The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  He nods.

  “But at what price?” I say. “There has to be a catch.”

  “You’re right, of course. As they say, there is no free lunch.” He looks long at me, his kindly grey eyes on my face, and I’m sure at that instant we recognize each other for what we are, above and beyond business, family, or religion—baseball fans. The true word is fanciers. Fans of the game itself. Men having favourites, but not blind prejudices, here because we love the game. Not Sunday fathers dragging young sons after us, or college kids guzzling beer and cheering ourselves hoarse, but steady, long-term, win-or-lose fans. I can tell by looking at him that he has seen Mike Marshall work on a sleety April night in Bloomington; that he has endured the arctic cross-winds of Candlestick Park in San Francisco and Exhibition Stadium in Toronto; that he has been jellied in his seat by the steam-cabinet humidity of Busch Stadium in August. I feel towards that old man the camaraderie that soldiers must feel for their fellows as they travel home after a long campaign.

  “My name is Revere,” he says, extending a manicured hand that is solid as a ham, a baseball player’s hand. “I caught a little myself at one time,” he says, knowing I can feel the outsize fingers, like plump, scarred sausage. “I think we should have a serious talk.”

  “The price,” I say. “What is the price of tampering with time?”

  The game had begun. Jerry Reuss, pitching for the Dodgers, set Houston down in the first without a murmur.

  “I’ll explain the situation to you exactly as it is. No deception. I’ll always be candid with you. Don’t feel badly if you don’t believe me. In fact, most people don’t.”

  “Go on,” I say.

  He talks for a full inning. Explaining to me as if I were a child attending his first baseball game and he were a benevolent grandfather outlining the rules between hotdogs and orange drinks.

  “What you’re saying is . . .” but I am interrupted by the rising roar of the crowd as Joe Ferguson of the Dodgers strokes a home run to right field. I was not involved with what was happening and have to stare around the buffalo-like woman in front of me to see if there are runners on base. Revere and I applaud politely, sit down while the people around us are still standing; it is like sliding into the shade of a fence on a summer’s day. As the buzz of the crowd subsides I continue:

  “What you’re saying is that everyone has someone, somewhere, who if contacted and agreeable, could replace them in death.”

  “Badly put but basically accurate,” says Mr. Revere. “Limited, of course, to people who have achieved fame or made an outstanding contribution to society, and who still have an outstanding contribution left to make if given a second chance.”

  “And you’re suggesting to me that I might be able to sacrifice myself in order to give Thurman Munson a longer life.”

  “At this point I am only acquainting you with the situation. I want to make that very clear. There are many of us at locations throughout the world. Our search is rather like a game: we have a few days to find the one person in the world who can, if he or she desires, make the event—in this case Thurman Munson’s death—unhappen, so to speak. Experience teaches us that the natural places to be looking are ballparks, taverns, and assembly lines . . .”

  “My case would be a little different,” I say. “It would be like a chain of command, if I replaced Munson why there would be someone out there who could, if you found him, replace me.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Mr. Revere says, looking genuinely puzzled.

  I introduce myself. “I’m a writer,” I say. “I’ve published four books. Have dozens left to write.”

  “Really?”

  “Short stories, too. Over a hundred of them. I’ve had very good reviews.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” Mr. Revere says, “but I would have known if you were on the protected list. Something we never do is ask one protected person to replace another. And it isn’t like we didn’t know your name. We have ways of knowing things like that,” and he taps the side pocket of his suit where he had deposited what may or may not have been a ticket stub that winked and blinked.

  “But I’m relatively famous,” I protest. “I’ve made a contribution. I’m at least well known.” Mr. Revere remains silent. “I do have a following.”

  “I’m sure you do. But you must understand, our list is small. Few writers.” He smiles as if reminiscing. “Hemingway was there.”

  “But you couldn’t find his . . .”

  “Oh, but we did. Even as a young man he contemplated suicide. Used his service revolver one night. There was a retired bullfighter who replaced him.”

