Shoeless Joe (6 page)

My thoughts of Eddie drifted away as suddenly as they had come. In Chicago it was the White Sox who were at home, a chance for me to see left field of Comiskey Park (or, as it has been renamed, White Sox Stadium), in a new light—as the place where Shoeless Joe Jackson performed.

Chicago, as always, is cold, grimy, impersonal. I rent a room at a decaying hotel with fly-specked fluorescent lights in a shabby lobby full of gaunt black men slouching in ratty, knife-scarred leather chairs.

There is intermittent rain, cold drops that pelt down at odd angles, stinging like tiny slaps.

I leave my car in a locked, guarded lot, and decide to walk to the stadium. The rain has let up although the clouds are still low and angry.

It is unwise for a white person to walk through South Chicago, but I do anyway. The Projects are chill, sand-colored apartments, twelve to fifteen stories high, looking like giant bricks stabbed into the ground. I am totally out of place. I glow like a piece of phosphorous on a pitch-black night. Pedestrians’ heads turn after me. I feel the stolid stares of drivers as large cars zipper past. A beer can rolls ominously down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. The skeletal remains of automobiles litter the parking lots behind the apartments.

A man in a tight leather coat passes me. I look at the ground. I can hear the leather creak as he turns to stare, hear the cough that is really a laugh. I think of the gun burrowed like a rat in a box of rags in the trunk of my car. Gangly young men in white T-shirts and running shoes loiter in the doorways of the apartments I pass.

Two young women are approaching me; one has an Afro, the other’s hair is corn-rowed as tight as if she is wearing a ridged black bathing cap. Both are wearing jeans and satin blouses, one purple, one green. They are almost past me when one turns and speaks.

“Hey, man, you better watch out. There’s some boys in the doorway of that block up there; they’s figuring to rob you.” It is the corn-rowed girl who has been speaking. She is about eighteen and has a silver beauty mark on her right cheek that glows like a tiny moon.

I look at the slim brown hand that points toward the dark front of an apartment a block away. I imagine I can see indistinct, sinister forms lurking there.

Before I can speak, the other girl says in a kindly voice, “We don’t want to see you get in any trouble. If you got any money on you, you better cross the street.” She waves vaguely toward the other side of the road, where there are a number of equally unfriendly buildings.

My inclination is to turn and run or at least walk fast, but what if they are joking with me? Can I stand the sound of their laughter? I actually have very little money on me: enough for the baseball game and a taxi back to my squalid hotel. My money, what there is of it, is carefully stashed in the driver’s door panel of my Datsun. But I do have credit cards. I picture young black men in felt fedoras going on a lavish spending spree with my very white Iowa credit cards.

I consider crossing the road.

Why did the baseball fan cross the road? I can’t think of an answer.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Them boys is bad little buggers,” the girl with the kindly voice says. I notice she is smoking a cigarette—the white tube very conspicuous in her ebony hand.

What if they are setting me up? I hadn’t noticed where they came from. What if the boys
are
on the other side of the road, and don’t want to waste their time mugging a broke white man?

“If you have any money cross the road,” the girl’s words ring in my ears.

I smile feebly. “If I had any money, would I be walking down here?” I try to say matter-of-factly, as I shove my hands deep into my pockets and move on, trying to inject some bravado into my walk. I may be going to get myself killed because I am afraid to back down.

“Suit yourself,” one girl says.

“Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” says the other.

After a dozen steps I hear them burst into high-pitched laughter. I wonder if it is because I have not taken their advice, or if it is because they are pleased with themselves for scaring a white man half to death.

My fists are clenched as I approach the pale hulk of a building. The front of the apartment is black and foreboding, but empty. The entire area seems only sparsely populated. It strikes me that everyone except criminals and morons is inside. I exhale and I am surprised by the sound of my own breath: I have been holding it for at least a block. My stomach feels as if I have swallowed razor blades, my fingers ache as I uncurl my fists.

Across the street is an amateurishly painted rose-and-white 1967 Pontiac; the trunk is open and two loose-jointed boys are stuffing something inside. Two more lounge on the curb-side of the car, only the thistly tops of their heads visible.

