Shoeless Joe (5 page)

I bought a gun. I have never owned a gun. Once, as a child of ten in Montana, I took my father’s single-shot .22 and fired into a row of sparrows that sat like tufted pegs on my mother’s clothesline. I watched a dozen spring airward as if tossed by a juggler, and one fell. The feathered droplet on the ground looked so small; it shivered like an old woman’s hand as I picked it up. I actually felt its heart stop beating as I carried it in to show my mother. I was as proud as our yellow cat when she dragged home a snake or mouse to prove her ability as a huntress.

“Bring it back to life,” my mother said, looking up from her ironing board. The scent of scorched cloth drifted about the room, dark to my eyes after the blazing sky of outdoors.

My mouth dropped open. I was expecting praise.

“Bring it back to life,” my mother said again, holding the iron’s dull silver base toward me as a knight might hold a shield.

I stood dumfounded for a moment. “I can’t,” I whispered, feeling small as the bird cooling in my hand.

“Well, until you can I don’t think you should shoot anything unless you need it for food.”

I have never again fired a gun.

But now in the dormant months of the new year, I drive the hundred miles to Des Moines and spend a day frequenting pawnshops in an area of the city where store windows are covered in rusted metal mesh. Grit crunches underfoot on the unswept sidewalks. Unshaven men with sunken eyes dog my steps. I look at handguns, all heavier than I anticipate, cold as fish, smelling blue and oily. I flinch as if burned when a swarthy proprietor drops a half-dozen bullets into my extended hand.

“You’re not used to handling a gun, are you?” he says, smiling as he might at a child, his large lips dry and peeling, the orange-brown color of sweet potatoes. “It’ll grow on you,” he whispers. “It gets warm after you carry it for a while; the weight hangs right here by your heart,” and he pats his stained, vertically striped shirt.

“With a gun you’re never alone.” He smiles again, showing long twisted teeth.

“That’s real literature,” I say. “I bet you didn’t just make that up.”

“Came from an NRA bulletin. You belong to the NRA?”

“Not yet,” I say, winking conspiratorially. He lowers his price by fifteen dollars.

“Suppose you want it for protection?”

“Doesn’t everyone? The neighborhood’s changing. You know what I mean.” I smile slyly.

As the winter passes, a plan of action begins to form, at first as misty as dawn rising on the cornfield. But as I discern and dissect each new nugget of information—something that adds to my arsenal of ideas—I hear sounds, eerie, unusual sounds, like ball bearings—smooth, silver, cold—being plopped into an unseen pool, sending out ripples in ever-widening circles. I sense that when the sounds stop, my plan will be complete. I will be able to begin my journey.

“You don’t know him, do you?” Annie’s imagined question hangs like music in my thoughts.

I don’t know Salinger. But Salinger
does
know
me.

I discover this in a stale-smelling copy of the May 1947 issue of
Mademoiselle
from the Bound Periodical Room at the University of Iowa Library. Inside those yellowed pages, among Studebaker advertisements and ads featuring women who all look like the Andrews Sisters, is a story called “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist At All.” It is one of Salinger’s uncollected stories and not a very good one, but while reading it I discover that the young man in the story, Salinger’s character, is named Ray Kinsella. My name.

Suddenly a thought shoots through my mind. In
The Catcher in the Rye
there is a character named Richard Kinsella, a schoolmate of Holden’s who gives long and ambiguous answers to questions. Richard Kinsella is my identical twin brother. Salinger has used us
both
as characters in his fiction. If that is not a sign, an omen, a revelation, I don’t know what is.

Where did Salinger find us? How did he decide to use such an unusual and obscure name? Did he know someone by that name? Did he pick it out of the phone book or just make it up?

There are not many of us around. A few in New York, Florida, California. My father’s family once lived in New York, then part of it, including my grandfather, moved to the Black Hills of North Dakota. My father was born there, in a sod hut, on the open prairie not far from Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1896.

Except for my twin brother, I am an only child. One of my uncles also produced two sons, twins I think, whom I have never met. They keep bees somewhere in Florida. I have fantasies of them one day appearing on my Iowa doorstep, dressed in pith helmets and gauze, shaking hands while wearing huge leather gauntlets.

For me it is an alarming experience to discover someone else with my name. But the idea that it is J. D. Salinger who has created the fictional me fills me with a warmth, the same kind I feel as I stand in the dark in my daughter’s bedroom watching her sleep. I feel proud and very brave, but very scared.

