Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  As I inch along, the second police officer shrills his whistle and, when I look back, waves me over.

  “Could I see your license and registration, please?” he says to me.

  I comply meekly.

  Salinger must be tempted to turn me in. I believe there is a certain compulsion in each of us for orderliness of a sort: a desire to clip off loose fabric ends, to refold newspapers with the first page on the outside, to empty ashtrays, to turn in kidnappers.

  But there is no evidence. It would be his word against mine, and, in that circumstance, it would be an advantage to be an unknown Iowa farmer instead of a mysterious writer, a known eccentric.

  My mouth becomes drier as I think of the gun. It seems to me that there are laws of some kind about transporting girls and guns across state lines for illegal or immoral purposes.

  How embarrassing it would be to use my one phone call from some varnishy-smelling, leaf-encased police station to tell Annie that I have been arrested.

  The police officer is young and earnest, scrubbed pink as wild roses, brought up by a mother who taught him to wash behind his ears.

  He scrutinizes my license, turns it over to look for convictions, checks my face against the staring, felonlike photo lacquered with plastic. He leans in and looks over at Salinger. There is a tangy scent of fresh-cut lumber about him.

  “What is your name, sir?”

  Salinger keeps his face turned toward the passenger window.

  “Jerry,” he says quietly to the glove compartment.

  “Could I see some identification, Jerry?” the young officer says politely.

  They say you can tell you are getting old when police officers and cocktail waitresses start to look like teenagers. This young man looks like a nine-year-old dressed up for a play.

  Salinger digs in the back pocket of his jeans, produces a wallet, and passes it over for inspection.

  “Jerome David Salinger,” the officer reads without emotion. “And where is it that you and Mr. Kinsella are going, Jerome?” The officer’s bright eyes stare straight at Salinger without the slightest spark of recognition.

  “Fenway Park,” he replies, and all three of us can hear my breath escape with a rush. “The Sox are playing the Twins.”

  The officer takes in the back seat with a steely, well-trained eye, and, finding nothing suspicious, withdraws his head.

  “Your right taillight is out, Raymond,” he says to me. “I’d suggest that you get it fixed at the first opportunity.”

  “Thank you,” I say as we pull away. Salinger remains silent. “You could have done me in back there.”

  “I know. It crossed my mind. But think of the publicity. I’d get more headlines than Aimee Semple McPherson. The press are just waiting for something like this—some excuse to swarm up here like locusts and eat the leaves off my trees and snap the blooms off the flowers in my window boxes. I won’t have it!” His voice rises theatrically on the final words.

  He is silent again. We pass a wave of willow trees with leaves as green as lime juice.

  “I envy you your craziness,” he says quietly. “It has been years, far too many years, since I did something absolutely crazy.”

  “Would you like me to bore you with that story now?”

  “Yes. I think I’d like to know why you think you’re here, doing this.”

  “Well, let me see …” I am embarrassed about beginning, like an author about to read his work for the first time to an audience. “I read an interview with you, one you gave long ago, where you talked about the importance of titles. So let me try a title on you. My saga would be called ‘The Story of How Shoeless Joe Jackson Came to Iowa.’ “

  Salinger tosses his ball in the air and catches it.

  “My father said he saw him years later …” I begin.

  “J. D. Salinger has an obsessive fear of aging,” one of the guests at Mark’s party had said to me. “There are no mirrors in his house; no pictures of anyone past their fortieth year—parents, grandparents, wives, himself. When he is forced to leave his house, he avoids even glancing at any possible reflections of himself, no matter how vague or distorted. He is afraid that if he sees himself, he will look older than he really is.

  “The reason he hasn’t published anything new is that he spends all his time rewriting work done before he was forty, distrusting anything he has written since then, trying to achieve the ultimate in perfection. This, however, is impossible, because his mind has not stopped maturing and growing. So what he is eliminating from his early work is what makes it most valid and readable. He trusts no one to view what he is doing. He is living in a closed circle, without fulfillment or escape.”

  “How do you know that?” a woman with a body straight as a tree trunk demanded, her voice whining with excitement.

  “You’ll have to wait for my book,” said the speaker, smiling sagely. “It’s due out in the spring and is called The Existential Salinger.”

  I often get caught in thunderstorms. While clouds slowly levitate from the western horizon, or even when they come rolling in, I remain too long in the fields or at the ballpark, long after the first giant drops have plopped on the green-painted boards beside me, or the corn is bent, leaning away from the wind. I have, it seems, absorbed, perhaps by osmosis, some of Annie’s optimism. Only when I am wet as a bathed cat do I accept that the clouds are not going to veer to one side or the other.

  My mother reads the weather forecasts in the newspaper and believes them religiously, even though they are generally less truthful than statements made by “diplomatically reliable sources.” Thus she perpetually carries an umbrella, for such forecasts usually say, even in time of drought, “chance of rain, two percent.” Her umbrella is about a foot long and patterned with purple pansies. She would be horrified if someone suggested that its shape is phallic.

