Shoeless Joe (10 page)

Then suddenly, like the parting of the Red Sea, a parking place appears one row to my right. Two or three cars ease by it, the drivers apparently having their minds on home. I turn the car in an S motion, cutting in behind a bus that spews out fumes black and substantial as octopus oil. As the bus inches forward, I slip into the parking place.

I raise my hands. “More of a miracle to find a parking place on a baseball night in downtown Boston than for a man to throw away his artificial leg and grow a new one in front of an enraptured congregation,” I say to Salinger.

He sits impassive. “You are not impressed by magic,” I say sadly. “Are you hungry?” I ask as I bend my neck back, letting some of the tension drain from me. “We have time to eat before the game. On me, of course. This whole evening is on me.”

We walk back down a small hill toward a main road. “There used to be a Greek restaurant around here,” Salinger says. Then noting my surprise, he adds, “It’s been years since I’ve been to Boston, but the geography kind of leaves an imprint.”

I stop a fat man who looks as if he should know the location of all the restaurants that have ever been in Boston, and ask if he knows of a Greek restaurant nearby.

“Right across the street,” he says, pointing a monstrous arm. And it is.
Aegean Fare
is written in black script across the face of a gray building.

“You have a good memory,” I tell Salinger. He is loping along beside me, taking exceptionally long strides.

“Do you always wear that hat?” he says.

“It’s illegal to farm in Iowa and not wear one,” I reply. “Bill 1402 passed by the legislature in Des Moines last summer stipulates that a farmer can be fined ten ears of corn or a pound of soybeans if he’s stopped by the Highway Patrol and found to be bareheaded.”

“Oh really?” says Salinger, smiling a little lopsidedly as we turn into Aegean Fare. The restaurant is part cafeteria, part bakery, and has a glass display case full of Greek desserts radiating enough calories to power an atomic bomb. The restaurant walls are covered in mirrors. I catch sight of my arms, tanned as burnished maple. I tug off my cap, revealing my forehead, which, in contrast, is as white as sliced chicken breast. I practically dance to our table, I am feeling so manic. I have done it. I am eating supper with J. D. Salinger; we are in Boston; we are going to see the Red Sox play baseball.

“What … what do you do up there on your hill?” I say as tactfully as I know how. We have kept the conversation general, although I can tell he wants to ask me questions and I babble a little, every so often, about Shoeless Joe, or Annie, or Karin, or my stadium.

He calls me Ray. Sometimes he addresses me by my whole name. “Call me Jerry,” he says to me. I have been careful not to address him by any particular name. I have not yet called him Jerry. I very seldom use another person’s name in conversation. I think it is because when I sold life insurance, I was deluged with sales material that screamed, “A man’s name is the most important sound he ever hears,” and I was taught to work a client’s name into the conversation at every possible opportunity. It was as if I was armed with a little basketful of darts with Arthur, or Charles, or Amos written on them and could not sell a policy until I had stuck each and every one into my prospect’s body. Now that I am free, I try to erase that loathsome period completely from my mind.

Salinger—Jerry—looks at me over his plate of moussaka. I am eating Greek salad out of a bowl large enough to wash in, the lime-white feta cheese resting heavy on the crisp lettuce and tomatoes.

“I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s
all?
Isn’t it enough? Serenity is a very elusive quality. I’ve been trying all my life to find it. I’m very ordinary. I’ve never been able to understand why people are so interested in me. Writers are very dull. It’s people like you who keep me from achieving what I’m after. You feel that I must be unhappy. A neurotic, guilt-torn artist. I’m
not
unhappy. And I have no wisdom to impart to you. I have no pain for you, unless”—and he smiles mischievously—“you and your family were to be plagued with strangers lurking in your bushes, trampling your flower beds, looking in your windows, or, in your case, skulking about your baseball park, crushing your corn sprouts into the ground, and stealing your doormats. Once someone stole the valve caps off my jeep. I suppose he sold them or displays them under glass in his library. I don’t deserve that!” he suddenly shouts. And at the next table, two young men in Red Sox T-shirts look up from their food to see what the commotion is about.

