Shoeless Joe (22 page)

I follow her into the kitchen when she goes for more coffee. She steps into my arms, her face against my chest, her belly solidly and warmly against mine. I kiss across her cheeks and find her lips.

When our eyes meet, I nod my head toward the upstairs and our bedroom.

“Hey, Champ, we got company,” Annie says, cuddling close, letting me know she wants my love as much as I want hers.

“They can amuse themselves for an hour,” I plead.

“It was you who came home with an entourage. You’ve got to entertain them. Some of your fantasies will just have to wait.” She slips away, leaving me with my arms still in front of me in the shape of a circle.

Instead, I take my guests on a tour of the baseball field. But as we near it, I feel as if an exam has been laid in front of me and I have no idea how to answer a single question. The fence is there. The baseball field is there. But it is much smaller than I remember, and there is no magic about it this late afternoon, no concave grandstand full of thousands of fans who hum like the wind, no vendors, no banks of floodlights, no players. It looks pitiful.

Dandelions brighten the outfield like egg yolks.

I can see the disappointment creeping across Salinger’s face slow as a crawling insect. He must be thinking that I have conned him, that I’m just a crazy corn farmer who has hallucinations. Eddie Scissons creaks along with us, leaning on his cane.

“Do teams really play here?” asks Moonlight Graham, and I consider the difference between what he sees and what I know is there, hidden like wondrously painted Easter eggs waiting for someone who believes to part the grass and find them.

“Yes,” I say, but without conviction. The gap is too gigantic for me to try and explain it away with mere words.

The field under the sizzling sun and the high, breathless sky is sweet as a perfume factory. The grass needs cutting and raking. It is heavy and damp and cool; and all across the outfield, dense grass cowlicks glisten frog-green.

“What the hell is this?” says Eddie.

“It’s a baseball field,” I reply truthfully.

“Why?” he says and looks at me with his wide-set eyes, blue as a field of flax.

A valid question, and one I won’t be able to answer until the magic unfolds.

“Eddie, Eddie, you’ll love it here. The White Sox play here. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver …” I jabber on for ten minutes, extolling the virtues of my field and describing its marvels in a litany not dissimilar to Karin’s monologue on the back steps. I feel as if I have had a bucket of water dumped over my head and am somehow accountable for every drop. I try to cover too much ground. While I’m talking, I remember the story of how Shoeless Joe, after he had been paid off, tried to return the money and, failing that, tried to take it to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. He got only as far as an accountant, who slammed down a shutter, ending the conversation and leaving Joe alone in a darkened hallway. I think about how the sound of that slamming shutter must have haunted Joe for the rest of his life.

And I think of Richard. Where is he? “Gone to Iowa City,” Annie told me. “He’ll be home later. He works as a barker for the carnival that’s passing through town.” I still don’t know how he found us.

“Mark’s been around with more offers to buy the farm,” Annie said. “Getting really pushy, as if I could sell it to him by myself, even if I wanted to. And Eddie Scissons has been phoning you every day for a week. Did he tell you why?”

“Have you been phoning me?” I say to Eddie as he sits staring out across the playerless diamond, perhaps dreaming of his days with the Chicago Cubs.

“No,” he says, “I haven’t.” His voice is low and far away.

“It just needs a little work,” I say, spreading my arms to take in the whole ballpark, trying to sound enthusiastic. Three flat, expressionless faces return my gaze.

“I’ll hook up the tractor and mow the outfield,” I say. “It will make a lot of difference.”

After a very long pause Jerry says, “Do you need some help?” and Moonlight nods, even though I can see the skepticism floating in his eyes like tadpoles.

“
This
is what you bought the tractor for?” says Eddie in a scratchy voice.

“It’s more than just this,” I say. “You’ll see. I thought you’d understand. You played for the Cubs. Baseball’s been your whole life …”

“Now I don’t feel so bad about what I done,” says Eddie.

“What?” I say.

“You don’t know already, eh? Well, you will soon enough.”

I am afraid to ask for details. I have enough to worry about. I drag out my ancient gas-powered mower that burps blue smoke, and set Moonlight to mowing the infield grass. I give Salinger clippers and put him to work trimming the shaggy edges along the foul lines. I seat Eddie on an overturned bucket near first base, where he can glower at each of us in turn.

