Shoeless Joe (7 page)

“Only got a family unit left,” says the bored old woman who sits sideways on a chair watching a microscopic black-and-white television, “but I’ll give it to you at regular price.”

The outside of the motel is finished in gray imitation brick. Inside are two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a bath—enough room for a large family dragging along an ailing grandmother. The building is old and depressing: swaybacked linoleum floors, a brown hulk of a space heater, dead flies on all the windowsills. The place has obviously been rented out on a permanent basis over the winter months, as I discover when I look in the freezer compartment of the squat yellowish fridge and discover some frozen fish. There is a bottle of Dr. Pepper on one of the shelves, and some brown lettuce in the crisper. I move to the kitchen cupboards and find a half-package of graham crackers, an unopened box of Minute Rice, and a plastic bag half-full of potatoes growing slender feelers the cold color of ivory.

I wonder how these things came to be here. Where did the winter tenants go? Did they steal off in the dead of night, rent unpaid, carrying only essentials in brown shopping bags?

I eat the crackers and drink the Dr. Pepper in front of a fuzzy TV as full of moving shadows as a prisoner’s past.

Before leaving, I check the cupboards again—I have already packed the Minute Rice and consider absconding with the potatoes.

In New York the weather is warmer, and an unusual thing happens to me at Yankee Stadium.

I stand in a long line for tickets.

“Right-field bleech-has is all we got fo-ya,” I hear the ticket seller intone to those in front of me.

I plunk down my Master Charge and say, “One of your best, please.”

I sign for the $7.50 ticket and am surprised when the man at the turnstiles directs me toward the lower box seats.

By some miracle, my seat is ten rows directly behind home plate. The man next to me has paid a scalper thirty dollars per ticket for him and his family. His wife is surly and disinterested, his sons too small to concentrate for long. He spends the game trekking back and forth to the concessions.

I am so close to the game that when Thurman Munson tosses his mask and charges back to the screen after a pop-up, he is nearly close enough to touch. I’m glad I got to see him. No one knows that he will be dead before the leaves turn.

*  *  *

I drive on to Boston even though it is out of my way. I want to have the tickets in my pocket when I travel to New Hampshire; I want to feel them in my hand, solid as passports with convictlike photos. Perhaps secret codes will be punched in them.

I park the car and walk in the sun along the sleazy street outside Fenway Park, where winos, unkempt as groundhogs, sun themselves and halfheartedly cadge quarters, supposedly for food.

“I’m a little short for a meal, Mac. Can you help me out?”

“I’m eighty cents short of the price of a ticket,” says a tiny bald wino with a sunburned head. He eyes me carefully, smiling sardonically from a toothless mouth. He must know from the way I hitch my jeans that I’m not a local, or perhaps he can tell by my green and white cap with the red letters ORKIN on the peak.

I give him a dollar and say I hope he enjoys the game. He winks at me.

Again I am fortunate. Two tickets in Section 17.

“Right behind the Sox dugout,” the elderly ticket seller assures me; his right eye is sightless, rolled back, and what is visible looks like a mixture of milk and cherry blossoms.

I drive as far as the intersection of highways 90 and 91. A little more than an hour of traveling upward along a vermilion line that parallels the Vermont and New Hampshire borders will bring me to Windsor, Vermont. Salinger country. My project seems more absurd all the time. What in the world am I going to say to him?

Salinger’s twenty-five-year silence has bred rumors that rise like mosquitoes from a swamp and buzz angrily and irritatingly in the air. And I’ve collected them, as a child might collect matchbooks and stash them in an unruly clamor in a dresser drawer already full of pens, tape, marbles, paper clips, and old playing cards.

“He hasn’t eaten anything but soybeans for fifteen years,” I recently heard an American Literature professor say authoritatively when we were at Mark’s home in the University Heights area of Iowa City, Annie and I the only non-academics present. Tired of answering the question, “How is your corn crop coming?” I had mentioned my interest in Salinger, to let them know I read more than International Harvester repair manuals.

Mark’s house is wide and spacious, with a lot of windows and much glass and chrome furniture. In fact, the living room looks a little like a furniture-store display window, and smells of new fabric, plastic, and waxed floors.

