The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  “You remember Heather Bratus,” she’ll write to me. “She married the youngest Dzuba boy, from the packing-plant Dzubas, not the lumberyard Dzubas—well, her daughter . . .” She will tell me a long, often pointless, story about someone I know only by name. I often remind her that I lived only about three years in Northside, but she can’t seem to comprehend that, at least for more than a few minutes.

  But it was through my mother that I knew what became of Kaz, Eddie, and Cory.

  “Eddie, that nice boy with the bad eyesight, is an architect now. He turned Jewish. But then his name always was, wasn’t it? He married the daughter of the founder of the firm he works for.” She even went so far as to clip the bold-type listing from an outdated Yellow Pages directory: MOSER, SALTZMAN, GREEN & KLEINRATH, followed by a prestigious address in the downtown area of the city.

  “Your friend Bronislaw is a millionaire,” my mother reported. “Mrs. Piska says he owns a thousand trucks. But no one can figure how he got his money. Mrs. Hearne says he was doing something illegal to start with, drugs or stolen goods . . .” Kaz as Gatsby. Interesting. I’ve seen Kaz’s trucks in southern California, golden transports and tankers, with Bronze Transport in swirling script on the doors and down each side, a small Polish flag beneath the curlicued B in Bronze. “Your friend Bronislaw married the ex-mayor’s daughter. I guess two fortunes are better than one.”

  Once she mentioned Cory. “Pauline, the youngest Mazeppa girl—you remember the family has that little store on Railroad Avenue—got married over the weekend to a mining engineer from Chicago. A big splash at the Russian Orthodox Church and a huge reception at Northside Community Hall. I hope she’s done better than the middle girl; she married one of the awful Kliciak boys and has had nothing but grief.”

  As my final summer in Northside moved into the heat of July, I found myself doing what I vowed I’d never do. I drifted further and further away from the continuous baseball game. My paper route took up my time; I had money to spend. I helped Kaz work on his truck. He taught me to drive.

  One evening, as I headed home from Kaz’s place, I found myself crossing the baseball field at twilight. There had been a heavy thunderstorm an hour or two before and the game hadn’t resumed. The grass was sopping, the air fresh as an April morning. As I neared home plate, I saw someone leaning against the backstop.

  The last red tines of sunset clawed across the field. I recognized Cory by her silhouette. She beckoned to me. I walked slowly toward her across the damp infield. She smiled shyly. “It’s so fresh out here,” she said. “I like the air after a storm.” I didn’t say anything. “You haven’t been around very much this summer,” she went on. I mumbled about being busy, about working on Kaz’s truck. I became conscious that though I’d washed my hands I still smelled like solvent and had more grease on my clothes than I was comfortable with.

  Cory didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s walk,” she said. And she took my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do.

  “Pickup! Pickup!” screamed a couple of shrill voices from across Railroad Avenue as we started up the wooden sidewalk toward the edge of town. Though the words were directed at Cory, the girls yelling were schoolmates of mine, Ruthie Fontana and Cookie Brost. I realize now that Cory was doing what they didn’t have the nerve to do. But what she was doing made her different, and there is no room anywhere for people who are different. “Pickup!” they screamed again, then went into a fit of shrill giggling.

  “Don’t pay any attention,” whispered Cory.

  Cory’s father had made her quit school on her fifteenth birthday. For nearly a year, her life had revolved around the dark little store that smelled of coffee and oily floorboards. I didn’t speak but I squeezed Cory’s hand in a gesture of reassurance. I thought of Ruthie Fontana, pale, hatchet-faced, eyes quick as a bird’s. Ruthie went steady with one of the Bjarnson boys, who lived down by the stockyards. They had a blanket stashed in the bushes behind a Coppertone sign way out at the end of Railroad Avenue; they went there every day after school and had probably spent half the summer there, too. But they were going steady.

  There I was, walking up the sidewalk, the first hints of ground mist rising from the grassy gutters. Me, the clutch hitter, heart thrumming, tongue clotted in my mouth because I was holding the hand of a girl I’d known for three years and seen every baseball summer day that whole time.

