The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “I’m slow on the bases,” I said. “I never honestly stole a base all season.”

  “You get on, though,” he said. “You hit singles, and more importantly, you walk. Walks are very important. You need patience to walk. I’m going to put my batters up in the order of their patience.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “McCracken has great control.”

  “It’s a strategy,” said Roger, as he smiled disarmingly.

  We had one practice Friday evening. I’m afraid we didn’t look very good. Someone from McCracken’s team sat in a pickup truck about three blocks down the street, studying us through binoculars. Roger did not pitch. Our regular pitcher, Dusty Swan, threw batting practice.

  “I want you guys to lay back and wait for the fast ball,” Roger told us. “McCracken’s got a killer curve, a mean slider, a big-league change-up you can break your back on, but his fast ball’s nothing; he uses it to set up his other pitches. If we can keep from swinging at anything outside the strike zone, he’ll give up lots of walks. Then he’ll have to throw the fast ball, and when he does we’ll hammer it.”

  All that week Roger worked out at Barons’ in the afternoons, but at night he played the mileage game in every bar in Iowa City. According to the stories we heard, he picked up several hundred dollars each night. It was also a way for Roger to become known quickly, assuring a good crowd at the ball game on Sunday. At the end of his third day in town he had a very pretty coed from the University of Iowa on his arm. Her name was Jacqueline, and she spent the rest of the nights that week in Roger’s room, except the night before the big game.

  “Do you have any objection, Mr. Clarke,” Roger said to my father our first night at supper together, “to my having occasional female company in my room?”

  My father looked up from the page of statistics he was studying as he ate, stared at Roger, blinking, perhaps trying to remember who he was.

  “Oh no,” he said, smiling almost shyly. “You can bring a goat to your room as far as I’m concerned, as long as you’re quiet.”

  It was during that same week that I found out a lot about distances myself. Most of my friends had not discovered girls yet. Oh, we talked about them individually and collectively, usually in a disparaging manner, repeating gossip we heard from older boys at the café or the pool hall. Stan went to the movies in Iowa City a few times with a pale blonde girl named Janice, who wore no lipstick or makeup because her family belonged to some fanatical religious splinter group that thought the end of the world imminent, and taught that we all should be in a natural state when the end came.

  “I asked her why she wore clothes,” said Stan, after his third and final date. The only reason her parents let her go out with Stan was that he appeared to be a likely candidate for conversion.

  The third evening, when they arrived back at her house after the show (her father drove them to the theater and picked them up at the Hamburg Inn afterward), their preacher, a Pastor Valentine, and eight members of the congregation were camped in the living room, which Stan said was decorated like a church interior. Pastor Valentine conducted a service where everyone prayed loud and long for Stan’s wandering soul. They said many unkind things about the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular, having assumed wrongly that Stan was a practicing Roman Catholic. Stan’s family were actually lapsed Catholics with no church affiliation.

  That summer I was in love for the first time. Her name was Julie Dornhoffer, and I had become enamored of her just at the end of the school year. She was a robust farm girl, almost my height, and a good fifteen pounds heavier. But she had a healthy quality about her and she always looked me in the eye when we talked. She sometimes drove a four-ton grain truck to school. I liked her straightforwardness, her toughness. I have always been repelled by delicate girls in pastels and cosmetics. Julie tolerated my interest, but made it clear she would prefer a more masculine beau. She teased me about my ignorance of farms and was slightly contemptuous of my physical strength. Also, I didn’t drive yet. Julie had been driving farm equipment since she was ten.

  I called on her about once a week, walking the three miles of unpaved road to the farm. She would entertain me in the dark parlor of the house, or we would walk in the sweet dusk, watching fireflies rising, sparkling, dissolving in our path. We even kissed a few times. But I knew my interest in her was much greater than her interest in me.

