The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “If you can’t get love one way—in the physical way—then you get it in another,” she said to me during those fine days we spent together before it all began. During the few gigs she’d done she had discovered that the applause, screams, cheers, wails, were enough for then. “I’m only somebody when I sing, but God, the gigs are so few and far between.” Of course, that was to change, and soon.

  Friends were visiting Cory and me the night that Janis’ death was announced. It was an afterthought item at the end of the news, between weed killer and fertilizer commercials.

  “Oh,” was all Cory said.

  “Who?” said my parents.

  “Who?” said our friends, noting my consternation. She watches the soap operas in the afternoons. He collects records of marching bands.

  After our first breakfast we walked all day, looked at the ocean, the terraced houses frosty white as splashes of tropic sun. The day was full of spring—all San Francisco tasted and smelled of peaches.

  The magic of her—whirling onto the stage—a white girl singing black music—the trills, the shrieks, the croaks, the moans, as she made love through her music. “The only love I know is with the audience—that’s my whole life,” she told an interviewer once, as I shrank into the shadows. But the gods of music would have been pleased with her, “a whirling dervish with blue nail polish, a wall of hair closing over her face like drapes,” is how Rolling Stone described her recently. “The biggest, wildest, roughest, most flawed diamond in show business.” We have sold more records than anyone but Elvis.

  The picture-taking session over, Janis, exhausted, rests her head on my shoulder. “Sweet Jesus, but I need a drink.”

  “Just one,” I say, and she makes a face at me, shaking her head.

  “Aw, Sugar, after a session like that Mama needs to cut loose.”

  “We’ll see,” I say as we walk off the set.

  I think of all the people that her life touched in the sixties and until her death: all those people whose lives are different in countless tiny and not so tiny ways because I appeared to Janis on a dark San Francisco street on a spring night.

  I can’t help but wonder how much of history I have personally changed. I know what is going to happen soon but am powerless to stop it, not even sure that I would if I could. In my workshop a few swatches of blue satin, a dozen lion-coloured hairs, a few feathers and rhinestones . . .

  Searching for January

  On December 31, 1972, Pittsburgh’s all-star outfielder Roberto Clemente took off on a mercy flight taking clothing and medical supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims. Some time that night his plane went down in the ocean. His body was never recovered.

  The sand is white as salt but powdery as icing sugar, cool on my bare feet, although if I push my toes down a few inches, yesterday's heat lurks, waiting to surface with the sun.

  It is 6:00 A.M. and I am alone on a tropical beach a mile down from our hotel. The calm ocean is a clear, heart-breaking blue. Fifty yards out a few tendrils of sweet, gray fog laze above the water; farther out the mist, water, and pale morning sky merge.

  It appears slowly out of the mist, like something from an Arthurian legend, a large, infaltable life raft, the depressing khaki and olive-drab of military camouflage. A man kneeling in the front directs the raft with a paddle. He waves when he sees me, stands up and calls out in an urgent voice, but I can’t make it out. As the raft drifts closer I can see that the lone occupant is tall and athletic-looking, dark-skinned, with a long jaw and flashing eyes.

  “Clemente!” is the first word I hear clearly. “I am Clemente! The baseball player. My plane went down. Days ago! Everyone must think I am dead.”

  What he says registers slowly. Clemente! It has been fifteen years. Is this some local fisherman playing a cruel joke on a tourist?

  “Yes,” I call back, after pausing too long, scanning his features again. There is no question: it is Roberto Clemente. “I believe everyone does think you’re dead.”

  “We crashed on New Year’s Eve,” he said. “I’m the only one who survived.”

  He steps lithely into the water, pulls the raft up on the beach, tosses the paddle back into the raft.

  “Five days I’ve been out there,” he says. “Give or take a day. I sliced up the other paddle with my pocket knife, made a spear. Caught three fish. Never thought I’d enjoy eating raw fish. But I was so hungry they tasted like they were cooked. By the way, where am I?”

  I tell him.

  He thinks a minute.

  “It’s possible. We crashed at night on the way to Managua. The plane was carrying three times the weight it should have, but the need was so great. Supplies for the earthquake victims.

  “You look so surprised,” he says after a pause. “Have they called off the air search already, given us up for dead?” When I remain silent he continues. “Which way is your hotel? I must call my wife, she’ll be so worried.”

  “I am surprised. More than surprised. You are Roberto Clemente, the baseball player?”

  “Of course.”

  “You were lost at sea?”

  “Until now.”

  “There’s something not quite right.”

  “Like what?” says Clemente.

  “Like what year do you think this is?”

  “When we took off it was 1972, but New Year’s Eve. We crashed in the ocean. It must be January fifth or sixth, maybe even the seventh, 1973. I haven’t been gone so long that I’d lose track of the year.”

  “What if I told you that it was March 1987?”

  “I’d laugh. Look at me! I’d be an old man in 1987. I’d be . . .”

  “Fifty-two. Fifty-three in August.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know a little about baseball. I was a fan of yours.”

  He smiles in spite of himself.