“I’ve done nothing to deserve that. I’ve had twenty-five years of it—strangers gawking at me like I was a two-headed baby bobbing in a specimen jar.” He eyes me up and down, waiting for my reaction. The lines have been delivered with actorlike precision and projection.

The inside of Aegean Fare is very Old World—heavy, varnished tables and chairs, some of the tables covered with red-checked tablecloths. The walls are mirrored, and high on each wall are pink neon phrases written in Greek. Hoping to ease Salinger’s tension, I point them out and begin speculating on what they might mean:

“No trespassing.”

“Don’t pinch the waitresses,” says Jerry, but without enthusiasm.

“Why are you looking up here?” I suggest.

A small boy about tabletop height, who has been weaving in and out among the tables in a private game of some sort, pulls a chair out from our table, circles it a couple of times, then slides onto it, trying to coil his lithe little body around it. He has straight dark hair, delicate features, and eyes the color of Coca-Cola.

“I know something you don’t know,” he half sings.

“I’m sure you do,” I say, smiling.

“Car wash fifty cents,” says Jerry.

I look at him blankly.

“The sign.”

“Oh yes.”

“I had strawberry pie,” the boy informs us. “The strawberries were this high.” He raises his slim-fingered hand about six inches above the table.

As Salinger and I prepare to leave, the boy skips along behind us.

“Ah, so he’s with you,” the bullet-headed man behind the cash register says to us, and points a fat white finger at the boy who stands scuffing one shoe on the other.

“Not us,” I say.

“You sure?” says the cashier. “He had pie and milk, and he’s been walking around for about an hour.”

“His folks must be here somewhere. He’s too well dressed and fed to be abandoned,” I say. I look back as we leave, and the boy is staring after me as if I’d just kicked his cat.

I wait until we are settled in our seats at the stadium—good seats directly behind the Sox on-deck circle (although the seats are much too close together and we are hunched knees close to chins, as if we were passengers in the rear seat of a foreign car)—before attempting to discuss Salinger’s life with him again.

“If I’d known, I’d have bought three tickets so we could sit one seat apart and angle our legs,” I say, laughing a little too loudly.

Jerry keeps his eyes mainly on his program, occasionally staring furtively around. He is still a little worried about being recognized. The incident with the police officer was not enough proof for him.

At one point on the drive down, I had suggested stopping for coffee when we gassed up.

“I don’t think so,” Jerry said, looking around like
he
was the criminal.

“Why?”

“Well, what if people recognize me and make a fuss?”

“I didn’t recognize you, and I have a special interest in you. I can almost guarantee no one else will.”

“
Almost
.”

“That’s the best anyone can do,” I said.

The game begins and the Red Sox are in trouble early. The last notes of the national anthem have barely faded on the wind before Mike Torrez is bombed. Ken Landreaux homers; Roy Smalley homers; Bombo Rivera triples to deep center field.

Don Zimmer, the Boston manager, trudges to the mound. The crowd erupts in a chorus of boos. Booing Don Zimmer appears to be a favorite pastime of Boston fans.

“Hey Zimmer! Whatcha doin’ out? They cleanin’ your cage?” screeches a man with a beer belly and a Boston baseball cap. Zimmer is round and heavy and built close to the ground; his beady eyes are buried deep in a jowly face.

“Ya joibal!” the man yells. “Whatatheydoin’ with a joibal managin’ a baseball team?” The man looks around for approval. He draws a few scattered smiles.

It is difficult to imagine that Zimmer was once a pretty good second baseman, that he scooted after sizzling grounders like an unattended lawn mower.

As a long-reliever warms up, I speculate on how best to draw Salinger’s pain out in the open. I’ve got him here in the proper surroundings. I want to be a metaphorical poultice applied to his wounds, but so far it has been like trying to open a seamless tin can with only my fingernails.

“I wrote a sonnet to you once,” I say, staring across at his large ear; his profile that emphasizes a fleshy nose.

“So you’re a writer,” he replies accusingly.

