The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  Five minutes later the Fox is back. “Let’s go shopping,” he says, clapping his hands together. King picked a department store on Granville Street, in the high-rent district. We cruise the men’s wear department and he picks out a complete wardrobe, topped by this nifty $550 suede suit. The Fox makes mental notes of types and sizes, tapping his head just in front of his left ear to show he has the information stored there. He takes the suede suit off the rack, holds it up to inspect it, puts it back with the hanger facing opposite to its neighbors.

  “Where’s your cannon?” I ask.

  “She’s around,” says the Fox.

  I look up to the mezzanine to where a coffee shop overlooks the business floor. A slim Black girl with tight, cornrowed hair and a long skirt sits staring down at us.

  “Strong?” asks King.

  “Can slap a table-model typewriter between her thighs and boogie out of the store like she was being chased.”

  “Class,” says King. The Fox nods in agreement.

  “Meet me back at the Sunshine at seven,” he says to King. “We’ll have everything for you by then,” and he smiles though his thin, red mustache covers his upper lip completely.

  7.

  Outside the store, King and I part company. I am halfway back to my room when my teeth start to itch and I develop a feeling as if someone is staring hard at the back of my neck. Some guys claim they can tell when they enter a room if someone is carrying a piece. Other guys claim they can smell cops. To me there is something about the Fox that smells bad. Maybe it takes an outsider to spot an outsider. I circle around and head back to the store. Everything seems okay. The suede suit is exactly as we left it. I move to the mezzanine coffee shop and take a table with a view.

  Two nervous hours later my hunch is rewarded. I watch as a sad-looking man in a brown-striped suit emerges from the dressing room area, takes the suede suit off the rack and carries it into the back. He has store-dick written all over him.

  As I head back toward the Sunshine I wonder how I should handle the situation. The Fox and his lady are almost certainly undercover heat. They won’t hit King or Hacksaw today. Sometimes these types make hundreds of deals before the ax falls. An operation can go on for a year or more, then in the dark of night the heat covers the drag like a sponge and slurps up every small-timer who ever custom ordered a fivefinger-bargain or dealt an ounce of grass. But the Black chick, Cora, is supposed to be a junkie. That puts a whole new face on the operation. A lot of street people, Hacksaw included, could take a big fall. I’m clean, so I could warn the Fox that I’m onto him. If I did, he and his chick would disappear off the street fast as the steam that huffs up out of manholes. But they’re not smart enough to leave well enough alone; they’d still drag the streets, use the evidence they’ve collected.

  I guess I’m gonna have to decide if I’m them or us. “There’s one law on the streets and one law in the suburbs. If the heat would only realize that it would be a lot better world.” I realize that I’m quoting King. Well, maybe he’s right.

  At the Sunshine I head directly for the Coffin Corner. I don’t wait to be invited up the steps. As I drop into a chair across from Hacksaw the corner gets very quiet.

  “Get rid of the jailbait,” I say, “we’ve got to talk.”

  A couple of Coffin Chasers are reaching for the shanks in their boots, but Hacksaw stops them with a movement of his head. He unwinds the blonde and pushes her away. “Bring Hacksaw fifty dollars,” he says to the chickie. She pouts. He grabs a handful of ass and holds on. She yells as he gives her a push toward the back door. “And make it quick.” She scuttles off like a dog that’s just been kicked.

  Hacksaw sniffs the fingers he’s had down the front of Blondie’s jeans, and smiles. “It better be important, my friend,” he says to me.

  “Could be,” he says, after he’s heard what I have to say. “The Man gets trickier every year.

  “Be cool, I know how to handle this. Like that old joke, try to pretend nothing unusual is happening. All you got to do is what I tell you . . .”

  8.

  I disappear until about an hour before the deal is due to go down. King is with Lannie at her favorite table near the door. She is stoned, nodding into her beer, her neck whiplashing every thirty seconds or so. A john comes over, taps her awake; she gets up, walking like she has rubber ankles, takes his arm and they head for the door. She’s wearing jeans and her sweater has stains on it.