  A couple of days after Roger Cash arrived in town, I walked out to the Dornhoffer farm. I arrived at midafternoon on a high-skied, blazing day. The farmhouse was tall and sad-looking, badly in need of paint. I knocked at the side door, and a large woman whom I recognized as one of Julie’s aunts answered, wiping perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Julie and her sister’re coiling hay back in the north pasture,” she said. I could not see into the house because of the thick screen on the door, but from the dark interior came the smell of pork roast, the fumes mouth-watering, almost tangible.

  I walked through a grove of trees, enjoying the coolness in the midst of the fiery day. I picked a bluebell or two, split the bell, and rooted out the teardrop of honey inside the flower.

  On the other side of the trees was a small field of red clover. Half of it had recently been swathed. Julie and a younger sister were at work with pitchforks, layering the hay into coils, which when finished resembled giant beehives.

  “You townies don’t know how good you’ve got it,” Julie said, driving the tines into the earth, stilling the vibrating fork handle, then leaning on it as if it were a tree. She was flushed and perspiring. Her copper-colored hair spilled over her forehead and was flecked with clover seeds. She wore jeans and a short-sleeved blouse the color of wild roses. The back and underarms of the blouse were soaked dark. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I realized that even after my three-mile walk I was still cool. I was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and khaki shorts. My own hair was white as vanilla ice cream, and I was hardly tanned at all. Julie’s arms and face were sun-blackened, her hair bleached golden in spots.

  “Can I help?” I said, hoping somehow to win her favor.

  “Sure,” she said, smiling too knowingly, as if there was some private joke I was not in on. “Beat it,” she said to her sister, and the younger girl stabbed her fork into the ground and raced off, happy to be relieved of an unpleasant job.

  I have probably never worked as hard as I did in the next fifteen minutes and accomplished less. I might as well have been trying to coil water with that pitchfork. I babbled on about my friend Roger Cash, the upcoming baseball game, mileages, distances, posters, concessions, all the while accumulating a pitiful pile of clover in front of me. No matter what I did to it, it had no resemblance to the waist-high beehives Julie and her sister had created; in each coil they had made the hay was swirled, the swaths interlocked, impervious to wind, resistant to rain.

  While I worked and talked Julie relaxed, sitting back in the shade of a green coil, smoking, a crockery water jug bathed in condensation beside her.

  I finally gave up and joined her, red-faced and disheveled.

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” I said.

  Julie grinned with what I hoped was tolerance rather than contempt.

  “You people in town live so far away,” she said, her tone still not definable.

  “It’s only three miles,” I said stupidly.

  Julie crushed out her cigarette in the earth beside her. She looked at me with a close-lipped smile. “At least you tried,” she said, and leaned over so her head rested on my shoulder.

  We kissed, both our faces damp from the heat of the day. The smell of freshly cut clover was overpowering. Julie slid closer to me, crossed one of my bare legs with her denim one. She radiated heat. Her breasts burned against my chest, only two thin layers of cloth separating us. Her tongue was deep in my mouth, her large right hand gripped hard on my left shoulder. She was forcing me down onto my back, pushing me deep into the sweet clover. I di
dn’t mind that she was stronger than I was; there was nothing I could do about that; it even excited me. I ran my free hand down the thigh of her jeans, let it find its way between her legs.

  We stopped kissing and gasped for breath.

  “I bet I could take you,” Julie said into my neck, and I knew by her tone that she meant in physical strength.

  “You probably could,” I said, sitting up, gasping for air. “What does it matter? You work hard, I don’t—” But she forced me back down, my head going deep into the hay. All the sexuality of the moment was gone. This was a contest. Julie’s hands were on my shoulders. Her right leg was between my thighs; she held my back down flat on the stubbly earth.

  I had no experience roughhousing with girls. My own sister, a year older than me, had always been a deadly serious child, resentful and threatening, someone I avoided physical contact with.

  My worst fear, a fear I was almost certain was a truth, was that Julie would care about being able to outwrestle me. How hard should I defend myself? I’d taken a few wrestling lessons in physical education class. If I was to concentrate on one of her arms, get a solid lock on it . . . But I was flat on my back with Julie sitting on my chest. My shoulders were pinned to the earth, my head partially covered with clover, which choked my senses, the tiny red seeds filling my eyes and mouth, spilling down my neck.

