Shoeless Joe (16 page)

“This morning while I was walking down here, I looked south from Lake Street, down Third toward the school, and I thought I seen him, his white hair bobbing along, his black overcoat open, like it always was even if it was fifty below zero, and him carrying an umbrella, like he always did. He claimed he carried it out of habit, for something to hang on to and ‘to beat away all my lady admirers,’ and he used to laugh about that. Only the umbrella he was carrying must have belonged to his wife, because it was all pale blue and silky and had little flowers growing out of it. She always wore blue—I bet you didn’t know that. My wife was a student of hers. Anyway, you see what you’ve gone and done. I’m seeing Doc Graham walking down the street like he was, oh, thirty years ago. And him wearing his overcoat in June. The memory sure does you strange sometimes.”

“He’s been dead about twenty years. You should write about the living. To heck with the dead,” says a gruff voice from the end of the table. But he is quickly shouted down, and everyone present passes me one or more bits of information about Doc Graham.

“Alicia did like blue. Doc used to buy hats for her—most always blue ones with lots of flowers on them. I think the stores used to order in blue hats because they knew Doc would buy them. When they tore down the old school after Doc retired, why they found a half-dozen hatboxes in his closet with brand-new hats in them. I wonder if anybody ever told Alicia. It would tickle her to know—if she’s still alive.”

The man who said crossly that I should write about the living is now pacing up and down behind me, racking his brains, stopping frequently to put his hand on my shoulder.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says finally, tapping his glasses frames. “Doc gave me my first pair of glasses, but that’s not the story. Doc had as many pockets in his suit as a magician. Why, he’d reach in, and out would come an orange or a peanut or some candy, or there’d be a silver flash and he’d pop a dime into the hand of each child he’d meet. Doc had money in every pocket, and not just silver. He gave away more free glasses than any man in Minnesota. Can you imagine a doctor giving away eyeglasses today?”

“I thought of him like he was Joe DiMaggio,” says a quiet man who declines to elaborate.

“He wrote by moving his paper up and down under the pen. And he used to chew up his prescription slips, so he was always looking for scraps of paper, and sometimes his patients used to have to dig into their pockets for a piece of paper so Doc could write a prescription.”

“I went with him to make a housecall up at one of the camps,” says a woman who has not spoken before. “The husband was sick and they had no heat—no stove. When we got back to Chisholm, Doc went to the hardware store and bought a stove for them and paid to have it delivered. And I bet that wasn’t the only time he did something like that.”

“He could show you every spot where there had ever been a hitching post in Chisholm. He had that kind of mind.”

“And that man had an arm on him,” says another. “‘Feel my muscles,’ he used to say to us boys. Never put on an extra pound in his life, and used to brag that he never let another doctor examine him. One day over at the ballpark, he wandered down from the stands after a game. ‘Let me see that ball,’ he said to us, and one of us tossed him the ball. He studied it for a minute, looked at it so long I thought he’d forgotten what he was doing with it, and then he walked over behind home plate, cranked up his arm in a kind of comical way, reared back, and fired that ball over the left-field fence, and it was still
rising
when it disappeared. He just smiled at us and nodded, and then he wandered off, shuffling along, looking kind of lost the way he always did. But what an arm. There ain’t many
young
men could have done that—three hundred thirty-five feet it was, and him at least fifty at the time. A hell of an arm.”

“Doc came here in 1909 just after most of the town burnt up. He just grew with the town. Chisholm’s a mining town, always has been, always will be. Whole area is called the Iron Range. Town used to have ten thousand people, but we’re down to four thousand now. All the underground mines are closed, just strip mining left. Needed a lot of men to dig in the old days, there was mining camps like sores all over the hills. But the mines were good to the town. Better than most big industries. They paid for the doctors to come here, and brought in the first teachers and built the schools. It wasn’t all take, they put back into the community. Even in the thirties there was a market for iron ore, so we hardly felt the depression up here.”

