Shoeless Joe (19 page)

“Archie Graham, is it?” says Jerry. We look at each other with secretive expressions. Expressions of childhood. “We know something he doesn’t know” expressions.

“Yes sir,” says the boy.

“Haven’t we seen you before?” asks Jerry.

“No sir, I think not.”

“You from around here?” Jerry persists.

There is a long, long pause. Looking through the rearview mirror, I try to frame the expression on his face.

“My family hails from North Carolina,” he says finally. His lips curve in an enigmatic line, as if he has chosen his words carefully.

I shake my head ever so slightly at Jerry, as an indication that he should stop asking questions. And he changes the subject to the weather and current baseball standings, which I have to help him out with.

I realize, talking with Archie Graham as the miles roll by, that there are gaps in his life, like boards pulled off an outfield fence by anxious fans. And I come to believe he has been created by the strength of my dreams, by the depth of my belief in what has been happening. The young Archie Graham is like a doll Jerry and I have conjured up to satisfy our desire that fantasy turn into truth.

“We
are
heading for Iowa, but slowly,” I say. “We’re stopping in Minneapolis for a Twins game, and then home. Do you want to come with us?”

But before he can answer, Jerry says, “You must be a fan of the game.” I stare at him as the words hang in the air like skywriting. Jerry’s face remains impassive. I glance back at Archie, who has his slim hands clasped together and is staring at the back of Jerry’s head. He seems unperturbed. Is Jerry playing cat and mouse with me? Does he somehow know what I know?

“Wherever you’re going is fine,” says Archie. “I’m not in a rush, and I’ve got money to pay my own way.”

We drive on to Minneapolis. We are all relaxed at the game, cheering the Twins to an easy win, chanting, “Bombo! Bombo! Bombo!” each time the Twins’ right fielder Bombo Rivera is announced. He is a good young player, but not great. It is his name that intoxicates the crowd.

“Nicknames appear to be a thing of the past,” I say to Jerry. “Look around the leagues, they’re full of Daves and Als and Dons and Barrys.”

“There’s a simple explanation,” says Jerry. “Baseball has become a business for the players as well as the owners. Guys who make a million dollars a year don’t even want to be called by their first names. They want to be called Sir. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of these years some free agent with a 280 batting average gets a clause in his contract specifying that he has to be announced as Mr. Bigstar every time he comes to bat. It was all right for a boy who earned five thousand dollars playing baseball and was an apprentice plumber in the off-season to be called Snuffy, or Peewee, or Slats, but if you spend all your nonplaying time administrating your fifteen dry-cleaning franchises, your apartment complexes, or your bank, you don’t want to be known as No-Neck to your comptroller.”

“What do you think?” I say to Archie.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You guys are a lot older than me.”

“Do you have a nickname?” asks Jerry. A leading question if I ever heard one.

“Not yet,” says Moonlight Graham. “You have to do something strange, or have an unusual off-season occupation. Nicknames are funny, they just land on you, like waking up one morning with a tattoo. You don’t know how you got it, but you know it’s gonna be with you forever.”

“Would you like one?” asks Jerry.

“You a supplier?” says the kid. He’s ripped off the corner of one of the baseball programs and is busy chewing it into a spitball.

“I make suggestions,” says Salinger. “There’s no obligation. Let’s see. How about Lefty?”

“I throw right,” says the kid.

“Babe,” suggests Salinger.

“Been used,” says the hitchhiker.

“I have an idea,” I say. I am sprawled on one of the beds in the Concho Shell Motel in Bloomington, not far from the baseball stadium; Archie sits in a chair facing the television, which picks up only one shadowy channel; Salinger is pacing the room. “Let’s go to the ballpark.”

They look at me without comment.

“Have either of you spent any time in an empty ballpark? There’s something both eerie and holy about it.”

“How would we get in?” says the kid.

“Leave that to us old people,” I say.

Salinger already has the door open and is switching off the lights.

