Shoeless Joe (20 page)

“Even been on a big-league field before?” I ask Jerry, but don’t wait for an answer. “Oh, but you must have dreamed of the Polo Grounds just like I dreamed of Comiskey Park, of playing for the White Sox.”

“I’ve told you about that,” hisses Jerry. “Wherever you got that story, it’s wrong. I’ve always been a writer.” We are interrupted by a tapping sound, like a judge rapping a gavel, and turn toward home plate. Archie Graham stands there. He pops a bat twice more on home plate, then tosses a ball in the air and swings. The crack of the bat sounds like a paper bag exploding, yet the sound is cold and lonely, too, like a hunter firing on an endless tundra. I hear the ball traveling overhead, whistling softly, and then there is another pop as it hits the center-field fence. I am able to follow it for an instant as it bounces back and rolls among the equipment we have strewn. Archie waves to us and holds up another ball.

For the first time, I worry about the noise we are making. My heart flutters against my shirt. What if we are discovered? I feel the sharp form of the screwdriver in my pocket, the one I brought along to tighten the locks I kicked loose. What if we are arrested? I can picture a court clerk reading out the charges: breaking and entering, willful damage, possession of burglar tools—to wit, an amber-handled screwdriver.

The bat cracks and a ball soars up, glints across the moon’s eye, and disappears over the right-field wall.

“Can you do it without the bat?” I say in a stage whisper.

The young man smiles, a wide, pumpkin-happy grin, as if I’ve just complimented him on his sexual prowess. He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean.

The boy continues to grin.

“You have quite an arm,” I say.

Jerry whistles softly.

I picture the ball bouncing crazily across the asphalt-and-gravel parking lot. I imagine some swing-shift worker taking a short cut across the quiet parking lot, perhaps kneeling down before the white revelation that has rolled to a stop at his feet.

Salinger has placed two bats in an inverted V on the right-field grass. He now stands just behind second base, and, like a lawn bowler, rolls baseballs toward the distant ash-whiteness. The balls hum across the grass and ricochet unceremoniously to one side as they strike a cleat mark or depression in the grass.

Watching this, I remember something Eddie Scissons once told me. “When I was in the minors there were gopher holes in the outfields of some of the parks we played in,” he said. “The home team knew where they were, and how to step around them, and they’d laugh fit to kill when a visitor would sprain an ankle or take a fall. I remember once I decided to fix a guy who played right field for Idaho Falls. Before the game, from before noon until suppertime, I carried pails of water and dumped them all in a little depression in the outfield grass. It was August, and the rest of the field was baked dry. By game time that plot, about three foot square, was like quicksand.

“Second play of the game, one of our men singled to right, and the fielder charged the ball.” Here Eddie stopped to chuckle heartily. “His feet disappeared right up to the ankles, and he pitched on his face just as the ball rolled by and to the wall. Our player got an inside-the-park home run.”

For an hour or more Salinger, Graham, and I play like children in a forbidden room.

“Can you hear the roar of the crowd?” I say. “Stretch out your ears and listen. Smell the onions frying, smell the roasted peanuts.” Salinger and our young friend are kneeling on the outfield grass perhaps twenty yards apart, rolling baseballs toward each other, trying to make them collide. The balls send up a fine spray, and when they do bump, they skitter sideways like shying horses, leaving strange hieroglyphic signatures on the turf. In the dewy morning, the baseball field under the moonglow looks as though someone has set out silver bowls of water at strategic locations. The only sound is that of a plane dozing overhead, its lights blinking hypnotically.

As I look around the empty park, almost Greek in its starkness, I feel an awesome inarticulate love for this very stadium and the game it represents. I am reminded of the story about the baseball fans of Milwaukee, and what they did on a warm fall afternoon, the day after it was announced that Milwaukee was to have a major-league team the next season. According to the story, 10,000 people went to County Stadium that afternoon and sat in the seats and smiled out at the empty playing field—sat in silence, in awe, in wonder, in anticipation, in joy—just knowing that soon the field would come alive with the chatter of infielders, bright as bird chirps.

Now, in the predawn grayness of the Twins’ stadium, the loudspeaker booms out over the silent field we have invaded. The words reverberate from the outfield walls and vibrate the cold metallic chairs in the boxes along each baseline.