Our own sofa was plucked from the front lawn of a frat house in Iowa City, not long after we were married. It has rounded arms and is covered in a ferny green cloth soft as a plush toy. It has endured abuse. I lifted a cushion one day to find an atrophied doughnut in among the Lego, pencils, matchbooks, and Karin’s lost socks. I looked at the doughnut for a while, feeling very happy, and covered it up for posterity.

“He arrives at the store every afternoon at three-thirty and he speaks the same words every single day, ‘Three pounds of soybeans, please,’ unless of course a long weekend is coming up, then he orders five pounds.” Mark’s party is bulging with tweed and intellect. As I steer Annie toward the door, she informs me brightly that she has just learned that Chaucer died of cancer of the testicles.

Mark, besides being a burgeoning business tycoon in partnership with a dishonest-looking accountant named Bluestein, is a minor celebrity in the university community. He had been written up in a number of learned journals, has had articles published, and is often invited to give lectures to government officials, farm marketing boards, and Future Farmers of America conventions. Mark’s theory is that the impudent corn weevil is bent upon conquering the world.

When Annie first told me about this, she looked me straight in the eye and warned me not to snicker about it, especially in the presence of my brother-in-law, who wrestled as a light-heavyweight during one of the numerous years when Iowa won the NCAA wrestling title.

“University people treat that kind of thing very seriously,” she said, exploring my forearm with her small freckled hand. She added that it was probably wise never to snicker in the presence of my brother-in-law, who holds atheists, Catholics, Democrats, and the University of Oklahoma wrestling team in equally low esteem.

“But if you want to snicker when we’re alone, it’s okay,” said Annie, throwing herself into my arms, sitting on my lap, her denimed legs bracketed around my thighs. “Imagine, devoting your life to corn weevils.” Annie buried her face in my shoulder as we laughed and rocked back and forth.

“It can’t be as bad as selling life insurance,” I said, and told her about selling a $5000 policy that week to a Portuguese house painter who thought he was insuring his half-ton truck.

“I’m Ray Kinsella,” I’ll say confidently, after I’ve rung his doorbell and he has answered. Then I’ll just stand and wait for his incredulous reply.

At the same time I can picture myself sitting for days in his driveway, while my chin stubbles and the car interior begins to smell of orange peels and stale bread.

I have breakfast at a Motel 6 near Holyoke, Massachusetts. It has rained in the night, and the parking lot is peppered with pink petals. As I drive toward Windsor, Vermont, I remember once driving through Iowa City with Karin at my side, over streets where trees formed a dizzying arch of pink and white. Petals fell silently on the car as we drove.

“Don’t run over the flowers,” she said to me.

We stopped the car and Karin and I walked on the tender grass between sidewalk and street, Karin gathering the velvet droplets, pressing them to her face, scattering them over her head.

I had to go to Iowa City again that night. As I tucked Karin into bed in her room with curtains covered in kittens and ballerinas, I said, “Is there anything I can bring you?” figuring on an ice-cream bar, a Dr. Pepper, or a slice of cheese pizza, which, incredibly, she likes to eat cold for breakfast.

“Bring me the flowers, Daddy,” she said. “I want some to touch when I wake up in the morning.”

That night, after my meeting, I drove back to the spot we had visited by day. It was like a cathedral, the filtered light of stars and streetlights peeking through the thatch of blossoms and leaves.

From the jumble in the back seat, I took a large Styrofoam cup that had once held a cherry Coke, and, walking along the dark street rather sheepishly, scooped handfuls of petals from the overflowing gutters, wondering how I would explain myself if someone chanced to ask.

I carried them home on the seat beside me like an urn of ashes, and placed them on the night table beside Karin’s bed. I watched her sleeping; she slept on her back, her right-hand palm up beside her head. She looks like Annie run through a copying machine that reduces things in size. I bent and kissed her freckled nose. I will probably never love her more than I did at that moment.

A tiny sound, like a soap bubble bursting, pops me back to reality. I stop at a rest area and try to regroup. I feel like an eighth grader bringing home a bad report card. In daylight, when I’m alone, what I am about to do seems so ludicrous. I don’t have Annie to reassure me, to put her arm around my waist and her head on my shoulder and say, “Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it.”

