The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  We glanced at each other, inched up the steps to the deck, straining forward trying to make out what was happening. The glass doors were wide open. Frank had his back to us. Angie was bent over the arm of the black leather sofa. She was naked from the waist up, her face against the leather seat cushion.

  Her arms were tied behind her back. Frank was wielding a belt or a length of leather strap, bringing it down hard across Angie’s ass, the backs of her legs. Her ankles were tied with a leather thong. It became clear as we watched that this was not a punishment inflicted in anger, for the strokes of the strap were often a half minute even a minute apart.

  Frank was talking to her, constantly, though we couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, for he was speaking in a measured, almost conversational voice. There was the sound of the strap striking Angie’s denimed ass, her cries and whimpering, the soothing music, the unintelligible words Frank spoke, then the strap again.

  After we’d watched five or six strokes, Frank talked for a longer time, as if he were making a serious argument, as if Angie was in a position to do something, anything. He bent close to Angie to hear something she said. He nodded. He set the strap down, and reaching under her undid the zipper on Angie’s jeans. He pulled them down a few inches at a time until they were bunched about her knees.

  Still talking to her, he picked up the strap, and at that moment the record ended and suddenly we could hear Frank’s voice clearly, even though he was speaking toward the interior of the building.

  “Let me hear it, baby. Tell me how much you want it. Show me how much you want it.”

  Angie was crying, whimpering, babbling, but I know I saw her raise her ass an inch or two in response to Frank’s words.

  “That’s it, baby, that’s it,” he crooned, then brought the strap down twice in succession, once across her bare ass, the second across the backs of her legs.

  Angie screamed, and we could make out, “No more. No more,” as Frank began talking to her again.

  Jee let go of my hand and strode across the deck toward the open door. I followed, my heart hammering. But they were so involved they didn’t see or hear us until Jee tapped loudly on the glass wall beside the door.

  “What’s going on?” she said, her voice ragged.

  When Frank turned I expected the worst. I thought he might begin flailing at us with the belt. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. He gave us a sly, knowing, half smile.

  “Everything’s cool,” he said. “We play a lot of games. We get off on it.”

  But it was Angie’s reaction to our arrival that stunned us. Eyes wild and swollen from crying, her face pushed into the leather of the sofa cushion, she screamed, “Get away from us!”

  Her voice was shrill and full of tears, like a child throwing a tantrum.

  “Get away from us!” she shrieked again. “You’ve spoiled everything. This is why we live so far from people. You’ve spied on us. Get away, leave us alone.”

  We retreated to the deck. Frank followed us to the door.

  “It’s cool,” he said, the strap still dangling at the end of his arm. “You best go now. Everything will be cool tomorrow. She’ll be okay. I’ll have a talk with her. Maybe we’ll see you at the cafe.”

  As we walked into the darkness the music came on again. Donovan singing about San Francisco and flowers. For a long ways we’d hear the strap like a car backfiring, we heard it until we were so far away it must have been only memory.

  “Wow!” said Jee.

  “It’s sick,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen anything so incredible,” Jee said. Her breath was shallow and I’m sure I could hear her heart beating. Her step slowed as she lit a cigarette, and even over the sound of our footsteps I could hear the force with which she pulled the hot smoke into her lungs.

  Later, as I recalled the scene on the deck, I wondered if Jee had been alone, would her purposeful stride toward Frank and Angie have been to intercede or to join them?

  “I don’t want to see them again,” I said to Jee the next afternoon. “Surely they won’t have the nerve to show up at the cafe.”

  But, as we walked toward the cafe after school, Frank’s truck was parked at the curb.

  “Wait here,” Jee said. I did, though I should have gone with her. She straightened her back, walked to the window of the truck, she was wearing a raspberry-colored sweater, leaned in, her breasts on the window ledge. A moment later she stepped back, opened the door and got in. The truck eased away from the curb. She didn’t even wave.

  “I said to him, ‘Whatever you do with her I want you to do with me.’”

  We were in a cubicle in the school washroom. Jee lit cigarettes for each of us.