  We slowed and stepped into a gateway where tall, yellow caragana rose high above our heads. Cory turned to face me. I held her, my hands flat on the middle of her back, and we kissed. Cory was soft in my arms and she smelled sweet; her lipstick was slick against my lips. We clung that way for a long time. I remained totally silent. I kissed down the side of her face, across her cheek and back to her lips. They parted willingly. At the same time, I was as happy and as frightened as I had ever been in my life. Cory needed to be held. So did I. Fantasies of rescue flashed through my mind. Cory moved one hand to the back of my neck, twined her fingers in my hair, pulled my face closer to hers. She had none of the coyness of the girls I went to school with, girls who doled out half-returned kisses for favors real or imagined.

  We walked on slowly, our arms now twined around each other’s waists. The only sound was our shoes on the hollow wooden sidewalk. The sidewalk ended a block farther on. A single avocado-green house sat fifty yards back from the street, a cow grazing near it. In the distance a dog yapped.

  We sat on the end of the sidewalk and kissed some more. Cory swung both her legs over my closest one. One of my arms braced her back. I kept thinking of what Eddie and Kaz said about her, of my seeing her with Nick Kliciak. What was expected of me? Wasn’t instinct supposed to play some part in a situation like this? Wasn’t I supposed to know what to do? I had no idea what to do. Cory was wearing a soft, pink sweater and a brown skirt. Her dark hair was restrained by pink barrettes shaped like kittens. I tentatively touched the sweater, let my fingers slide across to her breast. Cory didn’t resist, so I cupped her breast gently, trying to convey affection through my touch. My throat felt cemented shut, like a useless plumbing pipe. I could say nothing. I tried once to speak her name, just her name, a whisper in a tone that would convey some feeling. What emerged was a helpless sound, like a shoe being extracted from mud.

  “Your arm is shaking,” Cory said, burying her face in my neck. My left arm, which supported her back, was trembling.

  “I’m all right,” I managed. Cory shifted her weight, wrapped her arms tightly around my neck, kissed me fiercely. I caressed her breast.

  “Please, please, please,” Cory murmured, holding on to me so hard her own arms trembled. We sat for several more minutes, kissing, touching gently.

  “I have to get back,” Cory said finally. “Papa will miss me.” We walked back toward the lights of Northside, our arms still twined around each other’s waists.

  When we got to her door I cleared my throat and said, “Thanks, Cory.” I felt like a fool the instant the words were out.

  “For what?” She smiled, I think sadly, stood on her tiptoes, and brushed her lips across mine. “Do you like me?” she said suddenly, slipping her arms around me, resting her head against my chest.

  “Yes, I really like you,” I said.

  “Will you come by tomorrow evening?”

  “I will. I promise.”

  Cory slipped away, closing the screen door softly behind her.

  My wife and I sometimes work as a team on journalistic assignments. She does the interviewing; I do the writing. I don’t like interviewing people, because silence is still a problem in my life. Weeks after an interview I think of all the questions I should have asked. I relive the interview again and again even though it is water under the bridge. In the same manner I have spent a great deal of my life thinking about Cory. I feel like a wedding car with a tin can still traveling behind it, years and years after the event. I mean, I haven’t been obsessed to the point where it has destroyed my life. I have a lovely wife and a
grown daughter who has been a great joy to me. We live in a pleasant condo in La Mesa, California, with a cat the color of cinnamon, named Joy-Hulga. I have season tickets at nearby Jack Murphy Stadium where I watch the San Diego Padres perform. I have never mentioned Cory to my wife. In fact, I have never mentioned Cory to anyone, ever.

  I have not done very many things in my life of which I am genuinely ashamed. But in the week following my evening with Cory I did three reprehensible things that will trail after me like pale ghosts all my life.

  The first was that I did not go back to see Cory as I had promised. I wanted to. I planned to. But each evening as I made ready to walk over to Railroad Avenue, my throat tightened until I could barely swallow. Even away from her I could not think of a single word I could say. The anticipation of the long, crushing silences I knew lay ahead was too much for me. One day became two, three, six.

