The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  I don’t exactly say that I’m goin’ along but when Cal gets up from the table, belches, and heads for the door, I follow him. “Don’t expect me to bail you out if you get in trouble,” says Delly.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say.

  “As long as you know you’re in bad company,” she says.

  “Pussywhipped,” says Cal as he guides the car across the desert, spirals of red dust coiling out behind us. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than a pussy-whipped man,” he mumbles. “If she’d said you can’t go, you wouldn’t be here.”

  I don’t deny it, which don’t please Cal very much.

  “Don’t take no crap from ’em, boy. She’s my own little girl, but I don’t know where she gets off bein’ so feisty.”

  The Last Stand is located in a Quonset hut, surrounded by oilfield supply businesses on the far outskirts of El Reno. The building has one small window in the front, with two blue neon Coors signs bleeding down it. Inside there’s a long bar down one wall and about twenty tables with scruffy kitchen chairs pushed under them, and a pool table at the very rear with one bright light above it.

  “Bring us a coupla Coors and keep ’em comin’,” Cal says and then he proceeds to tell anyone who cares to listen and a few who don’t that he is the man taught Red Adair all about fightin’ oilwell fires.

  After about the third beer he spots a baseball sittin’ on a shelf behind the bar. “Stanley here is a pro-fessional baseball player,” he says real loud, and slaps my shoulder, practically makin’ me bust a tooth on my beer bottle.

  “Lefty,” I say. “Nobody’s called me Stanley since I started holdin’ my baby bottle in my left hand.”

  “Bet that wasn’t the only thing you used to hold in your left hand,” laughs Cal.

  “I reckon it wasn’t,” I say, and laugh with him.

  “Where y’all play?” asks one of the roughnecks.

  “Triple A,” says Cal. “An All Star, goin’ to be in the Bigs next season, you see if he ain’t.”

  “What Triple A?” asks the roughneck.

  “Hawaii,” I say, not missin’ a beat, and pickin’ the team farthest away from Oklahoma City.

  “Seen ’em three times in Honolulu this summer an’ I don’t remember you.”

  “I was out with an injury for about six weeks. Must have been then,” I say. With my luck he’ll have seen me in Butte, and remember me.

  Cal winks at me, gathers up a handful of empty Coors bottles and walks to the end of the bar. He sets three of the squat empties at about one-foot intervals on the end of the bar. The empties are about the same colour as the bar wood and in the bad light they blend right in.

  “I’m bettin’,” says Cal, “that Stanley here can knock them three bottles off with three pitches of the ball,” and he nods to where the baseball sits like a white tomato beside the cash register.

  “Cal,” I whisper, “how many people here know your full name is Calvin Washington Jefferson Coolidge Collinwood?”

  “I’m bettin’ my son-in-law, Lefty here . . .” and he repeats the proposition, flashing a wad of twenties.

  “I’ll take fifty,” says one roughneck.

  “Twenty says he can’t hit three outa three,” growls a guy built like a jeep, and with enough oil on his clothes to soak down a quarter mile of red dust.

  “I ain’t sure I can do it,” I whisper to Cal.

  “Cal here ain’t never rowed with but one oar in the water,” says the bartender, winking at me. “I’ll take fifty of that.”

  “Put your money away,” I whisper to Cal. “I ain’t a pitcher.”

  “Hell, boy, you play way out there in the outfield, you told me so yourself. You got to throw two, three times as far as a pitcher. Can’t be no more’n forty feet from one end of this bar to the other.” And he waves the roll of bills again. “Duck soup,” he says.

  There’s about $250 dollars riding on my arm. The bartender tosses me the baseball. “You know,” he says, “one time Mickey Mantle came in here. Was just drivin’ past, but the fellow drivin’ Mick’s 1956 scarlet Lincoln Continental convertible was sailin’ her at about 125 mph. The sheriff hauled them over, but he brought them here instead of to jail. Mick bought a round for the house and he signed a baseball. It said, ‘Best wishes to Sheriff McCall and everybody at the Last Stand,’ and it was signed ‘Your Friend, Mickey Mantle.’ But somebody stole it right off the back of the bar.”