  Houston goes scoreless in the third. There are a couple of hits but I scarcely notice. Usually I keep a score card. Use a green or purple felt pen and have the card woven over with patterns as if it were a square of afghan. Tonight my program lays whitely on my knee.

  “If you’re totally appalled at the idea, you must let me know,” says Mr. Revere. “If you feel that I’m senile, or crazy, or if you know that you could never do such a thing, don’t take up my time. There was a certain magic about you or I wouldn’t be here.”

  Thurman Munson: I have never been a fan of his, though I recognized his greatness. It was the Yankees. They have always been like the rich kid on the block who could afford real baseballs and a bat that wasn’t cracked. You played him, you tolerated him, but you were never sorry when he got spiked.

  “No,” I hear myself saying, “tell me more. Still, dying . . .”

  “Ceasing to exist,” corrects Mr. Revere.

  “Dying,” I insist. “Euphemisms don’t change the nature of the beast. It is definitely, ah, quite final?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid it would be, as we say, terminal.”

  Mr. Revere settles back to watch the game, a rather sly smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  Ferguson and Yeager hit back-to-back homers for the Dodgers in the fourth. The fans in front of us, whom I have mentally named the Buffalo Brigade, all stand, blocking my vision. The largest woman has made two trips to the concession since the game started. She applauds with half a hotdog protruding obscenely from her mouth. I remain in my seat as each of the home-run hitters circles the bases.

  Die. The word rings through me as if it were a bolt rattling in my hollow metal interior. Who would I die for? My wife? I like to think that we are beyond that kind of emotional self-sacrifice. I would, in a split-second situation, endanger myself, say, to push her from the path of a speeding car, but, given a thoughtful choice like this, of quietly dying so the other might live, I suspect we might each choose to save ourselves. My daughters? Yes. In effect I would be saving my own life by saving them. My grandchildren? The blood ties thin. I think not. Is there anyone else? I have never had a friend for whom I would even consider such a sacrifice. A stranger? As unlikely as it seems, there are probably several.

  I look over at Mr. Revere; he appears engrossed in the game. “Take your time,” he says, still looking at the emerald infield. “Feel free to ask questions.”

  What would motivate someone to make the supreme sacrifice so that a stranger might live? Heroism is the only word I can muster. Heroism, I believe, is something basic to human nature. I have often fantasized delivering my wife or daughters from some holocaust, or walking steely-eyed into the jaws of death to rescue one or more of them, perhaps, afterwards, expiring in their grateful arms, my mission accomplished, the cheers of the crowd fading slowly as my life ebbed.

  An idea begins to form. I inch forward on my seat.

  “I’m afraid not,” Mr. Revere says. I look at him harshly.

  “Couldn’t I rescue him from the plane?” I suggest.

  I could see myself racing across the tarmac of that airport near Canton, Ohio, tearing open the door of the plane and dragging Thurman Munson’s body to safety, gripping him under the arms like a twohundred-and-twenty-five-pound sack of flour and backing away from the flaming wreckage. Later, when I was interviewed by tel
evision and newspaper reporters, I would speak modestly of my accomplishment, displaying my bandaged hands. I would be known as The Man Who Rescued Thurman Munson.

  “Our operatives are always quite anonymous,” says Mr. Revere.

  “No possibility of recognition. It makes the choice harder,” I say.

  “It eliminates the insincere,” says Mr. Revere, returning his attention to the game.

  I am silent for a few moments. “What would happen to me?” I say to Mr. Revere’s neatly trimmed, white, right sideburn. He is intent on the game; Houston has a bit of a rally going.

  “You needn’t have any fear of pain,” he replies, sounding, I think, suspiciously like a dentist. “You might, after the game, decide to sleep for a few moments in your car before driving home. It would be peaceful, like sinking into a warm comforter.”

  “What guarantee do I have?”

  “None at all. You would have to sense that I’m telling the truth. You would have to feel the magic, see the world from a slightly different angle, like batting while lying prone.”

  “Who have you saved? How many?”