“A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church,” I say, as I stop the Datsun on the gravel of the parking lot and turn off the motor and lights. Gravels rearrange themselves under the weight of the car, making sounds like snapping fingers. Our breathing becomes very loud. We might be parked on a country road, the only sound that of a faraway car hissing a long a freeway. Above, an airplane blinks as it drifts toward the nearby Minneapolis International Airport. Stealthily, we open the doors and step out. I look straight up at the ink-blue sky. Its edges are bathed golden by the city lights, but, with my neck bent back, neckbones cracking in protest, I can see the stars bubbling, unspoiled. We stand silent. Salinger, too, stares at the sky.

“I haven’t done this for years,” he whispers, massaging the back of his neck. “And I live in the country.”

“You have to make time, even for something as universal as staring at the stars.” The moon hangs over the ballpark like a softly glowing peach.

“Full moon,” I say, smiling wryly. “Perhaps that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. They claim that a lot of strangeness goes on during the nights of full moon.” The moon turns Salinger’s glasses to silver. I cannot see his eyes.

Cops, taxi drivers, and cocktail waitresses will tell you about the full moon: a time when the most docile little wino runs amuck, tossing off twice his weight in blue uniforms; when college students scream through cities, writing on walls; when sedate businessmen drink until they vomit on linen tablecloths; when wives shoot husbands and husbands shoot wives; when little old ladies report lost cats and strange men under their beds. From dark doorways, priests hiss at hookers when the moon is full. And housewives have fearsome attacks of manic energy and shred their underclothes in the blender.

The stadium is totally dark. The silver light poles, like tall, polished trees, stand out against the dark, their tops festooned with hundreds of identical eyes. Behind us, Archie Graham picks up and lays down his cleats, softly, in order to make as little noise as possible. When the moonlight illuminates his face, I can see that it is covered with question marks.

The small door marked “Passes” is located fifty yards to the right-field side of the main entrance. When I walked by it earlier in the evening, I noted that it was held closed by a Yale lock. I know what to do with Yale locks. I have seen enough police and private-eye shows to know that one kick, properly placed, will do the trick. I wave Jerry off and take a short run at the door. What a fool I will feel like if it doesn’t work! The flat of my foot hits hard right on the shiny outer portion of the lock, and the door gives with a tearing sound and a dull thud like a muffled gunshot. The kid winces as if I have hit him.

“Are you two guys all right?” he asks, looking frantically around.

There is a second bang as the door swings back against the inner wall. I reach out and silence it, and Salinger and I slip inside, scarcely more than shadows along the dark green wall.

An empty ballpark at night must be like the inside of a pyramid. We are like archeologists exploring new territory. We climb the steps and stare out over the field from behind home plate. Peanut shells crunch underfoot, and last night’s waxy cups and hot-dog wrappers brush against our ankles.

“We should have a radio,” I say.

Salinger looks at me quizzically.

“They’re probably still playing on the West Coast. The darkness here is so smooth and soft and silent it would be like having a feather comforter around our knees. We could huddle down, tune in the game—very softly, so as not to disturb the ghosts of this park—and sit and listen. And once in a while, we could turn up the volume when the ball is whacked sharply and the crowd roars. Or better still, we could sneak in here while the Twins are on a road trip, and listen to the games, pretending they were home games and that the players and crowds were
here.
We could bring our own drinks and peanuts …”

“You could be accused of being possessed,” says Salinger. “Is there a baseball devil?”

“Anything taken too seriously becomes a devil. Do I take baseball too seriously?” But I don’t want to hear his answer, or anyone’s answer. What could be done to exorcise me? Would the ghost of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, white-maned, actually named for a mountain, appear with crossed baseball bats, and stand over me as I lay pinioned to the pitcher’s mound? Would he swat away baseballs that circled about my head like bumblebees? I raise my arms over the moon-silvered park like an Aztec priest.

Once, as a child in Montana, I went with my father to a baseball game. I remember the soft-drink cups beaded with condensation, and a vendor in an orange hat tossing peanuts up into the stands like a pitcher making a move to first, and us passing quarters from hand to hand down to the vendor, and my father cheering for the pitcher. I forget what teams were playing, but the pitcher’s name was Tony, and he was stocky, short-haired, and looked like a taciturn cowboy with a square, dimpled chin and gimlet eyes.

