Shoeless Joe (12 page)

As I finish copying the information onto the available white space on the program, the public-address announcer speaks to me. “Go the distance,” he says.

Why? Why me?
I almost scream, but don’t. I glance surreptitiously around me, to see if anyone else is aware, but the game moves on, the crowd drones lazily, and Jim Rice swings his bat in the on-deck circle.

“I’ll get you that drink,” I say to Salinger. He has just crushed his wax cup under his shoe. “Is there anything else you want?” He is involved in the game, his face relaxed and more youthful looking. If he hears me, he doesn’t let on.

As I climb the steps two at a time up the narrow aisle to the concession stands, there is a solid crack of the bat loud as a gunshot. I turn my head and, looking over my shoulder, see Jim Rice cross first base. I have taken perhaps three full steps with my gaze averted. As I once more face upward, I walk directly into a sharp steel girder that stands like a galvanized sword in the middle of the aisle.

Although I am stunned, I try to pretend that nothing unusual has happened, in that way people behave after they’ve tripped on a curb or stepped into an unseen hollow. I hold my hand to the left side of my forehead and climb on for three or four more steps before I feel my stomach drop slowly and my arms become hundred-pound weights dragging me into a sitting position.

“Are you all right?” a man says to me.

He looks as if he’s staring at me from under sunlit water.

I try to answer, but my mouth won’t open. I take my left hand away from my forehead and find it dripping scarlet, warm and sticky as honey. I wipe it on my shirt front.

By this time there are two ushers bending over me.

“We’ll take you to the first-aid room,” one of them says, and takes hold of my elbow. My legs are soft as butter in sunshine.

They finally manage to half-drag me to the top of the stairs.

“Is he drunk?” I hear a voice from the bottom of the bucket say.

I pull my ticket stub from my shirt pocket with a bloody hand. Taking a deep breath I say, “The man in the goosedown vest is with me. Tell him to bring my program.” Then I slip down into a world soft as the lining of Salinger’s jacket.

Salinger insists on driving back. He holds my arm solicitously as we make our way slowly from the park to my car. I have four stitches in my left eyebrow and my shirt looks as if it’s been worn by the loser in a dandy barroom brawl.

“Who won the game?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It was long over by the time you came around. For being such a baseball fan, you pick strange times to take naps. The game was tied when the usher came and got me.”

“You didn’t have to stay, you know.”

“How the hell was I going to get back home? I can just see myself sitting all night in the bus depot with the winos and shopping-bag ladies, waiting for a bus to Windsor, Vermont.”

My head throbs dully.

The headlights make two grapefruit-colored tunnels on the road, and dark shrouds of trees rush by on either side. I lean my head against the window and look up, noticing a few lamb-like clouds in a chrome-blue sky. The moon is full.

“I’m still not entirely clear why you chose me,” Salinger says. “How did you interpret the cryptic message you received to mean me? Was it just because a voice told you to?”

“Yes. And I saw you and me at a baseball game—a vision.”

He is silent for a mile or so.

“But why did you obey it? You don’t seem like the type who always does what he’s told. Just from spending this day with you, I can tell you have a healthy contempt for authority, big business, academia, religion—all the forces that control our lives. You have all the prerequisites for being a rebel, yet you hop to when an unknown voice delivers an ambiguous message.”

“There were a lot of reasons. Baseball, for one. As you can tell, I love the game. And I admired you as an author and a person. I’ve always wanted to follow Holden’s dictum in
The Catcher in the Rye
and pick up the telephone and call you …”

“Which is why I’ve had an unlisted number for twenty-five years.”

“But it was the interview that decided it. Don’t you remember?” I look at him, genuinely surprised. Perhaps he is not as astute as I imagined.

“Remember what? What interview?”

“I didn’t see it in whatever magazine it was in originally, but the newspapers picked it up. It ran in the
Des Moines Register;
even the
Iowa City Press-Citizen
picked it up.”

Salinger continues to eye me suspiciously, watching me instead of the road as we round a gentle curve. So I babble on.