This land is foreign to me. The hills are blanketed with trees and foliage. I am used to being able to see for miles in any direction, and, if I’m able to find a hill, being able to count the houses on nearby quarter-sections. I grew up in Montana under the Big Sky, where the landscape outruns the vision. Here, I am surrounded. Perhaps I won’t be able to find him. The sky is clear, with a rumble of clouds on the horizon. I walk into the woods—oak, maple, white birch, conifer, poplar, the ground clothed in green crawling vines decorated with tiny purple flowers. Acorns cover the ground like pebbles. The trees are a golden-green; spring bristles all about me. There is more rock than I imagined, although the mountains, compared to the real mountains of the West, are only green hills.

My impulse is to turn back, but I know I won’t, even though it is so easy
not
to do something. Pretend you’re selling life insurance, I tell myself as I wheel the car out onto the highway.

As I near Windsor, anxiety crawls along my arms like ants. I am really quite shy. Why didn’t The Voice pick a real salesman for this job? I hated to contact people when I was selling life insurance; only my empty bank account, my love for Annie, and knowing that at the time it was the only way I could stay in Iowa, made me pick up the phone and don my optimistic and charming voice as I lured another potential commission check to lunch.

I press on. Make two trips back and forth through the town of Windsor, Vermont. At the edge of town, golden writing on a black sign reads WINDSOR, BIRTHPLACE OF VERMONT, 1777. As I cruise the main street, I see the Old South Church with four whitewashed Greco-Roman columns at its front; I pass the drugstore where I’ve read Salinger buys his newspapers; American flags everywhere; I pass the home of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, their hall white as a Klan convention. And a covered bridge—I drive over it twice, windows down, enthralled by the rumble like stampeding horses, the earthy smell of this place permanently protected from the sun.

Finally I force myself out of the car, walk stiffly into the post office, and make the first of my inquiries.

In reply to my hesitant question, a tired clerk with a pale face and silver spectacles reels off a list of directions I don’t have time to assimilate before he has gone back to counting stamps. I lack the nerve to tell him I don’t quite understand, that his accent is thick as porridge to my midwestern ears.

I have to make three more stops to ask directions. One lady raises her eyebrows and says she doesn’t know where he lives, indicating by her tone that if she did, which she probably does, she wouldn’t tell me anyway.

An old man in a store that smells of oiled floorboards and coffee rolls his eyes as he would at a grandson who has just asked an embarrassing question about sex, and asks, “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m a friend of his, from the city,” I stutter.

“If you was much of a friend, he’d of give you the directions hisself,” the old man says, and goes back to his newspaper.

Eventually, a gas-station attendant, upon hearing my request, walks from my window to the front of the car, notes my Iowa license plates, and walks back grinning laconically.

“Lots of si-reens an kafuffle up around his place one evening about a month ago.” He shakes his head solemnly.

“I just want to take a look,” I say.

He gives me directions for the nine-mile drive. I give him a dollar for his trouble.

“Be careful.”

“I will,” I promise.

*  *  *

The road along the New Hampshire border is mainly dirt, but beyond the Private Property sign the surface is graveled. The new May leaves of the white birches and poplars dust the roof of my elderly Datsun. The leaves, delicately veined as a baby’s hands, are not full grown but are already gathering a film of dust. As I approach, I catch a brief glimpse of some brown siding and the sun glinting off window glass. I park next to the curving driveway that spirals up a steep hill. I explore gingerly, trying to walk without crunching gravel, ready to leap into the underbrush like a shy animal. A two-car garage is built into the side of the hill, like a bear’s den at a zoo. One side of the garage stands open and empty. I look up through the lacy leaves, and the sky seems very high.

What I remember most vividly about the landscape is that on the way into Windsor, from a high point on the road, I could look out over the very area where I now sit. Everywhere was a smooth, liquid green, with no indication of habitation, no sign of houses or towns. Yet here I am, near a very real house, on a road with other houses on it that are all camouflaged by leaves.