The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “Left field would be out there in the furniture department,” said Eddie.

  We walked to the sporting goods section. There was little baseball equipment on display. But Kaz and Eddie found gloves while I took the only bat in sight. Kaz spotted baseballs, safely behind glass in a display case. He looked around. As usual in K Mart, there were no salespeople anywhere in sight. Kaz went behind the counter, slid open the case, and extracted a half-dozen baseballs. Kaz and Eddie took off their overcoats and laid them across the counter. We made our way to women’s wear. I took a child’s red dress from a dolly and dropped it to mark the spot where home plate would be. Kaz paced off the distance to the pitcher’s mound, elbowing dress racks out of the way, clearing a path. Eddie sprinted for the outfield. “Hit me a good one, Flash,” he sang.

  I held the bat high, gripped tight at the end. I held it straight up and down, peeking over the crook of my left elbow. I have always prided myself that I was using a stance and grip remarkably similar to Carl Yastrzemski’s, ten years before he first appeared in the majors. Kaz pawed the cheap white tiles where the mound used to be. Far back in left Eddie drifted among the sofas and loveseats.

  “Burn it in there, Kaz,” he hollered, shielding his eyes with his glove, blocking out the glare of an imaginary sun. A few people were staring at us, warily, as they passed in nearby aisles.

  I wiggled the end of the bat and waited. As I did, the white light of K Mart became summer sunshine. The store lifted away from us like a bell jar. The other players took their places on the field: tall, silent Ted Troy at first base, Peppy Goselin as shortstop, Pudge Green in center field. As the players took shape, the racks of pink and blue dresses, the women’s and children’s clothes, fresh as sunshine, smelling of ironing and starch, rose like mist. The grass was emerald-green, measled with dandelions.

  “Burn it in there, Kaz,” shouted Eddie.

  Kaz fired the ball. I swung and fouled it off. Strange that it made a sound like breaking glass. Someone strange was walking in from right field, a young man, his face the color of maple, wearing a white shirt buttoned to the collar and a black-on-white name tag reading AHMED. He looked both puzzled and frightened. “Please not to do what it is you are doing, please,” he said in a heavy accent. He raised his hands in a gesture similar to calling time in baseball, though I’m sure he had no idea what he was doing.

  Kaz snarled several words at the intruder. He scuttled away.

  “Come on, Flash, straighten one out,” yelled Eddie.

  “I lied about Cory,” I yelled.

  “Everybody lies about things like that,” said Kaz.

  “You?”

  “Everybody.” He made a gesture that encompassed us all.

  All the players were in place now, my team along the sidelines, Kaz’s team in the field. All the baseball boys. All the accountants and thugs and TV producers and packing-plant workers and railroad section men. And Cory was sitting on the grass a few yards behind the bench, alone as always, her black hair snarled about her face, her mauve dress spread in a wide arc about her.

  There were two pinging sounds like a doorbell. “Security to Section 12. Security to Section 12,” said a female voice.

  “Burn it in there, Kaz.”

  Cory is dead and her death stays with me, trapped here with me, inside my own skin.

  The maple-faced boy was back and there was someone with him. Someone larger.

  “Please not to do what it is you are doing, please.”

  “Fire the ball.”

  “Security to Section 12.”

  What were these strange people doing on the field? The earth felt hard, my feet refused to dig in properly.

  “Pitch the ball.”

  Kaz wound up; his thick arm and hamlike hand with the grease-stained knuckles snapped the ball toward me.

  Cory smiled shyly. After the game I’d walk her to the end of the sidewalk, kiss her so gently in the lilac shadows.

  The ball was one long laser of white connecting Kaz’s hand with my bat. In the hairsbreadth of a second between the crack of the bat and the ball exploding into the sun above the outfield, I relished the terrible joy of hitting it square on.

  For Lesley Choyce

  The Firefighter

  It’s Cal that I want to tell you about. But it seems there are so many other things I should get to first, like Delly and my baseball career. I just finished Rookie League up in Butte, Montana. The Butte Copper Kings. We finished 25-45 for the season, but I batted .337 and hit 30 homers in 70 games. Up in Montana winter breathes on you all year round; the grass was white with frost one morning before we left Butte on the last day of August.

