Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

Late in the game, Salinger suddenly taps me on the arm. “I’ve had a dream,” he says when I turn to look at him. “I know how things are going to turn out.”

  “Things?” I say.

  “The farm. Listen! It will be like this …” He moves down and sits in front of us, his back to the game, so he can deliver a lecture, like a professor with five graduate students who has been assigned an amphitheater for a classroom.

  “It will be almost a fraternity, like one of those tiny, exclusive French restaurants that have no sign. You find it almost by instinct.

  “The people who come here will be drawn …” He stops, searching for words. “Have you ever been walking down the street and stopped in midstride and turned in at a bookstore or a gallery you never knew existed? People will decide to holiday in the Midwest for reasons they can’t fathom or express.

  “They’ll turn off 1-80 at the Iowa City exit, drive around the campus, get out and stroll across the lawns, look at the white columns of the Old Capitol Building, have supper at one of the tidy little restaurants, then decide to drive east for a while on a secondary highway. They’ll watch the hawks soaring like Chinese kites in the early evening air. They’ll slow down when they see your house, and they’ll ooh and aah at the whiteness of it, the way it sits in the cornfield like a splotch of porcelain. They’ll say how beautiful it is, and comment on how the flags snap in the breeze. At this point, they won’t even realize that the flags fly over a center field. They’ll be hypnotized by the way the corn sways in the breeze.

  “They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it, and arrive at your door, innocent as children, longing for the gentility of the past, for home-canned preserves, ice cream made in a wooden freezer, gingham dresses, and black-and-silver stoves with high warming ovens and cast-iron reservoirs.

  “ ‘Of course, we don’t mind if you look around,’ you’ll say. ‘It’s only twenty dollars per person.’ And they’ll pass over the money without even looking at it—for it is money they have, and peace they lack.

  “They’ll walk out to the bleacher and sit in shirtsleeves in the perfect evening, or they’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere in the grandstand or along one of the baselines—wherever they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes, in whatever park it was, whatever leaf-shaded town in Maine, or Ohio, or California. They’ll watch the game, and it will be as if they have knelt in front of a faith healer, or dipped themselves in magic waters where a saint once rose like a serpent and cast benedictions to the wind like peach petals.

  “The memories will be so thick that the outfielders will have to brush them away from their faces: squarish cars parked around a frame schoolhouse, blankets covering the engine blocks; Christmas carols drifting like tinseled birds toward the golden wash of the Northern Lights; women shelling peas in linoleum-floored kitchens, cradling the un-shelled pods in brindled aprons, tearing open corn husks and waiting for the thrill of the cool sweet scent; apple-cheeked children and collie dogs; the coffee-and-oil smell of a general store; people gliding over the snow in an open cutter; the dazzling smell of horsehide blankets teasing the senses.

  “I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.

  “I’ll bet some of the men will be dragging along little women in flowered housedresses and high-heels who will see nothing and whine about sitting on a backless bleacher seat for two hours. And, occasionally, a woman will pull along a pale, sink-chested husband, or one squat as a rosebush who looks like a bulldog with a cigar clenched in his teeth, who gave up the sports page for the Dow Jones Average when he was twenty-one; and while she watches and thrills, he’ll read the financial pages of the Times or the Trib and be soothed as a pacifier soothes a baby. But mostly, the arrivals will be couples who have withered and sickened of the contrived urgency of their lives …”

  As Jerry speaks, a car turns off the highway and, in the twilight, zippers up the long driveway toward the house. It is a black Chrysler with the scorched-gold license plate of New York State.

  “You talk a good dream,” I say to Salinger.

  Behind me I hear cars. Richard and Gypsy will be there selling tickets to the ballpark. Near their trailer, farther up the driveway, Karin will sit at a child-sized table, her orange cat curled around her ankles, chanting the carnival litany, and above her will be the garish canvas signs. She will offer the newcomers passage to the exhibit, but they’ll shake their heads tolerantly and walk on toward the baseball stadium, where the lights blaze furiously.