  I suppose I should pay closer attention to weather forecasts and storm warnings. My brother-in-law represents, at least symbolically, the icy-white clouds that foretell hail, the farmer’s worst enemy. Mark and his friend Bluestein already own a good portion of Johnson County, Iowa, but for some reason have become inordinately interested in the past few months in buying our quarter-section.

  Mark cornered me at his party.

  “Well, Ray,” he said, “I’ve decided to make you one more offer for the farm. Bluestein put it in the mail to you this afternoon.” He waved his hand vaguely behind him, where Bluestein lurked like a funeral director at a christening.

  My brother-in-law has always looked to me like the villain from a nineteenth-century melodrama. He is tall, slim, but solid, with hawkish features. His dark-red hair, in spite of being carefully styled, slips down over his forehead, requiring him to flip his head every ten seconds or so, like a bull testing the air for odors of sex. Today he wears a tight, tailored sports jacket that looks as if it has been skinned off a long-haired, cinnamon-colored monkey. He wears a green tie, thoroughly knotted. His hands are immaculate, his ring finger featuring an emerald that if sold might get me out of debt. Mark has a wine-colored mustache that turns up wickedly at each corner, apparently of its own accord. I’ve never seen him twirl the mustache like a genuine villain, but I’m sure he will one day.

  “Tell Bluestein to save his postage,” I said as we headed for the door.

  Bluestein, Mark’s business partner, is a squat little man with terminal five o’clock shadow and shifty eyes.

  Mark, regardless of the queerness of his notions concerning the corn weevil, displays considerable business acumen. He and Bluestein own apartments and older homes all over the city, which they rent to students at exorbitant rates. They also own, or have optioned, several thousand acres of farmland that is planted and harvested by a crew of hired hands headed by a foreman who wears a black hat and looks a lot like Jack Palance. It is curious that at one time the land barons owned prairie ranches as far as the eye could see. Their authority was eventually undermined, and the farmers took over, dividing the land into ch
eckerboards, each square crowned with a white castle of sorts. Now a new breed of land baron is buying out the farmers one by one, and I suppose corn farms like mine soon will be operated by computer. Instead of a farmhouse and family, there will be a small metallic box studded with red, green, and blue lights, which will tell a foreman which quadrant needs water and in which area the cutworms are hatching.

  “You’re going to have to face the facts,” Mark said to me. “Your financial position is no secret. It appears to me that you either have to sell the farm now or lose it in the fall. Even if you have a bumper crop, which doesn’t appear likely, you’ll never be able to keep up with the mortgage payments. You can’t make a living off a quarter-section anymore. The days of the small farmer are gone forever. You’re an anachronism.”

  “Let’s hear it for the anachronisms,” said Annie, joining us. “It sounds like a baseball team. The St. Louis Anachronisms.”

  “As you know,” Mark said directly to me, not even bothering to acknowledge Annie’s joke, “we’re offering you more than the place is worth, simply because of Annie.”

  “I’d never want you to pay me more than the place is worth, Mark. And by the way, I will not have you tearing down our house and replacing it with a computer.”

  Mark looked at me strangely.

  “We’ll get by,” said Annie.

  “Sure, you’re going to discover diamonds in your cornfield,” said Mark.

  I have a twin brother. An identical twin. His name is Richard, and the only way anyone, including my mother, can tell us apart is that Richard has an inch-and-a-half scar on his left eyebrow. When we were about three we were bouncing on a bed, and Richard bounced himself off the headboard—four stitches’ worth.

  Mother had us fingerprinted, or rather, footprinted. She had our birth certificates tacked to the wall of our room. The reverse side of each featured purplish left and right footprints and statistical information about the mother and father. I’m not sure whether it’s just that I’ve heard the story so many times, or if I can actually remember as a child screaming loudly as Mother held my ankle in an iron grip and forced my foot onto a cherry-colored stamp pad. Mother claims that until Richard’s accident, she often foot-printed us in the evenings after our bath, just to be sure which was which.

  I’ve often told Annie, only half jokingly, that after I’ve been away, she should check me over carefully when I return, to make sure I don’t have a scar on my left eyebrow.

  “Oh, I’d be able to tell,” Annie says, grinning her evil grin.

  “Not likely,” I say. “We tried once when we were about fifteen to find something different about us. Anything different. Our voices were the same, people always mistook us for one another on the telephone. Our hands were the same size, we were the same height, and our shoes were the same size.”

  “I get the picture,” says Annie.

  One night in our room we set out to see if maybe our cocks were different. We got them hard and then argued about where we should measure from—the top or the bottom. We had an old steel ruler, the color of railroad tracks, that Mother had had as a child; it was cold as hell no matter where we measured from. But it didn’t matter, we were the same length from any and all angles, and if we’d measured circumference, it would have been the same, too. Every part of us is interchangeable.

  The morning of our sixteenth birthday, Richard came downstairs, flexed his muscles, and said, “I’m a man now. I’ll do anything I please from now on.”

  “Like hell you will,” my father replied.

  They argued for a few minutes, and finally Richard took a poke at my father. He missed and his fist smashed through the wall, which was not wood or wallboard but heavily calcimined wallpaper. Fortunately he didn’t strike a joist, or he might have broken his hand.