I look at Salinger and Moonlight Graham. They do not raise their heads, but continue with their boy’s game.

I glance at Jerry, who is driving my battered, salmon-colored Datsun. He looks my way, and his craggy features break into a slight smile.

“We just crossed the Iowa border,” he says. “Do you know, I’ve never been to Iowa?”

“I suspected.”

Our young hitchhiker is scrunched into the back seat, his right knee a rigid lump in my back, his duffel bag upright beside him like a dun-colored torso.

“When we get to Iowa City, we’ll take the Old Capitol exit,” I say. “Before we go home, I have to stop in town.”

“Groceries?” says Jerry.

“A relief pitcher,” I reply. Groceries? I recall the story I heard about Jerry craving soybeans. “Do you really eat a lot of soybeans?” I ask.

“Relief pitcher? Soybeans?” He laughs pleasantly. “Never tasted the things that I know of, though I’ve read they’re supposed to be good for you.”

“I’m glad.”

“That I’ve never tasted soybeans?”

“Yes.”

Jerry shrugs. “That doesn’t sound as unusual to me as it would have a week ago. I guess I’m getting used to you,” he says, then abruptly switches to a new subject. “Your wife isn’t a vegetarian, is she? The thought just crossed my mind that I hate eggplant casseroles, and dishes with a lot of noodles covered in stuff that looks like powdered horse dung.”

“We’re meat and potato people,” I say.

“Somebody say something about food?” asks the hitchhiker from the back seat. His voice is a little high, but softened by his whispery Carolina drawl. “Anytime you want to stop, I’m ready to eat again.”

The deeper we penetrate Iowa, the greener it gets. It has been summer for all my odyssey, but a lean, scanty summer of thin trees and cropped yellow grass. Here, near the heart of the nation, everything is lush: The corn is waist high, the trees fat-leaved, the grass tall, and the earth soft.

I wheel off the interstate at Exit 244.

In the over-air-conditioned motel in Minneapolis during the few hours between our trip to the ballpark and our rising, I had dreamed of Eddie Scissons. As we rolled toward Iowa City, I decided on a definite plan of action. Today Eddie haunts my waking hours like a dropped pop-up. I can see him sitting across the polished maple table from me at the Friendship Center: back straight, huge hands spread out on the table in front of him, face pink as rose petals.

“Know what I’m gonna do?” Eddie said.

“No,” I said, although I’m always tempted to answer a question like that with a yes.

“Goin’ to be buried in a Chicago Cubs uniform.” He smiled and nodded his head up and down, waiting for my reaction.

And as I thought about the statement, I pictured Eddie laid out across a circular table, stiff as a board, head and feet extended over the edges, dressed in a soft, new-smelling uniform with a grinning bear-cub insignia, his large feet encased in shiny, uncrumpled spikes, his head covered by a Cubs’ cap.

“Spikes and cap, too?” I said. I felt it better to take Eddie’s statement in stride, for I didn’t think he was trying to shock me, only to share something he knew no one else understood.

“By golly, I hadn’t thought of cleats. I got the cap.” He tapped his mane of yellowish-white hair. “Just up and wrote to the Cubs one day and asked how much for a size 44 uniform and cap, and they sent back the price and I ordered one, and I got it put away with lots of mothballs, in a cedar chest my wife used to keep linen in. But I never thought of cleats. Now I’d look right foolish, I’m afraid, all laid out fit to start a new season, but with patent-leather shoes on, or brogues, or even slippers. Nope, nothin’ will do but cleats, and I thank you for reminding me.”

“Didn’t you tell them who you were?” I asked. “They should
give
a uniform to their oldest living player.”

“Well now, I never thought of that either. Why I reckon they don’t know who I am anymore. I played in 1908, ’09, and ’10. Why it’s nearly seventy years since the last time I stepped out on the grass at Wrigley Field. I was just a kid. Did I tell you I was called Kid Scissons?”

I nodded, to show that he has told me.

“It was Three Finger Brown give me the nickname. You know what his full name was? Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown. Now it was no wonder he didn’t mind being called Three Finger, or sometimes Miner, for that’s what he was, and how he lost part of his pitchin’ hand and got his nickname.