  “She’s startin’ to look like a whore,” says King. “Guess I hit the bricks just in time.

  “Lannie’s a class chick,” he goes on, “all she needs is an aggressive old man to keep her in line. What I like about Lannie is she can handle a john or a deal even when she’s blissed to the gills. Her head clears when there’s bread on the line.”

  When she come back to the table, King puts an arm around her shoulder, pulls her and her chair close up to him. “Later tonight,” he says, “I’m gonna get me a room, some good smoke, a bottle of Three Crown and a lady who like to fuck up a storm. You know of a chick who might like to join me?”

  Lannie blows smoke and licks her lips. “Why don’t you cross the room off your list, we can use mine,” and she rubs her nose against his shoulder.

  “Suits me,” says King, “but first some business. You know the Fox’s woman?”

  “Sure, Cora . . .”

  “She a junkie?”

  “Yeah. She buys . . .”

  “You ever seen her fix?”

  “She’s on the stuff, man . . .”

  “You ever seen the needle in her arm?”

  “No.”

  He clues Lannie into the scene. She looks at me in a new light, actually seeing me; she smiles an off-center smile.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” says King. “Cora’s on her way here. Go outside and get a couple of girls you can trust. The CCs want to talk to Cora but they don’t want to be seen snatching her off the street. And make sure you keep her hands in sight, she might be carrying a piece.”

  Lannie is out the door a minute later.

  “Blissed or not, she’s a good lady,” says King.

  Seven o’clock comes and goes. I have purposely sat with my back to Fox’s table, but every few minutes I sneak a glance at him. His feet are on the floor now, and he is nervous, doing a little dance. I bet he’d like to be up and pacing, but he’s got to pretend to be cool.

  Lannie comes in the front door, catches King’s eye, winks, and goes out again.

  He draws his index finger across his throat in a quick, slashing motion. “Fucking snitch,” he says, without moving his lips.

  9.

  Following Hacksaw’s instructions, I go and make a phone call on the single pay phone by the front door. I then accompany King over to Fox’s table.

  “Where’s your cannon?” King says, standing close beside the Fox, giving him a pretend frisk, enough to establish he doesn’t have a piece under his shirt. About his only chance right now is to haul out a piece, fire a shot into the ceiling, and wait for the management to call in the street cops.

  “She’s a little late, man. You know you can’t trust junkies,” and he gives us a little shark of a smile, though his eyes are blinking ten times a second. “What’s with the frisk? You heat or something?”

  “Or something,” says King. “Fox, you and your lady have made a lot of people unhappy.”

  “I don’t follow,” says Fox. “Don’t worry. Cora will be along with your stuff.”

  “No she won’t.” The Fox’s skin is pale even under his beard and there are stains under the arms of his dark blue shirt. “They must have told you what happens to snitches, undercover, fucking pigs. You must know how a chick gets a few straightforward words carved into her body before she o.d.’s. You must have heard about how they find snitches with their cock and balls stuffed in their mouths. That’s done while they’re still alive, Fox. As a warning to the Man not to put any more snitches on the street. But they always do. Guys like yo
u figure they’re smarter than guys like us,” and he stares at Fox, expressionless. I realize I’m looking at Fox the same way, not a trace of emotion on my face.

  Fox is staring around in desperation. Hacksaw and most of the CCs are between him and the back door. A couple of Coffin Chasers, like leather-covered sides of beef, hang on each side of the front entrance.

  “If you’re a snitch, man, you got one chance, and that’s to get to the pay phone and call your friends to come and get you.” King picks a dime off the green terry-cloth table top and holds it out to Fox. He snatches it and darts toward the phone.

  “Thanks,” he mumbles.

  “Luck,” says King, then gives me a look. I nod.

  He’ll need it. I jammed the phone with a slug before we visited Fox’s table.

  Wavelengths

  Me and Brody driving north. We’re four days into our trip home; southern Florida to Bellingham, Washington, over 3300 miles, five days if we push it, but neither of us are in the mood to push it. We’ve just finished our first summer of professional baseball, Brody and me. Neither of us is happy with how it turned out. The baseball was bad, at least for me. Our personal lives were worse.

