Field of Fantasies

by Rick Wilber

  But then I didn’t quite become the ballplayer she’d figured on. Or the famous sportscaster either, though I gave that a try for a few years. Or even, later, the Famous Writer.

  I didn’t become much of anything and one day, five years into the marriage— she was patient with me, I’ll give her that—I came home to packed bags and a note about what I hadn’t turned out to be. Later, I found out she had a boyfriend who made more money than he knew what to do with in software sales, so Emily finally found somebody who could succeed at something, and that gave her a chance for a new beginning. That’s how she told me to see it in that note: A New Beginning.

  A Girl of the Streets

  Cora wanted to know about my writing. It started with the how-many-words-a-day questions and went on from there, growing in complexity, some of them personal and some of them about the work. She wanted to be a writer herself and kept talking about how she was willing to pay her dues to get there. I should have thought that through a little better when she said it.

  She had stories to tell, God knows. I found out this: She was a local girl, Catholic elementary school at St. John’s Parish out on the beach. Then four years at St. Petersburg Catholic High School, where she played on the softball team and edited the yearbook.

  She was a good Catholic girl from a solid family—father a pediatrician, mother a teacher, two little brothers who played soccer. She was on her way to wherever it is good Catholic girls go for their careers when she got hooked up in college to a boy with the wrong kind of dreams and the wrong way to reach them, and she found herself in trouble—drugs and pregnant and the boyfriend got mean. I didn’t get all the details but there was no child and a nasty little scar on the back side of that gorgeous left cheek.

  So she’d come back from all that. Back in school, wanting to write, looking great. And paying her way through as a dancer at the Club De Dream out on the beach. I started going there every Tuesday and Thursday night. She went on at ten, this good Catholic girl, and oh, my.

  A Sense of Obligation

  Halfway through the season I had a terrible Sunday pitching, getting roughed up for nine earned runs on the way to losing 15—2. We have a ten-run mercy rule in this league, and it was a good thing for us, since it ended the game early. Most of us went to the Little Regiment bar afterward, a dark-wood paneling faux-British pub not far from the field. A few pints of Guinness sounded pretty good to me at that point.

  We weren’t in there more than fifteen minutes when Cora left to play some pool with Humphrey Regis, our shortstop. He was fresh from a recent tough divorce and had been oh for four at the plate, so a little eight-ball with Cora must have seemed heaven sent.

  That left me and Steve alone at the table for a few minutes. Steve pulled my collection out of his bag and told me he’d read it.

  I stared at him.

  “This is the copy you signed for Cora,” he said. “She asked me to read it.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s good work,” he said. “I like it. But. ..”

  “But?”

  He gave me a slight smile. “I know a little something about writing, David. I did well at it there for a while.”

  I nodded. “Sure. I know. You’re Stephen Crane, the Stephen Crane.”

  He shrugged those thin shoulders. “You know what I mean, all right, David.” He leaned back in his chair, sipped on his beer. “Look, David, I don’t know how or why this is happening, either, chum. I think I recollect something that Herbert said, about that machine of his.”

  “Sure,” I said again. “H. G. Wells and his time machine.”

  He laughed. It sounded bitter. He started to rise. “All right, then, David. I’m sorry I tried to monkey with this. Cora thought you’d appreciate my advice, that I should try and help, that your career—”

  “Cora thought?” I shook my head, waved at him to sit back down. “Please, Steve, stay. Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, really, but my career is fine. Just about got my novel done, and my agent says she’s close on the next deal. I might get to quit teaching if things really take off, you know.”

  “Bully for you, David,” he said. Then he smiled at me. “David, can I tell you a story?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Tell me a story. Something about the Civil War, right? About red badges, about fighting and dying and all that.”

  I knew that sounded mean even as I said it. This poor guy really did think he was Stephen Crane; he’d convinced me that he really believed that, at least. And here I was teasing him, acting like I was hot stuff just because I’d written a few books and won a few awards.