I study my map of the United States; it is red-veined as a bloodshot eye. And as I do, I hear a few more ball bearings plop into my imagination. I realize that I cannot go directly there, like some missile programmed and locked into specific coordinates. I cannot land in New Hampshire like a rock thrown through a window.

I lay out a schedule. I imagine a little man with bifocals sitting in an office that smells of furniture polish and floor wax, charting out a baseball schedule. I study the homestands of the teams, draw red circles like vermilion lakes on the map, connect them with snaky yellow lines—Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Boston.

I have to absorb the new season like sunlight, letting it turn my winter skin pink and then brown. I must stuff myself with lore and statistics until my fingers ooze balm with which I can staunch
his
wounds—whatever form they may take. He hasn’t seen a live game in over twenty-five years; he needs my memories. And I will arrive like Little Red Riding Hood with a basketful of them, like crustless sandwiches under a cool tea towel. I’ll tell him of the warmups, of the home team in their white uniforms doing calisthenics and wind sprints like fast-flying sailboats on a green sea. I’ll make him smell the frying onions and hear the sizzle of the hot dogs, and I’ll tell of baseballs scattered like white oranges on the outfield grass. I’ll walk beside him as if I am a bottle of blood swinging from a gray enamel standard; I’ll pierce a vein and feed him the sounds, smells, and sights of baseball until he tingles with the same magic that enchants me. Then we’ll ride off together, as in the happy ending of a western movie, drifting toward the closest baseball stadium.

My journey will be like going out to hunt stars with a net on a stick. I have to make certain that there is plenty to share. I have to do all the right things, at all the right times, in all the right places; fill my pockets with string and stones, a jackknife and a frog, have my suitcase bulging; arrive in New Hampshire as if I have been on a long road trip and am now moving in for a homestand.

April arrives, tender and personal as the breath of animals in a barn; snow shrinks from the sun. The fields puddle. The sun drinks away the standing water, and the land is ready for seeding.

Each spring I hire a retired corn farmer from Iowa City to help me. Machines of all kinds are mysteries to me. I regard them as minor deities and attempt not to understand them but to please them. The farmer’s name is Chesty Seidlinger, and he farmed all his life until his children moved him bodily to an Iowa City apartment three years ago. If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to pay him; he would do the job for the love of it. In that respect we understand each other. He wears a floppy brown felt hat, bib overalls several sizes too large, and black gum boots with ocher-colored soles, even though the land is dry. For two days we drive the great green machines with their clashing gears and phalluslike planting arms. It doesn’t take long to seed a quarter-section.

“What have you got there?” Chesty asks, eyeing the ballpark fence.

“I’ve built myself a baseball diamond,” I answer honestly.

“Been told you had, but I wanted to hear it from you,” he says. Chesty is stocky as a well-packed sack of chop and walks with his toes turned out.

“Must take up an acre or more.” He shifts the cud of tobacco in his cheek. His tone tells me that I can’t afford to part with an acre. “What do you plan to do with it?” Chesty, I’m sure, has never intentionally done an impractical thing in his life, and I can hear him saying to his pale, housedress-clad wife, “He always seemed like such a sensible young man—I wonder if it runs in his family. Poor little Annie. I’ve known her all her life—such a pretty thing.”

I consider telling him outrageous lies about importing professional teams, perhaps from Puerto Rico, to play on the field, but then I look at it. In sunlight it is ragged as a page ripped from a magazine. Chesty and I stand, our eyes staring out of dust-powdered faces. The fence bulges occasionally—sometimes I hear nails groaning in the night as the boards warp. The grass is coming along nicely, though. I have been primping and priming it in hopes that the phantasm will appear for Annie and Karin while I am away.

There is nothing I can tell Chesty Seidlinger that he will truly understand. I shrug off his questions and grin like a kid caught smoking behind the barn. Chesty penguins off toward his pickup truck, his back stiff with disapproval.

“I’m going to plant some hollyhocks,” says Annie as we are walking across the field one day, then claims she wants to put them right against the outfield fence, in the final six inches between the green boards and the warning track. I have told her about—in fact, we have been to—Wrigley Field in Chicago, and she has seen the fielders virtually disappear in greenery as they spread-eagle themselves against the living outfield wall.

