The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “I want to spend every precious moment I can with her, Fitz. She says she doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to come to me.”

  Was McGarrigle really losing it? Fitz wondered. Was it possible to appear coherent in most respects, yet be loony as a bedbug? Fitz sat alone in the living room for a long time. “You’re not the only one has lost someone you loved,” he said, rising slowly, the low-slung sofa taking its usual toll on his back, and heading outdoors.

  Fitz padded slowly around the pool and, ducking his head, walked the concrete block path through oleander, bougainvillea, what may have been hibiscus, past orange trees, a lacy-leafed olive tree, until he came to, off in a corner next to the concrete-block wall, a lime tree.

  The earth was dry, even dusty. Lovers walked to the end of the sidewalk and turned around. As Fitz left the sidewalk, a few fallen leaves crisped underfoot.

  Soon after he and McGarrigle had moved into Lime Tree Courts, they had explored the outback, as McGarrigle had called it.

  What had drawn McGarrigle out here in the dead of night to this isolated corner, to this small lime tree?

  Fitz remembered as a boy in Kansas planting an orange seed in a soup can full of dirt, watching the plant grow day by day, being amazed when his mother squeezed the small deep-green leaves, unleashing the heavenly scent of oranges in the middle of winter.

  Fitz pressed gently on a leaf of the lime tree, inhaled the pure perfume it emitted fresh as a dash of cold water, obliterating the exhaust fumes, seeming to quell the sound of traffic from nearby streets.

  “Oh, Maggie, I hope you’re here, dear,” Fitz whispered. “I hope you’re talking with your daddy, that it’s not just old age, a failing mind and terminal wishful thinking he’s suffering from.”

  Another evening, as they waited, Fitz kept pressing McGarrigle for details: Did he see Maggie? If so, did he touch her? If he touched her, was she there in reality, or just a shade?

  “Fitz, do you remember telling me the story of how you tricked your sainted mother?”

  “I remember,” said Fitz. “It was a dry, hot Kansas day when the wind teared my eyes and chafed my skin. I was about eleven, and I ran home from the nearest neighbours, two miles away, and told my mother the Parson was there at the Sonnenberg’s, and would be along to our farm as soon as he finished his tea and fruitcake.

  “A terrible dirty trick, it was. Poor Mama near had a fit. I’m sure she developed an extra pair of hands as she cleaned and scrubbed the house and us children, all the time cooking a noontime meal that a chef would have been proud of. It was such a simple lie, a teasing lie, but when Mama turned into a whirling dervish of a housekeeper-cook, it became a lie I was afraid to undo. Mama wasn’t even very mad when I finally confessed as she was standing on the porch staring into the white afternoon glare, squinting down the road looking for the Parson’s buggy.

  “‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’ve done me a week’s worth of work in under two hours. I believe I’ll take the rest of the day off.’ Which she did. But what has that story got to do with anything?”

  “Now, Fitz, do you remember once in Yankee Stadium, about 1935, when you were with the Browns. It was 8–1 for the Yankees late in the game, at least 40,000 fans roaring at every Yankee hit and every Brown error. Two on, two out, and Tony Lazzeri hit a little inning-ending pop-up behind second base. A can of corn. You camped under it; the sky was cloudless, no wind. Yet the ball passed between your hands, hit the bill of your cap, scraped your nose, then bounced over behind first base, while the runners galloped around the bases, and the fans booed the Browns, cheered the Yankees, and rejoiced at your inept play.”

  “Are you saying the two events are somehow related?”

  “You figure it out, Fitz. You’ve never been slow on the uptake.”

  “My own sainted mother would do such a thing to me?”

  “Only in a game that was already decided. My Maggie says such acts aren’t revenge. Just a trick here, a harmless joke there. A little soup down the front of a tuxedo might be a mother evening up the score for a threeyear-old puking during a bus trip.”

  “I don’t think I believe you,” said Fitz.