  It sure ain’t cold where we are, headin’ from Tulsa toward Oklahoma City, where we’re gonna spend the off-season. The heat-gauge on this rattle-trap ’71 Plymouth has gone clear out of sight and it must be a hundred outside the car. Delly’s fanning her thighs with a baseball program from Kansas City, where we stopped off for three days to see how they play in the Bigs, a place where I’m gonna be in two, three years at the most. Delly grins and fans and don’t mind lettin’ me see there’s a wet spot in the crotch of her denim cutoffs.

  I’d pull off the road right now if there was anywhere to pull off to except sand dunes and red rock hot enough to fry steak. I know if I ever stop this rickety car it will just die and go to Plymouth heaven right by the side of the road.

  We ain’t actually headin’ for Oklahoma City, but for a place called El Reno: twenty-two adobe buildings, five service stations, and an air-conditioned Taco Bell. Thirty-five miles past El Reno, out in the sage brush, is where Delly’s family lives. Cal is Delly’s father and he’s the one I want to tell you about. There’s an oil-donkey about every hundred yards on Cal’s land, turnin’ slow in the desert glare like big birds primpin’ themselves. Cal don’t own the oil rights so he ain’t gettin’ rich, but the oil company pays him so much for each land site.

  I should tell you more about Cal being a firefighter and all, but I can’t help thinkin’ about this morning in the Blue Velvet Motel in Tulsa ($12.95 for two, day sleepers welcome), and how I was reading that same baseball program Delly’s fannin’ her thighs with, when I look up to see Delly come out of the bathroom. She don’t actually come out. She just stands in the doorway, naked from the waist up, her titties pointing at the ceiling like they see something up there that I don’t. Delly’s got hair the same colour as the red desert sand and it’s kind of mussed and casual like she just crawled out of the sack, which she did. She’s wearing faded blue jeans not quite done up and she’s leanin’ against the door jamb starin’ at me with her big, sleepy-blue eyes in a way that makes me toss the program on the floor and polevault over to her. Before we know it the maid is knockin’ on the door tellin’ us it’s noon and check-out time for us was eleven.

  Now it’s Cal, and Eddie, and Regina, and Ma, who are Delly’s immediate family, that I want to tell you about, and how they live so far back in the boonies, that, as they say on TV documentaries, they’ve hardly been disturbed by time or sanity.

  “You ain’t quite what I expected, but I expect you’ll do,” is what Delly said to me after the first time we was together in the single bed in the room she rented a few blocks from the university in Oklahoma City, where I’d come on a baseball scholarship. Delly was waitin’ tables at a little bar patronized mainly by students. “I took a job here ’cause I figured I’d meet me a doctor or lawyer or maybe a dentist, ’cause they make the big money. I been poor the first eighteen years of my life and that’s about long enough,” is what she said to me, after we made love that was so sweet I couldn’t have even imagined it. If somebody’d said to me, “Tell me about your wildest fantasy,” I couldn’t have dreamed up nothin’ half as good as what Delly and me did that night.

  I remember Delly comin’ up to my table to take my order. She was wearin’ blue jeans and a top the colour of green tomatoes, and I wondered if her titties had as many freckles on them as her face and arms.
And the sound of denim rubbin’ together as she walked away made me so horny that when I paid for my beer I held on to the dollar until our hands touched and I said, “I sure would like to know you better.” And she said, “Where you from?” And I said, “Iowa.” And she said, “That’s a big state.” And I said, “I’m like a fellow I read about in a story once. I’m not from a place, just from near a place. And if you ever heard of Onamata, Iowa, that’s the place I was raised nearest to.”

  “I never,” she said, and she frowned when I told her I was a Phys. Ed. major studying on a baseball scholarship.

  “I ain’t gonna be no Phys. Ed. teacher with a beer belly and a lot of might’ve-beens,” I told Delly. “You come out and watch me hit the ball and see if you don’t agree,” and I guess she did, ’cause we been together ever since, and hasn’t it been great.

