Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella

  “But why quit publishing altogether?” I persist. “You should be entitled to as much privacy as you desire, but why deprive all the people who love you of hearing your voice on the page?”

  “Because people take me seriously. It interferes with my privacy. Can’t you see that? They swarm up the mountain like monkeys or commandos, peer in my windows, slip notes under the doors, carry off anything portable as souvenirs, lay in wait like you did. I’ve had to call the police many times. But I have to admit, none of them has ever done anything as crazy as you did. All this, and I haven’t published a book in fifteen years. What would it be like if I suddenly released a new series of stories or a novel?”

  I sigh. He is making good sense.

  “You’re out of soda,” I say. “I’ll go get you some more.”

  “Not so fast.”

  I am half standing. “Why?”

  “You figure on sneaking away just when I’m getting in some good licks. What we’ve been talking about, whether you know it or not, is sharing.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “You’re putting all this pressure on me, but how much sharing are you willing to do? Be honest. If you’ve got what you say you have out there in Iowa, then it shouldn’t be hidden. You’re making thousands of people unhappy. It’s like hoarding the secret of eternal life.”

  “But I would be willing to share. Only, who would set the criteria? Who would come?”

  “Your board of directors would work that out. Picture it. At dawn every day there would be private planes leaving New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Miami. Cedar Rapids Airport would have to build new runways to handle the traffic. Of course it would all be very secretivee, the pilots wearing dark glasses, fake mustaches, military uniforms.”

  “Baseball uniforms.”

  “Too crass. The operation would have class, panache. No one who earns less than one hundred thousand dollars a year knows what panache means. Frosted windows on the planes. The passengers would be herded to buses, blindfolded like political prisoners, driven to the farm by a circuitous route. The blindfolds would be taken off only after they were seated in your bleachers.”

  “Perhaps I’ll give a short welcoming speech before the game begins,” I say, trying to get into the spirit of the moment; but the whole idea is quite frightening.

  “You? Oh, you won’t be there. You’ll be lucky to be home once every three months for a day or so. You’ll be off doing the talk-show circuit, and interviews with Playboy and Cosmopolitan. And the Los Angeles Times will pay Jim Murray’s way to your stadium, and he’ll write a column about being there, and there will be two hundred thousand new people beating at the doors of travel agencies all across North America. You’ll be busy setting up trust funds, someone will ghost a book for you, and you’ll have to hire a bodyguard for your wife and child. The governor of Iowa will declare you to be a national resource, and your park will be open every day of the year except Christmas, just like Cooperstown. In the winter, you’ll sell hot apple juice and cinnamon, and postcards, and little plaster statues of Shoeless Joe Jackson with a halo over his head. You wouldn’t mind all that, would you?”

  “Of course I would,” I squeak. “I’d never let things get out of hand like that.”

  “You wouldn’t have any choice. Don’t you ever watch the late movies? A scientist makes a wonderful discovery, but it just grows and grows until it destroys him.”

  “I’ve never looked at it quite that way. A bodyguard? Really?”

  “Now, perhaps you see why I don’t publish?”

  “Touché.”

  It is the Boston seventh. We stand for two choruses of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The score is tied. Just as the fans settle back in their seats, relaxed and ready for action, it happens.

  There is no voice this time. It is the scoreboard. Boston has one of the most sophisticated scoreboards in the majors. It flashes pictures of the batter and the pitcher and does instant replays of action that doesn’t involve controversial calls by the umpires.

  It flashes a line of statistical information, leaves it on the scoreboard for, I suppose, thirty seconds. Being no stranger to the Baseball Encyclopedia, I recognize the information as an entry, but not an entry I would ever have considered important. The words and figures glow like rare minerals giving off a halolike whitish vapor. I look around furtively to see if anyone else is aware of what is happening.

  I eye Salinger carefully, but he is involved with his orange drink. The sign speaks only to me. What I know is that I have to perform another assignment after I am finished with Salinger.

  “I’m too tired. I don’t want to think about it,” I say.

  “What?” says Jerry. He looks first at me, then at the scoreboard, then back at me.

  Salinger starts to speak, but the crowd roars as Craig Kusick, the Twins’ lumbering first baseman, lunges to his right for a sharply hit baseball. He goes down slow as a toppling tree, the ball snapping into his glove as little puffs of dust rise in the air all along the length of his body. He scrambles to a sitting position and prepares to throw to first, but the rookie relief pitcher is watching in awe from his position in front of the mound. He has forgotten to cover first. Then out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of Rob Wilfong, the second baseman, who has sensed the problem in that way good ballplayers have of anticipating a play. He sprints toward first, screaming like a hawk making a long dive at a rabbit, in order to alert Kusick, who throws from his sitting position, throws to an empty bag. But the ball falls into Wilfong’s glove as he sprints across the picture like a breeze, touching the corner of the bag, avoiding a collision with the galloping runner; their shadows collide but their bodies miss.