  I bucked ineffectually a few times.

  “Okay, you’ve proved your point,” I said.

  Julie threw herself to one side and scrambled to her feet. I stood and brushed the clover seeds from my face and shirt front. I smiled at Julie, hoping to make a joke of my defeat. But what I read in her eyes said that I was never to be forgiven for my weakness. I was walking toward her with the idea of taking her in my arms, in spite of the coldness in her eyes, when her sister reappeared.

  “We’ve got to get back to work,” said Julie, dismissing me.

  “I’ll see you again,” I said. Julie didn’t reply.

  As I walked slowly back toward Onamata, I knew I would never call on her again.

  Saturday night, Roger went to bed about ten o’clock.

  “Got to rest the old soupbone,” he said, flexing his pitching arm, which was muscular and huge, as he headed up the stairs.

  I went to bed shortly after him, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was too full of the game the next day; my thoughts were as much on the operation of the concessions as on baseball itself. I eventually dozed fitfully. Late in the night I woke with a start, surprised to hear the stairs creaking. I stretched out my arm and let the rays of moonlight slanting through the window touch the face of my watch. It was three A.M. I went to the window. I heard Roger’s keys jingle in the darkness, watched as he opened the trunk to the Caddy and stealthily extracted the garden tools, hoisted them to his shoulder, and set off down the fragrant, moonstruck street.

  About four-fifteen, just as the first tines of pink appeared on the horizon, Roger returned, replaced the gardening tools, and reentered the house.

  By game time we had sold 511 tickets; I left Margie Smood at the ticket table to sell to latecomers until the fifth inning. The concessions were booming, and the air was riddled with the smell of frying onions, hot dogs, and popcorn. There was no fence around the ballfield. At Roger’s suggestion, we constructed a funnel-like gate with pickets joined by flaming orange plastic ribbons. People were generally honest; only a few school kids and a handful of adults skirted the ticket line.

  We were all nervous as we warmed up along the first-base side. One thing we forgot to tell Roger was that Onamata High had never been able to afford uniforms, so we wore whatever each of us could scrounge, from jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers to a full Detroit Tiger uniform worn by Lindy Dean, who was a cousin a couple of times removed from Dizzy Trout.

  Across the way, McCracken Construction, in black uniforms with gold numbers on their chests and their names in gold letters on their backs, snapped balls back and forth with authority. Baseballs smacking into gloves sounded like balloons breaking.

  “Where are the gate receipts?” Roger asked me.

  “In a box under the ticket table. You don’t need to worry. Margie Smood’s honest.”

  “Go get them. Just leave her enough to change a twenty.”

  “But—” “I’ve got to get down some more bets.”

  “What if we lose?”

  “Never in doubt, Gideon. Never in doubt.”

  I brought him the money, and while the Onamata High School Music Makers Marching Band, all six of them, were assassinating the national anthem, Roger carried the money around behind the backstop, and held a conference with McCracken and his teammates.

  The president of the University of Iowa was seated in the front row and he had apparently agreed to hold the bets. By the time the game started there were bags and boxes, envelopes and cartons, piled at his feet. As near as I could guess, Roger had about ten thousand dollars riding on the game, most of it covered by McCracken and members of his team.

  Roger and McCracken continued to talk animatedly for several minutes. It was a long discussion, and finally McCracken went to his equipment bag and counted out more money; he also signed something. Roger dug into the back pocket of his uniform and produced the keys to his Caddy. He held them up and let the sun play on them for an instant, then dropped them in a box with the money and notes, which a bat boy carried over and deposited at the feet of the university president.

