The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “Crawl inside,” he say to me, point down at the bloody cavity.

  “Huh?”

  “Crawl inside. Warm. Caribou will keep you alive.”

  “I can’t,” I say, gagging, and feeling faint at the idea.

  “You’ll be dead in less than an hour if you don’t.”

  “What’s the good? The caribou will freeze too.”

  “My brothers will come for us.”

  “How will they know?”

  “They’ll know.”

  “How will they know where we are?”

  “They’ll know. Now get inside,” and Ben raise up his bloody mitt to me. I think he is about to hit me if I don’t do as I’m told. All I can think of as I curl up like a not born baby is what a mess I’ll be—all the blood, and the smell.

  “Face in,” says Ben.

  “Why?”

  “You want your nose to freeze off?”

  I squeeze into the cavity, breathe as shallow as I know how, my stomach in my throat, I’m scared as I’ve ever been. Ben drape the loose hide across my back. It is warm in there.

  “Don’t move. No matter what,” he says. “My brothers will come. I’m going to the other animal. Don’t move.”

  And I hear his first few steps on the ice and rock, then nothing but the wind.

  It pretty hard to guess how much time has passed when you freezing to death inside a dead caribou. I have a watch on, one of those $7.00 ones flash the time in scarlet letters when you press a button. But the watch is on my wrist, under my jacket and shirt, and I’m scared to make a move to look at it. I try thinking about some of the stories I still want to write, about my girl, Sadie One-wound, about some of the things I should of done in my life that I didn’t. Still, time pass awful slow.

  I’d guess maybe three hours. The more time go by, the more I know Ben has saved my life, even if it is temporary. Out in the open I’d be dead, and maybe Ben too, tough as he is.

  Then from a long way away I hear the faint put-put-put of Ski-Doos. At first I’m afraid it is only the wind playing tricks, but the sound get louder, and finally a flash of light come through a crack between the ribs and the loose hide, hit the back wall of the caribou and reflect off my eye.

  I try to move, but find I can’t budge even an inch. I push and push. The caribou is froze stiff with me inside.

  “Silas, Silas, you dead or alive or what?” I hear Frank yell.

  “I’m here,” I say. My voice sound to me like I’m yelling into a pillow.

  There is a ripping sound as the hide pulled away from my back. Then Frank’s hand shove a jug of walrus milk in front of my face, but I can’t move to grab it and he can’t position it so I can drink.

  “Lie still.” It is David Ammakar’s voice. “We cut you out with a chain saw.”

  I hear the chain saw start. “Buzzzzz . . . rrrrr . . . zzz,” go the saw. I know I ain’t frozen when I can feel those blades about to cut into places all over my body. I sure hope Frank ain’t operating it.

  Eventually they cut the ribs away and somebody grab onto the back of my parka and pull me out onto the tundra.

  Ben is there, smile his slow smile at me; his face is friendly, but his eyes is tough. We both look like we committed a mass murder.

  “I told you they’d come,” say Ben, slap the shoulders of his brothers with his big mitt. I tip up that jug of walrus milk, going down my throat it feel like kerosene that already been lit. But I don’t mind. It great to be able to feel anything.

  “Lucky they didn’t leave the search up to me,” says Frank. “Soon as we got home I borrowed five dollars from Andy Ammakar and was winning back my stake, when these guys, without even looking at a watch, all sit silent for a few seconds, listening, then Andy say, ‘Ben ought to be back by now.’ They get up, all three at the same time, right in the middle of a round, and head out to start their Ski-Doos.”

  “‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Let’s finish the game, and the walrus milk,’ but they just get real serious expressions on their faces, and nobody say another word. We drive for miles through a snowstorm thick as milk, and find your Ski-Doo and you, first try. I don’t know how these guys do it.”

  That night there is a celebration because me and Ben been brought back alive. An old man in a sealskin parka play the accordion. And we get served up food that I’m afraid to even think what it might be. A couple of men sing songs, unmusical, high-pitched chants, like the wind blowing over the tundra. A couple of other men tell stories about hunting.