  He was staring at me. I tried again, nicer. “I’m sorry. Sure, absolutely, I’d like to hear a story.”

  He shook his head slightly. “The Tied Badge,’” he said, then paused for a moment. “You know, I’d never seen war when I wrote it.”

  I nodded. “I knew that.”

  “I thought I could tell the truth about war when I wrote it. I thought I had

  some talent.”

  “You did, on both scores.”

  He shook his head again. “No, not really. You know, it’s hard for a man to realize these things about himself.” He paused, sipped on his beer, went on. “I didn’t know the truth from an electric streetcar. I came to realize that in May of 1897, the Greco-Turkish War. The New York Journal hired me as a correspondent, and it was there, at Velistino, that I finally saw the truth of war for the first time.” “And?”

  He smiled, shrugged. “Death is very real.” He took a sip of beer, smiled again. “I wonder how close to the truth I might have come if I’d lived past twenty-nine.”

  “Now you’ll get to find out. You’re writing aren’t you?”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s the rum thing. There’s no time.”

  “No time? We practice a couple of times a week and we play a single game on Sundays. What are you doing with the rest of your time?”

  He frowned. “What am I doing?” There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to think about it right now, trying to remember, and I don’t know. When I’m not at the park, playing the game, it’s all gray, blank.”

  “Oh, c’mon.” The poor guy, I thought, was Looney Tunes. “You’re here now, with me and there’s nothing gray.”

  “Yes, I am at that.” His eyes widened. “Maybe it’s you, David. Maybe it’s you that’s brought me back, you that makes me real.”

  I laughed. “Right. Me and my magic powers, that’s it. Okay, then, here,” and I grabbed the paper placemat from under his plate, flipped it over to the blank side, pulled my antique Waterman pen out of the reading-glasses case where I keep it, and handed it to him, calling his bluff. “Abracadabra, Steve. Here’s your chance. Get writing. I’ll just hang out here and make you real for a while, while you scribble.”

  He chuckled. “It might work at that, my friend,” he said. He held up the pen to look at it—an 1893 Waterman #25, eyedropper filled, a classic with a tapered cap and gold-filled bands around the barrel. Emily splurged and bought it for me to celebrate my first contract. He gave me the damnedest look, part smirk, part wonderment, then reached over to put his finger on the placemat, slid it back his way, and started writing. I shut up and for the next couple of hours just sat there and watched him write. It was my job to keep the beer coming for both of us.

  His handwriting looked clean and legible, but I couldn’t read it from where I sat, beyond being able to see that it was prose. He wrote steadily, the motion of pen against the paper was so fluid, so constant, that I could see the story taking shape before my very eyes. There was no hesitation, no long moments where he was lost in thought, no getting up to wash the dishes or cut the front yard and vacuum the carpet or stare out the window or any of the other tricks I used myself to stall for time in the middle of a writerly panic. It was utter confidence at work—dumbfoundingly utter confidence.

  As he got toward the end of the second paragraph, he coughed, the first one
I’d heard from him in the couple of months he’d been around. It was just a sharp, quick bark, that first one; but a few minutes later came another and then another, each one looser than the one before, like his lungs were filling with mucus right there in front of me. Finally, maybe an hour into that writing session—on his fourth or fifth placemat by then—the cough was so rattlingly hard that he had to stop and get it over with. I got up from my chair and came around the table to help him but he waved me away, then grabbed one of the big paper napkins from their holder on the table and held it to his mouth as he brought the mucus up. He spat into it finally, and his lungs seemed to clear. He tossed the napkin back on the table and went back to writing as I sat back down. Later, when the waiter came by to clear away the empty beers and the used napkin, I saw the red stains on the paper napkin.

  The coughing eased after that; there were still some fits but nothing so dramatic as that one, and then, finally, he seemed to hit a stoppingpoint. He set the pen down, leaned back in his chair, reached over to pickup his beer, and took a good, long pull. He smiled. “You, of all people, must understand just how good that felt, David.” “That’s a hell of a cough,” I said.