  Richard then walked out the door of that old ranch house not far from Deer Lodge, Montana, and has not been seen or heard from since.

  We are nearly to Boston when I finish the story of my baseball stadium and of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other suspended White Sox. I also tell Salinger about the second coming of the voice.

  “Ease his pain,” repeats Salinger in a tone of wonder, shaking his head. “How could you possibly know that I was the one your voice was referring to?”

  “It must be akin to religious conversion,” I reply. “Something you have to experience to understand. But I was right the first time,” I point out.

  “You don’t have any witnesses. What if it was all a hallucination? Religious fanatics are known to have detailed visions. You’re obviously a baseball fanatic.”

  “Karin and Annie experience it too. When you meet Annie you’ll see how reliable she is.”

  “When!”

  “Sorry. I am … just taking you to one game.”

  “But what pain? I don’t have any pain. Well, no more than anyone else.”

  “You haven’t been to a live baseball game for over twenty-five years.”

  “It’s not a big deal. To some people that is not pain.”

  “But surely to you …” But I stop, fearful of probing further, in case my worst fears materialize. “You’ll feel better for it. Trust me.”

  We hit Boston at the beginning of rush-hour traffic, and of course I become lost immediately. I travel over a number of bridges and drive along the ocean, trying all the while to weave in the general direction of the Prudential Building, which I know is in the vicinity of Fenway Park and is the one landmark in Boston that I know. But the traffic sweeps my Datsun along like a cork in a swift current, past corners where I want to turn, and I am carried onto and over expressways. I eventually work the car to an exit and return to the bunched streets. Quite by accident, we end up on a main street and I can see the silvery light standards of Fenway Park.

  I have to make a left turn. Pedestrians in the East behave like lemmings rushing dispassionately to their deaths—it takes a good ten minutes to make a left turn into the blinding rush of oncoming traffic, with pedestrians thronging suicidally into the intersections. As I turn the corner, I enter two rows of traffic. Cars bound together like tiny coupled trains stretch over a hill and beyond the baseball park. I picture myself being forced onto another expressway, and in an hour or so reappearing at this corner, only to be swept by again.

  Then suddenly, like the parting of the Red Sea, a parking place appears one row to my right. Two or three cars ease by it, the drivers apparently having their minds on home. I turn the car in an S motion, cutting in behind a bus that spews out fumes black and substantial as octopus oil. As the bus inches forward, I slip into the parking place.

  I raise my hands. “More of a miracle to find a parking place on a baseball night in downtown Boston than for a man to throw away his artificial leg and grow a new one in front of an enraptured congregation,” I say to Salinger.

  He sits impassive. “You are not impressed by magic,” I say sadly. “Are you hungry?” I ask as I bend my neck back, letting some of the tension drain from me. “We have time to eat before the game. On me, of course. This whole evening is on me.”

  We walk back down a small hill toward a main road. “There used to be a Greek restaurant around here,” Salinger says. Then noting my surprise, he adds, “It’s been years since I’ve been to Boston, but the geography kind of leaves an imprint.”

  I stop a fat man who looks as if he should know the location of all the restaurants that have ever been in Boston, and ask if he knows of a Greek restaurant nearby.

  “Right across the street,” he says, pointing a monstrous arm. And it is. Aegean Fare is written in black script across the face of a gray building.

  “You have a good memory,” I tell Salinger. He is loping along beside me, taking exceptionally long strides.

  “Do you always wear that hat?” he says.

  “It’s illegal to farm in Iowa and not wear one,” I reply. “Bill 1402 passed by the legislature in Des Moines last summer stipulates that a farmer can be fined ten ears of corn or a pound
of soybeans if he’s stopped by the Highway Patrol and found to be bareheaded.”

  “Oh really?” says Salinger, smiling a little lopsidedly as we turn into Aegean Fare. The restaurant is part cafeteria, part bakery, and has a glass display case full of Greek desserts radiating enough calories to power an atomic bomb. The restaurant walls are covered in mirrors. I catch sight of my arms, tanned as burnished maple. I tug off my cap, revealing my forehead, which, in contrast, is as white as sliced chicken breast. I practically dance to our table, I am feeling so manic. I have done it. I am eating supper with J. D. Salinger; we are in Boston; we are going to see the Red Sox play baseball.

  “What… what do you do up there on your hill?” I say as tactfully as I know how. We have kept the conversation general, although I can tell he wants to ask me questions and I babble a little, every so often, about Shoeless Joe, or Annie, or Karin, or my stadium.

  He calls me Ray. Sometimes he addresses me by my whole name. “Call me Jerry,” he says to me. I have been careful not to address him by any particular name. I have not yet called him Jerry. I very seldom use another person’s name in conversation. I think it is because when I sold life insurance, I was deluged with sales material that screamed, “A man’s name is the most important sound he ever hears,” and I was taught to work a client’s name into the conversation at every possible opportunity. It was as if I was armed with a little basketful of darts with Arthur, or Charles, or Amos written on them and could not sell a policy until I had stuck each and every one into my prospect’s body. Now that I am free, I try to erase that loathsome period completely from my mind.