If Wishes Were Horses
BY W. P. KINSELLA

Copyright

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Copyright © W. P. Kinsella 1996

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Quotation from The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc

W. P. Kinsella asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007497553

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007497560

Version: 2014-07-31

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

SECTION ONE: HEARTLAND

ONE: RAY KINSELLA

TWO: GIDEON CLARKE

THREE: RAY KINSELLA

FOUR: GIDEON CLARKE

FIVE: JOE McCOY

SIX: RAY KINSELLA

SEVEN: JOE McCOY

EIGHT: JOE McCOY

NINE: JOE McCOY

TEN: JOE McCOY

SECTION TWO: AT LARGE

ELEVEN: JOE McCOY

TWELVE: RAY KINSELLA

THIRTEEN: GIDEON CLARKE

FOURTEEN: JOE McCOY

FIFTEEN: JOE MCCOY

SIXTEEN: JOE McCOY

SEVENTEEN: JOE McCOY

EIGHTEEN: JOE McCOY

SECTION THREE: IF WISHES WERE HORSES

NINETEEN: JOE McCOY

TWENTY: GIDEON CLARKE

TWENTY-ONE: JOE McCOY

TWENTY-TWO: JOE McCOY

TWENTY-THREE: JOE McCOY

TWENTY-FOUR: JOE McCOY

Also by the W.P. Kinsella

About the Publisher

SECTION ONE HEARTLAND

They say it can’t be done,

but sometimes it doesn’t always work.

—Casey Stengel

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.

‘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.

THREE

RAY KINSELLA

I’m glad Joe Mccoy has chosen Pearson’s as a meeting place. It is my favorite indoor spot in Iowa City. I discovered it soon after I arrived as a student, more years ago than I care to remember. Pearson’s is a drug store; but at the back, dark and heavily air-conditioned, is a soda fountain, smelling deliciously of chocolate and lime, of cherry Cokes and malt.

From one of the dozen stools at the soda fountain one can watch a devilled-egg sandwich being prepared or see a chocolate malt—there are none better anywhere—being created by a waitress, one of whom, Doreen, has been working at the soda fountain for all the years I’ve been going there.

I have a habit of being early for every appointment: I arrive half an hour early to watch batting practice of a summer evening or to have a tooth filled on a depressing January afternoon. I order only coffee, but my resolve disappears quickly enough. Even though it is barely 9:30 in the morning, I order a half-sized chocolate malt, which at Pearson’s is called a pony malt, a term I’ve encountered nowhere else.

I eat my malt slowly, dipping the straw in and licking the stiff, cement-like mixture off the end. That’s the way I taught Karin, and later the twins Shannon and Crystal to love chocolate malts. When each was just old enough to accept that kind of food I would hold her in the crook of my arm and, dipping the straw in the malt, push the laden end of the straw into her mouth. Each baby would smack her lips and make wonderful gurgling noises that sounded vaguely Japanese.

The next person to arrive is Gideon Clarke. I have been watching everyone who came in, knowing I would recognize Joe McCoy, wondering who the mysterious third party could be. Gideon Clarke is a white-blond scarecrow of a fellow, tall and stoop-shouldered, who lives in Onamata, a dying town on the Iowa River a few miles south of Iowa City.

We’ve never spoken, but both of us patronize Pearson’s regularly, and he was a denizen of the University of Iowa library all the while I was studying there. I know vaguely that he was involved in some dispute with the Department of History over a thesis his father had written in the 1940s. There was some talk he was going to sue the university because they wouldn’t accept as fact what his father had written.

He must have been right all along, for a few years ago something happened, and since then he’s been regarded as a baseball historian. He’s given lectures at the university, though I’ve never attended, and I saw his picture, his long, bone-white hair combed tidily for the photograph, on the cover of Sports Illustrated a year or two ago.

There are three stools at the far left of the counter. I’ve occupied the middle one. Clarke swings a long leg over a stool near the center of the soda fountain. A group of coffee drinkers occupies the far end.

‘Where’s Missy today?’ Doreen, the waitress, says to him. She is wearing a black uniform with a white collar.

Missy? Perhaps he has daughters, as I do, though I’ve never thought of him as being married. Or Missy could be a wife.

‘She’s at home this morning. Actually I’m here on business …’

‘I thought it was a little early in the day. What can I get you?’

‘A green river float,’ says Gideon Clarke.

‘Sure,’ says Doreen. ‘This is usually coffee time,’ she says to anyone who cares to listen. ‘Takes a real drinker to down a green river this early.’

A green river is something else unique to Pearson’s, or at least to the Midwest, a sweet-tart lime drink that goes down best as a float with a baseball-sized scoop of French vanilla ice cream bobbing in the middle of it.

As she turns to work at the soda fountain I catch Gideon Clarke’s eye and say, ‘Did you happen to get a mysterious phone call this morning?’

‘Are you Ray?’ he replies. ‘Joe …’

‘I’m the third party, Ray Kinsella. Did he tell you there was going to be a third party?’

‘He did. I’ve seen you here lots of times, and around town, I just never connected the name and the face,’ says Gideon.

‘He didn’t supply the third party with a name. I was just guessing. Though I know who you are, and I guessed that since all three of us have rather strong connections with baseball …’

Gideon moves over four or five stools until he is on the first stool around the corner. I move against the wall leaving an empty stool between us. The scene reminds me of the unwritten rule of washrooms: unless there is a crowd men leave one empty urinal between them. We shake hands. His hands are too large for his body, his skin as white as his hair.