  The play reaffirms what I already know—that baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. I have often thought, If only there was a framework to life, rules to live by. But suddenly I see, like a silver flash of lightning on the horizon, a meaning I have never grasped before.

  I feel as if I’ve escaped from my skin, as if I left a dry shell of myself back in Iowa. My skin is so new and pink it feels raw to my touch; it’s as if I’ve peeled off a blister that covered my whole body. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “The game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

  I take a pen from the pocket of my jeans, and check my various pockets for paper, without success.

  “Paper,” I say to Salinger.

  He shakes his head.

  “What kind of a writer are you?”

  “I’m a writer who was kidnapped on his way home from the grocery store and taken one hundred fifty miles to a baseball game.”

  “Oh.” I use my program to write on, and copy down the information that still glows on the scoreboard in phosphorescent wonder.

  As I finish copying the information onto the available white space on the program, the public-address announcer speaks to me. “Go the distance,” he says.

  Why? Why me? I almost scream, but don’t. I glance surreptitiously around me, to see if anyone else is aware, but the game moves on, the crowd drones lazily, and Jim Rice swings his bat in the on-deck circle.

  “I’ll get you that drink,” I say to Salinger. He has just crushed his wax cup under his shoe. “Is there anything else you want?” He is involved in the game, his face relaxed and more youthful looking. If he hears me, he doesn’t let on.

  As I climb the steps two at a time up the narrow aisle to the concession stands, there is a solid crack of the bat loud as a gunshot. I turn my head and, looking over my shoulder, see Jim Rice cross first base. I have taken perhaps three full steps with my gaze averted. As I once more face upward, I walk directly into a sharp steel girder that stands like a galvanized sword in the middle of the aisle.

  Although I am stunned, I try to pretend that no
thing unusual has happened, in that way people behave after they’ve tripped on a curb or stepped into an unseen hollow. I hold my hand to the left side of my forehead and climb on for three or four more steps before I feel my stomach drop slowly and my arms become hundred-pound weights dragging me into a sitting position.

  “Are you all right?” a man says to me.

  He looks as if he’s staring at me from under sunlit water.

  I try to answer, but my mouth won’t open. I take my left hand away from my forehead and find it dripping scarlet, warm and sticky as honey. I wipe it on my shirt front.

  By this time there are two ushers bending over me.

  “We’ll take you to the first-aid room,” one of them says, and takes hold of my elbow. My legs are soft as butter in sunshine.

  They finally manage to half-drag me to the top of the stairs.

  “Is he drunk?” I hear a voice from the bottom of the bucket say.

  I pull my ticket stub from my shirt pocket with a bloody hand. Taking a deep breath I say, “The man in the goose-down vest is with me. Tell him to bring my program.” Then I slip down into a world soft as the lining of Salinger’s jacket.

  Salinger insists on driving back. He holds my arm solicitously as we make our way slowly from the park to my car. I have four stitches in my left eyebrow and my shirt looks as if it’s been worn by the loser in a dandy barroom brawl.

  “Who won the game?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. It was long over by the time you came around. For being such a baseball fan, you pick strange times to take naps. The game was tied when the usher came and got me.”

  “You didn’t have to stay, you know.”

  “How the hell was I going to get back home? I can just see myself sitting all night in the bus depot with the winos and shopping-bag ladies, waiting for a bus to Windsor, Vermont.”

  My head throbs dully.

  The headlights make two grapefruit-colored tunnels on the road, and dark shrouds of trees rush by on either side. I lean my head against the window and look up, noticing a few lamblike clouds in a chrome-blue sky. The moon is full.

  “I’m still not entirely clear why you chose me,” Salinger says. “How did you interpret the cryptic message you received to mean me? Was it just because a voice told you to?”

  “Yes. And I saw you and me at a baseball game—a vision.”

  He is silent for a mile or so.

  “But why did you obey it? You don’t seem like the type who always does what he’s told. Just from spending this day with you, I can tell you have a healthy contempt for authority, big business, academia, religion—all the forces that control our lives. You have all the prerequisites for being a rebel, yet you hop to when an unknown voice delivers an ambiguous message.”

  “There were a lot of reasons. Baseball, for one. As you can tell, I love the game. And I admired you as an author and a person. I’ve always wanted to follow Holden’s dictum in The Catcher in the Rye and pick up the telephone and call you …”

  “Which is why I’ve had an unlisted number for twenty-five years.”

  “But it was the interview that decided it. Don’t you remember?” I look at him, genuinely surprised. Perhaps he is not as astute as I imagined.

  “Remember what? What interview?”

  “I didn’t see it in whatever magazine it was in originally, but the newspapers picked it up. It ran in the Des Moines Register; even the Iowa City Press-Citizen picked it up.”

  Salinger continues to eye me suspiciously, watching me instead of the road as we round a gentle curve. So I babble on.