  “You didn’t.”

  She smiled. She unbuckled her jeans and moving cautiously sat down. I saw all that I needed to. I thought my heart would burst from my chest. “I stayed overnight,” Jee said. “I’m gonna like work for them.”

  “Work?” I echoed stupidly.

  “Like housekeeping. That’s what I told my old lady. What she don’t know won’t hurt her.”

  There were so many questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I refused to go with Jee to the cafe in case we ran into them. I was the outsider now, they couldn’t be themselves around me. They had too many secrets.

  Jee relayed an invitation to dinner from Frank and Angie.

  I couldn’t make myself say the words. I just kept shaking my head.

  Then they were gone. Jee was spending at least three nights a week with Frank and Angie and often missing class. Frank dropped her off at school on the mornings she did attend.

  She didn’t come to school on Friday or again on Monday. Monday night I walked the lonely miles to the A-frame, only to find it scary and silent. Leaves crunched under my shoes as I walked across the empty deck and peered into the vacant living room. The empty house creaked ominously in the night, in a light wind tree branches dragging against the eaves frightened me.

  “Acht, gone nord. Work. Work housekeep,” said Jee’s mother, shrugging her shoulders.

  A few days later I saw a telephone company truck parked by a house under construction. I leaned in the passenger window, the way Jee did with Frank.

  “Do you know what’s become of Frank?” I asked. “Stocky guy with red hair, big mustache,” I added. The driver was dark and thin, eating a lunch of fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper.

  “Took a transfer way up north, place called Hundred Mile House, way out in the wilderness.”

  I hoped Jee might write, or even Frank. I’d visit if they asked.

  Last week I took the bus into Vancouver. In a clothing store on Robson Street I stole a pair of Levis. From our darkest closet I took a worn out black shoulder bag of my mother’s, one she would never use again. I filled it with empty cartons, newspapers, junk. Leaving my old unstylish jeans and my purse behind in the changing booth, I admired the fit of the new ones in the mirror. “I want to see how they look in daylight,” I said. No one stopped me as I stepped into the street and kept going. Jee would have been proud of me.

  The Lime Tree

  It didn’t surprise Fitz that McGarrigle, even though at seventy-eight he was a year younger than Fitz, was beginning to lose it. Yes, Fitz decided, carrying on conversations in the courtyard with long-dead relatives was a definite sign. McGarrigle was out there now, crouched by the lime tree, even though it was well after midnight. Though both men were used to turning off the TV after the ten o’clock news, and heading for bed, they had become positively nocturnal in the past few weeks, McGarrigle out in a corner of the moon-blue courtyard talking to his dead wife and daughter, Fitz pacing, worrying, keeping an eye on McGarrigle.

  “A couple of old women.” That was how Fitz had heard himself and McGarrigle described by a young man in their apartment complex, Lime Tree Courts. McGarrigle had just passed by the pool, limping in from the parking lot, a sack of groceries in the crook of his left arm, his rubber-tipped cane helping him keep h
is balance.

  “Queer as three-dollar bills,” another young man, dangling his feet in the azure-blue water of the swimming pool, had added. “I heard they were both football players about a hundred years ago,” the first young man said. The speakers didn’t realize that Fitz was standing on his balcony two floors above the pool. Voices travelled clearly through the dry, early evening air.

  “They’re not queer, at least in the way you mean it,” a girl in an orange bikini contributed. “They’re just old. I talked to them once. They both had wives and families. And it was baseball they played, though you’re right it must have been a hundred years ago.”

  The group around the pool all laughed.

  Fitz didn’t hear any more because McGarrigle was thumping at the apartment door, probably having misplaced his keys again. They should have seen us in our prime, Fitz thought. We could have licked the whole lot of them, their friends and relatives, and the box they came in. Bull McGarrigle was like a raging bull in them days, alright. Saw him almost single-handedly whip six Boston Red Sox in a barroom brawl after a Saturday doubleheader. “Them Red Sox always choke in the clutch,” McGarrigle wheezed as he and Fitz walked away from the bar, McGarrigle shaking beer and blood and broken glass off himself like a wet dog emerging from a river.

