Shoeless Joe Read online

  It was a Sunday afternoon the next time my wonderful mirage appeared. Annie’s relatives were visiting. Her mother, face pink as wild roses, dentures a perfect white, silver-rimmed glasses flashing glints of disapproval at everything in sight, sat ramrod straight in an antique rocking chair. When there were lulls in the conversation she read her Bible, sneering a little in her perfection.

  Annie’s brother and his wife were also present. Mark is a professor at the University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City. His area of expertise is the corn weevil. He and a business partner own apartment blocks and several thousand acres of farmland. He has designs on my farm. He also has brothers named Matthew, Luke, and John.

  “Daddy, the baseball game is on,” says Karin as she runs breathless into the living room.

  “Now?” I say.

  Karin smiles broadly, reaching her arms out to be picked up. She scissors her legs around me at belt level and, hugging my neck, whispers into my ear.

  “Hot dogs.”

  “Excuse us for a few minutes,” I say and head for the kitchen and out to the verandah. My relatives assume that we are going to watch television. They know that I am a baseball freak and despair that I have corrupted their daughter and am in the process of converting their granddaughter. They wish I had a more serious vice: that I would perhaps drink excessively and abuse Annie, or be arrested for some unspeakable act. They never mention my eccentricities to me, but they think I am crazy, and take turns pulling Annie aside and offering her all sorts of incentives to leave me. They all hope Mark will be successful in buying the farm. Then I will be forced to go back to selling life insurance, and perhaps Annie will come to her senses and leave me. When she does, they will all be waiting with a gaggle of Christian suitors ready to court her and bring her back into the fold, poor lamb.

  My heart jumps as we hurry toward our bleacher in left field, for as we skirt the shadows on the third-base side I see Chick Candil stomping around first base, like a bull pawing the ground. His intense face with its hollow cheeks and bullet eyes glares in at a batter, daring him to hit the ball past him.

  “You see,” Joe hollers up as Karin and I take our seats, “the others are waiting …”

  “I’ll have the infield ready in a month,” I promise, my back twitching in anticipatory pain, “except you’ll all have to be careful of the infield grass for a while, keep your spikes off it except to make a play. The outfield will take a little longer.”

  “Happy Felsch can wait a little longer,” says Joe. “One thing we got is plenty of time.”

  He is able to wait. They are able to wait. It sounds as though I am conjugating a Latin verb in some obscure case. I can’t wait. My blood blazes around my circulatory system like Cale Yarborough on an asphalt straight-away.

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” my own mother would say if she knew of my plight, which she doesn’t. She lives with her sister, my maiden aunt, in a high-rise in Great Falls, Montana, with a cat and a Bible. She occasionally watches a World Series game on TV, often forgetting which team she is cheering for, unless the Yankees are involved. Even though my father has been gone for over twenty years, she recalls how he loathed them, and as she sips her tea says things like “Oh, you Yankees, I hope you break a leg,” and then looks to me for approval.

  Reluctantly I continue to wait, and as I finish each area of the field a new player springs to life. The cornstalks are now toast brown in the orangeade sunshine of October; the ballpark smells of burning leaves and frost. The ever-listening corn rustles like crumpling paper in the Indian-summer breeze.

  They’ve all come now—Chick Gandil and Shoeless Joe Jackson; the pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams; the rest of the infield: Fred McMullin the utility player at second, Swede Risberg at shortstop, Buck Weaver at third. Happy Felsch stalks center field. Only the right fielder and the catcher are ghost-gray in the afternoon sun.

  The magic grows and grows. As I walk with Karin and Annie toward the bleacher, the crowd hums lazily and the chatter of the infielders swoops across my baseball park like gull calls.

  I keep asking about the catcher.

  “Be patient,” Shoeless Joe says.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Chick Gandil advises, “we’ve kept our promises so far, haven’t we?”

  And I have to admit they have.

  My catcher will come too, someday—I’m sure of it.

  I’ve taken to keeping stats on the games. After each one I sit at the kitchen table late into the night translating my inky scorecard into batting and fielding averages, roaming through the pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia. I write wild and sometimes incoherent letters to the White Sox Baseball Club and to the historian at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, asking for stats on the 1921 and 1922 seasons. But when the results come back nothing quite fits. The whole situation is mysterious and ethereal, reminding me of animals in a thicket that you can’t quite be sure you’ve seen. The averages for opposing teams are subtly different from existing records, a few points lower or higher, an error or two more or less. It is as if in another, fairer climate the Black Sox Scandal never happened, and the Unlucky Eight play on, several of them earning baseball immortality. I stare in awe at the acres of figures in front of me; to translate this situation to reality would be like trying to stuff a cloud in a suitcase.

