Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  My impulse is to turn back, but I know I won’t, even though it is so easy not to do something. Pretend you’re selling life insurance, I tell myself as I wheel the car out onto the highway.

  As I near Windsor, anxiety crawls along my arms like ants. I am really quite shy. Why didn’t The Voice pick a real salesman for this job? I hated to contact people when I was selling life insurance; only my empty bank account, my love for Annie, and knowing that at the time it was the only way I could stay in Iowa, made me pick up the phone and don my optimistic and charming voice as I lured another potential commission check to lunch.

  I press on. Make two trips back and forth through the town of Windsor, Vermont. At the edge of town, golden writing on a black sign reads WINDSOR, BIRTHPLACE OF VERMONT, 1777. As I cruise the main street, I see the Old South Church with four whitewashed Greco-Roman columns at its front; I pass the drugstore where I’ve read Salinger buys his newspapers; American flags everywhere; I pass the home of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, their hall white as a Klan convention. And a covered bridge—I drive over it twice, windows down, enthralled by the rumble like stampeding horses, the earthy smell of this place permanently protected from the sun.

  Finally I force myself out of the car, walk stiffly into the post office, and make the first of my inquiries.

  In reply to my hesitant question, a tired clerk with a pale face and silver spectacles reels off a list of directions I don’t have time to assimilate before he has gone back to counting stamps. I lack the nerve to tell him I don’t quite understand, that his accent is thick as porridge to my midwestern ears.

  I have to make three more stops to ask directions. One lady raises her eyebrows and says she doesn’t know where he lives, indicating by her tone that if she did, which she probably does, she wouldn’t tell me anyway.

  An old man in a store that smells of oiled floorboards and coffee rolls his eyes as he would at a grandson who has just asked an embarrassing question about sex, and asks, “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m a friend of his, from the city,” I stutter.

  “If you was much of a friend, he’d of give you the directions hisself,” the old man says, and goes back to his newspaper.

  Eventually, a gas-station attendant, upon hearing my request, walks from my window to the front of the car, notes my Iowa license plates, and walks back grinning laconically.

  “Lots of si-reens an kafuffle up around his place one evening about a month ago.” He shakes his head solemnly.

  “I just want to take a look,” I say.

  He gives me directions for the nine-mile drive. I give him a dollar for his trouble.

  “Be careful.”

  “I will,” I promise.

  The road along the New Hampshire border is mainly dirt, but beyond the Private Property sign the surface is graveled. The new May leaves of the white birches and poplars dust the roof of my elderly Datsun. The leaves, delicately veined as a baby’s hands, are not full grown but are already gathering a film of dust. As I approach, I catch a brief glimpse of some brown siding and the sun glinting off window glass. I park next to the curving driveway that spirals up a steep hill. I explore gingerly, trying to walk without crunching gravel, ready to leap into the underbrush like a shy animal. A two-car garage is built into the side of the hill, like a bear’s den at a zoo. One side of the garage stands open and empty. I look up through the lacy leaves, and the sky seems very high.

  What I remember most vividly about the landscape is that on the way into Windsor, from a high point on the road, I could look out over the very area where I now sit. Everywhere was a smooth, liquid green, with no indication of habitation, no sign of houses or towns. Yet here I am, near a very real house, on a road with other houses on it that are all camouflaged by leaves.

  I walk back to the car, get in, roll down the window, and wait. The sweetness of honeysuckle fills my senses.

  A jeep grinds up the road behind me, swings sharply into the driveway, sending up a spray of potato-colored dust. As if by afterthought, the jeep brakes, spewing up more dust, and stops, with only the rear end visible, protruding from the ferns and low-hanging branches that swaddle the driveway. I wait, tense as if my neck were tipped back, my mouth agape, and I was preparing for the dentist’s needle.

  A tall, graying man appears from the driver’s side of the jeep. He walks confidently, even a little arrogantly, toward my car.

  Panic falls over me like a net. It is as if my bills are due while my corn sways in a dark rain. Is it Salinger? The only photographs I have seen are over twenty-five years old. The one in Mademoiselle shows a very ordinary young man with downcast eyes. The other …

  “What do you want?” the man says, frowning. His hair is gray and white, the color of street slush, and is combed straight back. There are tension lines, like two ruts, between his brows. If it is him, he looks older than I imagined he would.