  “I dream of things that never were,” says Jerry.

  I spot a car with Ohio plates; in the dusk, its occupants resemble Wandalie and Frank, the holdup man and the waitress from Cleveland.

  I am smiling convulsively. Whoever controls the strings must be chuckling, treating me like the heroine in the Perils of Pauline. By midnight, if the cars keep arriving, I’ll have more than enough money to bring the mortgage up to date.

  “I’ll go and see what those cars want,” says Gypsy.

  “What cars?” says Richard.

  The game tonight has been a double-header, and, when it is finally over, Richard and I walk out on the field. My fists are clenched, my tongue a piece of rock chipping against my teeth. As we make our way toward the plate, I feel like a schoolchild commanded to an audience with the principal, who, until now, has been only a rumor. Richard and I stand close together, side-by-side like the figures representing the Gemini astrological sign.

  The catcher has been talking to Chick Gandil. He looks at us and smiles, and I can feel my heart shatter. But I do not die. Richard’s hand grimly holds my bicep, his knuckles white.

  “I admire the way you catch a game of baseball,” I say, my voice sounding like thunder in the nearly empty park.

  I don’t hear his reply, which is spoken in a gentle voice and accompanied by another smile, Richard’s smile, my smile, just a little off-center, showing teeth crammed together like passengers in a crowded elevator. I’ll have Richard’s fingerprints bruised into my arm for weeks. I stare at Richard’s face, his eyes wide as those of a kid who’s just had a coin pulled from his ear by a magician. All evening I have been peeling gauze from his eyes—Jerry and I have taken turns, actually, Jerry eulogizing about the lost past and the purity of baseball, and I counting the cars, looking at the fans that accumulate around us on the bleacher and fit into the phantom stands like baseballs tossed into a sea of baseballs. I feel as if I am watching a war movie in which a nurse is removing the last feet of white bandage from a soldier’s eyes. Will he see?

  My father stops speaking and looks questioningly at Richard, who is squinting at him as though he is at the far end of a microscope.

  “He’s been having a little trouble with his eyes, but I think it’s clearing up,” I say.

  “It’s true,” says Richard, air exploding from his lungs.

  “It is true,” I reply.

  “I admire the way you catch a game of baseball,” he says to the catcher, slowly, hesitantly, his voice filled with awe.

  As the three of us walk across the vast emerald lake that is the outfield, I think of all the things I’ll want to talk to the catcher about. I’ll guide the conversations, like taking a car around a long, gentle curve in the road, and we’ll hardly realize that we’re talking of love, and family, and life, and beauty, and friendship, and sharing …

  And I think of Gypsy waiting for us, clutching the handful of bills that will act as the cement to keep the stadium solid and permanent as the game it houses.

  V

>   The Rapture of

  J. D. Salinger

  No one asked me. It was instinct that caused me to build that door in the right-center-field fence, a very ordinary door that, from a distance, looks as if it was created by sawing the shape of a door into the finished fence. The door opens out and is held in place by a silver bird-beak latch.

  When a game ends, the players, both those with substance and those without, amble across the field, visiting with each other, gloves hanging limp in their hands, bats resting languidly on their shoulders. The bat boys and equipment men drag brown sacks of bats and balls across the outfield, leaving a quavering wake behind them on the bright green grass. The last to leave pulls the door closed behind him, and, as if this were a signal, the lights that whiten the baseball field snap off, glow eerily from yellow to orange to gray, and then vanish altogether, along with the other accoutrements of wonder: the stands, the fans, the vendors. Often Karin and I are left alone on our perch, the one weak battery of floodlights sizzling above us. We make our way across the cool, moist outfield grass, Karin sometimes walking, sometimes being carried. With my help, she latches the gate, pushing the silver bird beak through the silver circle. Then we walk toward our home, our shadows long and black behind us. On the porch I switch off the lights, and the ballpark sighs in the silence, a frog shrills, the fence creaks in reply.