  They discuss whether I should get warm-up pitches or not and decide against it. It is awkward as hell to wind-up indoors, and I can barely see them little brown bottles at the far end of the bar. I let drive at the one on the left and hit the centre one dead on, sendin’ it screamin’ across the top of the pool table where it shatters against the back wall. All the people have been moved out of that part of the bar so it don’t do no damage. There must be fifty people standin’ around watchin’ me.

  I let fly at the left one again, and the ball bounces off the bar about two feet in front of the bottle but rises just enough to tip the rim, and the bottle topples off the bar.

  “I told you he was a pro-fessional,” says Cal. “He might even pitch this one from behind his back.”

  I give Cal one mean stare; he catches my drift and shuts up.

  I take a big stretch and wing one at the last bottle. There’s a stitch loose in the baseball from ricochetin’ around the bar after my other pitches, and it makes a whirrin’ sound and curves way more than I ever intended it to. Still it only misses to the right by about two inches.

  “I be go to hell,” says Cal, as people rush up to collect their bets. Somebody retrieves the ball and the bartender hands it to me, along with a pen. I sign it, ‘Best Wishes to everybody at the Last Stand, your friend Lefty Brooks.’

  “I need me some fresh air,” says Cal, headin’ for the side door. “I be go to hell,” he’s mumblin’. “Shoulda bet ’em two out of three.”

  “Cal keeps the whole town in spendin’ money,” says the bartender, grinning. “Brought in this little spit-lizard one day an’ took bets he could eat it alive . . .”

  After about ten minutes I figure I need some air too.

  As I head out the side door I hear a little chink-chink sound off to my left. The moon looks like a slice of silver floatin’ on its back in the sky.

  “Pssst,” says a voice that I know is Cal’s.

  I walk into the darkness to where there are five or six cars parked. Cal is just lettin’ down his jack and the pick-up truck he’s been workin’ on is level to the sand. A wheel lays flat on its side beside where each axle rests on the ground.

  “Give us a hand here,” says Cal, pickin’ up one of them wheels and layin’ it on my outstretched arms. Then he stacks another wheel on top of the first one. “Take ’em to the truck,” he whispers. “I’m gonna get me the grille and the front bumper.”

  I am only about halfway to the truck when a car switches on its lights, and I feel like a convict getting picked up by a search-light beam.

  “Just stay right where you are,” says a voice behind the light.

  I do. There are footsteps comin’ up behind me on the red shale. “Now where’d you get that armful of wheels,” says the voice.

  “Would you believe I won them from this guy in the bar?” I say. The voice steps around where I can see it, and it belongs to a man in a sheriff ’s uniform who is way taller than I am, wearin’ a trooper’s hat, and packin’ a gun and a badge.

  “Don’t set ’em down,” says the sheriff, noticin’ my knees beginnin’ to buckle under the weight. “Just carry these here wheels back into the Stand and we’ll check out your story.”

  I take a couple of steps toward the bar before I have second thoughts. The wheels almost certainly belong to one of the roughnecks. Those dudes are so tough even their spit has muscles. And most of them have some pretty primitive ideas of justice. I figure I could be in a lot worse company.

  “I was plannin’ to pay for them when I could,” I say.

  “I’m s
ure you were, son. Now where did you put the jack?”

  “I didn’t use one,” I say, settin’ the wheels down and breathin’ heavily.

  “You reckon you can put them back without a jack?”

  “No sir. They’s easier to take off than put on.”

  The sheriff walks to the back of the black-and-white and opens the trunk. “Take out the jack,” he says to me. “I don’t want to get my hands dirty. I’ll move the cruiser over and give you some light to work by, then I’ll just write this up while you put the wheels back on.”

  While he’s moving the patrol car I notice Cal’s truck easin’ off the lot and straight out into the desert, no sign of lights about it.

  The sheriff stands with a foot on the bumper of the patrol car and writes on a clipboard, while I sweat the wheels into place and tighten the lug nuts.

  “You come into town with Junkyard Cal, right?”

  “Eeeyuh,” I say, hoping the sound can be interpreted as either yes or no.

  “All the way from Iowa, eh?” he says, looking at my driver’s licence. “You must be the guy married Cal’s good-lookin’ daughter?”