  “Are you J. D. Salinger?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I—I want to talk to you.” What a banal, hopeless thing to say! I have promised myself, for close to 1500 miles, that I will say something brilliant, witty, charming. Entice him into my car like I was sugar and he an ant.

  “I suppose you’re a writer,” he says, and smiles, not unkindly, through snowy dentures.

  “I—no.”

  “Not a reporter,” he says, taking a step backward, as if the Datsun and I were fire or boiling water. “No.”

  “Then what is it you want?”

  He is wearing faded blue jeans, a khaki work shirt, and a spruce-green down vest like duck hunters wear.

  “I want you to come with me,” I stutter, and let my trench-coat-covered left hand peek above the car’s window ledge.

  It is wrong. All wrong. Completely wrong. I feel like a rookie runner caught off first base by a wily pitcher, hung up in that vast area between first and second, fluttering back and forth like a wounded bird who knows he’s doomed.

  What must he think? Is he used to dealing with crazies? I should have brought Annie. She could smile at him, bouncy as a red squirrel, and say, “My honey here has come to take you to a baseball game, because he thinks you need to go,” and he would believe her.

  Salinger frowns, and the stress lines between his brows deepen. His forehead is furrowed. There are long age lines from cheek to chin, making him resemble a tired but friendly hound.

  “Are you kidnapping me?”

  “Oh, please, that’s such an awful word. I’m sorry. I planned things so differently. I wanted to convince you to come with me. I never wanted to have to do this …”

  “Then you are.”

  “I just want to take you for a drive. I have tickets for a baseball game. A baseball game,” I say again. Even though I emphasize the last line, it has no visible impact on him.

  “And if I don’t?” His eyes look quickly to the jeep submerged in forest.

  What can I possibly say? I am inarticulate as a teenager at the end of a first date, standing in the glare of the porch light, a father hulking behind the curtains.

  “I’m Ray Kinsella,” I say, trying a new tack. My right hand is rigid under my trench coat; my left, fingers spread, makes a musical motion, as if playing a single note cn the tinny car door with my middle finger—a note that I hope will strike a response with Salinger.

  He remains silent and looks around, and I know he is trying to decide whether or not to run. If he does, it is all over.

  “I thought you might want to meet one of your own characters,” I say. Salinger continues to frown, looks blank. I notice that he has large ears.

  “Who?”

  “Ray Kinsella,” I repeat. “I was a character in one of your stories. ‘A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist At All.’ “

  “So?” He shrugs. “It was just a story. Not even a very good one. Where did you dig it up?”

  “In a back issue of Mademoiselle at the University of Iowa Library.”

  “Well, Ray Kins
ella, I suppose you’re under psychiatric treatment.”

  “You really did write about me,” I protest. “The boy in the story is named Ray Kinsella.”

  “What does it matter? I don’t understand.” He looks around, wishing, I’m sure, that someone or something would come by and distract me.

  “There aren’t many of us around—Kinsellas, that is. There are only nine in the Manhattan telephone directory,” I babble. “I stopped and looked on my way here. In 1946 or ‘7, whenever you wrote the story, there were probably less.”

  “Yes, there probably were. Still, it’s just a name. I don’t see…”

  “It’s my name. You used my brother’s name in The Catcher in the Rye: Richard Kinsella—he was the boy who gave rambling speeches, and everybody yelled ‘digression’ at him.”

  “I remember that, but I don’t understand why it is important. Why should I be thrilled to meet someone with a name I once used in a story? I write fiction.”

  “But surely you knew someone by that name.”

  “What if I did?” Salinger stops, squints his left eye slightly. It is as if he realizes that arguing with me is like trying to dissuade an overzealous missionary. He eyes me carefully, scratches behind his right ear.