  “Not as many as we’d like. Our business can be compared to searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. We have many more failures than successes. The rather sad fact is that no one ever hears of our successes.”

  “Who?” I insist. “Name names.”

  He unzippers the leather binder in his lap and produces a front page from the New York Times. The headline reads: PRESIDENT FORD ASSASSINATED IN SACRAMENTO. Below it is a large photograph of Squeaky Fromme holding a smoking gun.

  “We went through four hectic days in 1975, the days after Miss Fromme’s gun didn’t misfire. Gerald Ford’s body was lying in state in Washington when we found the party.”

  “Of course, there is no way to verify that!”

  “Absolutely none.” Enos Cabell ends the Astros’ fifth but not before they score two runs to cut the Dodger lead to 4–2.

  “What about John Kennedy?” I cry. “Half the world would have given their lives for him. I would have. Still would . . .”

  “There is only one chance for each person on our list. We saved him once, during the PT-109 sinking. It was a young black woman from Memphis who . . .” and his voice trails off.

  I think about Thurman Munson, remember how I heard of his death. I didn’t listen to TV or radio the night of August second. Mornings I write. My wife, who teaches at a nearby university, brings a newspaper home at lunchtime. On August third she brought me ice cream to soften the blow. When I’m troubled or disturbed or can’t write, I often head for the nearest Baskin-Robbins. At noon on August third, my wife walked into my study without knocking and handed me a cardboard cup overflowing with chocolate and coconut ice cream, my favourites. There was a fuchsia-coloured plastic spoon stabbed into the middle of it.

  “There’s bad news in the paper,” she said.

  “Did the Twins lose again?” I replied.

  “I’m serious,” she added.

  I was going to say, “So am I,” but didn’t as I caught the inflection in her voice.

  “Bobby Kennedy?” I say to Mr. Revere. “Martin Luther King?”

  The Houston Astros, as ragtag a crew of ballplayers as ever held first place in August, are running wild in the sixth inning, forcing errors, blooping hits, stealing bases. In front of us, the Buffalo Brigade are shuffling in and out with new armloads of food. It is very difficult for two fat people to pass in the narrow space between rows.

  “We should be thankful they are sitting in front of us rather than behind,” says Mr. Revere. “If one of them should fall forward, I’m afraid it could be fatal.”

  I repeat my previous question.

  “We were unable to find the party representing Dr. King.”

  “Then he’s still out there. You could still . . .”

  “We have only a short period. Even now the time for Mr. Munson runs low. We did find the man representing Robert Kennedy. In fact I found him myself. He was an Eastern philosopher, a man of great religious piety. He refused to cooperate. He had no qualms about his own fate, but his belief was that death is the highest attainable state; therefore he felt it would be a tremendous disservice to bring any man back to this world after he had experienced the next.”

  “How do the people feel who come back?”

  “They never know they’ve been away,” Mr. Revere says. “Gerald Ford thinks that Miss Fromme’s gun misfired. Hemingway thought he changed his mind about suicide in 1918. We are able to be of service sometimes, but our odds of success are rather like hitting eighteen in blackjack. Not very high.”

  “Who is the ‘We’ you keep referring to? You make it sound like a corporation. Who are you?”

  “Perhaps we should watch the baseball game for a while,” suggests Mr. Revere, smiling kindly.

  I look at the scoreboard. The Astros have put up six runs in the sixth inning with my hardly noticing, and now lead 8–4.

  I wonder about Thurman Munson. Would he want to come back? I picture Thurman Munson dead, his spine splintered like a bat hit on the trademark. Tentative cause of death, asphyxiation, caused by breathing in toxic chemicals from the burning craft. I understand now why I couldn’t be rescuer, why his friends couldn’t move his body from the wreckage. His spine shattered; he wouldn’t have wanted to be rescued. Would he want to come back now? For all his short life he did what he loved best. He died with the smell of the grass still in his nostrils. The crack of the bat and the rising roar of the crowd never had to fade away and become muted memories like distant thunder. He never lived to hear some fresh kid say, “Who was Thurman Munson?” He left a beautiful wife and a young family he loved very much. I suppose that would be the best argument for granting him a second chance, and I recall a picture in the newspaper of his young son, Michael, wearing a baseball uniform with Munson’s number fifteen, and the story of his asking why everyone was sad and saying that they should be happy that Munson was with God. “God has taken Daddy to heaven because He needs good people there.”