“Pour it on ’em, Tony,” my father cheered. I took up the refrain, and soon others did too, our voices carrying in the thin Montana air. Half the crowd wore cowboy hats, I recall, and the parking lot was full of pickup trucks.

“Pour it on ’em, Tony,” we roared, and he tipped his cap to us as he walked off the field after pitching out of a jam. He won the game, and for years I looked for his name on some big-league roster, but he disappeared, absorbed into the heart of America. One of the multitude who was not chosen.

And I think of that ballpark, abandoned the last time I saw it, the fences collapsed, lying at eerie angles, the stands dark and weathered, occasionally visited on cool summer nights by voices from the past.

For some reason, I recall the question at the bottom of the form sent by the Baseball Hall of Fame to everyone who has ever played organized baseball: “If you had it to do over again, would you play professional baseball?”

The historian at Cooperstown, Clifford S. Kachline, said he couldn’t recall even one ex-player answering
no
to the question. I wonder if any other profession can say the same?

Annie and I were in Cooperstown once. We looked at Shoeless Joe Jackson’s shoes reposing under glass. “How come a guy named Shoeless Joe had shoes?” Annie wanted to know. That was years before I built my ballpark. I explained that though Joe’s shoes were there, he was not, and might never be.

Archie Graham, Salinger, and I tiptoe down the hollow concrete tunnels to the locker rooms. The lockers look cold as coffins; silver locks with faces like clocks dangle from each door. The room smells of sweat and chlorine. We find the door labeled “Equipment,” and I do my kicking number again. Our eyes are treated to rack upon rack of white-ash bats glowing like opaque jewels in the darkness. We are exhilarated by the daring of our deeds: We feel excited, but evil, like Perry Smith and Richard Hickock on a gold-mooned Kansas night, exploring the dark recesses of the Clutter farmhouse room by room. The equipment room smells of leather and varnished wood. We motion for Archie to hold out his arms, and load him up with bats until he looks as if he is carrying an armful of fire-wood. I, too, gather an armful of bats. Salinger stuffs his pockets with balls, holds his left arm like a broken wing, fills the crook, runs balls down to his wrist and grips two in his palm. Our silent accomplice follows us, his eyes large. He is afraid to be with us, but afraid to run.

We make our way along the cold, reverberating corridors and emerge from the home-team dugout on the first-base side.

Scarcely looking around, I trudge out to the mound like a manager removing his fourth relief pitcher in an inning. The dew has fallen; the toes of my shoes are flecked with water. Salinger stops in the coaches’ box.

From out here on the field, the space seems vast. I feel as I did as a child standing on a bald Montana hill watching the Northern Lights play hide-and-seek in the infinite night sky. A momentary spray of mist across the moon makes it dull as a pewter bowl. It is as if our venture were preplanned. I straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath, walk to the edge of the outfield grass, and place bats at what seem to me to be strategic locations. Some I toss toward the right-field wall, watching them bounce at crazy angles before settling in place; white as piano keys. I take Archie’s bats from his arms and scatter them randomly about right field, like tossing the I Ching.

Salinger takes a ball and rolls it over the dew-silvered grass. In the moonlight it leaves a long black trail behind it. The moon is suddenly chrome-bright.

I take a ball and roll it toward a distant bat. It hisses softly and sends up a fine spray of dew. There is a muffled bump as it hits the bat and caroms off a few feet. It is as though we are engaged in a pagan ceremony.

Archie Graham tosses a ball high in the air; it looks like a snowball as it rises, and becomes a pearl as it crosses the face of the moon. It then drops onto the green-black grass and rolls away. I try to toss a ball skyward, but my throw is a rainbow arc that doesn’t even rise high enough to be glazed by the moon.

“Bad arm,” I whisper to Jerry.

“No arm,” he replies.

And I remember how in high school I was kept on the team because I could hit, but was stationed in right field, the place where a fielder who cannot judge fly balls and throws like a girl is apt to do the least damage. Whenever a left-handed batter came up, I traded places with the left fielder. If a hit came my way, the shortstop would be nearly to me by the time I fielded it, and I would underhand the ball to him so he could throw to the infield. But I batted nearly .500 and struck out no more than once or twice. If only there had been designated hitters then.