“The interview was mainly about baseball. Don’t you remember talking about baseball? The interviewer asked you a question about what you would have liked to be if you hadn’t been a writer. ‘When I was a kid,’ you replied, ‘I wanted more than anything else in the world to play baseball at the Polo Grounds.’ Over the years I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about that dream of yours, and about you being locked away like a hermit on top of a hill in New Hampshire. ‘I saw myself grow too old for the dream,’ you went on. ‘Saw the Giants moved across a continent to San Francisco, and finally they tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964!’ I cried when I read that interview, if you want to know the truth. I couldn’t help myself. I admit I’m overly sentimental about baseball, but it appeared that you were too. I read that passage thousands of times, smiling sadly at the thought that you must love the game as much as I do. That’s why I leaped at the chance to come here and take you to a baseball game—even if I might have ended up in jail because of it. Now how can you say you don’t remember?”

Salinger is now looking at me with genuine concern.

“I don’t know how to tell you this. Since you claim to know so much about me, I thought you’d know. I almost never give interviews. That’s not to say that people don’t try. I have some persistent lunatics removed from my driveway, and they babble to the police while they’re being driven away; they get two words from a grocery clerk or a gas-station attendant and then write and publish an exclusive interview. I always know about it, because a thousand or so people send me copies. Did you send me one from your Iowa City Press-whatever?”

“Yes,” I mumble.

“For some reason, people out there think I’ll wither away and die if I don’t see every word that’s written about me, no matter how bizarre. Do you know I’m supposed to have six wives and twenty-one children, and that I service my wives only for the purpose of procreation?”

“Yes,” I whisper again.

“I stopped reading the reports years ago. I don’t even want to imagine what they’re saying about me now. But I assure you, I
never
gave an interview about baseball. Those are very touching words you quoted. The writer must have had a better-than-average imagination.”

“Then you don’t …” I can feel my insides slipping away as if they are on a greased slide.

“Baseball is not a passion in my life. I’ve attended a few games, years ago. I occasionally watch one on TV. I read the papers, glance at the standings.”

“I’m really sorry,” I say. Salinger tenses a little. “I’ve caused you a lot of trouble for nothing.” He shakes his head, waves a long white-fingered hand in a conciliatory gesture. “It wasn’t just the baseball game. I wanted it to be a metaphor for something else: perhaps trust, or freedom, or ritual, or faithfulness, or joy, or any of the other things that baseball can symbolize. I only wanted to make you happy …” I feel myself choking up as I say it.

“You don’t know how those words affected me,” I go on.

“It was the line ‘They tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964’ that got me. Those words flew off the printed page, hovered in the air, assumed the shape of a gray bird, and landed on my shoulder. I reached up and picked off the bird and held it in my hand, tiny and pulsing, pressed it hard against my chest, and it disappeared like mist. If I were to open my shirt, and you looked closely, you could see its faint silver outline on my skin.”

*  *  *

The rest of the trip back is thick with silence. We are both exhausted. I slump dozing, defeated, as Salinger drives with two hands on the wheel. We stop for gas and coffee. Salinger is still reluctant to enter the café, although I am the one people will look at. I reassure him and am relieved to be right. No one even glances at him. Salinger dips into his jeans and pays for the coffee.

His mountain is blue with moonlight as we arrive at the foot of the driveway. The high windows of Salinger’s home glow like mirrored sunglasses in the cloudless night.

“I wish I had your passion for baseball,” Salinger says. “However misdirected it may be, it is still a passion. If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.”

“I could come back again,” I say. “It wouldn’t have to be baseball. A movie. A concert. I wouldn’t mind.”

“No. You keep on listening to your voices, even if they’re wrong. Keep on doing what it is you do. Another time here, there would be no thrill in it for you. Keep on taking risks.”

He opens the driver’s door and light floods the interior.

“I enjoyed the baseball game. I’ll read the statistics with a little more interest from now on.”

His speech sounds like a spoken bread-and-butter note. He bends down and looks closely at the car registration, which is strapped to the steering column in a tiny leather-and-plastic holder.