“But why hollyhocks?” I complain. I can visualize the gangly plants with plate-sized flowers the color of faded raspberries.

“It will give the park that little touch of beauty it’s been lacking,” and she wrinkles her nose at me, putting her arm around my waist, holding tightly to my belt.

And as it often is with Annie, I am not positive whether she is kidding me or not. I wonder what brawlers like Swede Risberg and Chick Gandil would think of hollyhocks.

“I read about it in a magazine just last night,” says Annie, keeping her face averted from me. “
Better Homes and Gardens
had an article called ‘Ten Ways to Beautify Your Baseball Park for Less Than $100.’” And she dances away from me, her laughter like music, and we are joined by Karin, who dances and laughs too, not knowing or caring what is funny.

“I had you going for a minute there, Champ,” cheers Annie as I chase them across the pitcher’s mound and into left field where we tumble like puppies on the angel-soft grass.

Ready to leave now, I hug Annie and Karin one last time. “Tell your family I’ve gone to a funeral in Florida—a relative of mine was stung to death by a swarm of non-Christian bees. It’s something they’d understand.”

“You’re terrible,” says Annie, mischief crackling like static electricity in her eyes. Annie and Karin are wearing buttercup-colored blouses, and Karin’s pigtails are tied with yellow wool. Annie’s jeans fit like a rubber glove. She kisses me sweetly, her petal-soft tongue counting my teeth. I lean out the car window for Karin to reach up and grab me just behind each ear and hug and kiss me. She smells fresh as melting snow.

“Take care,” says Annie. “Do whatever it is you have to do.”

I know I should stay in Iowa, should be working a second job in hopes of fending off creditors. But my compulsion is stronger than my guilt. As I ease my battered Datsun out onto I-80, heading slowly toward Chicago, I try to measure the pain of exile, but my ruler is blank, my calipers rubber, my thermometer a grass stem. I feel like a detective. I feel like a criminal. I feel like an explorer. I feel like a fool. But most of all I feel like a baseball scout for a miserly second-division team, reluctantly traveling away to woo an extravagantly priced free agent.

Chicago: from the Indian
Shee-caw-go
—the place of the skunk. The Cubs were on a road trip. All I saw of Wrigley Field were the foliage-covered walls as I drove by on the expressway. But as I did, I thought of Eddie Scissons—the oldest living Chicago Cub. And of his stories about playing for the world-champion Cubs in the era of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, the most illustrious double-play combination baseball has ever known.

Was Eddie still spinning his yarns in the afternoons at the Bishop Cridge Friendship Center on Gilbert Street in Iowa City?

“It was in the late innings of the fourth or fifth game of the World Series,” Eddie told me once, sitting across a round maple table in the recreation room at the center. “They weren’t as fussy as they are nowadays about who played where. I was a relief pitcher, but it was late in the game and our manager had used a lot of pinch hitters, so he was short of outfielders and he said to me, ‘Kid’—that was what I was known as then, Kid Scissons, I was the youngest man on the team, barely nineteen—‘Kid, you play left field.’ I mean it wasn’t a dumb or desperate move, I was pretty handy with a glove and I was no slouch at the plate either, if I do say so myself.” Eddie’s face, pink as strawberries, glowed across the table at me.

“Three Finger Brown was pitching and we were ahead, but only by a run, and they had the field crawling with base runners because of an infield hit, a walk, and a sacrifice that got booted. Then Eddie Collins, I think it was—oh, sure it was, I couldn’t forget that—slammed one, and as I went back the ball was no bigger than an aspirin and traveling fast as a bullet. I could hear the whack of the bat ringing in my ears and the crowd sounds rising that would drown it out—either if it was a hit or if I caught it. I pedaled back fast as I was able, and as I leapt up against the wall, why my arm disappeared in the ivy leaves the same time as the ball. I felt as if I was hanging there. As I hit the wall backward, I thought of how my shape would be imprinted on the wall of Wrigley Field forever—funny the crazy things you think of in a split second of action. God, but I wish they’d had that there instant replay like they have on TV now—I’d of liked to have looked at myself hanging there, white against green. I didn’t even feel the ball hit my glove. The voice of the crowd kept rising, the runners had scored, the batter was rounding second when I hit the ground and rolled over. I still didn’t know I had the ball until I stood up quick as you please, and there it was, white as a leghorn egg, like a big white eye in my old black glove.”