  “Thank you. But 1987? Ha! And I don’t like the way you said was. Was a fan of mine.” He touches spread fingers to his chest. “These are the clothes I wore the night we crashed. Do I look like I’ve been wearing them for fifteen years? Is this a fifteen-year growth of beard?” he asks, rubbing a hand across his stubbly chin. “A six-day beard would be my guess.”

  His eyes study me as if I were an umpire who just called an outside pitch strike three: my pale, tourist’s skin, the slight stoop as if the weight of paradise is too much for me.

  “Say, what are you doing out here alone at dawn?” Clemente says skeptically. “Are you escaped from somewhere?”

  “No. But I think you may be. Believe me, it is 1987.”

  “Can’t be. I can tell. I’m thirty-eight years old. I play baseball. See my World Series ring.” He thrusts his hand toward me, the gold and diamonds glitter as the sun blushes above the horizon.

  I dig frantically in my wallet. “Look!” I cry. “I’m from Seattle. Here’s the 1987 Seattle Mariners schedule.” I hold the pocket-sized schedule out for him to look at.

  “Seattle doesn’t have a team.”

  “They have a new franchise, since 1977. Toronto came in the same year. Read the schedule.”

  He studies it for a moment.

  “It’s crazy, man. I’ve only been gone a few days.”

  We sit down on the sand, and I show him everything in my wallet: my credit cards, an uncashed check, my driver’s license, coins, and bills.

  “Try to remember when your plane went down. Maybe there’s a clue there.”

  We walk slowly in the direction of the hotel, but at the edge of the bay, where we would turn inland, Clemente stops. We retrace our steps.

  “It was late in the night. The plane was old. It groaned and creaked like a haunted house. I was sitting back with the cargo—bales of clothes, medical supplies—when the pilot started yelling that we were losing altitude. We must have practically been in the water before he noticed. We hit the ocean a few seconds later, and I was buried under boxes and bales as the cargo shifted. A wooden box bounced off my head, and I was out for . . . a few seconds o
r a few minutes.” He rubs the top of his head.

  “See, I still got the lump. And I bled some, too.” He bends toward me so I can see the small swelling, the residue of dried blood clinging around the roots of his sleek, black hair.

  “When I woke up I was in front of the emergency door, the cargo had rolled over me and I was snug against the exit. The plane must have been more than half submerged. There was this frightening slurping, gurgling sound. Then I realized my clothes were wet. The raft was on the wall right next to the door. I pulled the door open and the ocean flooded in. I set out the raft, inflated it, and took the paddles and the big water canteen off the wall. I yelled for the others but I don’t know if they were alive or if they heard me. There was a mountain of cargo between me and the front of the plane.

  “I climbed into the raft, paddled a few yards, and when I looked back the plane was gone. I’ve been drifting for five or six days, and here I am.”

  “I don’t know where you’ve been, but you went missing New Year’s Eve 1972. They elected you to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973, waived the five-year waiting period because you’d died a hero.”

  “Died?” Clemente begins a laugh, then thinks better of it. “What if I go back with you and call in?”

  “You’ll create one of the greatest sensations of all time.”

  “But my wife, my family. Will they all be fifteen years older?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “My kids grown up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe my wife has remarried?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s certainly a possibility.”

  “But, look at me, I’m thirty-eight years old, strong as a bull. The Pirates need me in the outfield.”

  “I know.”

  “My teammates?”

  “All retired.”

  “No.”

  “If I remember right, Bruce Kison was the last to go, retired last year.”

  “Willie Stargell?”

  “Retired in 1982. He’s still in baseball but not playing.”

  “Then I suppose everyone that played at the same time, they’re gone too? Marichal? Seaver? Bench? McCovey? Brock? McCarver? Carlton?”

  “Carlton’s won over three hundred games, but he doesn’t know when to quit. He’s a marginal player in the American League. So is Don Sutton, though he’s also won three hundred. Jerry Reuss is still hanging on, maybe one or two others. Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home-run record, then a guy from Japan named Sadaharu Oh broke Hank Aaron’s record.”

  “And my Pirates?”

  “Gone to hell in a handbasket. They won the World Series in ’78, Willie Stargell’s last hurrah. They’ve been doormats for several seasons, will be again this year. Attendance is down to nothing; there’s talk of moving the franchise out of Pittsburgh.”

  “They need Roberto Clemente.”

  “Indeed they do.”

  “And Nicaragua? The earthquake?”

  “The earth wills out,” I said. “The will of the people to survive is so strong. . . . The earthquake is history now.”

  “And Puerto Rico? Is my home a state yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  He looks longingly toward the path that leads to the hotel and town. We sit for a long time in that sand white as a bridal gown. He studies the artifacts of my life. Finally he speaks.

  “If I walk up that path, and if the world is as you say—and I think I believe you—I will become a curiosity. The media will swarm over me unlike anything I’ve ever known. Religious fanatics will picnic on my blood. If I see one more person, I’ll have no choice but to stay here.”

  “What are your alternatives?”

  “I could try to pass as an ordinary citizen who just happens to look like Roberto Clemente did fifteen years ago. But if I become real to the world I may suddenly find myself white-haired and in rags, fifty-three years old.”

  “What about baseball?”