  “My Maggie says that’s the way things are. And you know Maggie wouldn’t lie. No one seems to think folks laugh on the other side.”

  “If I came out to the lime tree, would I be able to hear Maggie? Would I be able to see her?”

  “Well, now, Fitz, I doubt it.”

  “Then there’s no reason for me to believe that it’s not your hardening arteries sending you these messages?”

  “You believe what you like. But there’s something better coming.” McGarrigle moved closer to Fitz, whispering.

  “Maggie tells me she’s like a scout. She’s sizing things up. Seeing if conditions are right. Some night when everything’s perfect Mary-Kaye will be there instead of Maggie.”

  “You really believe that?” said Fitz.

  “Even if it’s a combination of old age and wishful thinking, I don’t want it to end. I’ve talked to my little girl, Fitz. Tonight I held her hand. And she hugged me and kissed my cheek the way she used to do.”

  “Can I get in on this good thing? I’d trade any two of my remaining faculties to feel Pegeen’s hand in mine, to hear her sweet voice one more time. For one single kiss sweet as a dew-covered rose.”

  “I don’t know,” said McGarrigle.

  What good would it do me to argue, to push him further, Fitz thought. He patted his old friend on the shoulder and wished him well.

  In the deepest part of the night, while McGarrigle was again out by the lime tree, Fitz sat alone by the silent swimming pool, a single light turning a section of the black water a beautiful turquoise. The scent of blooming flowers, of fruit trees, hung in the air.

  As he waited, Fitz imagined he had passed back over sixty years in time to a dusky summer evening at a sandlot baseball game. To a moment when the ball hit the sweet spot on his bat and disappeared far beyond the right fielder. He could hear Pegeen’s startled cheer, her voice rising above the few fans scattered along the baselines.

  As he loped around the bases he caught a whiff of the first essence of dew rising from the evening grass; he knew the game was over and Pegeen would be waiting for him, her sun-blonde hair on her shoulders.

  He would walk her home. He could already smell Pegeen’s perfume, the sweet and sour of it, and he could feel her in his arms in the shadows of the hedge beside her home, her lips parted for him.

  Somewhere a cat yowled, startling Fitz back to the present. He stood and began to make his way slowly down the path toward McGarrigle and the lime tree. His steps were awkward at first, his joints snapping.

  Before he even reached the lime tree, he heard gentle noises, and soft scufflings. He recognized the sweet breathless sounds of love, and for just an instant he saw the moonlight-filtered silhouette of the lovers, McGarrigle and Mary-Kaye, beneath the lime tree.

  Fitz turned slowly and tottered back toward Lime Tree Courts, his heart full of hope.

  Doves and Proverbs

  If you wait on the bank of any river long enough the body of your enemy will float by.

  —Chinese Proverb

  My friend Frankie should not drink. Because, when he ingests alcohol he turns into a dove. Other men, when they drink, grow boisterous, sullen, or imagine themselves to be Sugar Ray Leonard. Some, after a few drinks, become great lovers. Frankie becomes a dove. The sad truth is that a dove is only a glorified pigeon. It would take the Birdman of Alcatraz and Peter, Paul and Mary, to distinguish a dove from a pigeon.

  You cannot get a three-base hit by swinging a banana.

  —Biblical Proverb

  Synthesizing himself into a 160-lb. dove is Frankie’s business. I mean, I have some idiosyncrasies too. However, it is when Frankie develops the peaceful disposition of a dove that the trouble starts. Would that he instead developed little black fists and a winning smile.

  A wet bird never flies at night.

>   —A Comedic Proverb

  We are at a cocktail party.

  “Hello,” coos Frankie.

  I notice that his spur is sticking out the back of his oxford. He is wearing shorts that may well be made of feathers. His legs are the color and consistency of yellow floor tile, and about as thick as a pencil. As Frankie takes another swallow of gin his purplish-gray feathers grow before my very eyes. His eyes are now orange. His beak is tan.

  The Chicago Cubs will win the last pennant before Armageddon.

