Shoeless Joe (11 page)

The people around us have pretty well dismissed us as eccentrics of some kind, perhaps drunks. Except for an occasional “Shhhh,” they have turned their attention back to the game. Someone doubles, tries to stretch it. I don’t watch the play at third but keep my eyes on the pitcher as he scuttles over behind third base to back up the play.

“I’ve thought about you and baseball,” I go on. “I haven’t thought about much else for months. What does he have in common with a baseball player? I ask myself. He dispenses joy, I answer. He has fans—hundreds of thousands of them. Almost every North American boy has played baseball, so we know what has been accomplished, are able to appreciate it when we see someone like Freddy Patek or Rick Burleson scoot like a motorcycle after a grounder, capture it, and make the long impossible throw to first. I know I can’t duplicate their feats, and I applaud them for being able to do what they do. I’d like to meet them, shake their hands, tell them how I appreciate their ability. With you it is the same. You’ve captured the experience of growing up in America, the same way Freddy Patek corners a ground ball.
The Catcher in the Rye
is the definitive novel of a young man’s growing pains, of growing up in pain. Growing up is a ritual—more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time. But baseball can soothe even those pains, for it is stable and permanent, steady as a grandfather dozing in a wicker chair on a verandah.

“Open up your senses, Jerry. Smell the life all around you, touch it, taste it, hear it. You may not get a chance for another twenty-five years.”

Salinger takes a bite of his hot dog, cups his hand to catch a fleck of green relish as it falls.

“Watch the game,” he says, a half-smile on his face.

And I think of where we are, banked around this little green acreage. The year might be 1900 or 1920 or 1979, for all the field itself has changed. Here the sense of urgency that governs most lives is pushed to one side like junk mail shoved to the back of a desk. We can take time out from the game almost as if we were participants, and run toward the umpire as a play ends, holding up our hands in the recognized signal for calling time.

The game has moved along, gentle and unhurried as a brook in a pasture. The Sox are chipping away at Jerry Koosman, the veteran Twins’ pitcher. They only trail by two runs.

We stare at the feather-green field in silence. But after coming so far, I am not prepared to abandon what I am doing. I decide to keep on probing. I dig into my bag of tricks, my mind as rumpled and disorganized as a duffel bag after a two-week road trip.

“Why have you never written about baseball?” I ask.

Salinger turns his head slowly and his sad eyes rest on me, a forlorn question mark bobbing corklike in their dark centers. He does not answer, so I chatter on.

“I can’t remember Holden Caulfield talking about baseball—though the story takes place in December, doesn’t it? He wouldn’t have any reason to … The World Series had been over for a couple of months. You even had him end up in California, but at the time you wrote it the Dodgers and Giants were still in New York. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.” Salinger continues to stare as though memorizing me, perhaps so that I’ll appear exactly as I am in one of his stories.

“Buddy never mentions that he’s a fan. Never says that Les took the family to the Polo Grounds on Sunday afternoons. Sorry, I don’t mean to keep bringing that up. Seymour, as a little boy, made that statement in ‘Hapworth 16, 1924.’ But that’s all … I mean, I shouldn’t be asking, it’s your business, but if you love baseball so much, how can you keep from writing more about it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Salinger irritably.

“Oh, but you did, you did.” I am bouncing up and down on my seat. “Allie had a left-fielder’s mitt with poems written all over it in green ink. How could I forget that? Holden wrote an essay about it for Stradlater.
I
had a glove with green writing on it when I was a kid. I was a lousy baseball player, if you want to know the truth. Sorry. But there has to be something significant about it being a left-fielder’s glove. Don’t you see that? And, oh, Holden talking about a cabin in the woods and hiding his children, and the way you live—and I have a cabin, except it’s a big cookie box of a house, with an iron fence in a square shape at the very top and a lightning rod in the middle like a spike on a soldier’s helmet, and I have my own baseball stadium, but I’ve told you that story.”

“Do you always babble like this?”

“I don’t know how else to convince you.”

“Of what? That I’m really Holden? I’ve told you about that. I am a very ordinary man. I want to be treated like a very ordinary man. I just want to stay home and be left alone.”

“But don’t you owe your public something? I remember reading a sociological study when I was in college, all about ex-cons who do stupid things so they’ll be sent back to prison because they can’t make it on the outside. No matter how much they protest, they really want to be on the inside. It’s the only place that they can be big shots.”

“Are you saying I can’t make it on the outside? That’s a lousy parallel. I stay to myself because I make it
too big
on the outside.”

“Too big. Too little. It looks like a logical comparison to me. Think about it.” Why am I baiting him, posing these questions he must hate?

“You don’t understand,” Salinger says, his voice rising. “Like everyone else, you take everything at face value. It baffles me how supposedly intelligent people can be so dumb. Once and for all,
I am not Holden Caulfield!
I am an illusionist who created Holden Caulfield from my imagination.”

A number of people turn their heads. One or two point. But they soon lose interest.

“Look, on the drive in here do you remember passing a square white church with a big sign that said CHURCH OF THE EVANGELICAL COVENANT? We commented on the size of the sign, remember?”

“I remember.”

“I know absolutely nothing about that church. But in half a day, I could do enough research to do an article that would make the members of that church weep with pride. And everyone who read the article would assume that I was a dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong, devout member of that church. And that is as it should be.

“Writing fiction is the same, only instead of culling facts from reference books at a library and putting some life and love into them, I create everything out of my imagination.” He taps his forehead.

“You’re too good at it,” I say. “No one will ever believe you, including me.”

