Shoeless Joe (14 page)

These are the saddest of possible words
Tinker to Evers to Chance
Trio of bearcubs and fleeter than birds
Tinker to Evers to Chance
Making a Giant hit into a double
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

We find our way to I-90 and begin the long haul across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. We promise each other sleep, but it is as though we are driven. Each time we approach an exit, we decide we can make it one more. Salinger puts the passenger seat back and dozes fitfully for a few moments, sweat forming on his brow, a large white hand continually brushing imaginary objects from his face. We change drivers. My ankles are swollen. I prop my stockinged feet on the dash and try to sleep, but as soon as I relax, my feet slide with a thud against the steering column and into Salinger’s lap.

We push on and on until the adrenalin finally seeps out of us like sawdust oozing from a stuffed toy.

Salinger is no longer shy about being recognized. He uses a credit card at a mom-and-pop motel within sight of the Indiana Turnpike, the self-styled Mainstreet of America.

“I’m J. D. Salinger,” he says to the clerk. She is about sixty-five with hair white as spun sugar, piled up in a beehave hairdo that has been out of style for twenty years.

She looks at him steadily. She has orange eyes like a mother hen.

“Not the guy who used to write or something?”

“The same.”

“Oh.” She is busy making out the credit-card slip. The silence lengthens.

“How soon they forget,” I say in a stage whisper.

“I thought you was dead, maybe,” she says, pushing the slip at Salinger for a signature.

Our plan is to sleep until we are rested, but for me it is as if I have small bells attached to my body. In five hours we are both awake, wide-eyed as kids on Christmas morning.

I phone Annie and waken her—can scarcely contain my joy.

“I’m with J. D. Salinger,” I sing. “We’re going to Minnesota, way up past Duluth.”

“To hunt?” says Annie.

“Sort of,” I reply.

“See, it wasn’t so hard, was it?” says Annie. “I bet he was just waiting for you to come and take him to that baseball game.”

“I love you,” I say.

“Me too,” she replies, making a kissing sound into the phone.

“I’ll be just a few days more.”

“I know you’ll be back as soon as you can, love. Oh, Mark’s been around again. He insists we should sell.”

“We can’t.”

“I know.”

“Hug Karin for me.”

“Don’t take any wooden baseballs.”

I keep dreaming of Eddie Scissons, the oldest living Chicago Cub. I can’t imagine why, unless it has to do with his secret, which only I seem to know. Last night in the cool darkness of that old, linoleum-floored motel that smelled of mildew and rose-flavored room freshener, Eddie Scissons slid into my dreams as gently as if he were stealing second base in slow motion.

It has been five years since I met him. A chance meeting that resulted in our buying his farm. I have encountered little ghosts of Eddie Scissons these past five years: a hubcap in the grass that must have belonged to a vehicle of his, a can of Zambuck Ointment found on a shelf high above a door in the machine shed—ointment Eddie must have rubbed on aching joints when he came in from the fields.

I still drop in on him occasionally at the Bishop Cridge Friendship Center on Gilbert Street in Iowa City, where he spends his afternoons, and we talk baseball, or rather Eddie talks and I listen. Cridge was the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa at one time. He opened his large home as a center for senior citizens long before they were called senior citizens. Thaddeus Cridge occupied the upstairs of the house until his death. The story goes that after he died, they carted out over 2000 pounds of pornographic magazines and books, as well as a number of albums full of compromising photographs of Cridge and neighborhood children. After the furor died down, however, no one had the energy to change the name of the center, and it still stands.

Eddie’s presence bothers me, for he has no place in my dreams, my fantasies, or my life. He’s a Chicago Cub, and I collect White Sox. Yet his story has perched like a crow in the back of my brain ever since I first heard it. I have visited Eddie less often in the years since I first heard my voice; I guess I’m afraid I’ll share the story with him, and I fear that telling him will somehow destroy the magic. I kept the magic sealed inside for a long time, as if I were airtight, like a radio tube or a Mason jar. It was with relief that I shared it with Jerry, and shared and shared. Somehow I keep retelling my tale, as if it is a song I’m humming under my breath. Still, Eddie is often the last thing I think of at night, his hair white as whipped cream, his back straight, his cheeks the luscious pink of ripening strawberries. Across the table from me, he often resembles some wise old doctor, or senator, or scholar, plucked from a yellowed photograph.

