaven on earth,’ but it seems to me you’ve gotten a lock on it. Play it for all it’s worth.”

  Heaven on earth, indeed. I think of virtually nothing else for the next day. Karin is home, a bit subdued, her bruises and scrapes still visible. The near loss has affected us all; we each seem to be more concerned about the other, after having had our mortality waved in front of our faces.

  At the ballpark, Annie snuggles against me, her small hand inserted flat inside my shirt, her fingers warm on my chest. Gypsy leans close to Richard, whispering to him a play-by-play of the action taking place on the field. Often she jumps delightedly and cheers, then slides back down next to Richard and stares up at him with her ironic smile, so full of love, and tells him what has happened.

  Salinger has appeared preoccupied all day, and his eyes are far away tonight as he sits and hums absently, tapping one large white hand on the knee of his jeans. What he is humming makes me smile, for it is the tune Richard and Karin use when they chant the song of the carnival: “Mothers bring your daughters. Fathers bring your sons. The world’s strangest babies are here. Buy your ticket and come on in.”