How can I be so adept at saying the wrong thing? I wonder. “No. No. It was in a college English course I attended, oh, ten years ago. I had forgotten it completely until right now. Everyone had to write a sonnet. It was horrible, really, sentimental and melodramatic, but it was a plea to you to hurry and publish more stories. The sonnet was a cheap imitation of Keat’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’ Your work has been described as touching the soul of the reader. That’s the way I felt. Feel. Honestly. You’ve touched my soul. I’m sorry if I sound like a middle-aged librarian at a book-auto-graphing session. Your writing has drawn me nearly fifteen hundred miles, allowed me to make a fool of myself, actually made me a criminal. That’s what I call having influence.”

“But I didn’t ask you to do it,” says Salinger. “I didn’t ask for you to feel the way you do. You’re influenced by an illusion. Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them. I don’t write autobiography. I’m a quiet man who wrote stories that people believe. Because they believe, they want to touch me, but I can’t stand to be touched. They would have been chipping little pieces off me before I knew it, as if I were a statue, and pretty soon there wouldn’t have been anything left of me. That’s why I chose to drop out.”

We are loaded down with orange drinks, ice-cream bars, peanuts, and hot dogs. The hot dogs at Fenway Park are the smallest in the majors, scarcely bigger than cocktail franks. “Designed for midgets,” is the way Jerry describes them. I have a sense of déjà as I look at Jerry and the scene around me, for it is exactly as I envisioned it so many months ago in the October sunshine.

“Haven’t you been lonely? Aren’t you lonely?” I ask. “
That
was one of the reasons I did what I did … I’ve been alone.” Surely I can’t be wrong on all counts.

Jerry looks crossly at me, having been engrossed in the antics of a base runner striding arrogantly toward second then lunging back in a colored blur and pouncing on the base as if it were a chicken trying to escape becoming Sunday dinner.

“It was just a question …”

“I don’t know any answers,” he almost shouts, and slams his hands down on his knees.

“Look,
I’m
not trying to bleed you,” I say, spreading my hands to show my innocence. “I want to renew you. I want to do something nice for you. I don’t think I’m doing this for myself. I drove all the way from Iowa. I made stops along the way. I had to have the right odors about me before I could approach you.

“I consider myself happy. I’m one of the few happy men in the United States. I own a farm. I grow corn. I have a wife who not only loves me but understands me; and a daughter who has red hair and green eyes like her mother.

“I love to stand in my yard at dawn, smell the dew, and watch the sun come up. I’ve built a magical baseball diamond at the edge of the cornfield, and I spend my evenings there watching …”

“Watching?” says Salinger, as if he has been called back from another world.

“You know—baseball games. I’d like to take you there. We could sit in the bleacher I built behind left field. The hot dogs are like they were in the old days, long and plump and fried on a grill with onions, and you smear the mustard on with a Popsicle stick, and there are jars of green relish. But Boston is the best I can do right now. Unless …”

“It’s not possible,” he says, a stern set to his jaw. “You’ve made it up. It’s too preposterous to believe. You’re probably not even from Iowa.”

Suddenly I am the one who is shouting. People are turning to stare at us. “Watch the game,” somebody says, but the voice is far off, like a vendor two sections away extolling beer.

“Open up your senses!” I shout. “I’ve come fifteen hundred miles to drag you to a baseball game. Stretch the skin back from your eyes! Take in
everything
! Look at Yaz there in the on-deck circle. Look at the angle he holds his bat. There isn’t another player in the majors can duplicate that stance. Look at that left-field fence, half as high as the sky. The Green Monster. Think of the men who patrol that field, the shadow of that giant behind them, dwarfing them.” It is ironic, I think, that the place chosen for me to bring Salinger has no left-field bleachers, while in my own park I have
only
a left-field bleacher.

“This one idea has run like a colored thread through all my thoughts for all these months. ‘Ease his pain. Ease his pain.’ I have repeated it ten thousand times, in my dreams, in my fantasies, to my wife, to my daughter, to myself as I drove a tractor over my black fields. Well, I’m doing what I can. Look! Look at the yellow neon running up the foul poles. You won’t see that anywhere else in the majors. Watch the players, white against green like froth on waves of ocean. Look around at the fans, count their warts just as they count ours; look at them waddle and stuff their faces and cheer with their mouths full. We’re not just ordinary people, we’re a congregation. Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual. The only difference is that most of us realize that it
is
a game. Good writing is a ritual, I’ve been told, so many words or so many pages a day. You must know that …”