“Just checking,” he says. “I have a naturally suspicious nature, you know. Ray Kinsella, you puzzle me very much,” he adds, shaking his head.

“No one is more puzzled than I am,” I say.

“Is this some kind of penance you’re doing?”

“I’ve never thought of it that way, but perhaps it is. Oh, how I wish you could see my baseball park. I’ve built it all with my own hands. I’m not a carpenter. I’m not even competent when it comes to mechanical things.”

I feel desperate for someone else to see my creation. My mother. I would like to show it to her. Let her see what I have brought to life. Have her to be there when my catcher gets to play with the White Sox, as I know he will. What I’ve brought to life is much, much more than one tiny bird.

“There is a magic about it,” I say. “You have to
be
there to feel the magic.”

“What is this magic you keep talking about?”

“It’s the place and the time. The right place and right time. Iowa is the right place, and the time is right, too—a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place and the universe opens up for a few seconds, or hours, and shows you what
is
possible.”

“And what do you see? What do you feel?”

“Your mind stops, hangs suspended like a glowing Chinese lantern, and you feel a sensation of wonder, of awe, a tingling, a shortness of breath …”

“And then?”

“And then you not only see, but hear, and smell, and taste, and touch whatever is closest to your heart’s desire. Your secret dreams that grow over the years like apple seeds sown in your belly, grow up through you in leafy wonder and finally sprout through your skin, gentle and soft and wondrous, and they breathe and have a life of their own …”

“You’ve done this?”

“A time or two.”

“Is it always the same?”

“It is and it isn’t. The controlling fantasy is the same: the baseball stadium, the Chicago White Sox, Shoeless Joe Jackson. But the experiences are different. Baseball games are like snowflakes and fingerprints; no two are ever the same.”

He has moved slowly away; reluctantly, it seems to me. He stops at the rear of his own vehicle and makes the motion of pitching an imaginary baseball to me, where I stand outside the passenger door of my Datsun.

I have my hand raised in a gesture of farewell when he says softly, “New York Giants, 1905, one game, one inning.”

“You know!” I accuse him.

“No. What would I know?”

“About the scouting trip. Somehow you know. That’s why you’re hedging about saying goodbye. When did it happen? At the game? In the car? When you were walking down to the first-aid room?”

“I have no idea …”

“Moonlight Graham!” I say. “Chisholm, Minnesota. Did you see one line out of the Player Register of the
Baseball Encyclopedia
flashed on the scoreboard tonight?”

Salinger is shaking his head. By the marveling look on his face, I can tell that he did.

“We were the only ones who saw it. You must know that. It was in the seventh inning, just after Carlton Fisk struck out.”

“It was …”

“Did you hear the voice, too?”

Salinger glances at me, then looks away.

“It’s all right to admit it. It was my own private ballpark announcer. It’s all right. He told me to find you …”

Salinger looks as if he might be facing a TV camera. He speaks slowly and clearly; only his eyes blinking rapidly betray his feelings.

“Highly disturbed persons often feel that they are receiving direct and personal messages from TV, radios, billboards, and road signs …” His voice runs down like a record player after it has been unplugged. A smile spreads over his leathery face; he advances a step toward me.

“You know!” I shout.

“Something,” says Salinger quickly.

“What thing?”

“That we’re going to Minnesota.”

“How do you know?”

Salinger stares around at the dark, listening trees; somewhere deep in the foliage something moves—a brief swishing of leaves.

“The announcer,” he says quietly. “Go the distance.”

“I knew it,” I crow triumphantly. “You heard him too.”

“I want you to tell me everything you know about this. Tell me the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson again. I want to hear it again and listen more closely; and about how and why you came to get me.”

“While we travel, I’ll tell you all I know.” My head seems to have stopped aching. “Do you want to get a change of clothes? Some books? Annie and I read to each other while we travel. Some paper? Your typewriter?”

“No.” And it is as though I have sneezed on him, or breathed in his face, and he has caught some of my energy. “I’m afraid that if I walk up that driveway all this madness will disappear.”