If Wishes Were Horses

ONE

RAY KINSELLA

This morning I received a telephone call from a man on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. Annie handed me the phone as I walked in the back door of our farmhouse, my shoes covered in early morning dew. The odors of morning trailed me into the kitchen, which is warm as a comforter and exudes its own odors: coffee, toast, cinnamon, frying bacon.

‘This is Joe McCoy,’ the thin, rather nervous voice said. ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Everyone with a television set knows who you are,’ I replied.

‘I’m not far away,’ McCoy said.

‘I’m not sure I want to hear this …’

‘Listen, don’t believe everything you see on television or read in the newspapers. Events don’t always happen the way they’re reported. Especially not the way they’re reported.’

‘I understand that. But what do you want from me?’

‘I’ve heard rumors about unusual goings-on at your farm, that you have a complete baseball field in your back yard, that all kinds of people from all over the world visit your farm every summer. I’ve heard that weird things happen out there at night, that there are long-dead ballplayers …’

‘Mostly true,’ I said. ‘It’s no secret from anyone who wants to know. I didn’t know you’d kept in touch with events in this part of the world.’

‘I’m calling you as a sort of last resort. I was hoping we might have something in common.’

‘If you want to know the truth,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘though I know you only by reputation, I’ve always thought you were …’ and I fumble for the exact words I want, ‘kind of irresponsible. And in light of your recent exploits I honestly can’t see any reason to change my opinion.’

‘Then you don’t know anything about my other life?’

There was a note of desperation in his voice.

‘Other life?’

‘My other life is one of the things I was hoping I could discuss with you. I know this sounds weird, but I think I may never have left this part of the world. I haven’t had a byline in the Iowa City Press Citizen recently, have I?’

I could sense his confusion. I could see him tucked into an aluminum-and-glass telephone booth at a truck stop out on I-80. He would have had to get my number from Information, for there isn’t a phone booth in America that has a phone book in it.

I laughed off his question, though I could tell it was asked seriously. I was slightly taken aback to find that Joe McCoy had, in a very few seconds, made me identify with him. Though it’s been several years, it seems like only moments since I was going through some very mystifying times myself. I have a long memory where mystifying events are concerned.

‘Some people who visit my baseball field see more than others,’ I said. ‘But I have nothing to do with bringing people here. Those who come are like pilgrims, they’ve been drawn by something within themselves.’

‘I see. Look, if you’ll give me a minute, I’m going to try to explain a couple of things, because you’re the only person who might not think I’m crazy. Have you ever heard the expression, “Things are out of kilter in Johnson County”? It’s something my mother used to say.’

‘My wife uses it, her family have been here for generations. I actually looked it up once, kilter means in good condition. So out of kilter means that things are not in good condition, though there are more sinister interpretations having to do with death and otherworldliness.’

He took a deep breath. I could hear a rumbling behind him, like eighteen-wheelers groaning into traffic.

‘I think someone—something—is playing a really nasty trick on me. I believe things are out of kilter in Johnson County, and, for whatever reasons, that out-of-kilterness has followed me like tin cans behind a wedding car.’

Across the room, Annie used one hand to pass our daughter Karin a brown-bagged lunch, while she poured coffee for us with the other. I could hear the twins, smaller versions of Karin and Annie, rattling about in the dining room. I stretched the cord from the wall phone, pulling its whiteness taut as a baseline, until I was able to sit at the kitchen table. If I let go of the receiver it would slam against the wall as if propelled from a slingshot.

‘Did you hear me?’ asked Joe McCoy.

‘I’m thinking,’ I replied.

And I was. Joe McCoy’s words struck a very strong chord with me. I remembered how I had felt when, during one sweet, soft Iowa sunset, a voice said to me, ‘If you build it, he will come,’ and I knew instinctively that I was meant to build a baseball diamond in my cornfield.

‘Did someone tell you to do all the things you’ve done in the past few weeks?’ I asked. ‘Have you been following instructions?’

‘Not exactly. But no one’s told me not to do what I’ve done. The thing is, no matter what the newspapers, especially the tabloids, say about me, nothing I’ve done has been in character.’

I had never acted irresponsibly until I heard the voice. I had been unsuccessful, yes, but not deliberately irresponsible. If inexplicable events could happen to me they could happen to someone else whose roots were in Johnson County, Iowa.