  The second thing was worse and occurred a week to the day after our meeting. At midmorning I had to run an errand for my mother. I caught the bus downtown. The bus was small, painted red and cream, and held only about twenty people. It looked like a loaf of bread with windows and wheels. When I got on there were only three other passengers and one of them was Cory. She was sitting in a window seat just in front of the rear door. I lowered my eyes, took a seat at the front of the bus with my back to her. I rode the bus twenty blocks past the downtown, nearly to the end of the line, staring straight ahead, unseeing, my neck stiff as a railroad tie. When I stood up to leave I noted with great relief that Cory was gone.

  What held me back? When I saw Cory why couldn’t I have marched down the aisle and sat beside her? Why couldn’t I have asked where she was going and then said something like “I guess we’re both pretty shy, but maybe if we spend a little time together we’ll get over the worst of it. Let’s just walk around downtown for a while and window-shop. Maybe we’ll get to be friends.” And I would have taken Cory’s hand, and she would have nestled her head against my shoulder. But then I’ve had nearly thirty-five years to compose that speech.

  My third act occurred later that same day and made the other two forgettable. Eddie came by Kaz’s place and the three of us tinkered with the truck. A couple of other sometime-ballplayers were hanging around.

  “I hear you’re travelin’ with Cory Mazeppa,” Eddie said to me.

  “Where would you hear that?” I said.

  “Cookie Brost saw you the other night. Nothin’ happens in Northside that somebody doesn’t see.”

  “So what?”

  “Cory’s hot stuff. Did you score?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “She took Kaz in the garage, more than once,” said Eddie, leering, his mouth twisted. “And me.” He danced backward a few steps. “So, what about you?”

  Everyone was waiting. They were all watching me.

  “She was easy,” I said.

  Northside and the city of which it is a suburb are not places where people buy books. They are rough, ethnically mixed, hard-working communities, distinctly lacking in imagination. I insisted the city be on my itinerary when I ventured out to promote Murder’s Blue Gown. My mother had visited California once or twice a year, spending the money from Nick Walczak’s dairy herd on airfare and hotels. I had not been back to Northside since the time about a month after my evening with Cory, when my mother sprang the surprise that she was marrying Nick and we were moving to Wisconsin.

  I arrived the night before Cory’s funeral. Coincidence? I suppose. A bitter wind drifted snow over the city. I bought a newspaper, found the ad touting my appearance at a bookstore the following evening, and scanned the obituaries, where I saw: “MAZEPPA, Corrina Ann (Kliciak). Suddenly, on Feb. 22; she is survived by . . .”

  The names of her four children, her parents, and her sisters followed. The oldest child was named James. Another coincidence, I suppose.

  Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby states, “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.” His, he says later, was honesty. I wonder about my own. It certainly isn’t honesty. Is hindsight a virtue? Where do vice and virtue blur together? How responsible are we for the lives of those we touch briefly? Is omission as much of a sin as commission? I tried not to think about it. But I couldn’t help it. I decided to attend the funeral of someone I hadn’t seen for sixteen years, half my lifetime, half hers. Yet I felt strongly that I had contributed to her death. At that point I didn’t know for certain how she died, but I would have bet my own life that she was a suicide.

  I arranged for my mother to take a taxi down to the hotel and have dinner with me. For once I was vitally interested in her oral history of Northside. I had only to ask “What’s new?” to elicit more information than I wanted to know about Cory and her family.

  “Lots of excitement,” my mother said, leaning conspiratorially across the dark blue linen tablecloth. “You remember Mazeppas, the family had the little store on Railroad Avenue, their second daughter, Cory, the one who married badly, committed suicide Monday. The old folks still live behind the store, though it’s not a store anymore; they closed up after Safeway opened across Railroad Avenue in the big shopping center. Well, the suicide isn’t official or anything. Mr. Mazeppa went to the bishop of their church; they have to have the funeral at a funeral home and not at the church, but she can be buried in their cemetery.” And she went on and on and on.