  We chug along in the beat-up Plymouth we shared in high school. I can see a map of the USA in my head, picture our progress, like a coloured bleep inching across the map.

  More than anything in the world, I’ve always wanted to play in the Bigs, and until this summer I always believed I had a great chance. I still believe I have a chance, but my stock is way down. My fielding is okay; I play a mean second base, cover a lot of ground, turn the double play with the best of them, steal a lot of bases if I get on base. Getting on base is my problem. I batted .212, didn’t walk as many times as I should have, swung at a lot of sliders in the dirt, and was always out in front of the changeup. As I’ve found out to my regret, there’s a big difference between being a star on a high school team in Washington and being one of twenty-five guys on a Rookie League team, all of whom were stars in high school.

  I’m pressing management for an assignment to play winter baseball in Mexico or the Dominican Republic. If they give me the opportunity I’ll take batting practice six hours a day. I’ll learn to lay off the bad sliders, I will. I’ll learn the strike zone, learn to be patient at the plate, practise bunting. I’ll lay a towel about twenty feet up the third-base line. I’ll bunt until I can stop two of three on the towel. I want to play in the Bigs so bad I’ll do anything, I will.

  Brody hit twenty-seven home runs, batted .276, and was okay in the outfield. The scouts liked his power, his bat speed. There was talk of him going straight through to Triple A after spring training next year.

  It’s odd the way life works out, isn’t it? Brody’s never going to play baseball again. He told the organization the day after our final game. After the interview, he gave away his glove to a twelve-year-old boy in the parking lot.

  “I’m never going to attend a game again as long as I live, not even watch the World Series on TV,” he said, as we made our way to our dusty old Plymouth, which was parked outside the house where we’d rented a basement suite, the back of the car already crammed with our clothes and equipment, Brody’s stereo and weights. The long aerial was bowed back, casting a scythe-like shadow across the hood and windshield.

  When we get home Brody’s going to enrol at Western Washington State University in Bellingham, where he’ll study chemistry, get a job teaching high school, and never leave Bellingham except to ski a little up in Snoqualmie Pass, or drive to Seattle for an afternoon at the Pike Street Market. Brody doesn’t want any surprises. I can’t imagine a life without them.

  I feel obligated to report back to my family, but I’ll be gone after a couple of weeks, a month at the most. Unlike Brody, I’ve got a few loose ends to untangle in Florida. If, in a couple of years, I don’t advance toward the Bigs the way I feel I should—I’ve no plans to be a career minor-league player—I’ll still head for a big city, Chicago probably, or New York. I want to travel, see everything there is to see, live and work somewhere at the centre of the action.

  “This whole summer’s been all about growing up,” says Brody. “I grew up this summer,” he’s said, about once every hour during the whole trip, whether he’s driving, or riding shotgun, or fiddling the radio to keep a fresh station blasting out music at us.

  “If growing up involves getting your brains scrambled by a girl, quitting a career that would probably make you famous, would certainly earn you a million dollars, maybe even a million dollars in one year, just to study chemistry, teach at a local high school, and probably marry the girl next door and live a boring life ever after, then I’ll stay the way I am, thank you. Not that I haven’t got my problems.”

  “Not that you haven’t,” says Brody.

  Brody is 6’ 3” with reddish-blond hair, a wide, ruddy face, and pale blue eyes. He has arms big as furnace pipes, and size XL shirts are taut across his back and shoulders. I’m the opposite, 5’ 9”, 165 lbs., a bit stoop-shouldered from crouching at second base since I was five years old. I’m dark, with straight black hair, worried brown eyes and a crease between my brows that my summer girlfriend, Mary, thought was sexy, and my mother says she could plant petunias in.

  Brody had the grades to go to college, but we both opted to play minor-league baseball as soon as high school was finished. Brody graduated. Me, I studied just enough to stay on the high-school baseball team. If I’m lucky I’ll never have to crack a book again, except maybe my bank book. The bulk of my reading consists of checking the morning sports pages to see if I was mentioned in the write-up of yesterday’s game.