  “You let me worry about the money, Sugar,” is what Delly said to me, and I let her. She banked her salary and tips and we lived off my scholarship money. When I graduated in the spring and got drafted by Seattle and then loaned to Butte for a summer in Rookie League, Delly said we could afford to get married.

  Ballplayers in Rookie League ain’t supposed to drag along wives or girlfriends. The scout who signed me looked at me like I was a pervert when I said I wanted to bring my wife with me. He arranged for one one-way airline ticket from Oklahoma City to Butte. Baseball club tried to make me take room and board with some solid-citizen baseball fans who would look after my well-being while I was in Butte. But Delly took care of things. She left two days before me on the bus and rented a two-bedroom basement suite. We took in one of the Panamanian outfielders to fill up that spare bedroom. Delly got a job waiting tables in a bar and she wasn’t afraid to wear peek-a-boo blouses. “I can count your pussy-hairs through them jeans,” I said to her one afternoon as she was getting ready for work.

  “You bet you can,” she smiled, “they’re worth about a dollar each in tips. Look, Sugar, them drunkies are always gonna be tipping too much in sleazy bars and they’ll never have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it outa. You just keep hittin’ the long ball and let me worry about the money.”

  And you know what? We’re comin’ back to a condo all our own in a nice new building near downtown Oklahoma City. And the payments aren’t any more than rent would be and Delly already rented the extra room to a student.

  I’ve met Delly’s family and except for her ma they’d make a great study for an anthropologist. This big company found oil on Cal’s land about fifteen years ago, and Cal ain’t worked since, not that he ever worked before.

  “Pa used to run what he called an Underground Auto Wrecking business,” Delly told me. “That means he sold stolen car parts. I went with him once or twice when I was a kid. We’d cruise into Oklahoma City and Pa would park behind a night club. ‘Folks who can afford to drink can afford to donate to our livelihood,’ he always said. Pa could strip four wheels, the spare, a couple of headlights and sometimes a grille off a pick-up in under four minutes. I seen him detach a mirror or strip a radio in broad daylight on the main street in about the time it would take somebody to sneeze.”

  Oil company pays Cal for the use of his land; they also pay him a thousand a month to stay the hell out of their hair, which he don’t. They even appointed him head firefighter, whatever the hell that is. Delly says she don’t remember there ever being a fire in that particular field. And anyway they only gave him a shiny new fire-engine-red pick-up truck with two pretty small fire extinguishers on the back. But that don’t stop Cal from talkin’ and actin’ like he was Red Adair. Actually, Cal and Delly look a lot alike, only he’s a man, about twenty-five years older and a hundred pounds heavier.

  When they gave out looks and brains in Delly’s family they clean missed Eddie and Regina, Eddie being her brother, who could be a basketball player if he knew what it was, and Regina being her sister, who looks like Eddie, poor Regina. Delly’s Ma is the only other one in the family who has any sense. She should go around with a whip and a chair to keep the others in line.

  We pull into the yard at Delly’s folks’ place. There’s just a frame house that lists about three ways at once and ain’t never seen a paintbrush even in its dreams, a couple of garages and out-buildings that list worse than the house, and about an acre of wrecked car bodies, used tires and faded appliances. The front of the house is hung with hub caps—when the sun shines you can see them glint like swords from a couple of miles away. That little red pick-up shines like an apple in front of the house. Delly goes directly inside to talk with Ma and Regina, while Cal walks around the truck and then around our shivering old Plymouth, kickin’ tires as he goes, remarking on how shiny his truck is, puttin’ his fingers on the hood of the Plymouth and pullin’ them back quick, remarkin’ on how it’s a wonder such a wreck made it all the way from Montana and saying he’ll give me fifty dollars for it if we ever want it taken off our hands. Delly says we can get four hundred dollars for a trade-in come January, when prices are low. Cal cracks us each a beer from a tub in the front yard that used to be Ma’s washing machine until Cal tried to fix it. The beer bottle is wet but warm, and I figure Cal must have recently tried to fix Ma’s refrigerator too.