  I noticed that McCracken seemed uncomfortable as he warmed up on the mound. One of the concessions Roger offered right off the top was, even though we were playing in Onamata, to allow McCracken Construction to be home team. I was right about McCracken being uncomfortable; he pawed the dirt and stalked around kicking at the rubber. The first three pitches he threw were low, one bouncing right on the plate. He threw the fast ball then, right down the heart of the plate for a strike. I was tempted to hammer it, but I held back, telling myself, a walk is as good as a single. McCracken was in trouble, I wasn’t. He walked me with another low pitch. He walked Lindy Dean on five pitches. He walked Gussy Pulvermacher on four. As I moved to third, I watched Roger whispering in Stan’s ear, a heavy arm around his shoulders.

  The first pitch was low. The second broke into the dirt. McCracken kicked furiously at the mound. I could almost see Stan’s confidence building as he waited. The fast ball came. He drove it into the gap in left-center. Stan had a standup double. Three of us scored in front of him, as Roger, leaping wildly in the third-base coach’s box, waved us in.

  McCracken was rattled now. It didn’t help him that the crowd were mainly for us. Here was a high school team with a 2-19 season record going against a crack amateur team who were state champions two years before, and finalists the last year.

  Our next batter walked on four pitches. Then McCracken settled down to his fast ball and struck out the sixth and seventh batters. Our catcher, Walt Swan, hammered the first pitch he got, about five hundred feet to deep left, nearly to the Iowa River. Fortunately for McCracken, the ball was foul. He reverted to his off-speed pitches and walked Swan.

  Roger Cash stepped into the batter’s box. He had confided to me that if he had kept a record, his lifetime hitting average would be below .100. But I have to admit he looked formidable in his snow-white uniform with CASH in maroon letters across his shoulders and the large numbers 00 in the middle of his back. The front of his uniform had only crossed baseball bats on it. He held the bat straight up and down and waggled it purposefully.

  “Throw your fast ball and I’ll put it in the river,” yelled Roger, and curled his lip at McCracken.

  The first pitch was a curve in the dirt, followed by a change-up low, another curve at the ankles, and something that may have been a screwball, that hit two feet in front of the plate. Roger trotted to first. Stan loped home with our fourth run. The bases were still loaded.

  On the first pitch McCracken came right down the middle at me with his fast ball. I swung and got part of it on the end of the bat
; a dying quail of a single just beyond the second baseman’s reach. Runs five and six scored. Lindy Dean ended the inning.

  McCracken’s team tried to get all six runs back in the first. They went out one-two-three.

  In right field, I trembled. My judgment of fly balls was not sound, and the opponents would soon find out that when any ball was hit to me the base runners could do as they pleased. Not only could I not cut a runner down at third, I had trouble getting the ball to second on two hops.

  McCracken walked the first batter of the second inning, but that was it. His curve started snapping over the plate at the last second, pitches that had been breaking into the dirt now crossed the plate as strikes at the knees. We led 6–0 after three innings, but McCracken Construction got a run in the fourth, one in the fifth when I dropped a fly ball with two out, and two in the sixth on a single and a long home run by McCracken himself.

  I managed to hit another Texas League single, but grounded into an inning-ending double play in the sixth.

  McCracken and his team were finally catching on that Roger was little more than a journeyman pitcher with a lot of guile. He had a screwball that floated up to the plate like a powder puff, only to break in on the batter’s hands at the last instant, usually resulting in a polite pop-up to the pitcher or shortstop. His fast ball was nothing, and he usually threw it out of the strike zone. But his change-up was a beauty, like carrying the ball to the plate. Roger’s motion never changed an iota; a hitter would be finished with his swing and on his way to the bench shaking his head by the time the ball reached the catcher.

  The seventh went scoreless. We got a run in the eighth on a double and a single, but McCracken’s team got two in the bottom, again aided by my misjudgment of a fly ball. It was obvious that Roger was tired. His face was streaked with sweat and grime. His bronze hair appeared wet and wild when he took off his cap, which was after almost every pitch now. To compound matters, we went out on four pitches in the ninth, allowing Roger only about two minutes’ rest between innings.