Doreen appears with the green river float, long-handled silver spoon and straw. Doreen is about fifty with shoulder-length black hair, a long face and prominent teeth; it is a face made friendly by laugh lines acquired through years of bantering with her customers. Doreen and Lila, the other woman who works here regularly, are bossy and jovial in a motherly way; they each have several children. Doreen has a new grandson, and I, as a regular here, know of each new tooth and inoculation, while Doreen sees my Karin’s report cards and monitors Shannon and Crystal’s progress as three-year-old ballet dancers.

She plops the green river float and accoutrements on the counter in front of Gideon.

Norman Rockwell could have invented Pearson’s, could have drawn its waitresses. ‘Pearson’s is Iowa City,’ I tell Karin, almost every time I bring her here. The city expands, food and muffler franchises multiply, demolition crews chip away at history. Rows of elegant old houses are replaced by pink brick warrens that house stereo sets and university students; but Pearson’s survives, a little piece of the past intact, cool, dark and chocolatey-smelling.

‘Hey,’ says Doreen, bustling back from delivering a sandwich to the other end of the counter, ‘want to hear a riddle?’

‘What choice do I have?’ There is no choice. Doreen’s riddle will be clean and simple, probably something to do with elephants.

‘What’s the one thing you can never do during your lifetime?’

I lick the end of my straw contemplatively. I have no idea, but I usually like to make a weak guess or two before giving up.

‘Attend your own funeral?’ I say finally.

Doreen snorts. ‘Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral. Lots of people have faked their deaths and attended their funerals.’

‘You’re right,’ I say, pretending to be chagrined.

‘See the back of your neck,’ says Gideon, stirring his green river.

‘Can’t you do better than that? Anyone can set up enough mirrors to see the back of their neck.’

‘We give up,’ I say.

Doreen waits a long minute before divulging the answer, savoring her triumph. ‘Don’t care who you are, you never get to read your own autopsy report,’ Doreen chortles. ‘You can fake your funeral, but once you’ve been dissected like a biology-class frog, that’s all she wrote. Ha!’

‘I read mine,’ says a high-timbred voice behind us.

Gideon and I both swivel on our stools. Doreen raises her eyebrows, waiting for further explanation. There he is. He must have entered at the front, crossed the store and come down the far wall so he could sneak in behind us. He is a slight young man, with sandy hair. Too small to have been a major-league pitcher. His hands are slim and white. He doesn’t look dangerous.

Doreen moves down the counter to where someone is signalling for a refill, while the three of us shake hands.

FOUR

GIDEON CLARKE

Having spent most of my life being a researcher, instead of driving directly to Pearson’s I stop first at the University of Iowa library and spend a fast fifteen minutes scanning recent issues of the L.A. Times and Des Moines Register.

Joe McCoy certainly wasn’t lying about being a criminal. Reading of his exploits over the past several weeks makes me wonder how I could get so out of touch with what is happening in America. Not that anything McCoy’s been doing is of great importance. He’s an ex-major-league pitcher, working as a reporter in Los Angeles, who, for no apparent reason, was involved in a rather bizarre kidnapping. I vaguely remember his name—perhaps Stan has mentioned him—and I guess I knew, at least subliminally, that he grew up in Lone Tree, the next town down the line from Onamata.

McCoy looks very much as I had pictured him from the blurry mug shots in the newspapers. He is only about 5´8˝, wiry, with long reddish-blond hair and quick, almost furtive blue eyes. He is wearing faded jeans and sneakers, and a red-and-white satin baseball jacket, old and glazed with dirt, with LONE TREE in red, carpet-like letters on the back. He takes a long time to decide to sit on the stool between Ray Kinsella and me. He has that about-to-spring demeanor of a startled bird, the look of a second baseman caught napping on a bunt play, still at his position when he should have covered first, wishing that everyone would stop staring at him.

‘The autopsy thing is true,’ he says. ‘But so routine as almost not to count. Remember that business in L.A. where they thought the body in the burned-out car was me?’ He waits for a response, doesn’t get one.

‘You didn’t read about it, did you?’ he says with disappointment. ‘I’ve been away from the Midwest too long.’

Ray and I remain silent. On the drive into Iowa City I had heard a song on a country station that was called, I think, ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ McCoy displays what seems to me a false bravado. I’m sure the autopsy thing is true. I don’t like him very much.

‘It’s been ten years since I’ve been in here,’ he says, as Doreen takes his order for a chocolate malt made with chocolate ice cream. ‘I have, I had, a friend-enemy at LAPD. He let me read the autopsy report.’ He shrugs.

Doreen pays no attention to him as a person, it is obvious he means nothing to her, yet Doreen is one who keeps up on the news; she often asks me about local and national events I have no knowledge of. She would be aware if there was a nationally known fugitive at large who used to live at Lone Tree. She would recognize his face. But she goes to make his order without a backward glance.

While Joe and Ray talk quietly about where their paths may have crossed I remember who and what Joe McCoy reminds me of. A couple of months ago a salesman came to my door. I couldn’t avoid him because I was sitting on the porch swing reading a book when he strode up the sidewalk and knocked on a porch pillar to attract my attention.

He was wearing a white shirt, black pants and tie. At first I thought he might be a Mormon missionary, but no, he was a salesman hawking encyclopedias, and since my body was warm, I was a prospect. He moved in for the kill.