  “Eeeyuh,” I say again.

  “If I thought you were dumb enough to be courtin’ the other one, I’da probably shot ya for a stray. That Regina Collinwood is the ugliest girl in six counties; she is gonna be a burden to Cal in his old age. There ain’t much goes on around El Reno that I don’t know about,” the sheriff goes on. “Cal’s not really a bad man. He usually steals from strangers, or at least people who can afford it. He sells reasonable, and his initiative keeps him off the county welfare.”

  At the jail the sheriff lets me wash up before he locks me in the second of two cells. The first one is occupied by a forlorn-looking Mexican who’s playing “Streets of Laredo” on a plastic harmonica.

  “We’ll just wait for a while and see who comes to fetch you,” says the sheriff, grinning. “I hope it’s Cal. Doggone, but I love to listen to Cal lie. Ain’t nobody in these parts can do it better. I sure would like to know how he talked that oil company into givin’ him that truck.”

  “Ain’t I allowed a phone call?” I ask the sheriff.

  “Call me Bud,” he says, “an’ sure, you’re allowed a phone call; but who you figurin’ on callin’? I reckon there ain’t no phone out at Cal’s place, unless’n he’s tapped in on the oil company line again. Did that a year or two ago, but they got a little testy when he charged up a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of long-distance bills. He was sellin’ his car parts in about forty states there for a while.”

  I guess he can see I’m lookin’ kind of worried.

  “Also, if I let you use the phone I got to read you your rights, an’ if I do that I got to book you, an’ if I do that why things can get plumb out of my control, and you never can tell what might happen. So why don’t we just wait around until somebody comes to get you. I suspect Cal will come pussyfootin’ in like a coyote casing a hen house. Doggone, I never did look at the front of that truck; did he get the grille?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Magnets for fingers, that’s what Cal’s got. They should have a contest for strippin’ down cars on Real People or That’s Incredible! Cal could become a genuine celebrity if they did. Why don’t you catch forty winks, boy. And let me give you a little advice: if you gonna steal, don’t be dumb enough to get caught.”

  It wasn’t Cal come to get me.

  About 5:00 A.M. I hear the brakes on the ’71 Plymouth singing from about a quarter mile away as Delly starts slowin’ her down. The sheriff gets up from his desk and goes out to meet her.

  “You holdin’ Lefty here?”

  “Sure am,” says the sheriff.

  “How much is he gonna cost me?”

  “How much you figure you can afford?”

  “Don’t be cute. I just want to bail him out.”

  “You go have a word with him while I figure out the charges,” he says.

  Delly starts talkin’ as she crosses into the room. “I woke up with a start about four o’clock and you wasn’t there and I could hear Cal snorin’ so I knew somethin’ was wrong.” All I can think of is how good she looks to me. She’s missed the bottom button on her blouse so it’s done up crooked all the way, and her red-rock hair is all tousled, one leg of her jeans is pushed into her boot the other is caught on the top and bunched up. She must wonder why I’m grinnin’ as if I just hit a home run with a big-league scout watchin’. “I had to thump on Cal for about five minutes before he woke up. ‘Where’s Lefty?’ I yelled. ‘He got himself in a mite of trouble,’ said Cal. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I screamed. ‘You was sleepin’ when I come in, and he’ll still be there in the morning. I figured we’d all drive to town bright an’ early, and I’d treat for breakfast at the Pronghorn Drive-in after we picked him up.’ ‘What’d he do?’ I asked. ‘Well, I don’t rightly know,’ said Cal. ‘You know how these young fellas is, always lettin’ off steam.’ So what did you do? And what did Cal have to do with it?”

  “I sort of got in a fight,” I say. “This here cowboy mistook you for your sister and said I was married to the ugliest girl in six counties. Now I couldn’t stand for that, could I?”

  “I woulda bet money Cal was involved some way. Is he tellin’ the truth?” she says to the sheriff.

  “Yes, ma’am, he is,” says the sheriff, and I breathe easy.

  “Well, how much is the fine?”

  “I reckon he’s cooled down by now. I’ll just let him off with time in custody. You take him home, Miss Delores, and take good care of him. I expect to see him in the Big Leagues next year. Y’all remember me to your papa, ya hear?”