‘Are you telling me you’re innocent? You didn’t kidnap a baby? You’re not on the run? You didn’t hijack …?’

‘Not exactly. It’s a long story.’

‘And you want to tell it to me?’

‘I’d like to.’

Karin, smelling like fresh ironing, kisses me on the cheek and bounds out the door, the screen slamming like a shot after her. Karin has her mother’s red hair, green eyes, and ten million freckles.

‘I don’t think you should come out here,’ I said, not wanting the perfection of my life threatened.

‘I don’t intend to. I’m … I’m grasping at straws. I heard that unusual things happened with time out there … at your farm. Things concerning baseball … I played baseball, you know. Major-league baseball.’

‘I know.’

‘Will you meet me in town? In Iowa City?’

I watched Karin skip off toward the road and the school bus. Yogi Berra, her brindle cat, walked after her in stately procession, his tail raised straight in the air like a beacon, knowing that his advanced age wouldn’t permit him to keep up with her, but if the bus were even a half-minute late, Yogi would arrive at the road in time to be petted before Karin left for the day.

‘Where?’

‘Pearson’s Drug Store. The soda fountain.’

‘That’s an awfully public place. You’re a fugitive. You’re known in this area. You come from Lone Tree, don’t you?’

‘Ray, one of the reasons I know something is out of sync, is that even though I’m at the top of the Most Wanted List, even though there are rewards for my capture that must total a half-million dollars, even though my picture has been on TV at least once a day for weeks and weeks, I don’t think I could get arrested if I walked into a police station with a sign around my neck saying, “Check the 10 Most Wanted List! I’m Joe McCoy!” If I did, someone at the police station would create a diversion, and eventually I’d get thrown out for loitering. I get the impression that either I’m invisible or every cop in the United States is dumber than a duffel bag.’

‘Pearson’s in an hour,’ I said.

‘I’m going to invite someone else, if that’s all right?’

‘Who?’

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘Then how can I approve or disapprove?’

‘You can’t.’

‘Pearson’s in an hour.’ I hung up.

‘Who?’ asked Annie, plunking herself and a cup of coffee down at the table. ‘Whew! It’s gonna be a hot one,’ and she wiped her red curls back off her forehead.

‘Joe McCoy,’ I said.

‘You’re gonna meet him at Pearson’s?’

I nodded.

‘But he’s wanted for everything except … I can’t think of anything he isn’t wanted for. What if there’s a shootout?’

‘There won’t be.’

‘But why meet him? Why don’t you just call the police?’

‘I don’t think he’s really dangerous. He just wants to talk.’

‘You don’t have to call the police. I will.’

‘No.’

‘What did he say to convince you to see him?’

‘He thinks there’s something odd about all the things that have happened to him lately, that he isn’t exactly in control of his life.’

‘But what can you do for him?’

‘I don’t know, but if you recall, I have a little experience in not being entirely in control, and in dealing with magic …’

‘You didn’t kidnap a baby. Maybe he’s kidnapped the girl who’s traveling with him, too. What’s her name? Francie Bly?’

‘Annie, I took a gun when I drove off to New Hampshire looking for J.D. Salinger. And I did kidnap Jerry, though I didn’t use the gun. Maybe Joe McCoy is not entirely in control of what’s happening.’

‘But hasn’t Joe McCoy always been kind of a troublemaker?’

‘According to some.’

I was surprised to hear myself defending Joe McCoy, but then I remember the opinions of neighbors, God-fearing, generous, hard-working, but unable to grasp eccentricity, watching me plow under a portion of my corn in order to build a baseball field proposed by a disembodied voice.

‘Don’t forget the flack we took about me building the baseball field out there.’

‘I’ll never forget that!’ says Annie.

‘Remember when I spent the last of our savings to buy the lawn tractor? You were the only person in the world who didn’t think I was crazy.’

‘Who said I didn’t think you were crazy?’

Annie reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, the smile in her green eyes letting me know she didn’t think I was crazy then, or now, in spite of what people say or think. Annie is one in a million, she is, and I hope I appreciate her enough.

I fire up my road-weary Datsun for the twenty-minute drive to Iowa City. We have a new car since the ballpark has made the farm profitable, but I prefer the Datsun. It’s like traveling with an old friend, as full of memories as it is food wrappers.

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.