He buried me in an avalanche of words. He was delivering a canned sales pitch, but even my all but ignoring him failed to deter him. He simply pretended that I had acknowledged the importance of what he was saying and crashed onward like a moose through a thicket.

I found him totally detestable. And when he finally finished his presentation, sweat running in his eyes, yards of brochures, and sample copies spread about the porch swing, the railing of the verandah, and the floor, I told him so.

‘It doesn’t matter what you’re selling,’ I told him. ‘It could be carpet tacks, carpet itself, or a whole new interior to my house. If I like you, I’ll buy any product from you that isn’t totally fraudulent, and the average person will buy the fraudulent products too.

‘What you’ve shown me this morning is a loud, self-centered, obnoxious, hot-shot salesman out to swindle a small-town rube. Now get off my property.’

‘But I’m not like that,’ the young man said. His shoulders slumped and he took a deep breath. For a second I thought he was going to cry.

‘I’m not loud. I’m no more self-centered than anyone else. And I’m sure not a hot shot; I’m scared to death. I haven’t made a sale in two weeks and I’m out of cash and every time I go to buy food or gas on my credit card I expect it to be seized, and I’ve got a wife and two babies back in Oklahoma, and the only money I’ve sent them this month is three cash advances I’ve taken on that same credit card.’

That changed my opinion of the young man entirely.

‘Are you selling a good product?’ I asked.

‘The best,’ he replied. ‘I researched it.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me that, instead of spewing all that foolishness designed to make me feel guilty if I don’t buy? You never asked what I do. I’m a researcher of sorts. I need current geographical information, like what’s the population of Houston at this minute? How far is it from Toledo to Cincinnati? Will your books have the answers to those questions?’

‘Yes, sir, they will. And there’s an atlas, a really good one, and a year book every year for five years with updates on current events and statistics.’

We talked for another hour, not about selling but just about life in general. His name was Carsten Walgreen; his wife’s name was Kitty and his daughters were Katherine Dowd and Patricia Darling.

I called to Missy and told her to change her dress, we were going to town, and the three of us drove into Iowa City. I sent Carsten to the university library to do some research for me while Missy and I came here to Pearson’s for green river floats. Afterwards we met Carsten, and when he gave me the information I wanted I placed an order for fifty sets of encyclopedias. At over a thousand dollars a set, the bill, with taxes, came to over fifty-eight thousand dollars.

‘You don’t look rich,’ Carsten said, when he got over the shock. The research I’d asked him to do was to compile a list of small libraries in the eastern end of the state, fifty of them to be exact.

‘I don’t feel rich,’ I said. ‘My mother’s second marriage was into a monied family. I inherited more than I ever dreamed. The money just sits and multiplies. I have trouble spending ten thousand dollars a year. My accountants will be happy to have such a healthy charitable deduction.’

The odds, I suppose, were about even money that Carsten was a miserable little shyster, but he wasn’t. He had been a university student at Norman, Oklahoma, working toward an MBA, when he got his girlfriend pregnant. They were married, but the money ran out; and his family weren’t about to provide for three and eventually four. He dropped out and worked at the kind of miserable jobs a boy with three dependants and a year and a half toward an MBA can expect.

I’m jolted back to the present by Joe McCoy clapping his hands.

‘I suppose you gentlemen are wondering why I’ve called this meeting?’

I’m tempted to say that I’m not wondering at all. I want Joe McCoy to be the boy from Tidewater, Oklahoma, with the pretty wife and daughters in white dresses, not the overzealous encyclopedia salesman intent on making an impression.

‘Gideon,’ and he lowers his voice as he speaks, ‘let me begin by saying that I am on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.’

Should I congratulate him? Offer sympathy? I glance over my shoulder toward the racks of greeting cards. Is there one that says, ‘Congratulations on Making the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List’?

‘Well …’ I say, not sure what to do. I don’t like being entrusted with this type of information.

‘If you gentlemen will bear with me I’d like to tell you my side of the story. Though you two don’t seem to know each other, I believe you’ve each had experiences that while not totally alike, are similar enough that you might sympathize with me and be able to offer some advice on how to get out of my situation—alive and without doing a hundred years in prison.’

‘I’ve got an hour or so,’ says Ray.

‘Why not?’ I say. I owe him that much. My life was once terminally weird and I’ve been having some disturbing dreams lately, erotic dreams, but not about my long-lost wife or my long-lost girlfriend. I’ve been dreaming of kissing the pouty lips of a small blonde woman who speaks in a language I’m unfamiliar with, though it seems I can almost understand what she’s saying.

Besides, Joe McCoy looks distraught enough that he might pull a gun and take us hostage if we don’t let him deliver his monologue.

‘Fair enough,’ says Joe McCoy. He dips his straw in the double chocolate malt Doreen has set in front of him. He looks uneasy, as if he doesn’t know where or how to begin.

FIVE

JOE McCOY

‘Fair enough,’ I hear myself saying. Gideon Clarke is not exactly what I’d hoped for, he and Ray Kinsella being my court of last resort, so to speak. Gideon looks at me from under his white silk eyebrows. I think he’d like to turn me in.

I play frantically with my straw, dipping the end in the thick mass, licking the chocolate off. I notice Ray eats his shake the same way.

Should I preface all this with an apology? ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’ve done what I’ve done,’ I could begin.