  He’s always been larger than life, Fitz thought, and he fumbled the door open. “What took you so long? Tangled up in yer knitting yarn again, Granny,” said McGarrigle, ducking his head, crowding into the apartment like an oversized sofa.

  Though pushing eighty, Fitz held himself ramrod straight. He walked slowly, his full head of porcelain-white hair contrasting his healthy pink complexion. His eyes were a clear, aquamarine colour. He did not wear glasses or a hearing aid. McGarrigle, on the other had, looked every bit of his seventy-eight years. He had taken on a bulldogish appearance in his later years, his large ears emphasizing the huge size of his head, his potato-like face blotched and mottled. His huge catcher’s hands were gnarled and arthritic. He walked with his legs spread wide, guided by a redwood walking stick.

  Lime Tree Courts consisted of seventy apartments built around a swimming pool and shrub garden. Most of the units were studios and one-bedrooms. Fitz and McGarrigle shared one of the only two-bedroom units.

  Fitz had been widowed most recently. Pegeen had been gone seven years. At first he’d puttered around the big house in Gardena, taking little pleasure from the landscaping and house repairs that seemed to occupy most of his time. He and McGarrigle golfed year round and had season tickets to California Angels’ games. When the Angels were on the road they often drove to Chavez Ravine in McGarrigle’s little Buick, to watch the Dodgers.

  McGarrigle’s wife, Mary-Kaye, had been dead for almost twelve years. Their marriage had not been as happy as Fitz and Pegeen’s. Neither McGarrigle nor Mary-Kaye had ever been the same after they’d lost their daughter.

  Fitz and McGarrigle talked of moving to one or the other’s house; McGarrigle’s was grander, with an ocean view, and he could afford to hire a gardener and a part-time maid. Eventually, the empty space became too much for McGarrigle, even with the thought of company. So both houses were sold, and together Fitz and McGarrigle bought a unit in a new and luxurious singles complex, Lime Tree Courts.

  Neither would have admitted it publicly, but what prompted their particular purchase was what Fitz had heard referred to as the vanity of the athlete, the hubris that kept thirty-five-year-old pitchers, hitters, quarterbacks, and tennis players hacking away long after their bodies had ceased to react promptly to the commands of their brain.

  Fitz and McGarrigle each harboured a secret fantasy that a young woman in Lime Tree Courts would find them attractive. That a young Pegeen or Mary-Kaye would see through the erosion of time to the magnificence that had been, and each harboured an even more forlorn hope that the young woman’s youth would somehow transform them, even for a short time, into what they had once been.

  Friends for almost sixty years—McGarrigle from New York City, Fitz (Elwood Joseph Fitzgerald on formal occasions) from a Kansas farm—they’d met playing baseball in Louisville in the first years of the Great Depression. Both had up and down careers in the Bigs, McGarrigle catching for the Browns and the Senators, Fitz playing second base and shortstop for five clubs, with a few stops in the minors in between. His longest stint was a full season at second base for the Pirates in 1933. Fitz had played part of twelve seasons, and he was quick to point out to McGarrigle that his career had been longer, even if he hadn’t played as many games.

  “I was still turning the double play when you were hammering 2x4s in California,” Fitz would crow.

  After baseball, McGarrigle started a construction company in Los Angeles; he cashed in on the post-Second-World-War building boom, moved later to apartment construction during which time his company had built several complexes similar to Lime Tree Courts.

  Fitz and Pegeen had settled briefly in St. Louis, until at McGarrigle’s insistence they visited California and, again at McGarrigle’s insistence, stayed.

  McGarrigle offered to take Fitz into the construction business. “I don’t have the temperament to be a boss,” Fitz said. “I like to leave my job behind at the end of the day and head home to Pegeen and the kids.”

  McGarrigle found Fitz a job as a representative for a large building supply firm.