  “Perhaps we could talk about it,” he says, and I sense that in his desperation he has called up words that are hidden unknowingly inside him like scissors lost in a sewing basket. I picture him, alone these many years, watching endless reruns of Emergency One, Barnaby Jones, Policewoman, Cannon, Marcus Welby, and The Eleventh Hour, in which the good doctor, officer, detective, or paramedic cautiously approaches the disturbed person and says, not patronizingly but with a calm air of authority, “Perhaps we could talk about it?”

  “I’ve come to take you to a baseball game,” I say doggedly.

  “Why?”

  In my anxiety, I see a grotesque cartoon of a pale, lumpish blob of a person with a flashing light bulb over his head. It is as if I am trying to pile gifts in front of Salinger, in hopes of distracting him from my real purpose.

  I conjure up my last trick. “I’ve brought you a baseball,” I chirp, and reach my left arm over my right and open the glove compartment. The ball rests in the safe darkness behind the maps, sunglasses, and a couple of paperback books. I pull the whole mass onto the floor, duck my head, and eventually pop up with the ball.

  I hand it out the window to him. He reaches for it, then pulls his hand back like an adult does when a child tries to hand him a sticky, drool-covered toy.

  “It’s yours,” I say. “I’ve carried it all the way from Iowa. I’m from Iowa, you know.”

  “No. I didn’t know,” says Salinger. He steps back and sideways and checks my license plate, just in case I don’t know where I’m from. I am still offering the ball in my extended hand.

  “Please,” I say. “It was hit by Shoeless Joe Jackson. A home-run ball.”

  “It must be valuable,” says Salinger, eyeing the ball with its red and blue stitching; the ball looks as if it has been aged by several coats of varnish.

  “It’s yours,” I say again. “A gift. No strings attached—from one baseball fan to another.”

  Salinger frowns, narrowing his dark eyes. Then he reaches out and takes the ball, using just his finger tips, handling it gingerly, as if it might explode.

  “What’s all this about baseball?” he says, and my stomach drops as if I’m in a balky elevator. What if he isn’t a baseball fan? The fates are known to play tricks on innocents. But I’ve come this far, I can’t even think of the possibility.

  “Fenway Park,” I say. “I have tickets for tonight’s game. Good ones. I want you to come with me.”

  “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?” he asks again.

  “I suppose I will be if this doesn’t go well,” I say, making a rather pitiful attempt at a smile. Salinger plods on, ignoring my attempt at humor.

  “What makes you think I want to go to a baseball game, need to go to a baseball game?”

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  “Perhaps you should bore me with it.” There is a hard edge to his voice, but his eyes seem to me to hold a few flecks of amusement, floating like golden needlepoints.

  “I’ll tell you on the way. Please,” I add, like a child begging to stay up an extra hour.

  There is a long silence. I can feel the wetness under my arms; the sweat trickles down my ribs. I suddenly itch in a dozen places.

  Salinger appears much more composed than I would if I were being kidnapped by an armed stranger in a faded dirty Datsun with Iowa plates. He nods toward his own vehicle. “I left the motor running,” he says almost apologetically. He edges back toward it. Another step or two and he’ll be gone. I leap out of the car, stumbling as I do, pointing my trench coat at him. Salinger raises his hands halfway, more in a gesture of self-defense than surrender.

  Establishing my footing, I try to appear very cool and trusting as he disappears into the foliage. Leaning on the rear fender of the jeep, I peer after him, the spicy ferns touching my face. He shuts off the motor, pockets the keys, and returns.

  “You don’t need that,” he says, pointing to my coat-covered hand. “I have great respect for my life. I won’t do anything to risk it.”

  We get in the car. I kill the motor twice, then remember to release the hand brake, and we roll slowly down the hill toward Boston and Fenway Park.

  As we drive, it strikes me that I haven’t searched him. As I look across at him, it appears to me that there is an ominous bulge on the left side of his vest. I picture concealed there a German Luger, resting like a cold rock in a homemade holster under the friendly goose down. Perhaps the first time I am forced to slow for a stop sign or a traffic light, he’ll whip out the weapon and with military accuracy blow me away. I can feel my rib cage exploding as the bullet slams me against the driver’s door.

  “Now really,” says Salinger, “are you under psychiatric care?”

  “No. Not now or ever.” I try to keep my voice from breaking. “Perhaps it’s just that they haven’t got me yet.”