Here is another beginning: My name is Joe McCoy and I have lost my wife and family. I have a beautiful little girl named Charlotte, who hugs my neck and is all angel eyes and soft little kisses. I soak up her love like a sponge. I would give up my life for her, for my wife Maureen, for my baby son, Joe Jr.

At the moment all three are lost to me. I have been kidnapped and thrust into an alien dimension, where I am someone else. I am someone I don’t even like very much. I am the someone else I would have been without Maureen Renn, without my roots in the quirky little town of Lone Tree, Iowa, without my passion for baseball, without my beautiful children.

The Joe McCoy I am in Los Angeles, the Joe McCoy in an open-necked white shirt, black slacks and a pair of hot-shot alligator cowboy boots, the Joe McCoy with a beeper attached to his waist, cannot be the Joe McCoy that Maureen loves. Maureen would laugh at this Joe McCoy.

‘You buy those boots to compensate for a small dick?’ Maureen would ask if I had the audacity to come home wearing them.

‘I do not have a small dick.’

‘Of course you don’t. And I’m the only one it matters to, and I’ve been happy with it for almost fifteen years and will be for another thirty, providing you lose those ridiculous boots.’

‘I’ll drop them off at Goodwill tomorrow.’

‘Why not just park them under the bed for the moment, and tonight we’ll pretend you’re a six-foot-eight rodeo cowboy with a big dick …’ Maureen puts her laughter aside and reaches for me, her mouth sweet and swarming. I grab a handful of her plum-colored hair, pull her even closer.

My wife Maureen is the love most men never know.

Then she’s gone. The Joe McCoy even I don’t like much is sitting in the newsroom late at night, trying to compose a story, wearing hot-shot alligator boots and a beeper.

What I actually say to Ray and Gideon is, ‘If I could live my life over, I’d pitch in the damned state tournament. I’d ruin my arm, forget about a career in baseball, attend the University of Iowa, study journalism, get a job with the Iowa City Press Citizen, marry my high-school sweetheart, Maureen Renn, and live happily ever after, okay? That’s what I wish I’d done. But I didn’t.’

Well, baring my soul hasn’t cleared the air any. These guys look at me as if I’ve spoken in Croatian.

‘How long ago was this? This state tournament business?’ asks Ray.

I name the year.

‘Oh, well, I was working at an evil job then, selling life insurance to keep from starving. It was sort of like robbing convenience stores, only legal and less profitable. I was waiting for the girl I was going to marry to be old enough to propose to, hoping she wasn’t going to run off with a brainless football player her own age. I didn’t have much time to follow local sports.’

‘I was being thrown out of the offices of the Chicago Cubs,’ says Gideon. ‘I was writing letters, doing research, trying to find someone who would believe in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. I didn’t keep track of local sports. I was interested in bigger game.’

I smile, but draw two bland, blank stares for my trouble.

When and how did my moderately orderly life, like a train gliding along, bumpita, bumpita, on a straight track, suddenly encounter an invisible switch and shunt without so much as a quiver onto a parallel track traversing a different and maddening country?

I have made some bad choices. Beginning in high school in Lone Tree, Iowa, through college and a mediocre baseball career, through my stint as a reporter for a major Southern California newspaper, there are so many things I wish I could change.

1. I shouldn’t have refused to pitch on less than four days’ rest in the Iowa State Baseball Championships.

2. I shouldn’t have been so quick to abandon my high-school sweetheart, Maureen Renn.

3. I should never have shot my mouth off to Sports Illustrated.

4. I should never have believed my eyes that night in the desert outside Los Angeles.

After that, the list lengthens to infinity.

I try another tack.

‘Picture this, guys! Southern California. The not-too-distant past. I am thirty-one years old and living with a dental technician named Rosslyn Quinn, who is the sole source of income in our household. I have just been totally destroyed. Pounded into the ground by a herd of buffalo. Crapped on from a great height. Wile E. Coyote at the end of a cartoon. Can you guys relate to that?’

They nod. Maybe I’m getting somewhere.

‘I was a reporter for a famous Southern California newspaper. Not a tabloid. We reported news. We didn’t create news.’

I had enough journalistic credits that the famous newspaper was not averse to hiring me. In the two years I was with the famous newspaper I was surprisingly successful, though, looking back, I think I may have overestimated both my abilities and influence. I made the age-old mistake of believing my own press clippings. As a journalist, I was a minor celebrity, something I had never been able to achieve in sports.

I have to admit I have a small flair for the dramatic and I enjoyed playing the part of a hot-shot reporter.

I started out doing person-on-the-street interviews. ‘What do you think we should do to achieve world peace?’ ‘How do you feel about gun control?’ In my spare time I began investigations into shady small businesses and discovered I had a unique ability to write up the results. The public loved it, and I got to feeling like Mike Wallace as I walked smiling into an office, backed up by a concealed tape recorder, ready to trap some grifter selling nonexistent graveyard plots in the desert to unsuspecting senior citizens.

What I suspect is that I’ve been living in two dimensions at the same time, or part time in each. Besides the frightening events that have happened to me, I believe I have received occasional glimpses of what might have been.

For instance, one night I saw myself and Maureen Renn walking down the steps of the great stone court house in Iowa City. It was late fall and the leaves were yellow, but the sun was blazing and the sky blue as tropical water. We were holding hands and had just come from getting our marriage license.

