Kitabı oxu: «If Wishes Were Horses»

TWO

GIDEON CLARKE

Missy likes to keep the windows open in summer. She convinced me to take a hammer and small crowbar and pry open the windows at the rear of the house, several of them for the first time in their existence. In summer, in Iowa, the humidity itself is a presence, and the fragrance of honeysuckle is like a character in a drama. As the windows were opened, a breeze moved through my home like a cool hand, and as I pried open the side windows, cross breezes soothed and purified, carrying away odors and memories, letting in what I wished might be hope.

Eventually, all the windows on both floors were freed and oiled, and Missy could raise or lower them with the tips of her fingers. And my huge old house with the iron-spiked widow’s walk was airy and cool, even in breathless high July.

Missy was eating the breakfast I had made, toast and marmalade, three fried sausages, two eggs and a glass of milk, when the phone rang. I raised my hand to indicate she needn’t get up, then didn’t make any move to answer it myself. It is a silly game we play: who can ignore the phone longest, but still get to it before the caller hangs up.

Before Missy came to live with me after her mother, Marylyle Baron, passed away, I seldom answered the telephone. The only person I hoped might call was my long-lost wife, Sunny. But Sunny did not like telephones, had never in the years we were married, in the dozen times she disappeared for days, or weeks, or months, or now, for years, ever called me.

Missy likes an ordered world. An unanswered telephone makes her agitated, for Missy, despite her Downs’ syndrome, has, in many ways, more curiosity about life than I have.

The average caller, we have discovered, hangs up after the sixth ring. This time, after the fourth ring, Missy pushed her chair back, but I made as if to stand, a quality feint, deking Missy into sitting back down. The phone, the pure white of camelias, jangled a fifth time from the apple-green wall of the kitchen.

This phone is another concession to Missy’s joy of living; we were walking past the phone store in Iowa City one afternoon when Missy was drawn in like metal filings to a magnet by the dazzle of multi-colored and miraculously shaped telephones. The camellia-white phone replaced the black-box table phone with a circular metal dial that had been in the house since I was a child.

I don’t know who said, ‘Be careful, for you may get what you think you want,’ but it was certainly true in my case.

I labored most of my adult life to prove that information my father and I knew about a baseball league called the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was true and accurate. And, surprisingly, after a miraculous sojourn in the past, I accomplished what I had set out to do. My late father, Matthew Clarke, is now held to be one of the pioneers of American baseball research. His thesis, A Short History of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, is considered one of the finest pieces of baseball research ever documented. But in the process of accomplishing what I thought I wanted most, I believe I lost whatever capacity I ever had for love, or at least true love, however that might be defined.

I thought when I first returned from the past (1908 to be specific) that I’d eventually be able to go back there, to take up where I left off, to somehow alter history.

I fantasized about returning to 1908 armed with nothing but a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia, which I would use as a guide to betting on pennant races and World Series’ winners. But as time passes, it appears that my excursion into the past was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’ve spent the dark of many a night walking the baseball spur on the outskirts of Iowa City, searching for the magical spot where my friend Stan Rogalski and I crossed the dimensions of time.

I’ve stood in the clover-smelling darkness at the end of that spur line, arms raised to the moon like some pagan warrior. I’ve pleaded with the night, with the voices and spirits that listened to me once. But there is only silence, only the touch of the velvet night on my arms, only the rub of the perfumed grasses on my ankles.

Sometimes I’ve broken the night open with the caterwauling of my horn, blasting out raucous Dixieland jazz or the ultimate sorrow of the blues. But nothing I could do would move the phantom listeners I knew were nearby in the long, black moonshadows of the abandoned rail line.

In the days when I thought of myself as a knight in shining armor, when I had a quest, it was I who reassured my life-long friend, Stan Rogalski, a career minor-league player, that he had a few more baseball games in him, that he still had a chance, albeit a slight one, of making it to the major leagues. But though I’m the one who got what he thought he wanted—the recognition that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy existed—it is Stan who has adjusted to life as I have never been able to.

When we returned from our adventure to our home town of Onamata, Stan had been cut by his team, forced into retirement, a situation that to my great surprise, he accepted. Stan didn’t let his wife and brother-in-law talk him into a dead-end job with the railroad; instead he went to Onamata High School and applied for a job he was technically unqualified for, and he got it.

The baseball coach had just retired, but in order to coach baseball one had to have a teaching certificate and be able to teach health as well as physical education. But the powers that be wanted Stan to coach baseball. They forced the drivers’ ed. teacher to teach health, and hired Stan as a custodian at a salary equivalent to that of a beginning teacher. It was agreed that as long as Stan coached all the boys’ sports teams he didn’t have to do any custodial work.

Stan has been at it for several years and is as happy as it’s possible for him to be. His wife, Gloria, has supplied him with a square-built replica of himself, Stan Jr., now a toddler, and Gloria is pregnant again.

Just as children become guardians to aging parents, Stan and I, in the past year or so, have reversed roles. It is now Stan who assures me that I have something to live for, that my long-lost wife, Sunny, will return again someday. Or that I will be able to return to 1908, to Big Inning, Iowa, where Sarah will be waiting for me, and where I will be able to alter history by saving Sarah from the accidental death I know awaits her.

As the phone begins its sixth ring both Missy and I leap for it. I beat Missy by a stride and put the white receiver to my ear. Not many people phone us. We’ve calculated that for every call for me, there are two telephone solicitors. Missy and I have learned how to torture telephone solicitors with silence.

No matter what they are selling—magazines, travel opportunities, insurance, cookies, or cuckoo clocks—the seller’s spiel can only be successful if the sellee co-operates by making acknowledging sounds at the proper moments. Missy and I listen to whatever pitch the salesperson is making, then, when they pause in their presentation for us to comment or grunt or answer a direct question, we simply stay silent.