  In the meantime, Karin and I are out every time there’s a game, munching hot dogs, sharing Cokes, cheering Shoeless Joe and the phantom White Sox. I’m teaching her the finer points of the game and she is learning fast. At the last game, in the late innings, as a desperate situation developed in the field, Karin lay cuddled in my lap, apparently sleeping. Suddenly she sat up and said, “Daddy, why wasn’t the hit-and-run on?” And she was right, it should have been. I was astounded.

  Even Annie is excited about the game now. She is more comfortable here in our ballpark than she is in the big-city ones. If she’s bored or too hot or too cold she can go back to the house. But as the summer has turned to fall and we have been gifted more and more often with this kaleidoscope of wonder, Annie has stayed longer and longer; occasionally she even leans toward the dark green fence to question or converse with Shoeless Joe.

  This afternoon I kiss Karin’s nose, which is covered in freckles the color of toasted coconut. “You have the most beautiful nose in the world,” I tell her. She giggles.

  “Kiss my beautiful nose,” says Annie, leaning toward me. “Who do you think she got her freckles from?”

  And I do kiss her nose and hold her close to me; her breath is scented faintly with orange drink, her hair is warm against my cheek and smells of sunshine.

  And it was at about this time that the ballpark announcer spoke another brief parable for my ears alone. I stiffened and strained toward the sound like a hunting dog. Annie rattled her bag of peanuts, and I reached down automatically to stifle the small noise.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “You didn’t hear?” I replied.

  “Hear what?” said Annie.

  I looked at Karin. She nibbled her hot dog, squinting her eyes slightly against the bright sun. She was daydreaming, humming to herself, tapping one sneaker-clad foot to some imaginary music.

  “I just heard something,” I said.

  “Oh Lord,” said Annie. “You’re not going to build a football field or a racetrack?”

  “No, I’m not,” I say.

  But it was two weeks before I was able to tell her what I was going to do. Two weeks of pacing the house, prowling the ballpark like a caged beast, sniffing the air, crunching leaves beneath my feet, the specter of winter hovering like a pale-winged bird. I knew that the season was over, that promises remained unkept.

  In the delicious warmth of our bed, after making love, with Annie’s head on my chest, her breath soft as a bird’s, I tried to explain.

  “In the spring I have a job to do.”

  “Seeding, and the house needs painting.”

  “No. I mean, yes. But this is the othe
r thing. About what I heard at the game that day.”

  Annie raises her head slightly to look at me. Her eyes are clear and green as outfield grass after rain. She pushes some damp red curls from her forehead.

  “Oh, that,” she says, as if it hasn’t been on her mind too, crowding her senses like a fat lady squeezing into a checkout line.

  “I have to … I have to …” But the right words won’t come. What I have to say is so simple yet so complicated, like explaining the concept of baseball to a primitive man in an age just about to discover fire.

  “What did the announcer say this time?”

  I take a deep breath, like a pitcher before a critical delivery. “Ease his pain.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And you know who his is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll laugh. All I can say is I was right before, about building the park and all.”

  “Is it Joe Jackson?”

  “No.”

  “One of the other ballplayers?”

  “No.”

  “Then who?”

  I feel as if I am about to suggest an unnatural sex act to a total stranger in a supermarket. “J. D. Salinger.”

  “The writer?”

  I nod.

  “What has this got to do with baseball?”

  I remain silent. I know, but I can’t tell her. The story floats within me, tenuous as a spider web, impermanent as dew.

  Annie might well continue with a spate of questions: “You don’t know him, do you? He lives in the East somewhere, doesn’t he? Isn’t he a hermit or something? What kind of pain does he have? Does he want it eased?” But she too remains quiet. She lowers her head to my chest. Our breathing becomes audible, then ominously loud. The ticking of the old alarm clock on the nightstand sounds like a convict rhythmically pounding rock.

  “Oh, love,” Annie whispers into my neck, “you do what you have to do.”

  “I’ll tell you everything, Annie, just as soon as I can. As soon as I really know.”

  “Ray, it’s so perfect here. Do whatever you have to, to keep it that way.”

  How do I feel about this? Annie’s question is indeed pertinent: What has my new assignment to do with baseball? Even while laboring in the baseball park, while sweat pours into my eyes and my blue work shirt is soaked to the color of a bruise, I tingle as if looking forward to a first date. It is like when I was given the option of building the baseball diamond: I know what I have to do, I’m just not certain of how to go about it.