  Then Frank stand up and say, “Listen to me. I want to tell you a story of how I brought my brothers in from the cold.” He then tell how he sensed we was in trouble, and how he convinced the Ammakar brothers to stop playing dice and drinking walrus milk, and start the search. When he is finished everyone laugh and pour Frank another drink.

  “Come here,” Ben Ammakar say to me. He carrying a funny little instrument, look something like a dulcimer, have only one string that I’d guess was animal and not metal. Ben pull at my arm.

  “Why?” I say, holding back.

  “You guys are here to learn about our culture. You and me going to sing a song to those two caribou, tell them how grateful we are that they saved our lives, ask them to forgive us for killing them before their time.”

  “I can’t sing,” I say.

  “What kind of Indian are you?” say Ben. “When you open your mouth the song just come out, you don’t have nothing to do with it.” Ben pull me to my feet and we walk to the front of the little group.

  He pluck at the dulcimer and it make a “plong, plong,” sound, not musical at all. Ben sing a couple of flat notes, then make sounds in his throat like he imitating the call of some sad bird.

  Frank staring around bold-faced, his black cowboy hat pushed to the back of his head. There are already two or three girls got their eyes bolted to him. “The best way to learn about any culture is to make love with their women,” Frank said to me on the flight up. I bet he ain’t gonna have to sleep alone for the rest of our stay here.

  Ben Ammakar point at me and plonk on the dulcimer.

  I’ve a truly flat voice and a tin ear. But it look like I’ve found a culture where everybody else have the same problem.

  I’ve never felt so shy in front of a group of people. But I had a lot of time to think inside that dead caribou, and there no question it did save my life. I open my mouth and sing; the sound that come out is more high-pitched than I would of guessed, but flat as all the prairie. “Thank you, Mr. Caribou, for saving my life today. Please forgive me for killing you so I could go on living.” After those first lines it is easy. Almost like when people get up and give testimonials at Pastor Orkin’s church back home. Ben echoes my words, so do his brothers who sit in a circle on the floor in front of us. “Thank you, Mr. Caribou, for giving up your life,” I sing, and as I do I raise the blood-stained arms of my parka towards the ceiling.

  K Mart

  “The past is so melodramatic,” my wife said to me not long ago. “I remember standing at the sink with a plate raised over my head,” she went on, “screaming at my first husband, bringing the plate down on the pile of broken dishes already in the sink, screaming louder. I don’t even remember what I was mad about. I’ve never done anything like that since we’ve been married. But then you don’t goad me. I keep remembering all those terrible life-and-death situations when I was a teenager; you must have suffered the same kind: she loves me, she loves me not. If he doesn’t ask me out I’ll die. None of them were ever as disastrous as I feared they would be.”

  “Some are,” I said.

  “Name one,” she said.

  “Well . . .” I said, and remained silent, smiling wryly, letting her think she had me. But I was thinking of Cory.

  “If we lived in the South we’d be white trash,” my mother said as she stared around the living room of the dark, dilapidated house we were moving into. I was not quite fourteen and had spent all my life in a dreamy, small town called Onamata on the banks
of the Iowa River, until suddenly, the hardware store my father had inherited from his father failed, and our big, old house with its wide verandahs and creaking porch swing was sold to pay off creditors.

  We were not in the South but on the outskirts of a dingy factory town in Illinois, where a never-before-seen relative had found my father a job as a nighttime security guard at a tool and die plant.

  There were dust demons on the scuffed floorboards. The previous tenants had left behind the skeleton of a chrome kitchen chair, scabby food particles dried on the legs. The chair glinted sickly under a single pale light bulb. We were, in my mother’s no-nonsense way of speaking, “making the best of a bad situation.” The year was 1949.

  The cast of characters: Bronislaw Kazimericz, Edward Kleinrath, Corrina Mazeppa, and a character named Jamie (Flash) Kirkendahl who, when I look back, is less real to me than many of my fictional creations. The nickname, incidentally, was an irony, tacked to me because of my lack of speed on the basepaths, perpetuated because of my propensity to fall down while trying to get out of the batter’s box after hitting the ball. Jamie Kirkendahl would say this is not a story about baseball. Perhaps I should let you be the judge of that.