But as I cuddle down on my stomach, prepared to dream, my left hand lonely, missing the touch of Annie’s thigh, Eddie Scissons’s words peck at the warm honey of my sleep. Why, I wonder, of all the people in Iowa City, Iowa, did he decide to stop me on the street?

Why, after he had asked the time and I had responded, did he add, his blue eyes glistening in the March sunlight, “I used to play for the Chicago Cubs, you know?”

“No, I didn’t know,” I said, but I was thrilled at the idea of talking with an ex-major-leaguer.

“I’m not in bad shape for eighty-seven,” he said, his wide-set eyes looking me up and down as if daring me to contradict him. He carried a white cane, and his mittened hand only partially covered the brass serpent’s head that served as a handle.

What I had first seen was a tall old man in a full-length overcoat the color of dirty snow, standing on a street corner, his feet planted on the curb as if he were standing solidly on second base eyeing the outfield after a standup double. His came was pointed straight ahead, waist high, as one might hold a fencing foil or a baseball bat. It was an earachy day, and an evil little wind chewed along the icy sidewalks.

Suddenly, with a fluid motion more agile than I had expected, he turned toward me, his cane stopping just short of the middle button of my parka. He asked the time in a pleasant, resonant voice that was younger than he. As I looked at his bird-bright eyes, I remember thinking, even before he spoke of baseball, “Wide-set, great peripheral vision.”

Then he mentioned his age and the Chicago Cubs. The traffic light in his direction turned to “Walk,” but he made no move to leave.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Montana,” I replied. “I was born there, but I live here now.”

“I used to play ball in Montana. Do you know Bozeman?” His face, pink as a child’s, was slowly and cautiously forming a smile.

“I’m from Deer Lodge,” I said. “My mother lives in Great Falls.”

“I played in Helena, too, and against Great Falls and Butte. Tough teams from those mining towns—you filed your spikes before you went out on the field.”

“When did you play for the Cubs?” I asked, the wheels of my brain turning, trying to get traction. When did Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance play? Would he have known them? I stared down at his cane bobbing an inch from my navel as if looking for a place to plug in. If he was eighty-seven as he said, then he must surely be the oldest living Chicago Cub. The very idea of finding this living piece of history excited me, and I was about to say, “My dad played semipro ball,” when he answered my questions both asked and unasked by saying, “Oh, that was a long time ago. I played on the same team as Three Finger Brown and Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. You ever heard of them?”

Indeed I had, for my father had extolled their virtues just as a pitchman might sing the praises of a patent medicine or an unusual sideshow.

But Eddie Scissons didn’t stop for me to say I had.

“Oh, I wasn’t a regular or anything,” he went on, smiling, showing he still had most of his own teeth. One old foot in its overshoe was pawing rhythmically at the sidewalk ice as he spoke. “Just sat in the bullpen and spit tobacco juice at the horseflies that used to buzz around us—take a bite out of you like a small dog, then buzzards would. Once in a while I’d get to play in the late innings of the second game of a double-header, after all the other players were used up.” He chuckled briefly, wagging the cane up and down dangerously close to my body.

“I was a relief pitcher before there were relief pitchers, if you follow me. Starters almost always pitched the whole game in those days—thought it was a sign of weakness if they didn’t. Ball wasn’t made out of India rubber like now. I was fifty years ahead of my time, yes sirree.” He chuckled again, a friendly grandfatherly sound. He was wearing a brown farmer’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. The laces, which were supposed to be tied under his chin, hung loose, vibrating in the wind.

“What’s your name?” I asked, putting a hand over one of my ears to ease the bite of the wind. I tried to remember the names of some ancient Chicago Cub pitchers, but the only one I could recall was George Washington (Zip) Zabel, who ended his three-year Cub career with a 14-14 record.

“Eddie Scissons,” he replied, then abruptly changed the subject. “I spend my days, since the wife passed away, over at the Friendship Center. They feed me lunch and I play cards, and sometimes bingo. I’m gonna catch the bus home, that’s why I asked you the time. I used to farm out east of town, until my daughters insisted we had to move to town; my wife died the very next year. Did you know the life expectancy of a retired farmer is only two years? Say, you wouldn’t want to rent a farm, would you?”

