Shoeless Joe Read online

  “Suppose you want it for protection?”

  “Doesn’t everybody? 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 warm-ups, 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 1-80, 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.”

  My thoughts of Eddie drifted away as suddenly as they had come. In Chicago it was the White Sox who were at home, a chance for me to see left field of Comiskey Park (or, as it has been renamed, White Sox Stadium), in a new light—as the place where Shoeless Joe Jackson performed.

  Chicago, as always, is cold, grimy, impersonal. I rent a room at a decaying hotel with fly-specked fluorescent lights in a shabby lobby full of gaunt black men slouching in ratty, knife-scarred leather chairs.

  There is intermittent rain, cold drops that pelt down at odd angles, stinging like tiny slaps.

  I leave my car in a locked, guarded lot, and decide to walk to the stadium. The rain has let up although the clouds are still low and angry.

  It is unwise for a white person to walk through South Chicago, but I do anyway. The Projects are chill, sand-colored apartments, twelve to fifteen stories high, looking like giant bricks stabbed into the ground. I am totally out of place. I glow like a piece of phosphorus on a pitch-black night. Pedestrians’ heads turn after me. I feel the stolid stares of drivers as large cars zipper past. A beer can rolls ominously down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. The skeletal remains of automobiles litter the parking lots behind the apartments.

  A man in a tight leather coat passes me. I look at the ground. I can hear the leather creak as he turns to stare, hear the cough that is really a laugh. I think of the gun burrowed like a rat in a box of rags in the trunk of my car. Gangly young men in white T-shirts and running shoes loiter in the doorways of the apartments I pass.

  Two young women are approaching me; one has an Afro, the other’s hair is corn-rowed as tight as if she is wearing a ridged black bathing cap. Both are wearing jeans and satin blouses, one purple, one green. They are almost past me when one turns and speaks.

  “Hey, man, you better watch out. There’s some boys in the doorway of that block up there; they’s figuring to rob you.” It is the corn-rowed girl who has been speaking. She is about eighteen and has a silver beauty mark on her right cheek that glows like a tiny moon.

  I look at the slim brown hand that points toward the dark front of an apartment a block away. I imagine I can see indistinct, sinister forms lurking there.

  Before I can speak, the other girl says in a kindly voice, “We don’t want to see you get in any trouble. If you got any money on you, you better cross the street.” She waves vaguely toward the other side of the road, where there are a number of equally unfriendly buildings.

  My inclination is to turn and run or at least walk fast, but what if they are joking with me? Can I stand the sound of their laughter? I actually have very little money on me: enough for the baseball game and a taxi back to my squalid hotel. My money, what there is of it, is carefully stashed in the driver’s door panel of my Datsun. But I do have credit cards. I picture young black men in felt fedoras going on a lavish spending spree with my very white Iowa credit cards.

  I consider crossing the road.

  Why did the baseball fan cross the road? I can’t think of an answer.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Them boys is bad little buggers,” the girl with the kindly voice says. I notice she is smoking a cigarette—the white tube very conspicuous in her ebony hand.

  What if they are setting me up? I hadn’t noticed where they came from. What if the boys are on the other side of the road, and don’t want to waste their time mugging a broke white man?

  “If you have any money cross the road,” the girl’s words ring in my ears.

  I smile feebly. “If I had any money, would I be walking down here?” I try to say matter-of-factly, as I shove my hands deep into my pockets and move on, trying to inject some bravado into my walk. I may be going to get myself killed because I am afraid to back down.

  “Suit yourself,” one girl says.

  “Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” says the other.

  After a dozen steps I hear them burst into h
igh-pitched laughter. I wonder if it is because I have not taken their advice, or if it is because they are pleased with themselves for scaring a white man half to death.

  My fists are clenched as I approach the pale hulk of a building. The front of the apartment is black and foreboding, but empty. The entire area seems only sparsely populated. It strikes me that everyone except criminals and morons is inside. I exhale and am surprised by the sound of my own breath: I have been holding it for at least a block. My stomach feels as if I have swallowed razor blades, my fingers ache as I uncurl my fists.

  Across the street is an amateurishly painted rose-and-white 1967 Pontiac; the trunk is open and two loose-jointed boys are stuffing something inside. Two more lounge on the curb-side of the car, only the thistly tops of their heads visible.

  Traffic lights loom at the next intersection. I feel like a fur trader who has just run the gauntlet. I notice that it is spitting rain, very hard, and, by the wetness of my clothes, has been ever since the girls first accosted me.

  At a bus stop stands a lone black woman, conspicuously pregnant.

  In the ballpark it is bleak and raw. A few hundred fans huddle miserably under blankets. I purchase a box seat, but the rain forces me to retreat to a drier, less expensive seat higher up. The wind is cold and ice-pick sharp.

  The White Sox pitcher is overweight and perhaps dreaming of his home in Venezuela. The rain stops and starts like a jackrabbiting car. Raindrops blow onto my scorecard, smudging the ink. I shiver and long for Annie’s fierce warmth.

  Socked away in my suitcase, like an apple in a brown-bagged lunch, like a grandfather’s gift for a favorite grandchild, lies a baseball—but a very special baseball. I can only imagine what it will mean to a dedicated fan of the game like J. D. Salinger, to have someone turn up on his doorstep—a stranger, but with the aura of a prodigal returning—and present him with a baseball, shiny and fragrant as new, but with a signature and construction that labels it as being from the 1920s.