In Iowa when a couple marries, either one may take the other’s name, or they may choose a neutral name. We could have become the McCoys or the Renns, or we could have decided to to be the Terwilligers or the Underwoods, or any of the billion possible names floating about. At Maureen’s insistence we were going to become the McCoys.

‘Don’t you want to keep your own name?’ I asked.

‘Honey, I’ve been writing my name as Mrs. Joe McCoy ever since I was ten years old. Mrs. Joseph Michael Armbruster McCoy. Mrs. J.M.A. McCoy. I wasted half my school notepaper from fifth grade on practising variations of my married name, and nothing is going to take that away from me.’

Maureen stopped in the middle of the long flight of stone stairs. She was wearing a yellow-and-white summer dress with white accessories; her plum-colored hair, which she usually wore straight, had been curled at the ends.

‘It’s not every day I get a marriage license,’ she had said that morning as she jumped into my car and bounced across the seat to kiss me. I was used to Maureen in jeans and a denim jacket. She was so womanly in her bright dress and white sandals with crisscross ties that rose several inches up her calves.

She stepped one stair above me so our faces were even. Then she hugged my neck and kissed me. And seeing her so happy made my heart swell with love, and I knew that marrying Maureen was right, no matter what our families or anyone else said.

Every morning, on my desk at the famous Southern California newspaper, I would find fifty phone messages alerting me to various shady business operations. Within six months I had every bait-and-switch advertiser within fifty miles of Los Angeles trembling in his suede shoes and shiny suit.

Readers loved what I was doing. One of my competitors described me a twenty-five-cent Ralph Nader, which I decided to take as a compliment. There was a rumor that A Current Affair was going to do a segment on me, that they were going to nickname me Fearless Joe McCoy.

I was just starting to snoop around the edge of organized crime, had established famous and unusual underworld contacts like Pico the Rat and Bulrush Moe, and, as any investigative reporter worth his weight in clichéd situations should, had developed an enemy on the police force: Detective Nathan Wiser, LAPD.

Then came the extraterrestrial thing. Before the extraterrestrial incident, I was an investigative reporter with a reputation for both honesty and competence. I was gathering a faithful readership. I was the senior editor’s fair-haired boy. The extraterrestrial story ruined my life.

I received a telephone call from a teenage girl. Her voice was high pitched and breathless; in the background a radio blared rock music.

‘You the guy does investigatey stuff?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘McCoy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I seen somethin’ weird. I mean real weird, you know what I mean?’

‘I’m familiar with weird,’ I said. ‘What exactly did you see, and where did you see it?’

‘This here thing came down out of the sky. You know what I mean? We really seen it. Me and Buster.’

‘Buster?’

‘My boyfriend. My old man, sort of, only we don’t live together alla time. See, we just drove out to the desert to … you know, be alone. Buster parked his car, and we had this sleeping bag. We were down in this little arroyo, you know, outa sight sort of, when this thing fuckin’ near lands on us. Pardon my French, but it scared us shitless …’

She rambled on for about five minutes. I listened intently and commented at appropriate moments. Her manner was straightforward, truthful, with a certain naivete. She put Buster on the phone. He was the strong, silent type. ‘Yeah,’ was the only word in his vocabulary. I recounted the story to him point by point, and he agreed with everything the girl had told me. Then the girl, whose name was Bertha, got on the line and told it all to me again.

I was intrigued because of the way she told the story. Here was a person who believed what she was telling me. There was probably a logical explanation, but this girl believed. I had taken enough hoax calls to know when someone was putting me on. I wrote down the address and drove out to see her and Buster.

Bertha lived in a dilapidated frame house in a lower-lower-class neighborhood on the edge of the desert. There were gaps between the houses like missing teeth, the bleached bodies of abandoned cars were strewn about, doorless refrigerators and freezers gleamed like patches of snow on the sand and brittle brown grasses.

Bertha was about sixteen, with a wide, pink face surrounded by lank, collar-length blonde hair. She was probably fifty pounds overweight; the top button of her jeans was undone and an inch of pink flesh showed between the jeans and the bottom of a black T-shirt that used to have glitter on the front in the shape of some rock star’s face. She was barefoot, sitting at a filthy kitchen table covered with empty Pepsi bottles and full ashtrays.

We got into Buster’s car, a sun-faded 1971 Ford that had been sky-blue, and drove about three miles into the desert. It was evening rush-hour on one of the hottest days of the year.

Bertha recounted her story again, yelling over the shriek of the car radio. The radio was cunningly hidden so I couldn’t find a switch to lower the volume; and Buster, who turned out to be about twenty, long and thin, in tight jeans and cowboy boots, didn’t look like the type you asked on first acquaintance to turn down his radio.

I couldn’t catch Bertha in any lies. Buster confirmed everything she said. In person he nodded and grinned, instead of saying ‘Yeah.’ He had a raw, high-cheekboned face, and hair that he must have oiled at a Texaco station. ‘Born to lose’ was tattooed on his left forearm. A dragon’s head on his right bicep peeked from the sleeve of a gray T-shirt mottled with grease and sweat stains.

I felt uneasy. Hadn’t there been a guy and girl like this in Phoenix who drove people out into the desert and murdered them? But Bertha didn’t appear to have the ability to con anyone. Both she and Buster were a little in awe of me, thrilled that a well-known investigative reporter would take them seriously, after their friends, families and, I’m sure, other newspaper people had dismissed them as lunatics.