“
You
should know about imagination,” he says. “
You
imagine you own a baseball field where strange and wonderful things happen.
You
imagine you heard a voice that told you to come here. Suppose you wrote all that down and people believed you and started snooping around your farm looking for the real field …”

“But why quit publishing altogether?” I persist. “You should be entitled to as much privacy as you desire, but why deprive all the people who love you of hearing your voice on the page?”

“Because people take me seriously. It interferes with my privacy. Can’t you see that? They swarm up the mountain like monkeys or commandos, peer in my windows, slip notes under the doors, carry off anything portable as souvenirs, lay in wait like you did. I’ve had to call the police many times. But I have to admit, none of them has ever done anything as crazy as you did. All this, and I haven’t published a book in fifteen years. What would it be like if I suddenly released a new series of stories or a novel?”

I sigh. He is making good sense.

“You’re out of soda,” I say. “I’ll go get you some more.”

“Not so fast.”

I am half standing. “Why?”

“You figure on sneaking away just when I’m getting in some good licks. What we’ve been talking about, whether you know it or not, is sharing.”

“I suppose it is.”

“You’re putting all this pressure on me, but how much sharing are you willing to do? Be honest. If you’ve got what you say you have out there in Iowa, then it shouldn’t be hidden. You’re making thousands of people unhappy. It’s like hoarding the secret of eternal life.”

“But I would be willing to share. Only, who would set the criteria? Who would come?”

“Your board of directors would work that out. Picture it. At dawn every day there would be private planes leaving New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Miami. Cedar Rapids Airport would have to build new runways to handle the traffic. Of course it would all be very secretive, the pilots wearing dark glasses, fake mustaches, military uniforms.”

“Baseball uniforms.”

“Too crass. The operation would have class, panache. No one who earns less than one hundred thousand dollars a year knows what
panache
means. Frosted windows on the planes. The passengers would be herded to buses, blindfolded like political prisoners, driven to the farm by a circuitous route. The blindfolds would be taken off only after they were seated in your bleachers.”

“Perhaps I’ll give a short welcoming speech before the game begins,” I say, trying to get into the spirit of the moment; but the whole idea is quite frightening.

“You? Oh, you won’t be there. You’ll be lucky to be home once every three months for a day or so. You’ll be off doing the talk-show circuit, and interviews with
Playboy
and
Cosmopolitan
. And the
Los Angeles Times
will pay Jim Murray’s way to your stadium, and he’ll write a column about being there, and there will be two hundred thousand new people beating at the doors of travel agencies all across North America. You’ll be busy setting up trust funds, someone will ghost a book for you, and you’ll have to hire a bodyguard for your wife and child. The governor of Iowa will declare you to be a national resource, and your park will be open every day of the year except Christmas, just like Cooperstown. In the winter, you’ll sell hot apple juice and cinnamon, and postcards, and little plaster statues of Shoeless Joe Jackson with a halo over his head. You wouldn’t mind all that, would you?”

“Of course I would,” I squeak. “I’d never let things get out of hand like that.”

“You wouldn’t have any choice. Don’t you ever watch the late movies? A scientist makes a wonderful discovery, but it just grows and grows until it destroys him.”

“I’ve never looked at it quite that way. A bodyguard? Really?”

“Now, perhaps you see why I don’t publish?”

“Touché.”

It is the Boston seventh. We stand for two choruses of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The score is tied. Just as the fans settle back in their seats, relaxed and ready for action, it happens.

There is no voice this time. It is the scoreboard. Boston has one of the most sophisticated scoreboards in the majors. It flashes pictures of the batter and the pitcher and does instant replays of action that doesn’t involve controversial calls by the umpires.

It flashes a line of statistical information, leaves it on the scoreboard for, I suppose, thirty seconds. Being no stranger to the
Baseball Encyclopedia
, I recognize the information as an entry, but not an entry I would ever have considered important. The words and figures glow like rare minerals giving off a halolike whitish vapor. I look around furtively to see if anyone else is aware of what is happening.

I eye Salinger carefully, but he is involved with his orange drink. The sign speaks only to me. What I know is that I have to perform another assignment after I am finished with Salinger.

“I’m too tired. I don’t want to think about it,” I say.

“What?” says Jerry. He looks first at me, than at the scoreboard, then back at me.

Salinger starts to speak, but the crowd roars as Craig Kusick, the Twins’ lumbering first baseman, lunges to his right for a sharply hit baseball. He goes down slow as a toppling tree, the ball snapping into his glove as little puffs of dust rise in the air all along the length of his body. He scrambles to a sitting position and prepares to throw to first, but the rookie relief pitcher is watching in awe from his position in front of the mound. He has forgotten to cover first. Then out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of Rob Wilfong, the second baseman, who has sensed the problem in that way good ballplayers have of anticipating a play. He sprints toward first, screaming like a hawk making a long dive at a rabbit, in order to alert Kusick, who throws from his sitting position, throws to an empty bag. But the ball falls into Wilfong’s glove as he sprints across the picture like a breeze, touching the corner of the bag, avoiding a collision with the galloping runner; their shadows collide but their bodies miss.

The play reaffirms what I already know—that baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. I have often thought,
If only there was a framework to life, rules to live by
. But suddenly I see, like a silver flash of lightning on the horizon, a meaning I have never grasped before.

I feel as if I’ve escaped from my skin, as if I left a dry shell of myself back in Iowa. My skin is so new and pink it feels raw to my touch; it’s as if I’ve peeled off a blister that covered my whole body. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “The game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

I take a pen from the pocket of my jeans, and check my various pockets for paper, without success.

“Paper,” I say to Salinger.

He shakes his head.

“What kind of a writer are you?”

“I’m a writer who was kidnapped on his way home from the grocery store and taken one hundred fifty miles to a baseball game.”

“Oh.” I use my program to write on, and copy down the information that still glows on the scoreboard in phosphorescent wonder.