  He waved my concern away. “No, not that. The writing. It was . . he searched for the right word, “it was real; do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said. But I didn’t. Not then.

  “David, everything’s square with us, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I wonder,” he started to say, but then he fell into that cough again, a quick bark that built to a loose rattle that he covered with another big paper napkin, his whole body convulsing with it.

  “You ought to get that looked after,” I said.

  He laughed, and that brought him to a cough again for a minute. Then he smiled, nodded. “Yes. Get it looked after. Damnable thing.”

  Then he reached over to take my hand. Holding on to my hand, gripping it tighter as he spoke, he said this: “David. Why are you playing base ball? A fellow your age—you’re the oldest chap on the team by a good ten years—you could be hurt, pull a muscle, break an ankle. It doesn’t make any sense really, does it?” “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

  “But you’re playing.”

  I smiled. “Yes. I’m playing.”

  “Why?”

  I thought about it, started tossing out reasons, possibilities, excuses. “Hanging on to my youth? Getting some exercise? Still learning to hit a curve? Hell, I don’t know. Because I enjoy myself. Because I can quit worrying about other things when I’m out there pitching.”

  “What do you think about when you’re on the mound?”

  “The game. The situation. The next pitch. Whether or not my catcher can throw that runner out at second.”

  He smiled, the cough gone. “To the last question, the answer would be yes, old chap.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “I don’t know. I play because I love it. There’s no excuses, nothing gray out there. I pitch and they hit or they don’t, that’s it. At the end, it’s all very definite, very real.”

  “Real?”

  “Yes, real. I can feel the ball, the glove, the rubber, and the hole I’ve dug with my right foot in front of it; the downslope of the mound, the feel of the ball’s stitches against my fingertips, the way it comes off the side of the knuckle of this finger,” I held up the second finger of my right hand, “when I throw a curve, or off this spot,” I touched a spot a little higher up on that same finger, “when I throw a slider. It’s all about physical sensations and concentration, lovely, lovely concentration. It’s reality. Unarguable reality. I love it for that.”

  He nodded. “Unarguable reality. I like that.” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and said this: “Art—your art, my art—is involved in that terrible war between lies and the truth, David, and the truth must win out. Describe it truthfully. Make it real. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  He leaned forward. “If you’re truthful about the surface, if you get the details right, then the interior is revealed and you can get close to the bone, get inside the bone, to the marrow, and tell the truth. That’s all. This is something that took me years to figure out. Only at the end, lying there at Brede one day in the sun, dying, knowing I was truly dying, did I finally begin to figure it out. And then it was too late.”

  He let go of my hand, took the paper he’d been writing on, filled now with tiny scribblings that filled the page, folded it once, twice, and then put it into the pockets of his pants. He looked at me. "You have these skills, David. They’re very impressive, just like that little speech about base ball.

  “But they’re all a bit too, too . . .” he hesitated, came up with the word, “too pyrotechnic. I can’t find the truth of things in there anywhere. I don’t see anything that really matters. That’s all I thought I might say. All right?”

  What was I supposed to say to that, to this man who thought he was an invention of mine, someone I’d brought to life, created from the ether? “Sure,” I said. “It’s fine, Steve. Thanks for the input. I appreciate it, really.”

  “All right, then,” he said. And he got up and left, waving once as he walked out the door.

  Okay, I thought, finishing off my beer, that would be irony, right? A guy like him, a guy who thinks he’s a dead writer, preaching to me about the truth.

  I set my empty beer glass down on the table, tossed a twenty on top of it, and went over to the pool table to shoot some eight ball with Cora. Later, we headed back to my place at the beach, the one with the second-story deck that looks out over the dunes to the Gulf of Mexico so I can watch for the green flash that comes with some sunsets here. It’s a bright emerald moment that shoots straight up from the final instant of the sun’s disappearance into the Gulf. They’re wonderful and rare and require concentration, focus, to see. Some people watch for years and can’t get the hang of seeing one. I’d seen a lot of them—dozens— over the years.