  “The interview was mainly about baseball. Don’t you remember talking about baseball? The interviewer asked you a question about what you would have liked to be if you hadn’t been a writer. ‘When I was a kid,’ you replied, ‘I wanted more than anything else in the world to play baseball at the Polo Grounds.’ Over the years I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about that dream of yours, and about you being locked away like a hermit on top of a hill in New Hampshire. ‘I saw myself grow too old for the dream,’ you went on. ‘Saw the Giants moved across a continent to San Francisco, and finally they tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964!’ I cried when I read that interview, if you want to know the truth. I couldn’t help myself. I admit I’m overly sentimental about baseball, but it appeared that you were too. I read that passage thousands of times, smiling sadly at the thought that you must love the game as much as I do. That’s why I leaped at the chance to come here and take you to a baseball game—even if I might have ended up in jail because of it. Now how can you say you don’t remember?”

  Salinger is now looking at me with genuine concern.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this. Since you claim to know so much about me, I thought you’d know. I almost never give interviews. That’s not to say that people don’t try. I have some persistent lunatics removed from my driveway, and they babble to the police while they’re being driven away; they get two words from a grocery clerk or a gas-station attendant and then write and publish an exclusive interview. I always know about it, because a thousand or so people send me copies. Did you send me one from your Iowa City Press-whatever?”

  “Yes,” I mumble.

  “For some reason, people out there think I’ll wither away and die if I don’t see every word that’s written about me, no matter how bizarre. Do you know I’m supposed to have six wives and twenty-one children, and that I service my wives only for the purpose of procreation?”

  “Yes,” I whisper again.

  “I stopped reading the reports years ago. I don’t even want to imagine what they’re saying about me now. But I assure you, I never gave an interview about baseball. Those are very touching words you quoted. The writer must have had a better-than-average imagination.”

  “Then you don’t…” I can feel my insides slipping away as if they are on a greased slide.

  “Baseball is not a passion in my life. I’ve attended a few games, years ago. I occasionally watch one on TV. I read the papers, glance at the standings.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say. Salinger tenses a little. “I’ve caused you a lot of trouble for nothing.” He shakes his head, waves a long white-fingered hand in a conciliatory gesture. “It wasn’t just the baseball game. I wanted it to be a metaphor for something else: perhaps trust, or freedom, or ritual, or faithfulness, or joy, or any of the other things that baseball can symbolize. I only wanted to make you happy…” I feel myself choking up as I say it.

  “You don’t know how those words affected me,” I go on. “It was the line ‘They tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964’ that got me. Those words flew off the printed page, hovered in the air, assumed the shape of a gray bird, and landed on my shoulder. I reached up and picked off the bird and held it in my hand, tiny and pulsing, pressed it hard against my chest, and it disappeared like mist. If I were to open my shirt, and you looked closely, you could see its faint silver outline on my skin.”

  The rest of the trip back is thick with silence. We are both exhausted. I slump dozing, defeated, as Salinger drives with two hands on the wheel. We stop for gas and coffee. Salinger is still reluctant to enter the café, although I am the one people will look at. I reassure him and am relieved to be right. No one even glances at him. Salinger dips into his jeans and pays for the coffee.

  His mountain is blue with moonlight as we arrive at the foot of the driveway. The high windows of Salinger’s home glow like mirrored sunglasses in the cloudless night.

  “I wish I had your passion for baseball,” Salinger says. “However misdirected it may be, it is still a passion. If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.”

  “I could come back again,” I say. “It wouldn’t have to be baseball. A movie. A concert. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “No. You keep on listening to your voices, even if they’re wrong. Kee
p on doing what it is you do. Another time here, there would be no thrill in it for you. Keep on taking risks.”

  He opens the driver’s door and light floods the interior.

  “I enjoyed the baseball game. I’ll read the statistics with a little more interest from now on.”

  His speech sounds like a spoken bread-and-butter note. He bends down and looks closely at the car registration, which is strapped to the steering column in a tiny leather-and-plastic holder.

  “Just checking,” he says. “I have a naturally suspicious nature, you know. Ray Kinsella, you puzzle me very much,” he adds, shaking his head.

  “No one is more puzzled than I am,” I say.

  “Is this some kind of penance you’re doing?”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way, but perhaps it is. Oh, how I wish you could see my baseball park. I’ve built it all with my own hands. I’m not a carpenter. I’m not even competent when it comes to mechanical things.”

  I feel desperate for someone else to see my creation. My mother. I would like to show it to her. Let her see what I have brought to life. Have her be there when my catcher gets to play with the White Sox, as I know he will. What I’ve brought to life is much, much more than one tiny bird.

  “There is a magic about it,” I say. “You have to be there to feel the magic.”

  “What is this magic you keep talking about?”

  “It’s the place and the time. The right place and right time. Iowa is the right place, and the time is right, too—a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place and the universe opens up for a few seconds, or hours, and shows you what is possible.”

  “And what do you see? What do you feel?”

  “Your mind stops, hangs suspended like a glowing Chinese lantern, and you feel a sensation of wonder, of awe, a tingling, a shortness of breath …”