Traffic lights loom at the next intersection. I feel like a fur trader who has just run the gauntlet. I notice that it is spitting rain, very hard, and, by the wetness of my clothes, has been ever since the girls first accosted me.

At a bus stop stands a lone black woman, conspicuously pregnant.

In the ballpark it is bleak and raw. A few hundred fans huddle miserably under blankets. I purchase a box seat, but the rain forces me to retreat to a drier, less expensive seat higher up. The wind is cold and ice-pick sharp.

The White Sox pitcher is overweight and perhaps dreaming of his home in Venezuela. The rain stops and starts like a jackrabbiting car. Raindrops blow onto my scorecard, smudging the ink. I shiver and long for Annie’s fierce warmth.

Socked away in my suitcase, like an apple in a brown-bagged lunch, like a grandfather’s gift for a favorite grandchild, lies a baseball—but a very special baseball. I can only imagine what it will mean to a dedicated fan of the game like J. D. Salinger, to have someone turn up on his doorstep—a stranger, but with the aura of a prodigal returning—and present him with a baseball, shiny and fragrant as new, but with a signature and construction that labels it as being from the 1920s.

“This is a home-run ball hit by Shoeless Joe Jackson,” I’ll tell him. That should be sufficient to shift his blood into over-drive.

What I won’t mention, right away, is that the ball was hit over the left-field fence of
my
stadium, clubbed by Shoeless Joe off a ghostly relief pitcher during an extra-inning game, a blue darter of a line drive that thudded into the stands a few seats from Karin and me. Karin leapt from my lap and chased it down as it ricocheted off the bleacher seats like a rabid pool ball.

When she returned with it, it had a darkish bruise on one side, from being hit by Joe’s immortal bat, Black Betsy.

The disappointment of Chicago fades away as I take to I-80 again, headed for Cleveland. But my experience in Cleveland turns out to be little better, hardly the kind of adventure I would have chosen.

A meager crowd, scattered at random throughout the cavernous Cleveland ballpark on a blustery afternoon, watches as the Indians lose. Many of the fans carry radios, as if hoping the crowd noise will somehow be amplified and the game will be more interesting secondhand than in person.

After the game I go to a café near my hotel for supper. It is a plastic restaurant so archetypal of twentieth-century America that it could have been created by the motion of a cookie cutter: a counter, two rows of booths; the booths separated from the counter by a row of plastic foliage growing out of a divider full of white stones that look like they, too, were manufactured.

I am sitting at the counter eating a synthetic veal cutlet covered in a bland, tasteless gravy when the holdup man comes in.

The owner, a swarthy Greek with hair like tufts of black quack grass, is behind the counter. I am staring directly into his apron, which is a Rorschach test of grease spots. The holdup man walks the length of the counter and stops behind me and to my right. In fact, I don’t even notice him until I hear the Greek give a strangled cry that sounds like “
Wan …
graaaaaaaach!
”

Raising my head from my cutlet, I look directly into the Greek’s stricken face. I peer over my right shoulder. The holdup man is short and wiry and has his right hand buried in the pocket of a dirty brown windbreaker; his chinless, ferretlike face has not seen a razor for several days.

“I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the holdup man says clearly, with what I take to be just a trace of a southern accent.

The Greek continues to stand directly in front of me. I can see a field of tombstones emerging from the stains on his apron. He raises his hands palm out, at ear level, and makes the sound again, a rasping gasp as though he were swallowing his false teeth.

“I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the holdup man says again, louder. He is looking only at the Greek. Behind him, behind the divider full of geraniums and rubber plants with Tupperware leaves, some customers are padding rapidly toward the exit. I edge one seat to my left; the Greek moves with me, keeping me between him and the gun.

I wonder what would happen if I edged my way all the way down the fifteen or so empty stools to the door. I move one more. The Greek moves with me.

“Sit still,” the holdup man says.

Unaccountably, I reach back two stools and drag my congealing cutlet after me. I consider bolting and running, but as I stare at the Greek’s belly I imagine the holdup man pumping a number of bullets into my escaping back, and, simultaneously, an Iowa highway patrolman, his boots blood-colored in the glow from the porch light, informing Annie that I have been shot.