Back at the newspaper office, Veda Ponikvar hands me the small wallet-sized photo of Moonlight Graham in his New York Giant uniform. She passes it to me as a bishop might hand a religious object to a peasant—formally, hoping against hope that no harm will come to it. I hold it in both hands as if I am receiving the sacrament. I’m tempted to offer to leave my watch or wallet or belt as security—something tangible to prove that I intend to get it back to her safely. I carry it off to Chisholm’s only photo studio and order reprints, pay for them to be mailed to Iowa, and extract a solemn promise from the photographer to return the photo to Veda as soon as he is finished with it.

On the way to the motel I buy a newspaper, a
Chicago Tribune,
thick as a folded bath towel. On an inside page, above a two-column story the shape of a paperback book, is the headline: J. D. SALINGER MISSING. In summary, the story states only that a relative in California notified police after receiving no answer to repeated telephone calls. The piece concludes by saying that there are no known clues and that the police, for the moment, state that they do not suspect foul play.

I show the paper to Jerry.

He goes immediately to the phone and places a call to his son in California.

I decide to leave him alone, and head across to the Country Kitchen Restaurant for coffee and an apple dumpling. The apple dumplings may be addictive. I picture myself, years in the future, toothless, in rags, begging quarters in front of a Country Kitchen. “Spare change, sir? I only need thirty-five cents more for an apple dumpling. Sixty cents and I can have cinnamon ice cream with it. God bless you, sir.”

“My son says they’re camped in
his
driveway. Way out there. Can you imagine it?” exploded Jerry when I return to the room. “They’re probably breaking up my jeep and selling the pieces for souvenirs.” He laughs a little wildly and shakes his head.

“My son’s going to issue a bulletin. He’ll say he’s had a call from me and that I’m in a monastery in Peru eating goat cheese and contemplating the meaning of life. That’s what they expect. I told him to say that I’m thinking of changing my name to Dusty Chisholm because I’m planning to write a western novel. But he says that’s too silly. He has a level head, my son.”

“You must be getting lots of material out of this trip,” I say to Salinger late that evening as we linger over apple dumplings at the restaurant. I am on my second one. “I get abusive if I eat more than one,” says Jerry. “You wouldn’t want to have to bail me out, would you?” We smile. Then his expression changes.

“Material? Like what?” As he looks at me, the tension lines between his eyebrows deepen, and I realize that I have ventured over that mystical line into a writer’s domain, a place where I do not belong.

I can think of nothing to do with the stories I’ve gathered about Doc, except to tell them to Salinger, who, to my consternation, makes no notes. “Doc’s life. Couldn’t you write a wonderful story about Doc? I mean, sixty years the small-town doctor—pillar of the community …”

“Friend to those who have no friend; enemy to those who make him an enemy,” says Salinger, in a good imitation of a radio announcer.

“That’s cruel.”

“But accurate. Nobody cares anymore. Half the communities in North America have a Doc Graham. We’ve come up here and spaded up people’s memories of Doc, but what we’ve uncovered is all good: no paramours, no drunken binges, no opium habit …”

“No illegitimate children.”

“No crazy wife locked in the attic.”

“No shady financial dealings.”

“No evicting orphans, or midnight abortions.” Jerry stops and shakes his head wearily. “It’s a sad time when the world won’t listen to stories about good men. It’s one of the reasons I don’t publish anymore.”

“Oh, but you should. You should. Look. I want to show you something.” I dig frantically through the compartments of my wallet. Past shining Master Charge and oil-company credit cards, past a picture of Karin, her baby face smiling from inside a white bonnet; past various pictures of Annie, her red hair shimmering: Annie in pigtails standing beside her father’s 1950 Ford; Annie as a cheerleader for West High in Iowa City; Annie pregnant, looking as if she is hugging a watermelon; Annie all in denim smiling at me in that way she has. From inside one of the plastic photo holders, I produce a ratty clipping and thrust it at Salinger:

You do something in your stories that few writers do well—especially today—and that is to make the reader
love
your characters. They exude a warm glow. They are so real, so vulnerable so good, that they remind me of that side of human nature which makes living and loving and striving after dreams worth the effort. I, for one, came away with a delicious smile on my face and a soft little tear in my eye—and I felt pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day. Thank you.

“Have you ever seen that before?” I ask.

“No.”