Late that night I posed the question to Annie, and a week later, with a sense of relief, like waking from a nightmare, I quit my job selling life insurance and we moved into the big white biscuit box that had once housed the oldest living Chicago Cub.

I racked my brain, but the name Eddie Scissons meant nothing to me. My father would have remembered him. When he lived in Chicago after the First World War, he sometimes traveled across town on a Sunday afternoon and sat sweating in his shirt sleeves, watching the Cubs perform in Wrigley Field.

It is fortunate that Jerry has a sense of humor, for he has had more than his share of difficulties. At first he was paranoid about being recognized and having people demand autographs. But after traveling these past few days, he would like to find someone who recognizes him.

“I’m J. D. Salinger,” he says to a middle-aged, suede-faced gas jockey near Cleveland.

“The writer,” I prompt.

“Oh yeah, for real, eh? I’m a great fan of yours.” He reaches out and pumps Jerry’s hand, using both of his oil-soaked paws to enclose Salinger’s long, pale one.

“Yes, sir, you are some writer. Did you really go right into the prison there and watch them hang Perry Smith and that friend of his?”

Salinger shrinks back.

“You’ve mistaken my friend for Truman Capote,” I say. The attendant’s eyes are dark and deep-set and not quick to comprehend. “Truman Capote wrote
In Cold Blood,
the book about Perry Smith.”

“That so? Well, what did you say your name was? I recognized you as one of them fellows who wrote.”

“I’m just someone who used to be a writer,” says Jerry, in his best theatrical tone, as he climbs back into the car, wiping the grease from his hands onto the thighs of his jeans.

*  *  *

“Way up there,” is the way people in Minneapolis and St. Paul refer to the Iron Range. I have a close friend from college who comes from Duluth, the industrial center nearest to Chisholm. Even he says “up there” when talking about the Iron Range.

North of Duluth the landscape grows harsher, the trees shorter and more gnarled, the grass tougher and wirier. We pass Virginia, Minnesota, where all about the land is scarred. From above, the earth there would look as if it were criss-crossed with sutures. Above the town, the mines sit like sand-colored bunkers in the cliffs. From a distance they are stern and silent, like Greek ruins.

As we pass the town of Buhl and near Chisholm, the land reminds me of a pasture rooted and rerooted by giant hogs. It has been split and gutted; greenery has grown back, but at weird and unnatural angles.

Then as we swing down into the town, the highway divides, and we cross a beautiful and tranquil lake, so smooth and shiny it might be a scene painted on a glass plate. A sign reads WELCOME TO CHISHOLM, and underneath that states that calendar parking is in effect, taking several lines of fine print to establish which side of the street one may park on, and how often. It rather spoils the welcome, and makes it clear that even in this wild and breathtaking land, bureaucracy is alive and well.

There is a charming old hotel with a dark, beery tavern on the ground floor, but they are reluctant to rent us a room; assure us we would not be comfortable there. So we settle at the Ron-Son Motel, one of two in Chisholm: clean, comfortable, cable TV, air conditioner, complete, too, with a religious tract on the nightstand, signed in pen by “Your Maid, Ron-Son Motel.”

Above the town a barrel-shaped water tower stands like a gopher raised on its hind legs. In black print on the silver walls is written, HOME OF THE MINNESOTA MINING MUSEUM.

Jerry attracts service-station attendants. Soon after we arrive in Chisholm, with Salinger driving, we stop for gas at a small station. The gas jockey checks the oil, water, battery, fan belt, and tire pressure, washes all the windows inside and out, cleans off the license plates, and apologizes for not having a vacuum cleaner to do the inside of the car. He is slim and dark with neatly trimmed hair and a quizzical smile. He has heavy black eyebrows that look as if they might have been blackened for a theatrical performance. One ear, the right, sticks out as though he is cupping it forward to hear an important whisper. His face is smooth as a child’s, though he could be anywhere from sixteen to thirty. He assumes Jerry to be the car’s owner, and talks about the car with him.