  —A Milwaukee Proverb

  Like Gilbert and Sullivan, I keep a little list of those who won’t be missed. Frankie is accompanied by one of those near the top of my list.

  People who think they know everything sure piss off those of us who do.

  —A Romanian Proverb

  “I’ve decided you guys should be friends,” whooshes Frankie, his wing nestled around a cocktail glass. My enemy hulks beside Frankie, shaggy as a timber wolf. In Alberta, timber wolves often grow to a height of six feet, and, if they wear contact lenses, are allowed to teach in community colleges, though not in high schools.

  “Rowl,” says my enemy.

  Sheep have short memories.

  —The Politician’s Proverb

  Frankie attempts to flash the peace sign with his feathered fingers. I can tell Frankie is still struggling, but he is losing the battle with his uncontrollable desire to make peace. Frankie’s beak turns from tan to yellow; his feathers sprout so rapidly I might be watching a time-lapse camera.

  I was only taking my girlfriend for a drive in the country.

  —Charles Starkweather’s Proverb

  “You have so many common interests, you shouldn’t be enemies,” says Frankie, though I’m sure I am the only one who can understand him. To anyone else it sounds as if Frankie is saying, “Coo, cooo, trrrrr, trrrr, coooooooo.”

  My enemy stares at me through bloodshot contact lenses. He teaches a seminar on elastic at a progressive community college. We have about as much in common as Mother Teresa and Idi Amin.

  “Rowl,” says my enemy, shrugging Frankie’s wing off his hairy shoulder.

  In Texas it is illegal to carry concealed wirecutters, or for a bachelor to own sheep.

  —The Rio Grande Proverb

  “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall become late-evening snacks,” I say to my enemy. A small glint of primordial intelligence appears in his eyes. Salivating, he turns his long, hairy jaw toward Frankie, whose metamorphosis is now complete. He is a 160-lb. pigeon.

  A foul ball hit behind third base is the short stop’s play.

  —Proverbs 2:27

  “Those who never attempt the absurd never achieve the impossible,” coos Frankie. I am the only one who understands him. My enemy has a mouthful of feathers.

  The aim of literature is to create a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.

  —Donald Barthelme’s Proverb

  “Rowl,” says my enemy, feathers, like snowflakes, drifting in the air.

  Waiting on Lombard Street

  There is an old-fashioned IHOP on Lombard Street in San Francisco, probably one of the originals, blue roof, A-Frame, from the days when they were known as International House of Pancakes.

  Driving south on a hot afternoon, fresh out of both air conditioning and Diet Coke, we decided to stop for refreshment. A pleasant young woman greeted us and escorted us to a booth, my red-headed lady and I, brought us water and menus and an assurance that a waitress would soon be with us. She may have even supplied us with a name, “Barcelona will be your waitress this afternoon.” I prefer waitresses who don’t have names, I prefer an arm clutching a pencil with a yellow pad at the end of it.

  It was about 3:30 in the afternoon, Bermuda Triangle time in restaurants: the last of the lunch crowd has lurched out, belching martini fumes, time to wash the floors and scrape the food off the windows.

  We decided on what we wanted, I chose a chocolate malt, my redheaded lady decided on iced tea, then we visited the washrooms one at a time so in case the waitress came one of us would be there to give her the order.

  The waitress did not appear. She never appeared.

  There came a point when we simultaneously realized we had been waiting an extraordinarily long time for service. We stared around. There was only one other occupied table, far away. The silence was eerie. It reminded me of the Mary Deare. Food steaming on some tables, but no one in sight, especially a waitress.

  We waited a few more minutes. We finished our water.

  I really wanted a chocolate malt. No one came or went.

  “In another dimension, in another IHOP, perhaps in Sacramento, or San Luis Obispo, or maybe even Honolulu, a tall, blond man and his red-headed lady have just been served a chocolate milkshake and an iced tea,” I said. “They’ve drunk them up, received their check, and are now going to try and sneak out without paying. Look furtive,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to walk sideways down the aisle. Try to look as if you have a sugar dispenser in your purse.