  The next day Delly ain’t exactly happy with me or Cal. But, oddly enough, her anger kind of draws Cal and me together.

  I guess Cal is a little sheepish about runnin’ out on me, because he ain’t got around to mentioning last night at all. We make a lot of small talk about the weather. Eventually he goes and digs for a while in a big metal box that has Gulf Oil stencilled on the side of it, and comes sidling over to me, one hand behind his back.

  “I won this from a guy in a pool game a few years back,” he says, producing a baseball. “You bein’ a pro-fessional and all I thought you might appreciate it.”

  The baseball is brown and dry as if it’s been baked in an oven. The inscription is still visible—“Your Friend, Mickey Mantle.”

  “I do appreciate it, Cal,” I say. “I’ll put it right on top of the TV in our new condo.”

  We are still makin’ small talk and suckin’ beer when we see a cloud of red dust puffin’ up behind the closest sand ridge and a strange car comes barrelin’ into the yard, screams straight through the chickens, and spins around with so much noise it brings Ma and Regina out onto the sloping wooden porch. When the dust settles downwind, givin’ Cal and me a faceful, Delly’s brother Eddie unwinds from behind the wheel and stands there like a smilin’ hairpin.

  “I be go to hell,” says Cal, and then to me, “it’s Eddie with his newto-him car.”

  Eddie just stands grinnin’ at us through the hole in his face where he got two teeth knocked out in a Chicano bar up to El Reno. We all walk around the car, which is a ’57 or ’8 Buick of a kind of winey-red colour, like we were doing some kind of ritual. We kick the three whitewalls and one regular tire and comment on how great she looks. I mean, what else can you say to a guy that’s just got his first new-to-him car, except that it looks good, even if it’s covered in dents and got about the same number of rods knocking, and has tailfins on which you could terminally injure yourself.

  “Looks like she’s puckered to shit,” says Cal. And I know that Cal still likes to come home with a new-to-him car and take everybody for a ride into El Reno, where he parks in the Taco Bell lot right outside the dining room window. Then everybody goes inside where it’s downright cold, orders Mexican food, and grins at the car through the thick, polished glass.

  Eddie hops behind the whe
el, kind of folding himself up like he was made of coathangers, taking two or three tries to get all of him into the car. Eddie was six-foot-eight the last time anybody measured him, which was a couple of years ago when he was in his third year of Grade 8.

  “Ain’t this just the best shitkickin’ car you ever laid eyes on?” Eddie wants to know. And nobody’s about to tell him it ain’t true.

  “Maaaa,” he bawls, “come for a ride.” Then he hollers for Delores to get on out of the house and see his new car, and for Regina to be careful as hell of the leopard-skin seat covers when she gets in the back seat.

  “Come on, guys?” he says to us.

  “Can’t,” says Cal. “I’m on duty.” He says this with both thumbs hooked over the straps of his overalls.

  “Ain’t gonna be no fire,” says Eddie.

  “Never can tell,” says Cal.

  “You catch me next trip,” says Delly, after she’s admired the colour of the paint and the big plastic statue of Jesus on a spring that’s held to the dashboard by a suction cup.

  As soon as Ma closes the passenger door Eddie takes off spinnin’ the wheels and scatterin’ the chickens again. The force of his start tips Regina over backwards from where she was hangin’ onto the back of the passenger seat.

  After the dust settles Cal cracks us each another warm beer. Delly’s gone in the house and I bet to the back bedroom that used to be hers. I remember that first night in Oklahoma City when Delly took me to her room. When I started to take her clothes off she helped me, and things have been gettin’ better ever since. I’m kind of sidl’n toward the house but Cal is busy tellin’ me all the things he knows about, like cam shafts and oil rigs. I let my mind wander until I hear him say something about, “What you reckon that is over yonder?”

  When I open my eyes I see a streak of smoke risin’ on the horizon. “Maybe it’s an oilwell fire?” I say.

  Cal looks at me like I was Eddie or Regina.

  “Oilwells go BOOM, and shoot fire way up into the air, and any god-damned oilwell firefighter knows that,” shouts Cal.

  “You’re the expert,” I tell him.