After a long pause in which we can sometimes hear the heartbeat of the caller, the salesperson invariably says, ‘Are you there?’

We answer with the single word, ‘Yes.’

The sales pitch then continues until the next pregnant pause. Followed by the next query. Followed by the next, ‘Yes.’

Four or five pauses into the presentation the sweating, frustrated, suffering telephone solicitor succumbs to our silence, and forlornly hangs up the phone. Missy holds the record—she’s kept a strangling solicitor going through seven pauses. Five is the best I’ve ever managed.

When the defeated sales representative hangs up, Missy and I give each other a high five, as if one of us has hit a home run. It is so much more fun than getting angry and hanging up.

I place the receiver to my ear. Missy is disappointed when I speak to the caller, and goes quickly back to her sausage and eggs.

‘My name is Joe McCoy. Are you familiar with who I am?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I reply honestly, though the name vaguely rings a bell, a local politician or school board member, perhaps.

‘I didn’t think there was anyone who didn’t know me,’ McCoy said, with what I detect as disappointment, ‘I’ve been in the news a lot lately.’

‘In what way?’

‘I’m a criminal.’

‘Really?’ Maybe this was a telephone solicitation after all. I could picture being victim of the first telephone armed robbery. The stranger saying, ‘I’m covering you through your window with a high-powered rifle. Take all your money, your credit cards, and your cat, and drive to …’

‘What kind of criminal?’

‘Let me get to the point. I understand that you’re a baseball historian. In fact I know you are. I was raised at Lone Tree. I used to play against Onamata High, though I’m quite a bit younger than you …’

‘This is getting to the point?’

‘I’m afraid I’m expressing myself very badly … I need to talk to you. Don’t you watch television or read newspapers? If you did you’d know who I am.’

‘I don’t, actually. I’m not much interested in the present.’

I’ve let my subscriptions lapse. Missy watches Wheel of Fortune, and it’s on at the same time as the national news. I’ve always avoided local news: trivial happenings presented in such detail and delivered with such sincerity, as if someone actually cared.

Missy loves Wheel of Fortune. There is something about its simplicity that appeals to her nature. She takes a folding chair and moves it closer to the television than it ought to be so she can stare right into the faces of the contestants. She laughs, and talks to them and the little man and girl who host the show. She loves the dinging sound whenever a contestant guesses a correct letter.

I don’t know how much of the show Missy understands, and it doesn’t really matter because it gives her pleasure. Since she came to live with me I’ve enrolled her in a life skills course up at Iowa City. Missy has learned to read at about a third-grade level, she can add figures, she has her own bank account. She helps me buy groceries.

‘I understand if you’re reluctant,’ McCoy continues. ‘I made this call in desperation. I’ve always thought of you as someone I could trust. I played major-league baseball for several years,’ he adds, hoping to hew out some common ground.

‘I don’t loan money to friends, let alone strangers,’ I say, putting distance in my voice.

‘I’m not that kind of criminal. Well, actually I am. I held up a McDonald’s in Los Angeles, but there was a good reason. Oh, I’m sorry. I sound crazy. I probably am.’

I do recognize his name. I remember some controversy several years ago, ten or more, in which his name got yelled aloud at the local convenience store. Perhaps he threw a game or something.

‘Just what is it you think I can do for you?’

‘Will you meet with me?’

This was a telephone solicitation. It was my turn to answer a question, to acknowledge that I was still on the line. I remained silent.

‘Are you still there?’ asks Joe McCoy.

‘Yes,’ I say, after another lengthy pause. Then he says the words that crack my telephone-solicitor-hating heart.

‘I need to tell my story to someone who might believe me.’

How many long years were there when that was exactly what I needed? Someone somewhere who would believe that the Iowa Baseball Confederacy existed, as I had always known it had. If it hadn’t been for Stan’s childlike belief in me … but suspicion toward Joe McCoy lingers like a thief.

‘What do you know about me? Just tell me what you know about me,’ I say, a little too loudly.

‘I know you weren’t always considered an authority on baseball history. I remember when you were considered an oddball.’

‘You do?’

Now it was my turn to be surprised. In recent years I’ve been the only one who remembered that. Since I returned from the past, it’s like the whole world has had part of its memory erased.

‘Will you please meet with me? An hour is all I ask. Pearson’s Drug Store in Iowa City, the soda fountain, in an hour?’

‘I can be there,’ I say.

‘I’ve invited someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Ray Kinsella.’

‘The fellow who built the baseball diamond that attracts tourists?’

‘It’s just that I feel you two have a lot in common. I’m surprised you’re not close friends.’

‘Is he surprised I’m not his friend?’ I say, but Joe McCoy doesn’t catch the irony in my voice.

‘I didn’t tell him who you were.’

‘If you’re a criminal, how can you meet me at a public place?’

‘That’s part of the story I want to tell you. Have you ever heard someone say their luck was so bad they couldn’t get arrested?’

‘Besides you?’

My tone eludes him. I’ve always known that politicians, clergymen, academics and accountants had no senses of humor. Perhaps I will have to add criminals and retired baseball players to the list.

‘Will you meet me?’ His voice rises in agitation.

‘All right. Pearson’s in an hour, then.’

I turn to Missy.

‘I have to go into Iowa City. Is there anything you want?’

Missy asks me to rent a video. She likes the movies about a little red-haired girl named Pippi Longstocking.

It will be interesting to meet Ray Kinsella. In the final days of my quest I considered contacting him. In my frustration at not being able to repeat my journey to the past I’ve considered visiting his farm. I’ve heard his baseball field has healing properties.