  “What are you lookin’ at, Stretch?” were the first words Bronislaw Kazimericz ever said to me. It was noon hour on my first day at a cinder block school that looked more like a factory or a prison.

  I hadn’t been looking at anything. In fact I had been standing alone alongside a chain-link fence wishing I was almost anywhere else. I looked at the speaker, a squat, blond boy, heavily muscled. He had a wide, pink face, pale blue eyes, and a soft, flat nose like a baby’s.

  “Kaz beats up every new kid, just to show who’s boss of the playground,” said a thin boy with the face of a weasel, Coke-bottle glasses, and a shoelace of mud-colored hair that fell down on his forehead as fast as he flicked it back into place.

  “So go ahead,” I said, making no effort to defend myself.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” said the weasel. “Kaz is the toughest guy in North-side.” Northside was both the name of the school and the district within the city where we lived.

  “I guess I’m afraid,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “If you bruise me or break something it will hurt and maybe I’ll forget how miserable I am,” I said. “Do your worst.”

  “Kaz doesn’t usually beat up guys unless they want to take him on, or unless they try to get away,” said the weasel.

  “Shut up, Eddie,” said Kaz. “You too good for us, or what?” Kaz said to me.

  “If you’re gonna kill me, get it over with,” I said.

  “Go ahead, kill him,” said Eddie the weasel.

  “I never met one like you,” said Kaz. “You got a name?”

  “Jamie,” I told him.

  “I’m Kaz; he’s Eddie.”

  “His real name’s Bronislaw,” said Eddie, dancing backward in front of Kaz, staying well out of his reach.

  “Let only fear and common sense stop you from calling me anything but Kaz,” he said to me. “By the way, do you play baseball?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said.

  “Right after school,” said Kaz. “Kitty-corner from the back door of the Railroad Hotel,” he added, pointing across the gray schoolyard to where, a couple of blocks away, the hotel rose up rectangular and ugly. It was the only building over two stories for blocks.

  “Bring your own glove,” said Eddie.

  I showed up at the baseball field. Baseball was my salvation, for it was the only real connection between my past and present. The game we played here in this dismal factory town with its constantly gray skies was exactly the same game I had played in the sweet, green warmth of an Iowa summer. Here, it was April and the snow was barely gone. If I looked closely I could just make out the fine green tendrils emerging from the earth beneath the brown fuzz of winterkilled grass.

  There were some two dozen neighborhood boys from twelve to seventeen who played baseball from the time school was let out until dark, and all day Saturday and Sunday. In that strange way boys have of forming instant alliances, I was accepted by Kaz and Eddie, and because of that was grudgingly accepted by everyone else. Kaz cleared the way for me like a snowplow, for he was indeed a fighter to be reckoned with. He had been Eddie’s protector, and now he was mine as well. By the end of the summer it was as if I had lived all my life in Northside. But buried deep within me were memories of a better place and better times and a determination to succeed at something. I hated the overcrowded, inferior school, the gritty rows of bars along Railroad Avenue, the meanness, the poverty, the myopia of almost everyone trapped in a hopeless cycle, dependent on the availability of work at the ugly factories. The most important thing in every adult’s life was who was hiring workers and who was laying them off.

  What did baseball mean to us? Why the daily ritual, the dawn to dusk devotion? We were not good at the game. Kaz could hit the ball a mile, but a good pitcher could make him look ridiculous. I was a sneaky hitter; I held out my bat and let the ball do the work. I hit dying quail Texas Leaguers to all fields. I was the only one who kept meticulous records of my batting average. My on-base percentage was over .560, but in a game where power hitting was everything, I was one of the least valuable players. Eddie had virtually no skills at all; his poor eyesight made him a liability both at bat and in the field, but he was never picked last because if Kaz wasn’t a captain, he insisted that whoever picked him had to make Eddie their next pick.