  We walked out, silence clinging to us like lint. No matter how suspicious we tried to look, no one paid the slightest attention.

  I leafed through the San Francisco newspaper the next day to see if perhaps a waitress had been kidnapped from an IHOP on Lombard Street. Or if maybe there was a story of the entire staff of an IHOP being locked in a walk-in cooler at the rear of the restaurant by a drug-crazed robber. Or, if perhaps an IHOP had been found abandoned, floating down Lombard Street like the Mary Deare, food still warm but all humanity vanished into the ether without a trace.

  Several months have passed. I wonder if in some other dimension, my red-headed lady and I are still seated in that IHOP on Lombard Street in San Francisco, spectral, ghostly, playing with our ice cubes, waiting for service.

  Shoeless Joe Jackson

  Comes to Iowa

  My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.

  “He’d put on 50 pounds and the spring was gone from his step in the outfield, but he could still hit. Oh, how that man could hit. No one has ever been able to hit like Shoeless Joe.”

  Two years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin’segg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, as I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa, a voice very clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”

  The voice was that of a ballpark announcer. As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive. I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors’ hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate.

  In reality, all anyone else could see out there in front of me was a tattered lawn of mostly dandelions and quack grass that petered out at the edge of a cornfield perhaps 50 yards from the house.

  Anyone else was my wife Annie, my daughter Karin, a corn-coloured collie named Carmeletia Pope, and a cinnamon and white guinea pig named Junior who ate spaghetti and sang each time the fridge door opened. Karin and the dog were not quite two years old.

  “If you build it, he will come,” the announcer repeated in scratchy Middle American, as if his voice had been recorded on an old 78-rpm record.

  A three-hour lecture or a 500-page guide book could not have given me clearer directions: dimensions of ballparks jumped over and around me like fleas, cost figures for light standards and floodlights whirled around my head like the moths that dusted against the porch light above me.

  That was all the instruction I ever received: two announcements and a vision of a baseball field. I sat on the verandah until the satiny dark was complete. A few curdly clouds striped the moon and it became so silent I could hear my eyes blink.

  Our house is one of those massive old farm homes, square as a biscuit box with a sagging verandah on three sides.
The floor of the verandah slopes so that marbles, baseballs, tennis balls and ball bearings all accumulate in a corner like a herd of cattle clustered with their backs to a storm. On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream.

  When I finally went to bed, and after Annie inched into my arms in that way she has, like a cat that you suddenly find sound asleep in your lap, I told her about the voice and I told her that I knew what it wanted me to do.

  “Oh, love,” she said, “if it makes you happy you should do it,” and she found my lips with hers, and I shivered involuntarily as her tongue touched mine.

  Annie: she has never once called me crazy. Just before I started the first landscape work, as I stood looking out at the lawn and the cornfield wondering how it could look so different in daylight, considering the notion of accepting it all as a dream and abandoning it, Annie appeared at my side and her arm circled my waist. She leaned against me and looked up, cocking her head like one of the red squirrels that scamper along the power lines from the highway to the house. “Do it, love,” she said, as I looked down at her, that slip of a girl with hair the colour of cayenne pepper and at least a million freckles on her face and arms, that girl who lives in blue jeans and T-shirts and at 24 could still pass for 16.

  I thought back to when I first knew her. I came to Iowa to study. She was the child of my landlady. I heard her one afternoon outside my window as she told her girlfriends, “When I grow up I’m going to marry . . .” and she named me. The others were going to be nurses, teachers, pilots or movie stars, but Annie chose me as her occupation. She was 10. Eight years later we were married. I chose willingly, lovingly to stay in Iowa, eventually rented this farm, bought this farm, operating it one inch from bankruptcy. I don’t seem meant to farm, but I want to be close to this precious land, for Annie and me to be able to say, “This is ours.”