“He was the first man ever to pitch four straight shutouts. Did you know that?” I nodded negatively, even though I did know. “And I was there. Didn’t get to play. A fellow who’s pitchin’ shutout ball don’t need no relief pitcher. That was in the summer of 1908, my first summer in the big leagues. He pitched the last one on July Fourth, and they set up firecrackers and rockets after the game, and had a rack of sparklers that spelled out BROWN in big, burning blue-silver letters—pretty fancy for that long ago.”

“I wish I could have seen it.”

“Yes sir, I’m gonna have to get me a pair of size-twelve baseball shoes to go with my uniform. I bet if I dug down in some of the boxes I got at home, I could find a pair of spikes from my playing days, but they’d be all gray and petrified like me, and wouldn’t be classy enough to wear with a new uniform. They all think I’m crazy, you know, but I’m not.”

“I know,” I said.

“The Cubs have been my whole life. I’ve followed them for eighty years—since I was seven and an uncle of mine came from Chicago to visit our farm in Nebraska, clutching a fistful of Chicago sports pages, a copy of the
St. Louis Sporting News,
and a gift for describing the beauty and mystery of baseball. I’d listen to him for hours, both of us sitting on the front step of the house, and Ma would have to call me twice for meals and ten times for bed. And he brought me a baseball, a bat, and a glove. He showed me how to hit and how to throw, and he painted a target on the side of the barn with whitewash. ‘Laziest man in creation,’ was how my father described my uncle. ‘Stuffed full of dreams,’ he said he was, and I guess he was right.

“After he was gone, I retold his stories to my dog, so I wouldn’t forget them. And after the ball was worn out, I practiced with rocks, and frozen horse turds in the winter, and I made my own baseballs out of cowhide stuffed with hay and mud. Uncle Clyde even told me how to do that; said to always put a frog in the middle of the ball, to give it a true bounce. And I did.” Eddie grinned like a kid.

“The Cubs have been my whole life,” he repeated. “I kicked around in the minors for a few years, but once you been to the top, it’s hard to settle for less. I worked for years in Chicago, so I could be close to them—hardly missed a game, season after season. Then I got offered a school-principal job out here in Iowa, and I had a family and times were tough. But I still had the summers: used to go up for homestands. It’s just the last year or two that I’ve got too old and tired to make the trip. Only regret I have is that I never had a son of my own to teach to love the game. Have three daughters. Used to take them to the games, but they didn’t catch the fever. They’re all Bible thumpers, and been treating me like I was senile ever since they were old enough to think for themselves.’

I felt a genuine pang of guilt for not having shared my magical windfall with Eddie. I can’t think of anyone who would have enjoyed it more.

*  *  *

“This is home,” I say as the car glides down Dubuque Street into Iowa City, past City Park, and along the Iowa River, green and peaceful as Chinese silk, where it snakes between grassy banks with university buildings on either side. Salinger and Moonlight Graham are busy as rubbernecking tourists as we drive toward the center of town.

Iowa City: immortalized by Meredith Willson as River City in
The Music Man
. Shady streets, very old white frame houses, porch swings, lilacs, one-pump gas stations, and good neighbors. But the wagons have been gathered into a circle, and the pioneers are being picked off one by one by fast-food franchises that spring up everywhere like evil mushrooms, by concrete-and-glass buildings, muffler shops, and Howard Johnson motels. Each of these destroys a little more history. Iowa City is a town of grandfathers fighting a losing battle against time.

“We have a drugstore with a soda fountain,” I say. “It’s dark and cool and you can smell malt in the air like a musky perfume. And they have cold lemon-Cokes in sweating glasses, a lime drink called a Green River, and just the best chocolate malts in America. It’s called Pearson’s—right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

I think about the message I received at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, while we cavorted like mythical creatures on the damp grass. It was even less precise than previous ones. What I saw was Eddie Scissons seated across a table from me, the brass serpent-head of his cane hidden under his large hands. With the ambiguousness of a true oracle, the voice spoke of sharing and betrayal in a way that I knew meant Eddie Scissons.

I ease the car across town and park in the lot next to the Bishop Cridge Friendship Center, located in a renovated Victorian house. Tall honeysuckle, each stock measled with scarlet berries, clothes the front of the building, thickening the air.