  It was Brody’s folks who convinced him to skip college. They figured Brody would get to the Bigs faster that way. We’ve lived all our lives together, me and Brody, and his folks are the greatest. I remember when we were about six years old, Brody’s mom was always the one who picked us up after school and took us to practice, and was right there cheering for us from the stands behind our bench. Oh, sometimes she’d get a little carried away, give the umpire a bad time, or bug the coach too much if Brody wasn’t getting the playing time she felt he deserved. But she used to defend me, too. Boy, did I appreciate that. My own parents weren’t much interested in my playing baseball. They’d have been prouder of me if I’d been an A student. Mom is a social worker and Dad teaches mathematics at Fairhaven College in Bellingham.

  As we travel, the radio stations change every fifty miles or so. Whoever isn’t driving has to search until something we like comes in clearly. Until a few minutes ago we had a dandy country music station; George Strait wailed, and Merle Haggard did some songs by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But the station has faded away until it’s only a shadow and something else is coming in all scratchy and tinny, some news and talk station. Radio stations can’t be on the same wavelength unless they’re a long ways apart. A lot like people, I figure.

  I wish that just once in my life everybody could be on the same wavelength. But I guess that’s not the way life is. See, if Brody and I could have traded parents, and then this summer, if we could have become involved with different girls . . .

  Brody’s dad is a huge, shaggy guy who works for the forest service and was away all week planting trees or cutting windbreaks, or whatever. But on the weekends he’d be out at every game, cheering Brody on, giving him an audience to perform for. But Brody never cared. He never tried. He was just so naturally good he was a star anyway. I performed for Brody’s folks, and when they praised me it was better than a double chocolate malt, and I’d wriggle around like a pup being petted while they told me how good I was and offered pointers on how I could be even better. Brody never responded to their praise, except maybe to be a bit embarrassed.

  Brody’s dad was so great. He’d take us out on Saturday and Sunday nights and he’d hit Brody fly balls for a couple of hours. I’d cover the bases, after Brody’s dad called out the situation, you know, “Runner going to advance from second to third o
n a run-scoring sacrifice fly,” or “Single to centre with slow runner on second, play at the plate.”

  All my dad ever had to say was, “Have you done your homework?”

  Then Brody would move to first base. “When a great hitting outfielder loses his speed they move him to first,” Brody’s dad would explain. But Brody complained, almost every time we practised, and sometimes he even acted like he’d rather be someplace else. Brody’s dad would hit me grounders for an hour or so, and he’d coach me on playing second base, and Brody on playing first. On the best evenings Brody’s mom would come out and play shortstop. She was a pretty fair fielder if the ball was hit right at her, and her being there allowed me to practise turning the double play.

  “If you’d just hustle like C. J. here,” Brody’s dad said I don’t know how many times to Brody. But Brody had one speed in the outfield, and that was dead slow. He had instinct though, and because of that he always got a jump on the ball and looked a lot faster than he really was.

  While the Langstons sure wished Brody had my hustle, I wished they were my parents. I’m gonna have to spend a lot of time with them in the first week we’re home. They’re gonna be heartbroken when they find out what Brody’s done, if they haven’t already. I can’t believe that the organization hasn’t phoned to tell them Brody’s quit professional baseball for good.

  I figure three, four seasons at the most and I’ll be in the Bigs. I’ll send the Langstons free tickets; I’ll invite them to be my guests wherever I’m playing. If I was doing what Brody’s doing, my parents would be the happiest people in the world. And if Brody had half my desire to play in the Bigs his parents would be in pig heaven.

  We made it as far as Atlanta the first night, which was too far to drive in one day, so we took it easier the second day, only drove as far as Nashville. We spent the night touring some of the country bars downtown after we discovered that the Grand Ole Opry was sold out for months in advance. Brody wanted to push on. I think he’s actually looking forward to disappointing his parents.