  I was all for buyin’ a car, maybe a big one, with some of the money Delly had stashed away. “Cars depreciate. Land appreciates,” she said to me. “We’ll have a big car, Babe. You gotta hang in for a while.” She was standin’ by my chair and sort of kissin’ at my ear while she was sayin’ that. “You give me five years in the Bigs, and I’ll see we own enough of Oklahoma City so’s I never have to wait on another drunk and you don’t have to take no job sellin’ used cars the way them other retired ballplayers do.” I can’t fault that.

  Cal’s wearin’ bib-overalls, a Minnesota Twins baseball cap with about eight ounces of oil worked into the crown and the bill, and for whatever damn reason, rubber boots that must have his feet broiled up to the colour of corned beef.

  Cal eventually decides to take the shiny red pick-up truck and make a tour of the oilfield, “Just to be sure there ain’t no dangerous situation developin’ that I should know about.” I beg off sayin’ I’ve travelled enough for one day. When I get to the screen door I stop, for I hear Delly’s voice rising: “What do you do with your money?” she says in exasperation.

  “What do you mean?” says Ma.

  “Look around you,” yells Delly. “You got nothin’ an’ never had nothin’.” I’d guess Delly has her left hand on her hip and her right hand open, palm up, sort of gesturing at the floor. That’s exactly the way Cal stands when he’s making a point. Delly’d be mad at me for a month if I ever pointed that out to her.

  “I don’t remember you ever goin’ hungry,” says Ma, her voice defensive.

  “Hungry ain’t the point,” says Delly. “That oil company pays Cal a thousand a month up front and then rents the rig-sites, and he still sells lots of stolen parts . . .”

  “Don’t say that,” says Ma in a harsh whisper. And I’d guess she’s just looked at Regina, who must be sittin’ on a kitchen chair, her hands folded in her lap, starin’ off into space, her face blank as a dog’s.

  “Are you still pretendin’ you don’t know Cal steals anything that ain’t bolted to the ground and a few things that are?”

  “Your papa’s a nice man . . .”

  “I’m not sayin’ he ain’t nice. But he’s thoughtless and shiftless and . . . and . . . why did you ever marry him?”

  “Your papa has a winnin’ smile,” says Ma, with finality, as if her statement answers all the philosophical questions ever posed.

  Delly huffs with indignation and bangs a handful of cutlery into the dishpan. “I’d like to manage your income for a few months; you’d be livin’ in a nice place in Oklahoma City, and Cal could use this dump for a parts shack, like he’s always done anyway.”

  The last time we were here there was a stripped-down motorcycle under the kitchen table and about two dozen generators sittin’ aroun
d on the living room floor like a convention of alien pets.

  “Oh, we couldn’t move from here,” says Ma. “Cal’s on duty as a firefighter, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “For God’s sake, Ma. They gave him that truck so he’d stay away from the oil-donkeys and rigs and stop sellin’ booze to the roughnecks.”

  “You’re too hard on your pa . . .”

  I bang the screen door to let them know I’m here. Delly huffs a couple more times, but doesn’t say anything. The motorcycle’s still under the table, but Cal’s found it a friend since we were here last. There’s a dismantled trailbike keepin’ it company.

  “Where’s Eddie?” Delly asks. “He in jail yet, or just workin’ toward it?”

  “Eddie’s been working part-time on the rigs,” says Ma. “He’s goin’ into El Reno tomorrow to buy his first new-to-him car.”

  “I should’a known,” sighs Delly.

  “Let’s head into El Reno,” Cal says to me after supper. I sort of glance at Delly to see how she feels about it. She ain’t exactly been friendly toward her pa. She slammed his plate down in front of him so hard that some of the yellow beans jumped about a foot in the air and a couple came down in his coffee. When Cal deposited about a half-pound of butter in the middle of his grits Delly made a bad face. Then she suggested in no uncertain terms that Cal should buy Ma a new fridge, washer, dryer, stove, a TV that works, and that he should clear all his damn stolen parts outa the house.

  At that point Cal says directly to me, “You know, boy, when a man comes home from a hard day’s firefightin’ or playin’ with a baseball, or whatever, he don’t want to be bothered with no women’s stuff, you know what I mean?”

  I said I reckoned I did. Delly looked at me like she’d just lifted up a rock and seen me for the first time. I wished right away I hadn’t said it, and got busy eatin’ my pork chops. I like sugar on my grits.