  Fitz never regretted his choice. He and Pegeen had four children, two boys, two girls, all settled now. There were grandchildren galore and by the size and beauty of a couple of his teenage granddaughters, he guessed he might live to be a great-grandfather.

  McGarrigle had not been so fortunate. His marriage to Mary-Kaye was good enough; they both enjoyed fighting, one minute flinging plates and curses at one another, the next making up, putting the same amount of passion into reconciliation.

  “Don’t you try any of that aggressive behaviour with me,” Fitz told McGarrigle when they made the final decision to move in together, “or, by God, I’ll pin your ears back like Mary-Kaye could never do.”

  Mary-Kaye and McGarrigle had had one daughter, Maggie, as beautiful and sweet-tempered a girl as ever lived. In her senior year of high school, as she was riding her bicycle to a babysitting job a few blocks from her home, she’d turned to wave to a friend and steered her bike into the side of a passing car. One second she was alive, the next dead.

  McGarrigle muddled through. Mary-Kaye didn’t. She became at first a secret, and later a not-so-secret drinker. She withdrew from everyone, including McGarrigle, refused help, and McGarrigle spent the last fifteen years of her life essentially alone.

  It was his long-lost daughter, Maggie, McGarrigle was talking with now, out under the lime tree in the dew-fresh hours before dawn.

  “We have such a lot to catch up on, Fitz,” McGarrigle had said, after the first episode, a week ago.

  Neither man had ever been nocturnal, so Fitz, when he’d heard the outside door latch snap at 4:00 A.M., had gotten up to investigate. He’d caught McGarrigle, not going out but coming in, shoes in hand, like a guilty husband.

  “Let me guess,” said Fitz. “It’s one of the flight attendants in #27B. I noticed the one with green eyes staring at you last week.”

  “It’s my cane that enthrals them,” said McGarrigle. “None of these sweet young things have ever dated a man with a cane. Of course, the symbolism of the cane doesn’t escape them either.”

  “Could I interest you in telling me the truth?” Fitz said. “I gather you’ve been outdoors for some time. You’ve got the cool smell of the night on you, and your shirt is wilted.”

  “I believe I’d rather lie,” said McGarrigle.

  “At least give me a hint,” said Fitz. “You’re not one to miss your sleep without good reason. Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

  “Eternal,” said McGarrigle.

  “You’re having an experience with Himself?” said Fitz, nodding toward the ceiling. Neither he nor McGarrigle were of a spiritual nature.

/>   “Not so you’d recognize,” said McGarrigle. “What’s happened to me is my fondest dream come true. It’s what I’ve wished for in my heart every moment of the last twenty-seven years. Out there, under the lime tree, I’ve been talking with Maggie.”

  “To your Maggie?”

  What with all the publicity given to Alzheimer’s Disease, both Fitz and McGarrigle kept a wary eye on each other, kidding each other about Oldtimer’s Disease when they forgot names, put their eyeglasses in the refrigerator, or walked about with their zippers undone.

  “Just trolling,” McGarrigle would say, zipping his fly, but every joke was tinged with worry.

  “Yes, my Maggie,” McGarrigle said, after a pause, while he gazed around the living room as if trying to remember where he was.

  “What did she have to say?”

  “She relieved me of my fear of death. Not that I had a great fear.”

  “I see,” said Fitz. “And Maggie, is she still a girl, or is she a middle-aged lady?”

  “Well, now, I didn’t ask. Her voice is as I remember it though. Sweet, and with a little catch just before she laughs.”

  “So why here? Why now? Why you? You’re not the only old ballplayer hungry for loved ones lost. What did you do that no one else has done? Do you belong to the right organization? Did you give to the right charity?”

  McGarrigle looked startled, as if he’d just been awakened.

  “It’s way past my bedtime, Fitz. Yours, too. It’s the lime tree, Maggie told me, the way it scents the air, it . . .” McGarrigle tottered off toward his bedroom leaving his statement unfinished.

  So it had been for several nights: McGarrigle pacing the living room, clock-watching, waiting for midnight, waiting for the pool lights to go out, waiting for the last stragglers to leave the poolside area.