‘I was gonna call the National Enquirer,’ said Bertha, ‘but I couldn’t figure out how. I’ve never made a long-distance call.’

Buster grunted, grinned and nodded.

What had been somewhat of a road dwindled to a trail, then to tire tracks on sand. We drove another half-mile through sage, brittlebush and creosote trees, and parked in a gully.

We tramped over barren sand hills, past small hummocks sheathed in bleached grass. A lizard scuttled out of our way; some kind of large insect thumped against the knee of my pants.

‘See, here it is,’ said Bertha, as we arrived at the base of a dome-like hill. Two oblong, grid-like patterns were burned into the earth.

‘That’s where it landed.’

I knelt down and examined the tracks. Each one was the size of a very large snowshoe. The patterns had burned through the sparse grass and into the sandy soil, a heavy brand perhaps three-quarters of an inch deep.

‘We were laying right over here,’ Bertha said, shaking out a cigarette from a beat-up pack she extracted from the front pocket of her jeans. She pointed to a small, natural shelf in the side of the hill. ‘Fuckin’ near scared us to death, right Buster?’

Buster grinned and nodded.

I tried to imagine what could have made the imprints, tried to guess what Bertha and Buster had actually seen.

‘Well, do they look like flying saucer tracks?’ asked Bertha.

‘I’ve never had any first-hand experience,’ I said.

Bertha looked disappointed. Then she grabbed Buster’s arm, rubbing her nose against his bicep.

‘Tell him the surprise,’ she said.

Buster just smiled, a shifty-eyed, shit-eating smile.

‘They came back,’ said Bertha. ‘We first seen ’em two nights ago. They came last night and I bet they’re comin’ back tonight. I think it was because we didn’t run and didn’t have a gun or nothin’. Last night, they came and looked us over again. They kind of measured us, if you know what I mean.’

‘They?’ I said.

‘Well, you know, I could feel them. That machine made comforting sounds, like a baby when it’s talkin’ itself to sleep. But the light that came out of it touched us, like all over. Right, Buster?’

Buster smiled and nodded.

We drove back to the rickety, basementless house. The home belonged to Bertha’s mother, who arrived in a rusting Pontiac, accompanied by a couple of unkempt, tow-headed boys she must have retrieved from a babysitter.

The mother wore a grayish waitress uniform; her mud-colored hair was limp. She wasn’t much over thirty, but everything about her, including her clothes and hair, looked wilted and tired. She had probably been beautiful as a teenager, but now every part of her was slouching. I decided she had probably had a long succession of boyfriends, husbands and lovers just like Buster.

‘Geez, I thought reporters had better things to do than listen to dumb kids,’ she said, after Bertha introduced us. ‘Don’t tell me you believe this flying saucer crap. These kids are just looking for some attention.’

‘I photographed the tracks out there on the hill,’ I said a little defensively. ‘They’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Besides, I make a point of checking out every lead,’ I added, trying to sound professional and gracious at the same time.

‘Suit yourself. Hey, I loved the way you nailed that little rat who was selling phony water softeners. He worked this area, you know, sold to the old lady in the yellow house across the way …’

Bertha’s mother served canned tomato soup thinned with water, and sandwiches containing one slice of a pinkish substance that may or may not have had a protein base, followed by instant coffee served in cracked mugs, accompanied by Carnation milk with two yellow lines dribbled down the label.

I phoned Rosslyn to tell her I’d be late. Looking back, I realize she didn’t even ask where I was or what I was working on. But then, I didn’t ask her how many people’s mouths she’d immortalized in plaster of Paris that afternoon. Our relationship was not in wonderful shape even before I became terminally unemployed.

I have no idea why I got together with Rosslyn. I suspect she had no idea why she chose me. After I retired from organized baseball I took a long holiday. I went to Honolulu. I wasn’t worried about finding work; I had a journalism degree to fall back on and a few dollars in the bank, though I’d never made big money in baseball. I was to some extent at loose ends, suffering, in a mild form, from the terrible letdown professional athletes undergo when they are suddenly thrust into the civilian world.

I met Rosslyn in a singles bar. She had her own business, was two years older than me, sensible, dedicated. She was, as they say, upwardly mobile, the direction I intended to be traveling. Rosslyn was everything the women I’d known throughout my baseball career were not. We also had Southern California in common; I had made my home there every off-season. A week after we returned from our Hawaiian holiday we moved in together. We both thought it was time to settle down; the fact that we weren’t the right people for each other was incidental.

At Bertha’s we watched TV on a dusty, finger-marked black-and-white set until the sun went down. Then the three of us got in Buster’s car and again headed for the desert.

We sat on the ledge above where Bertha and Buster had been when the spaceship first landed.

‘I wonder what they thought of us,’ Bertha said. ‘We had the sleeping bag and we were, like, going at it, if you know what I mean.’

‘A much better introduction to Earth than being met by a dozen armored tanks and a trigger-happy SWAT team,’ I said.

‘You do believe us, don’t you, Joe?’ Bertha asked.

I paused for a long time. ‘I believe you’ve seen something. I believe you believe what you’re telling me.’

Bertha smiled, and, as she did, her wide, placid face was suddenly lighted the color of pink neon by the spaceship flitting over the nearest hill like a gigantic firefly. It landed in the tracks it had previously established.

‘Son of a bitch!’ said Bertha.