There is a flurry of activity as I carry cool, mothball-smelling blankets from the linen closet and make up beds for Moonlight and Kid Scissons in a room we seldom use. The furniture is sparse: a plastic-covered mattress, a single bureau with an amber-tinted mirror, one straight-backed chair.

“It’s not fancy,” I say.

“I’ve stayed in worse hotels,” says Kid Scissons. “In the minors, there was lots of times bugs.”

“I’d sleep in a strawstack for a chance to play ball,” says Moonlight Graham.

Late in the night, while my guests sleep, while my magic field sleeps, while Annie sleeps with one freckled arm tossed over my pillow, while trees sigh and the night breathes softly, I pad downstairs and sit at the kitchen table, my elbows resting on the slick, patterned oilcloth that covers it. The spicy scent of oilcloth means cleanness to me, for the table in my mother’s kitchen was always covered with it, and when it was washed, after every meal, it glowed in the lamplight and I would sniff its clean new-cloth odor.

I sit and watch two lemon-lines of moonlight that knife across the floor like laser beams. From where I sit, I can stare out the screen door; the moon looks as if it is covered with graph paper. I walk to the door, inhale the perfume of the Iowa night. Earlier, it has rained. A few nickel-sized drops plopped in the dust. I press my nose against the screen. Rain-green corn and spun-metal scents assail my senses.

“Just like a kid,” Annie always says when she sees me this way. Sometimes she kisses the dark pattern off my nose when I turn away, and sometimes she flees in mock horror, shouting, “No. No. No one with a checkered nose will kiss these lips!”

I have just come from making love to Annie. No. Making love
with
Annie: her arms around my neck, her mouth peach sweet, tiny freckled breasts pressed against my chest. Our bodies, slick with sweat, move together when we make love, slipping as if soaped. Annie’s curls are damp on her forehead, and all the time she sings to me, love songs in tongues, bird sounds, bird songs thrilling and brilliant as morning. And when I look at her face in the silky darkness, I marvel that I can love her so much, marvel that our love puts other things in perspective. I wish I had some kind of fame to dedicate to her: that I was an auto racer, a bullfighter, an author, even a politician—I see myself making my acceptance speech, thanking party faithful, then calling Annie forward to share the applause, the adoration.

But I am likely to have nothing to share with her in the near future. Eventually I turn on the light and drag out the bank books, the ledgers, and the sheaf of bills that puff up around the paper-spike. Annie is incurably optimistic. It was her idea to rent the farm, and, when we broke even at that, her idea to buy it.

“A farmer can’t make a living on one hundred sixty acres anymore,” everyone has said to us, especially Annie’s relatives. Eddie Scissons was willing to carry the mortgage, and the bank trusted him, but land here costs over $2000 an acre. A combine is worth $70,000, and the amount of equipment Eddie had on the farm was staggering. I look at the payments that will be due in the fall, and I have a sinking feeling within me, as if an elevator has dropped five floors. Mark is right, too many things have accumulated. Even if I let Eddie’s mortgage payments fall further in arrears, there still won’t be enough money.

I think of the tractor sitting out in the machine shed—the one that has nothing to do with the corn crop. The International Cub Cadet 127 for which I paid $3950 in order to be able to mow my baseball field.

“Things will work out,” Annie said when I came home with it in the back of our pickup truck.

Karin sat on my knee as, like a mechanical bee, we hummed around the outfield on the new tractor with a mower blade attached. Annie joined us and drove the tractor in tight circles on the center-field grass. “I’ll make a target circle for you, and you can hire a skydiver, and people will come from all over to see the show.”

“What show? We’re the only ones who see it,” I reminded her.

I recall raking the infield after supper, tweaking out an occasional weed that had infiltrated while I was away. The earth of the infield, for the most part, had that abandoned look that dirt quickly acquires when it is not tended—like a car windshield splattered with raindrops that have dried like black lace. My footprints, my players’ footprints, had been erased by gentle wind and spring rain. From my hands and knees, the ground had a moonscape aura—tiny grains of dirt looked like mountains, an ant like something prehistoric. The earth around the bases was fine as brown flour when I finished.