  Baseball held us together like glue. Kaz, Eddie, and I became known as the Three Ks, because each of us had a long, difficult name beginning with that letter. In science we had studied simple chemical compounds, and the diagrams of those compounds, dots joined by dark lines until they looked like constellations of stars, reminded me of our own attachments, and of the endless combinations we formed each day as the pickup game went on.

  It was during that first summer in Northside that I met Cory Mazeppa, the fourth major character in this story, the pivotal character. If it wasn’t for Cory, there would be no story. Her family operated a small grocery store across the street from the baseball field. We were in and out of the store two or three times a day all summer, and when she didn’t have to work behind the counter, Cory would wander across Railroad Avenue and sit along one sideline or another watching the baseball game. She was a year younger but two grades behind me in school.

  Mazeppa, Kaz informed me, was a Mongol name; he claimed there was some famous Mongol leader named Mazeppa. I often intended to look for confirmation in history books, but never have. The family claimed to be Yugoslavs who had crossed the border from Italy a century before. The parents had immigrated to America just before the Second World War. Cory would tell me a year later that she was conceived in the old country, born in the U.S.A. They belonged to a European church of some kind. It was housed in a sturdy building with a white steeple, formerly occupied by Lutherans who sold it after they built a flat, single-storey church covered in yellow California stucco. The signboard outside Mazeppas’ church was covered in upside-down writing that Kaz said was Russian. At least four gaunt, bearded, and black-cassocked clergymen lived in the church basement, and could occasionally be seen walking single file, hands behind their back, down Railroad Avenue.

  I would see the family file out the rear door of the small residence attached to the Mazeppa Family Grocery and head off in the direction of their church: the parents, Cory, her sisters, Mary and Pauline, one older, one younger, and a brother of about five who was always dressed in a replica of an adult suit and a tweed cap. The girls often wore billowing skirts and peasant blouses with brilliant embroidery patterns in vermilion, aquamarine, and kelly green.

  Cory had soft brown eyes, chocolate hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose. She was shy and tended to look away if one of us tried to make eye contact with her at the baseball field. We were braver at the store and would tease her and try to confuse
her change-making. None of us admitted any interest in girls that first summer, though I used to daydream of Cory when I came to bat, fantasizing myself in the big leagues, Cory my faithful sweetheart gallantly cheering me on against impossible odds. If I hit, I looked to where she sat, her skirt a tent floating about her on the grass. I was hoping for recognition, praise, a sign, knowing that if she did acknowledge me I would be the subject of unmerciful teasing, but I didn’t care.

  Baseball inextricably ties the four main characters together. But, as I’ve said, Cory is the important one, the fourth character. If Cory hadn’t died there wouldn’t be a story. But Cory chose to act, to end her life. If she had chosen not to act, to instead live out her days in the stifling cookie-cutter apartment, one in a complex of 250 identical apartments on the outskirts of Northside, apartments with gray stucco exteriors and close, airless interiors; if she had chosen to live that way, abandoned with her brood of children, she would have become only a passing memory to the Three Ks. To Kirkendahl she would have been a warm, grayish memory that would flit to the surface of consciousness every year or so on a honeysuckle-sweet summer evening, when fireflies glittered like sequins in the soft darkness. And she would have been even less to the other two.

  But she did act, in her thirtieth year. Just as by thirty each of the others had acted. Kirkendahl quit his job as a sportswriter and lived off his wife’s income while he researched and wrote Murder’s Blue Gown, the re-creation of a sensational crime that had rocked a nearby Illinois industrial suburb. The book had sex, mystery, and mutilation. It eventually sold eighty thousand copies and was made into a B movie starring Dean Stockwell that still turns up occasionally on the late, late show. The income from the book and movie allowed the author to pursue a full-time writing career. Kazimericz turned one used gravel truck into a small empire, then married into money. Kleinrath discovered his religious heritage. And Cory Mazeppa committed suicide.

  My father was a confused, unhappy man, supervised by my mother. He had served as a medic in World War I, and his superiors told him he had the skill and temperament to be a doctor. But instead of becoming a doctor he did what was expected of him and returned to Iowa and the family hardware store.