The only other time I experienced anything similar was when I was sent into a game in Yankee Stadium in the ninth inning, before fifty thousand screaming fans, the bases loaded, two out, and our team up by two. I remember feeling like I might faint, then imagining how ridiculous I’d look, a couple of runs scoring as the third baseman tried to pry the ball out of my glove. I got out of the inning and game with one pitch: I hung a curve ball that Craig Nettles hit in the gap in left-center to empty the bases.

What did the spaceship look like? Visualize one of those egg-shaped, plastic containers in which pantyhose are packaged. Picture one fifteen feet long and five or six feet high; then imagine it full of pink cotton candy.

It glided in like a cartoon insect. Bertha had been remarkably accurate in her description of the vehicle. Once it landed it sat silently, glowing baby pink, for what must have approached ten minutes, emitting comforting sounds.

The three of us just stood, awe-struck. For the first five minutes Buster and I each held one of Bertha’s pudgy hands. I wanted to touch the craft, but I don’t know if I lacked the nerve or if I was prevented from walking forward by some force within the machine.

Finally, I remembered my camera, and I began photographing the craft. I scurried around snapping photos like a Japanese tourist.

All the time the spaceship was there I had the feeling I was being touched, investigated, ‘measured,’ as Bertha had said, by gentle, loving hands.

Gradually I relaxed. I finished photographing, or, more accurately, ran out of film, and ended as we had begun, the three of us holding hands. I have never felt so at peace.

Then, the craft lifted one snowshoe-like foot up into its body, lifted the other, hovered an instant and was gone in the direction it had come from, leaving us bathed in a sweet, pink glow.

‘So now you’ve seen it,’ said Bertha, letting go of my hand, fumbling in the pocket of her jeans for cigarettes. ‘You believe us now, don’t you?’

‘I believe,’ I said, moving forward to feel the tracks, which were deeper than they had been, and many degrees warmer than the surrounding sand.

As I finish, I look expectantly at Ray and Gideon to see if they are any more sympathetic to my plight.

‘What you experienced,’ says Gideon, ‘was a close encounter, which, if you’ve described it accurately, seems legitimate. It also appears that you documented it with photographs, and had witnesses. So what went wrong?’

‘Can you spare me a few more minutes?’

They both nod.

‘What we have here are two people who between them do not display sufficient imagination to perpetrate a hoax.’ Those were the exact words I used in presenting my case to my managing editor. I had read in some self-improvement book that it was best to speak formally when conversing with superiors, and that I should never be afraid to show I possessed a vocabulary.

Later, the entire editorial board studied my photographs.

‘Those tracks look like a blow-up of a waffle iron,’ one said.

The photographs of the craft itself were, in spite of their number, of disappointing quality. They looked like a side view of cotton candy or the usual fraudulent shots of supposed ectoplasm, taken by your basic raving lunatic.

‘I have no control over the conveyance they travel in,’ I replied.

Three days had passed since my evening with Buster and Bertha. The next evening several senior staff members were out in the desert hoping for a glimpse of my extraterrestrials. Nothing. They all took their own photographs of the tracks.

‘Are your sources clean?’ management wanted to know. They meant Buster and Bertha.

‘Nathan Wiser himself ran them through both adult and juvie,’ I said. ‘Clean as the day they were born.’ Wiser had growled. ‘Buster has five traffic charges as an adult, but nothing criminal.’

I had put the same question to Bertha and Buster right after our close encounter.

‘You two clean? Any arrests? Any convictions?’

‘Well …’ said Bertha, as my heart sank, ‘I been rousted for hanging around a shopping mall. Fuckin’ security guards think they own the world.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yeah. What’d you expect? And Buster ain’t been in no more trouble than anybody else.’

Largely because I was personally involved in the case and was such a credible witness, management decided to run the story and photographs.

If there’s one kind of story that every rival journalist and reporter wants to discredit it’s one about UFOs or extraterrestrials. But I wasn’t worried. I knew what I’d seen. If I’d been smart I’d have remembered that I’d seen Reggie Jackson strike out a few hundred times, but he had three homers in four at-bats against me.

If there’s one kind of story the general public wants desperately to be true it is one about aliens or UFOs.

I appeared on TV a couple of times, but I was just another newspaper guy. It was Bertha and Buster the public were interested in. They could relate to Bertha and Buster. Three days after the story broke all three of us were on ‘Good Morning, America.’

Bertha, in a dress, with her hair permed, looked like everybody’s babysitter. Even dressed up and washed Buster looked like your average neighborhood hoodlum. In the aftermath, one of the more facetious tabloids would nickname them Big Bertha and Hoodly McHotrod. Never mind what they called me.

The first inkling I had of trouble was right after we got off the air from doing ‘Good Morning, America.’ There was an urgent message for me to call my managing editor.

‘Get your ass in here, McCoy,’ he growled. He was a gentlemanly managing editor who didn’t use alcohol, tea, coffee or profanity. It had never occurred to me that ass was in his vocabulary.

Nathan Wiser was in the managing editor’s office.

‘Your sources are contaminated, McCoy,’ the managing editor said. ‘Tell him,’ he said to Wiser.

‘Buster has more arrests than Willie Nelson’s had hits,’ said Wiser, smiling like a hairy bagel.

‘But you checked,’ I wailed.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, McCoy, but I never heard of these people until your boss called my boss.’

Why was he lying?

When a veteran police officer calls a reporter who has written the UFO story of the decade a liar, the charge is likely to stick.

‘It’s worse with the girl,’ said the managing editor, looking so pale he could have been in shock.