Out in the night, the metal cattle guard twangs as a car crosses it. A taxi pulls into the yard, its roof light glowing green as an electric lime. Then Richard stands dark in the kitchen doorway. I look up from the table. It is as if I am staring into a full-length mirror.

We don’t leap into each other’s arms, backslapping and recalling old joys. We shake hands cautiously, as if there is a referee holding his hand out like a knife between us. “We loved each other as brothers should, no more and no less,” I said to Annie once, and she looked at me uncomprehendingly. Except for occasional bursts of camaraderie, which came like thunderstorms, we were never close. Mother didn’t dress us alike or try to enhance what nature had already done. Twins can never escape from each other, I read in a book once. We are like the Gemini astrological sign. I make coffee and we sit across the table from each other, staring.

How do we know which of us is which? What if it was I who punched the fist through the wall in our farmhouse near Deer Lodge, Montana? What if it has been me who has swished like a tumbleweed across the face of America for twenty years, traveling like a long-distance mover with no home base, going from New Orleans to Amarillo, Kansas City to Chicago, Cleveland to Baltimore, and back again, over and over? What if Annie and Karin are his family, and I am rootless as a pulled weed?

“So tell me, where have you been? What have you done?”

“Have you got a year?” says Richard, and laughs—my laugh.

“Where did you go when you left? When did you find out that Dad was dead? Why didn’t you at least write to Mother?” The questions pour out of me. I try not to make them sound incriminating, but fail.

“I knew what was going to happen before I ever picked the fight with Dad. Hell, I’ve got feathers in my shoes. You were weighed down with lead, just like them. I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a bird, flying from one thing to another. Birds never go back to the nest once they’ve flown away.”

“You didn’t answer any of my questions.”

“I’ve been with the carnival for ten years now. You learn how not to answer questions.”

“Why did you come back now?”

“There’s a little homing device in all of us. I admit I’ve been pulled a few times. A year or so ago, I started looking for Kinsellas in every phone book in every town we passed through. I found a Raymond down in McClean, Texas, and I phoned him. He was black, and he didn’t know where he got his name.

“Then a week ago I came to Iowa City. They changed the schedule, we don’t usually stop here. Have too much equipment for the single block they give us to set up; I’ve always gone straight on to Cedar Rapids. I looked in the Iowa City phone book and there you were. I phoned and asked the lady who answered if you came from Deer Lodge, Montana, and she didn’t have to answer. I could tell by the long pause that you did, and that she thought she was talking to you and that you were playing some kind of game with her.” He stops and smiles.

“That lady of yours is something else, and Karin—I’d chop off an arm, bit by bit, for a child like Karin.” He smiles again. “I look around here and I see that it’s not so bad to be lead-footed. I’ve always thought it would be like having one foot nailed to the earth and turning in tight circles ever after, but now I’m not so sure. You must be happy. With a wife and child like that, you must be happy.”

“I am. But you haven’t seen anything. You haven’t met the others. You haven’t seen the field.”

“What’s going on here anyway? Annie just says something about you building a baseball diamond, but Karin says there are games on it. I walked around it one night and it was eerie, like I could hear leaves rustling where there weren’t any trees.”

“We’re cleaning it up,” I say. “You can help, after breakfast, if you want to.” Richard isn’t the only one who can avoid answering questions.

“Have you ever been married?” I ask, but the question is heavy as a paperweight, and the silence that follows it awkward. I have moved in too close too fast.

“I have a lady,” Richard finally says. “She works in the change booth at the carnival. She’s called Gypsy, and only the head office in Florida knows her whole name. She ran away from somewhere when she was thirteen, says she’s a Gypsy. Been telling it to people for so long she believes it herself. She’s like me, got feathers for feet. We’re convenient for each other, but we can, either of us, fly away whenever we want.” He pauses.

“Some guy told me once that her family owns a motel in Kellogg, Idaho, and that they’ve offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information about her. Says the reward’s been unclaimed for over ten years. I think about it whenever I’m broke.”