  “Hey, Flash.” It was Eddie at my shoulder, just as he used to be near me at my locker in high school and at the continuous baseball game. I was crossing the parking lot toward the door of the funeral home. Eddie punched my shoulder, just as he did a half lifetime ago, with a backhanded flick of his knuckles.

  “Eddie.” I turned and smiled down at him, his thick glasses revealing the same blue blur as in the past. His hair was styled now, the ever present shoelace defeated. He wore an expensive black overcoat, a maroon velvet yarmulke perched on his skull like a beanie.

  “Did you come all the way back here for the funeral?”

  “Coincidence,” I said, “though I might have, if I’d known in time.”

  We talked quietly about our present lives. We didn’t mention Cory.

  “How long since you’ve been home?” asked Eddie.

  “Years,” I said. Home. What a strange word. Where the heart is kept flashing through my head. Where the heart is. Not so untrue. This miserable, cold, inescapable city may well be where my heart is, I thought. A heart never grown to full size, suspended in the humid summer evenings of long ago: the baseball field, Cory, home.

  “You’ll see a lot of changes,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t recognize much. The downtown has been leveled and rebuilt.”

  “So has the old neighborhood. The Railroad Hotel’s still there, but there’s an auto dealership between the hotel and Mazeppas’ store. There’s a K Mart where we used to play baseball. Store’s a block square, dropped right down on the old playing field like a circus tent. You wouldn’t know the place.”

  At this moment Kaz appeared, getting out of a bronze limousine longer than the funeral cars parked at the side of the building.

  “This guy’s a wheel,” said Eddie, grinning, displaying Kaz to me like a personal accomplishment.

  “I guess none of us have done so badly, us three old ballplayers,” I said, shaking Kaz’s hand. Kaz looked every inch a millionaire: his hands were as soft and pink as his face, which was turning fleshy. In a few years he would look like a friendly bulldog.

  We sat shoulder to shoulder on one of the varnished pews of the funeral home. The service was brief, the chapel less than half full. The coffin was closed. A relief. I could never have brought myself to walk by it.

  “Those were the best of times,” said Eddie, smiling sadly. We were back in the parking lot waiting for Kaz’s limousine. He had offered to drop Eddie at work, me at my hotel. “God, I remember springing out of bed in the morning, wolfing down whatever I could find for breakfast, grabbing my glove, and heading for
the field. I was almost grown up before I realized how poor we were.”

  “I always knew how poor we were,” said Kaz.

  “But what was it about baseball?” I said. “Why did we spend three or four years of our lives on that playing field?”

  “It was something to do with the ritual,” said Eddie. “There was a wonderful sameness, a stability. At that age you don’t understand anything that’s happening to your body or your life. Kids at that age think they’re immortal; they don’t want their parents’ religion, if the parents have any . . .”

  “There was something primitive about the game,” said Kaz. “A closeness to the earth. The hardest part was waiting for the field to dry out after the snow melted. We’d try but we’d never make it, would we?”

  “We’d be playing with the water over our shoes. Remember how clots of mud used to cling to the ball.”

  “I can still see the spray flying when I hit it square on.”

  “Let’s drive by the field,” said Kaz. And he gave the driver instructions, not giving Eddie or me a chance to object.

  “Baseball is healing,” I said. “I wish I could put it better, but the feeling I had, though I didn’t know it then, is like I feel after being with a woman who loves me a lot, that dreamy lethargy, that feeling of well-being.”

  People stared at us as we got out of the limousine in the K Mart parking lot. Kaz and Eddie looked like Mafia hitmen; I looked like a poor cousin in my light jacket and slippery shoes. The sky was low, the air bitter; snow drifted around our ankles. Across the street Mazeppas’ store sat forlorn and in need of paint. There were curtains drawn across the front windows, and what used to be the door to the grocery was drifted full of snow and street refuse.

  Inside K Mart it was bright as summer noon. The ceiling was paved with white lights. There were few shoppers in the store. A bedraggled mother pushed a silver cart with two children in it. Another was tugging at her coat, whining.

  “The backstop and home plate would be over there,” said Kaz, pointing to the women’s wear section, where circular dollies full of bright, cheap clothes were crowded together like a field of giant flowers.