  I wondered, as I got into my Lexus with Cora, if I’d ever get to see what Steve had written on those placemats. By this time I’d read everything Crane had ever written. I’d know in a heartbeat if this guy was the real thing. I wondered about that all the way home. Later, the green flash was terrific. So was Cora.

  Yellow Sky

  “He was just trying to help you, David,” Cora said to me on a Sunday morning a week later, the early light coming in the bedroom window to backlight her, so I couldn’t see much of her face, just the penumbra of that long, blond hair around

  her, a vision, a miracle.

  She rolled over on her side to face me, propped herself up on one elbow, shook her head to clear her hair out of her eyes. We’d argued about her telling Steve that I was a writer, too. Now she wanted to explain herself. “He likes you,” she said, “and when I told him you were a writer, he said he’d like to see your work; that’s all.”

  I stared at her. “You really believe it’s him? You do know that Stephen Crane died in a sanitarium in Badenweiler, Germany, in 1900, tight?”

  She stared back, slowly smiled. “So he’s back from the dead, or some kind of ghost? I don’t know, David. You tell me. You’re the fiction writer. You’re the one who makes all this stuff up.”

  I played along. “I wonder how he got here, then,” I said. “He keeps talking about H. G. Wells and his time machine. I looked it up to make sure. The Time Machine was Wells’s first novel, that’s all—an allegory about the British caste system in the Victorian Age.”

  “So what?” she said, leaning over to kiss me on my stomach. It tickled. Laughing, I pushed her back, then reached up to touch that perfect chin, run my fingers across those lips, as beautiful in the morning on their own as they were during the day when she’d put on her lip gloss and lined it in. She was young and perfect and I wasn’t either one. And she’d actually bought a copy of my short-story collection, which made her one of about a thousand people in the whole damn country. Part of me felt pretty awful about having an a
ffair with a girl of twenty-two. But part of me felt I was not to be blamed. At least, with Cora, I was alive again. I was even writing again. Not particularly well, I thought, but bad words on the screen are better than no words at all.

  I didn’t know how long the bubble would last, floating along there in the metaphoric breeze with me inside it, playing these kids’ games—sex with a twentysomething, baseball with a guy who claimed to be Stephen Crane.

  Cora laughed. I watched those breasts move as she sat up on her knees and looked down on me. “You should get him to come guest lecture in your short-story-writing class. Now that would impress the students.”

  “They’d believe it was really him,” I said. “All that stuff about Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and Henry James and all the rest—they’d lap that up. And the part about Wells and his time machine, they’d go crazy for that. All most of them want to write anyway is sci-fi and fantasy.”

  “He is pretty damn convincing,” she said.

  “And good looking too,” I added, “in that dangerous kind of way.”

  She reached down to feel me. I was ready and she moved over on top, concentrating, her eyes closed as she eased on down. Then she opened her eyes— those perfect eyes—and smiled. “Yes,” she said in a whisper, “he is kind of good looking, and dangerous.”

  And then she started moving, up and down, and I started to lose control again.

  That afternoon she came to the game to watch. It was the first time she’d done that. She didn’t miss a single one after it. She even started keeping score.

  One Dash—Horses

  The next game, Steve turned a single up the middle into a sliding double when the center fielder took his time fielding the ball and coming up to throw. Steve saw this as he rounded first and just kept going, sprinting hard for second. His slide was showy and maybe a little risky, spikes up pretty high, but he got in there safe and then I brought him in with a single of my own two pitches later. That moment, when he raced like a thoroughbred across the plate well ahead of the throw from left to score the tying run for us, was the second happiest I saw him in the six months he was here. His narrow face with that dour, scraggly, wild look on it finally lit up in a huge smile and he clapped his hands and shouted happily as he scored. His cough was gone. Never once in a practice or a game did I hear the faintest hint of that deadly rattle.