  “I could never play again, I would give myself away. No one plays the game like Clemente.”

  “I remember watching you play. When you ran for a fly ball it was like you traveled three feet above the grass, your feet never touching. ‘He has invisible pillows of angel hair attached to his feet,’ my wife said one night, ‘that’s how he glides across the outfield.’

  “Perhaps you could go to the Mexican Leagues,” I suggest. “Remember George Brunet, the pitcher? He’s still pitching in the badlands and he’s nearly fifty.”

  “I suffer from greed, my friend, from wanting to claim what is mine: my family, my home, my wealth. My choice is all or nothing.”

  “The nothing being?”

  “To continue the search.”

  “But how?”

  “I’ve searched a few days and already I’ve found 1987. Time has tricked me some way. Perhaps if I continue searching for January 1973, I’ll find it.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Something closer then, a time I could accept, that would accept me.”

  “But what if this is all there is? What if you drift forever? What if you drift until you die?”

  “I can’t leap ahead in time. It’s unnatural. I just can’t.”

  “If you came back to baseball, Three Rivers Stadium would be full every night. You could make Pittsburgh a baseball city again. You’d have to put up with the media, the curious, the fanatics. But perhaps it’s what you’re destined to do.”

  “I am destined to be found, maybe even on this beach, but fifteen years in your past. I intend to be found. I’ll keep searching for January.”

  He walked a few steps in the direction of the raft.

  “Wait. I’ll go and bring you supplies. I can be back in twenty minutes.”

  “No. I don’t want to carry anything away from this time. I have five gallons of water, a bale of blankets to warm me at night, the ingenuity to catch food. Perhaps my footprints in the sand are already too much, who knows?”

  He is wading in the clear water, already pushing the raft back into the ocean.

  “If you find January . . . if the history I know is suddenly altered, I hope I went to see you play a few times. With you in the lineup the Pirates probably made it into the World Series in ’74 and ’75. They won their division those years, you know . . . you would have been the difference . . .”

  I watch him drift. Trapped. Or am I trapped, here in 1987, while he, through some malfunction of the universe, is borne into timelessness? What if I were to accompany him?

  “Wait!” I call. “There’s something . . .”

  But Clemente has already drifted beyond hearing. I watch as he paddles, his back broad and strong. Just as the mist is about to engulf him, as ocean, fog, and sky merge, he waves his oar once, holding it like a baseball bat, thrusting it at the soft, white sky.

  Lieberman in Love

  As soon as he entered the airport terminal, a beautiful Hawaiian girl appeared and slipped a lei of waxen orchids over the head of Lieberman, age 52, a land developer from Denver, Colorado, a widower for almost two years, lonely unto death. As he accepted the lei, Lieberman bent his long form to allow the girl to kiss him on the cheek, all the time thinking that Honolulu had to be one of the loneliest cities in the world.

  Across the whole island of Oahu brightly dressed tourists fluttered like flags in a breeze. But, thought Lieberman, flags are lonely objects, bright though they may be, always separated from their contemporaries, each snapping briskly in the wind, each alone. Alliances formed in Hawaii were of necessity short, often both harried and hurried. Women who lived in the islands permanently did not want to be bothered with tourists; other tourists were, like Lieberman, desperate for contact of any kind. But there were always planes to catch; one-week tours were ending. You could only stand to visit the Polynesian Cultural Center or take a moonlight cruise so many times, he thought.

  Lieberman was a good-looking man with a full head of iron-gray hair. He golfed, swam and jogged regularly; he traveled sufficiently to keep a
dark summer tan all year round. His trimmed beard and deep-set eyes were black and contrasted sharply with his almost white hair. Lieberman fancied that he looked like a magician.

  His life since his wife’s death had been miserable. She had always worked beside him, was as responsible for their financial success as he was. He had lost not only his lover of 25 years, but his best friend and business partner. His sons, both of whom worked in the business—actually they had made all the major decisions since his wife died—appeared to have written him off, acted as if he had suddenly become untrustworthy, seemed to expect him to join their mother in death momentarily.

  After observing an appropriate period of mourning, Lieberman had not lacked for female company. But what he longed for was to be in love. His friends’ wives introduced him to their friends; he found himself being asked out to dinner three and four times a week. But his dates were usually wilted women with squeezed, bitter faces and thin hands—women who drank too much and spent most of the evening maligning, rightly or wrongly, the husbands who had abandoned them to the world. Or else they were widows who spent the entire night extolling the virtues of their dead spouse. These types usually had a large studio portrait of the deceased beside their bed. More than once while making love, Lieberman looked up to catch the eye of the corpse. “Oy, Harry never did that,” one of them might say. Or, “I wish you had known Harry, you could have taught him a few tricks.”

  He occasionally dated one of the younger women who worked for his company or one that he met at one of the several private clubs he belonged to, but younger women, at least these upwardly mobile ones, wanted to go dancing, or skiing, or wanted to eat in restaurants that didn’t serve real food, but supposedly healthful concoctions at 20 dollars a plate that looked like algae and tasted like bicycle tires. Lieberman wanted an intelligent, attractive younger woman who liked steak and candlelight, quiet music and sex.