  I try not to wonder what is beyond that gate, to speculate on what kind of limbo my ballplayers lay in. Do they smell of mothballs, like dolls packed away in an old woman’s trunk for fifty years? Are they stored on shelves? Is there a warehouse full of ancient baseball players packed away in bales, brittle and dry, faces full of eggshell cracks? Or do they merely move on to another ballpark, another town? Are there other ballfields like mine, other players, other magic farms? Are there layers upon layers of dimensions, like coats of varnish on fine furniture? Or do my players go back to a phantom hotel, change clothes, and head out to shadowy restaurants, bars, and nightclubs?

  I do have hope. I think cunning thoughts. My hope is that if I serve them well, I may someday be told their secrets, may even be invited to walk through that door with them after a game.

  That is why I am at first surprised, then envious, then angry when I overhear a conversation in the outfield among Shoeless Joe Jackson, Salinger, and Happy Felsch.

  “How would you like to go out with us after the game?” says Joe to Salinger, while Happy Felsch nods his approval. It is early in the evening. We are on our way to the stands, the outfielders have been shagging flies. Everything seems so … normal. It is as if they are unaware of the uniqueness of their situation, the import of their suggestion, the star-dust that is their lives.

  “I’d be delighted,” says Jerry, smiling warmly.

  In the bleacher I am as silent as if I am being rained on. I remember that once, as a child, I invited two friends over to play with a board-game I had been given for Christmas. In a short time, they discovered it was more fun with only two players. They played. I watched and was outraged at their betrayal, which they seemed not even to realize.

  The same is true tonight. Salinger pretends nothing unusual is happening.

  By the sixth inning, I can no longer control my seething anger.

  “Why you?” I demand of Salinger.

  He is very interested in the action on the field. He refuses to look at me.

  “I built this damn field,” I shout. “I carved it out of my cornfield. It’s been like creating a giant work of art, like birthing a child. It’s mine.” I stop as the words pile up on top of each other in my throat. Whatever I may say will be inadequate to express my rage.

  “I didn’t ask them to,” says Jerry.

  “I built this field. They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me. I brought you here because I wanted to renew your life. I don’t want to be replaced.”

  “Nobody wants to be replaced,” Salinger says quietly. “But you didn’t think this up. You told me yourself that you were told to come to New Hampshire and find me,” he says logically. But I am not at the moment interested in logic.

  “Oh, you’ve already rationalized it until it’s okay. I should have known I couldn’t share without being taken advantage of.”

  “There is a reason, I assure you,” Salinger says with quiet dignity. It is as if he is speaking to a stranger, after all I have done to make him a friend.

  “It’s not fair,” I say, knowing that I sound like a pouting child. But am I really so wrong? This is my creation. If I can’t play, then I’ll take the ball home.

  Salinger studies the backs of his large hands, the hair on them bristling white as phantom willow stocks. He locks his fingers together, twisting them tightly until the nails become ice-colored.

  I picture myself in the quiet, air-conditioned cab of the high, dark-green John Deere tractor that sits, bulky as a weapon, in the machine shed. I could drive right through the fence, time and again, and smash the bleacher with two or three careful runs. I could gather up the pieces, tie them in bundles, white splinters grinning out of the dark-green boards, drag them off to the woodpile, and use them in the fireplace at the house. Then I could hook up the plow and chop the field up, as if I were cutting salad with a glittering French knife; bury the bases, erase the baselines. The single beam of light from the tractor would circle the field all night, and the beam would play across the corn each time I turned the wheel, driving my ghostly players away like fugitives. By dawn, there would be only a plowed field, level as a black sea.

  If Salinger says “No one ever promised you life would be fair,” I’ll do it, I swear. My stomach hurts. I can feel cold sweat trickling down my sides.