  “Then please,” says Salinger, referring to my trench-coat-covered hand. “About the only reason I got in here was because you seemed so hyper. I was afraid that if I ran, you might shoot up the whole side of the mountain, and maybe by accident get lucky. I don’t for a moment believe you have a gun in there. Still, I believe in going with the odds.”

  I’m glad he is insisting. I find it very difficult to drive while pretending to hold a gun. The real gun is still in the trunk, sleeping like a fish at the bottom of a cool stream. In the movies, the hero, or antihero, often drives across a whole city or state with a loaded gun trained menacingly on a carful of hoodlums. I assume movie heroes don’t drive cars with standard transmissions.

  I toss the dun-colored coat into the back seat, revealing my hand, empty as a politician’s promise.

  Now, he will probably pull a gun on me, and direct me to the nearest sheriff’s office.

  “Do you do this often?” asks Salinger. I glance over, and there may actually be a twinkle in his eye.

  “No. You’re the first. And, I hope, the last,” I add.

  “I didn’t really believe you had a gun. Still, there was always the chance. I read somewhere that it is better not to excite disturbed persons.” Then he looks at me and half smiles and half frowns. I imagine him wondering why he is talking to me like this, as if we are at least acquaintances, if not friends.

  “If I’d had a gun I’d probably have shot myself about five times by now. I’m not mechanically inclined.” We both laugh a little reluctantly, as if the situation doesn’t call for laughter. “I do have a gun,” I add quickly, “but it’s in the trunk. I know I was supposed to buy one, but I guess this isn’t where I’m supposed to use it.”

  Salinger looks at me out of troubled eyes. “As it should be,” he says. “I mean the gun … in the trunk.”

  I have not been paying attention to where I am driving. I virtually
never pay any attention to where I am driving. When Annie and I travel together, she drives, especially in Minneapolis or Chicago—even Iowa City. If Annie has been somewhere once, she remembers where she has been and how to get there again, if necessary. Even when I’m just driving in Iowa City, I often find myself parking at the University of Iowa Library, or heading up Johnson Street toward the house I lived in ten years ago.

  The road I am driving on might have been transferred from a Snakes and Ladders board. The trees are tall and leafy, the trail narrow. I pull up at a T-intersection. I have to choose between left and right. There are direction signs, but neither town means a thing to me. I will have to pull out my red-veined road atlas and try to figure out where I am. How humiliating. I must be one of the most inept kidnappers since the bumblers in “Ransom of Red Chief.”

  “Boston, is it?” says Salinger, noting my long hesitation.

  I look hopeful. “Yes.”

  He nods his head to the right.

  I turn gratefully. But what if it is all an act? What if he is directing me to the nearest jail?

  “Is your name really Ray Kinsella?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you really have a brother named Richard?”

  “Yes, though I haven’t seen him since he was fifteen. Since I was fifteen, we’re identical twins.”

  “And you came here all the way from Iowa?”

  “Drove all the way.”

  “And you brought me a baseball?”

  “Hit by Shoeless Joe Jackson.”

  “Yes. He was thrown out of the game or something.”

  “He was.”

  “And we’re going to Boston to see a baseball game?”

  “We are. The Red Sox are playing the Twins. I’m a Twins fan—if I have to make a choice. Usually I’m just a fan of the game.”

  “Now what about … ?” but we are interrupted as the snaky highway brings us into a town called Claremont, and a mass of road construction. I’m no longer certain whether we are in New Hampshire or Vermont. Traffic comes to a standstill. A sign at the side of the road reads TURN OFF YOUR RADIO IN BLASTING ZONE, while another says, USE YOUR LIGHTS. Construction crews appear to be rearranging the very center of town. A front-end loader scoops and dumps concrete fragments from one pile to another. Not one but two policemen are directing traffic. I look at Salinger. He looks at me—a steady brown gaze giving no hint of what he plans to do. We sit for a couple of moments as a fine white dust like volcanic ash drifts in the windows. He can open the door and walk away if he chooses. I notice that he is turning the baseball in his large hands. The backs of his fingers are heavy with white hair. His eyebrows are the gray-white color of gull wings.