  A vision of what I have to do flashed in front of me as I heard the announcer’s instructions; a scene that might have been projected by a shadow box was outlined on one of the clouds that hung over the stadium. The picture was of me and J. D. Salinger seated at Fenway Park in Boston watching a baseball game, our hands busy with hot dogs, soft drinks, and scorecards. The scene was in black and white, Salinger silhouetted so I could not see his physical features. I have only seen one photograph of Salinger, taken in 1951. It showed a dark-eyed young man with brilliantined hair and eyebrows the black-green color of crow wings.

  Now, as the pallid winter sky lowers over Iowa like a gray dome, I wonder again and again how I am ever going to accomplish such a miraculous feat.

  Salinger, almost everyone knows, has been holed-up like a badger, on an isolated hilltop in New Hampshire, for over twenty-five years. He has published nothing since a story in The New Yorker in 1965. He virtually never gives interviews, guards his privacy as if it were a virgin bride, even refuses to let his stories be anthologized.

  Sometimes as I stare out my window at the snow swirling across the cornfield, ticking like sand against the tall green fence of the ballpark, I feel my problem is hopeless. In the spring I must leave the loving warmth of Iowa behind, abandon this magic place, forsake Annie and Karin, drive over a thousand miles to a New Hampshire mountain, and convince the most famous American recluse of the century to attend a baseball game with me at Fenway Park in Boston.

  Annie’s family is right. I am quite mad. Why can’t I settle for watching the baseball results on TV at 10:30 each evening, and close-reading the box scores in the peach-colored sports pages of the Des Moines Register each morning? Then, like any normal baseball fan, I could talk trades and averages with the mechanics at the John Deere dealership in Iowa City, and develop a permanent squint from studying the sky, worrying about rain or lack of it. But then the excitement races through me like minute corks bobbing in my blood, and I know I have to follow the instructions I’ve been given.

  Over the winter, as the days contracted with cold and the cornfields lay folded under a blanket of snow, I spent my time at the library in Iowa City reading and rereading everything by and about J. D. Salinger. As I read, I discovered some uncanny coincidences. Or are there ever coincidences?

  I found an article, an interview I’d read some years before in the Des Moines Register, in an obscure literary magazine. The interview with Salinger was about baseball, and it saddened me as it excited me. It left me with a feeling of vague anxiety, of nameless fears snuffling about me like cold-nosed rodents; like reading of a favorite baseball player whose star has descended to the point where he parks cars at a restaurant or sits in a room above a delicatessen in Indianapolis, drinking vodka and waiting for his pension.

  Salinger, the article stated, was a devout baseball fan, a man who kept a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia in a prominent place on his bookshelf; a knowledgeable fan with a predilection to the Boston Red Sox, but one who avidly watched whatever baseball was available on television.

  So at least he knew of baseball. The interview established a vague kinship between us; perhaps we could be called ninth-inning cousins, for I have always been a little eccentric where baseball is concerned.

  I advocate the establishment of shrines in recognition of baseball greats: Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Mays, DiMaggio, and a few dozen others. Not just at Cooperstown, but at roadside shrines, like the cairns that commemorate cavalry battles, treaty signings, and Indian uprisings. Sites where bleary-eyed travelers could rest for a moment, drink clear water, fill their radiators on broiling afternoons, and study the highlights of their heroes’ careers, recorded in bronze and granite.

  Grottoes perhaps. Explosions of magnificent folly. A bronze of Al Gionfriddo flying like Peter Pan high over the Yankee bullpen, as he gloves a drive off DiMaggio’s bat at the 415-foot mark. Or of Willie Mays sprinting toward the bleachers, back to the plate, arms outstretched, hauling in Vic Wertz’s drive in the 1954 World Series.

  For days after I read that interview I was more restless than usual, dreaming of Salinger exiled for twenty-five years, living like a guru on a mountaintop. Something seemed about to happen. The air was thick with anticipation.

  The interview saddened me so because it radiated loneliness. He hadn’t, the article stated, been to a live baseball game since 1954, when he went to the Polo Grounds in New York to watch Sal Maglie pitch—even though, in 1965, in his last published story, Salinger had Seymour Glass describe baseball as “perhaps the most heart-rending, delicious sport in the Western Hemisphere.”

  “If you hadn’t become a writer, what would you have liked to be?” the interviewer asked.

  “When I was a kid,” Salinger replied, “I wanted more than anything else in the world to play at the Polo Grounds. But I’ve seen myself grow too old for that dream—seen the Giants moved across a continent to San Francisco, and finally, they tore down the Polo Grounds in 1964.”

  Those words deepened our kinship. I admit that I am overly sentimental about baseball. The interview touched my heart and made what I did next seem completely incongruous.

  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 spri
ng 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.