“It’s an excerpt from a fan letter to you. I cut it out of the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1957, and I’ve carried it with me ever since. How can you not publish, when people love you so?”

But Salinger only smiles sadly and continues to shake his head.

What are we doing here? I keep asking myself. Dispatched blind, like a taxi given only the number of a house, we root in the memories of the people of Chisholm just like the gargantuan machines that open and upend the earth outside of town. We are dredging up the past and laying it out in the sunshine to dry.

The house on our farm in Iowa is nearly a hundred years old, and several times when Annie and I have dug in the back yard, guessing at where the garbage piles must have been, we have come up with wonderful pieces of glass, old dishes, crockery, and, above all, bottles—blues, greens, rubies, small triangular bottles, dimpled long-necked bottles the color of ice, round milk bottles with the name of the dairy permanently imprinted on them. There was once a bottle manufacturer in Iowa City, and many of the bottles we unearth are unique and invaluable. Annie has filled the back windows of the sun porch with them, after washing and polishing them, and they sit in rows like soldiers from different armies, the evening sun flashing off their surfaces.

Here in Chisholm, we take the memories we unearth and carry them back to the motel, recording them, storing them, until we feel the presences moving, the voices whispering, growing in momentum like a breeze turning into a wind.

“What’s going to happen?” says Jerry. He brushes his hand across the seat of a chair before he sits down.

“Something,” I say, for that is all I know. We are mixing a cocktail of memories, and history, and love, and imagination. Now we must wait and see what effect it will have on us.

“He always carried an umbrella and was always losing them,” says a voice that filters into my dreams. “Businesses around town would just lean his umbrella somewhere near the door. If anybody asked, they’d just say, ‘Oh, that’s Doc’s umbrella.’”

And I dream, too, of Annie. Behind our house a hundred yards or so is a collapsed building, its unpainted wood aged to the softness of owl feathers. Annie loves old buildings. It was perhaps a granary or a henhouse once, but stood abandoned for years, until, as if nature had given it a gentle karate chop, the roof collapsed in the middle, sinking slowly downward like an old camel attempting to kneel. It rots with dignity into the earth. A window is now at ground level, and the strangle grass, bent by evening breezes, peers inside.

Late one evening, I looked out and saw Annie standing in the knee-high grass, her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, staring dreamily at the building.

I joined her and slipped an arm around her waist as I did so.

“Oh, love,” she said, turning and laying her head on my chest. “One day I want to travel around the country, in no hurry, no hurry at all; I want to stop and explore old buildings, walk through them and listen to my footsteps—funny old houses with porch pillars and turrets …”

On our honeymoon, in New England, we passed an elegant old home painted an olive green with white trim and shutters, and a turret, like a medieval castle, obviously unused.

“Maybe we could rent the turret,” I said to Annie.

“I’ll bet the lady who owns it has her hair in a tight bun and hasn’t smiled since 1933. I can just hear you. ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, we’d like to rent your turret.’ ‘Why young man, I’m shocked, I’m not that kind of girl.’”

Annie and the turret fade away and I am wide awake, my senses tense as if I’m hiding from soldiers. I ease out of bed and dress quietly.

I feel a little like a werewolf as I slip out the motel door, leaving Salinger asleep, his head gray on the white pillow, dividing it evenly. The night air, sweet with the smells of summer, has a high-country chill to it. The sky is cloudless and might be a lake reflecting stars and a golden sickle of moon.

I walk from the motel down the highway and into town, down Third Street as far as the school, back up to Lake Street, over to Second, and down past the Graham Apartments, a massive natural-stone building where Doc and Alicia lived in one unit and rented two others. The apartments are built on the site of the old Rood Hospital, where Doc first practiced medicine in Chisholm, where he was doctoring when he met and married the young school teacher, Alicia Madden. I walk across to Third, look at the school again, then return to Lake Street, completing my circle. I walk slowly, staring at the silhouettes of the trees and houses dark against the pure sky, knowing that much of this cannot have changed since Doc last saw it. He has been gone only fourteen years. I scuff along the boulevard of the sleeping street like a boy reluctant to reach school. The toes of my shoes are damp with dew.