A woman emerges from the metallic-colored swinging doors at the end of the counter to my right. She looks around, tosses her head, rearranges her hair like a horse shaking away a fly. She walks toward us, stopping beside the Greek, again right in front of me, only three feet or so from the gunman.

“Put your hands down, Demos,” she says to the Greek in a nasal twang. “This creep ain’t gonna hurt you.”

She wears a thin grayish-white uniform with two front pockets at waist level. A red cigarette pack shows clearly through the sparse material of one, a yellow order pad is in the other. Above her left breast is a white plastic name tag with the word WANDALIE impressed in black letters.

“What are
you
doing?” Wandalie says in a whiny yet contemptuous voice.

“I’m gonna blow everybody away,” the man says as an answer.

“Like hell you are,” says Wandalie. She is about thirty-five with steam-straightened black hair, a wide face with a very small nose, and a large mouth with spaces between her teeth.

Wandalie steps even closer to the gunman. “Frank, you haven’t got a gun in there,” she says, her upper lip curling into a genuine snarl, “and even if you did, you wouldn’t have the guts to use it.”

Under her flimsy uniform, like a twenty-dollar bill stuffed in her bra, Wandalie apparently harbors a death wish.

It becomes apparent that I am in the middle of a domestic dispute of some kind, not a holdup. The Greek lowers his right hand, keeps his left at ear level. Among the spots on his apron, I see silhouettes of Annie and Karin dressed in black. The police hate domestic disputes worse than holdups. I decide to move one stool closer to the door.

“Sit down!” Frank says to me. “I have so got a goddamned gun,” he says to Wandalie.

They play “Yes I have,” “No you haven’t,” for a few moments. As they do, they let little bits of their life loose like items of I.D. pulled from a billfold.

Frank is Wandalie’s boyfriend, live-in lover, maybe even an ex-husband. Wandalie keeps baiting him. I wait for him to indeed produce a gun and splatter Wandalie and the Greek against the mirrored wall, then start looking around for witnesses.

Suddenly the Greek says, “Hey Frank, what you think of the Indians losing again today? I hear it all on the radio,” and he points to an ancient brown radio with a fret-sawed design on the front.

“I was at the game,” I say hopefully.

Wandalie has been seeing someone on the side. Frank doesn’t know who, though I’d guess it is Demos, by the way he keeps his left hand in the air.

“Slut!” shouts Frank.

“Why should I stick around you, you can’t even get it up anymore.”

If he has a gun, he’ll use it now. I consider fainting. Surely he wouldn’t shoot an unconscious man.

There is a trick to fainting. Annie taught it to me. In her high school senior play, at West High School in Iowa City, Annie played the mother in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
. She was required to faint about five times during the play. You just cross your right leg behind your left and let yourself down onto the floor, sideways on your right side. When Karin or I tell Annie something of earthshaking importance, she still sometimes clasps her hand to her forehead and executes a faint.

“Oh, Mommy,” Karin will say in exasperation, “you’re not really dead.”

The Greek, who has been inching his right hand closer to the counter utensils, sees his chance. He picks up off the counter one of those glass sugar containers shaped like a small white rocket, and, with deadly aim, at close range, bounces if off Frank’s forehead.

Frank pulls his right hand, white and gunless, from his jacket pocket, and tests his forehead where blood is emerging in a bright semicircular brand near his temple. He turns and runs staggering from the restaurant.

“I told you he didn’t have a gun,” says Wandalie, standing triumphant, hands on hips.

Next time he will, I think, almost say.

“On the house,” says the Greek, pointing to my sad cutlet and cold coffee, as two burly police officers, summoned, I suppose, by departing customers, rush in, guns drawn, then rush out again as the Greek points in the direction in which Frank has fled.

Outside, a woman in a black kimonolike dress, body big as an oil drum, her head a wild tumbleweed of hair, her cheeks like halves of a black grapefruit, cuddles to her flabby chest what must surely be an albino baby, its skin the blue-white color of skim milk, its head covered in a crocheted bonnet woolly as a lamb’s back.

I stop at a motel near Pittsburgh.