  But Salinger remains silent, thoughtful. Karin has fallen asleep in my arms. Salinger reaches over, takes one of her tiny hands in his. Her small nails are blunt, her freckled fingers scuffed.

  “All right,” says Jerry, and he looks me squarely in the eye. “All right,” he says again. “I gave the interview.”

  “What interview?”

  “You know damn well what interview. The one about baseball. The one about the Polo Grounds. The one that charged you up and sent you all the way to New Hampshire to find me. That one.”

  “You lied.”

  “Back then I couldn’t let anybody get that close to me.” Karin stirs slightly as Salinger closes his hand over hers. “I’ve thought of telling you, but I was saving it for the right moment.”

  “Well, I think this is definitely the right moment,” I say indignantly. “I was just contemplating destroying the field.”

  “I thought of turning them down,” says Salinger. “I really did. Telling them it was you who created them—you who deserves to be first. But then I thought, they must know; there must be a reason for them to choose me, just as there was a reason for them to choose you, and Iowa, and this farm.”

  Yes, there are obvious reasons why he has been chosen, and they wash all around me as I see Salinger staring tenderly down at Karin. And as he does, he nods toward the house, toward where Annie waits with her brilliant love.

  “If you can package up your jealousy for a few minutes, you’ll see that I’m right. I’m unattached. My family is grown up. And,” he says, smiling sardonically at me, “if I have the courage to do this, then you’ll have to stop badgering me about the other business. I mean, publishing is such a pale horse compared to this. But what a story it will make”—and his voice rises—“a man being able to touch the perfect dream. I’ll write of it. I promise.”

  “You really gave the interview? You really said those things? You really wanted more than anything else in the world to play at the Polo Grounds?”

  “I did.”

  “I apologize for everything I’ve been thinking.”

  “No need.”

  “ ‘I saw myself grow too old for the dream. Saw the Giants moved across a continent, and finally they tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964.’ You really said that!”

  “I did!”

  As if on
cue, Annie appears, skips up the bleacher, and sits beside me. She rubs her denimed thigh against mine. She is warm as sunshine, Annie is.

  “Jerry’s been invited out with the baseball players after the game,” I say, trying to make it sound casual, the way ten years from now I’ll say, “Karin’s going to the drive-in tonight—with one of the Kowalski boys, the one whose fists drag the ground and who was arrested for reckless driving last month.”

  “Out?” says Annie.

  “Out,” I repeat, pointing toward the door in the right-center-field fence.

  “Well, be careful,” says Annie, smiling brightly.

  Jerry nods.

  “What do you think is out there?” he says to me. “Are there other places like this, people like you?”

  “I don’t know. You’re asking the wrong person. I’m the one who’s always one play behind, the last to know—if you know what I mean?” But as I say this, I, too, am smiling.

  “Ray, do you think the Polo Grounds just might be floating around out there? Do you think I might get to play, or, like Eddie Scissons, get to sit in the stands the way I am now, and watch a twenty-year-old kid, with a smooth face and black, pompadoured hair, try out with the 1938 Giants? I think that’s what I’d like to do.”

  “Well, I hope it works out,” I say. “I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  The game ends and the players begin to drift off toward their exit. Jerry places Karin’s hand carefully on my chest, breaking the chain by which the four of us touched. She curls her fingers into a fist, and tucks it under her chin.

  Jerry climbs down the bleacher and walks around the end of the fence. Below us, Shoeless Joe Jackson has been waiting in left field.

  “Take care of my friend,” I call to Joe.

  He salutes, claps a hand on Jerry’s shoulder, and they walk across the outfield to where Happy Felsch and the catcher wait by the gate.

  Joe, Happy, Salinger, and the catcher are the last ones through the gate. The lights dim, making cooling sounds like icicles breaking. The rest of the mirage retreats slowly, like a boat sailing into a fog bank. The voices of the ballplayers merge with the silky rustling of the cornstalks.