  Still, I wonder, would that be such a bad way to remember your father . . . having him taken when you were still young enough not to realize that he was only a very ordinary mortal?

  Some athletes can’t adjust to retirement; relationships disintegrate. There are many old baseball players who sell cars or insurance, drink too much, and wish that they had gone out in their prime while they were still adored by the fans. I recall the emotionally exhausting scene at Yankee Stadium as the crowd cheered for nine minutes when Thurman Munson’s picture was flashed on the scoreboard. Many fans, tears streaming down their cheeks, cheered themselves into exhaustion, somehow exorcising the grief that hung in their chests like concrete.

  Perhaps, I consider, no one is meant to tamper with time.

  I try to concentrate on the game but can’t.

  “There is magic,” Mr. Revere says. “It is close by. I can tell when someone feels it.”

  “It is the game,” I say. “Not you.”

  “We all have to claim some game as magic,” he says and takes from the inside pocket of his jacket a thick sheaf of paper that looks like a half-dozen sheets of foolscap folded over. I strain to get a look at what is written on them. I can’t distinguish the letterhead, but there appears to be long lists of questions with little boxes after each, places for Mr. Revere to make Xs or check marks.

  “Name?” and he reads my full name for me to verify. “A writer, you say. I’m afraid I haven’t read anything of yours. My job keeps me quite busy, as you can imagine.”

  During the next inning Mr. Revere plies me with more irrelevant questions than a tax return and loan application combined. There are questions about ancestry, employment, family, hobbies; it is as though I am being interviewed by a very thorough reporter. I am reminded that I once underwent, in connection with an employment application, the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), a series of several hundred questions designed to supply a de
tailed personality profile. Mr. Revere’s questions are equally probing but do not include such MMPI gems as: Are you a messenger of God? and Has your pet died recently?

  As I answer the questions my mind is working at three levels, with the baseball game being relegated to the lowest, Mr. Revere’s questions to the second level, while my top priority becomes: What will I do if I am chosen?

  I am forty-eight years old; I am not ready to die.

  “Thurman Munson was only thirty-two and he wasn’t ready to die either,” says Mr. Revere between questions.

  In my time, given this opportunity, who would I die for? The names flash past me like calendar pages blown in the wind: FDR, Dr. Tom Dooley, Bobby Greenlease, Perry Smith, Bogart, Jim Reeves, Elvis, Lyman Bostock, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, James Dean, Amelia Earhart, Lou Gehrig . . .

  “Given the choice, would you rather be an aeronautical engineer, a sign painter, or a dishwasher?”

  My head feels as though a dealer is shuffling cards inside it, his thumbs have slipped, and I’m inundated in an avalanche of playing cards. “What on earth do you care for? I have zero mechanical ability. I can’t draw. I would rather be a dishwasher.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Revere says, giving me his grandfatherly smile. “Everything used to be much simpler. We are experimenting with some rather advanced concepts in hopes of increasing our success rate. I’m sure you understand.”

  I recall Sydney Carton’s words from A Tale of Two Cities, something to the effect that “’Tis a far, far better thing I do than ever I have done before.” It is only the hero complex again, rising out of the crowd in front of me like the Loch Ness monster.

  “Why me?” I almost shout, causing several people to glance my way briefly, annoyed that I have distracted them from the excitement of a Dodger rally in the eighth.

  “Because you love the game for the sake of the game. There aren’t many of us left. It is rather like finding a genuinely religious person . . .”

  “I’m not exactly unprejudiced,” I say. “To put it mildly, I have never been a Yankee fan. I resent a team that buys its winning percentage.”