My insides felt as if they were melting.

‘A phony rape charge,’ said Wiser, smiling amiably. ‘She should have been charged. Instead, we just put the fear of the Lord in her and dropped the whole mess.’

I telephoned Bertha, turned on the speaker phone.

‘Listen, Joe, I’m a bitch sometimes, okay? I’ve been in a little trouble. I didn’t want to tell you ’cause then you wouldn’t run the story, and we both know one don’t have nothin’ to do with the other. It’s just that when I’m in a jam I lie though my fuckin’ teeth. Know what I mean? Honest to God, we weren’t jerking you around. Me and Buster seen what we seen. And so did you.’

‘What about the phony rape charge?’

She exhaled audibly.

‘It did happen, you know what I mean? But not the way everybody thinks. I was home alone one afternoon when this guy from down the street showed up, Orlando something—I never did know his last name—he’s twenty-six and he lifts weights and he had a bottle of wine. One thing, like, led to another, you know, and we had a nice time in my bedroom, and that would have been that except the son of a bitch laughed at me. After we was all finished, this guy tells me I’m fuckin’ lousy in bed.

‘I mean I done the best I could, and no son of a bitch should be able to talk to me like that, right? So after he left I called the cops and I said he raped me. Served him right, you know what I mean? They hauled his ass away in handcuffs and everything. I stuck to my story all night, scared him good. I bet he won’t laugh at the next poor chick who done her best for him.

‘The cops were so fuckin’ mad at me. They threatened me with all kinds of charges. You’d have thought I was the criminal. But I was just so tired, I said, “I don’t care anymore. Do whatever you want to me.” They sent me home. Didn’t drive me home like they drove me to the station.

‘“Get out of here and don’t ever waste our time again,” they said. The big-push detective was a fat, hairy bastard with a broken nose.’

I looked at Wiser, who I’m certain bared his teeth at me. My managing editor had slid down in his chair until his face was even with the top of his desk.

‘Would you have done the story if I’d told you the truth?’ asked Bertha.

‘I’d have still seen the spaceship. If I’d known the truth I could have been prepared to defend you. Things are going to get rough,’ I said.

I had no idea how rough.

‘UFO PHOTOS PHONY,’ trumpeted our competitors. They blew up my photo of the spaceship tracks and ran them beside the blow-up of a General Electric waffle iron. The photos were identical. Even I could see the G.E. emblem in one corner of my track photo.

The photos of the spacecraft were diagnosed as a pantyhose container stuffed with cotton batting, shot from an advantageous angle.

‘You’re fired!’ the managing editor said.

‘You were out in the desert. You saw the tracks. Why didn’t the waffle iron show up when we blew up the photographs?’ I asked.

No one had any answers, and highly embarrassed managing editors don’t want to hear unpleasant questions. The newspaper had kept the exact landing site a secret until the photographs were exposed as a hoax. Then a hundred reporters drove into the desert in a long, dusty caravan to find the hill where we had seen the craft land, as dry and bald and barren as it had always been. The only life they found were a few grasshoppers snicking about in the crackly grass.

I’ll spare you any more details of my disgrace. The hoax appeared so blatantly dumb that I realized I was going to be without income possibly forever. I had a brief fantasy that one of the more scurrilous tabloids might hire me. They wouldn’t.

Fortunately, I am not suicidal. Rosslyn has remained stonily silent throughout my ordeal. I’m sure she would be happier if I moved out, but she has the grace not to dump on me while I’m down.

‘I’m glad we didn’t decide to marry,’ she did mention, somewhat more than casually. We had actually discussed marriage. Rosslyn would have kept her own name. There was no stigma attached to R. QUINN DENTAL LABORATORY. Only her closest friends knew she was living with ‘that guy who wrote the phony story about the UFO.’

‘There’s an aura of danger about you,’ Rosslyn had said once, after my investigative reporting brought down a crooked district attorney.

I wonder what my aura is like now?

SIX

RAY KINSELLA

My inclination is to try to speed up Joe’s story. It’s like he has many coins hidden on his person, if I just picked him up by the ankles and shook him the coins would fall in a silver shower at our feet. But then, I’m beginning to feel a little sympathy for him. He is somehow being manipulated by forces beyond his control. At least he hasn’t been visited by disembodied voices.

I don’t think he realized how much story he had until he started. He looks from me to Gideon, shrugs helplessly.

‘This is going to take a lot longer than I anticipated.’

‘I want to hear it,’ I say. ‘Gideon, how about you?’

‘All right. I can see why you’ve asked us to listen. I don’t know what we can do for you …’

‘Just understand,’ says Joe. ‘I’ve barely scratched the surface. I want someone to say to me, “You’re not crazy. No matter what the rest of the world thinks.”’

‘It took me about twenty years to accomplish that,’ says Gideon.

‘Over three years for me,’ I say. ‘Look, I’ve got to get home. Joe, can you come to the farm this afternoon? Gideon, how about you?’

‘I’m not doing anything much except being a fugitive,’ says Joe, with a wry grin.

‘I can’t leave Missy alone for long,’ says Gideon.

‘Missy is your wife? Daughter?’

‘Neither. She’s the adult daughter of a close friend who passed away. Missy has Downs’ syndrome. I’m her legal guardian.’

‘Bring her along. She’ll enjoy my daughters. They have a whole menagerie of pets.’

Gideon nods.

‘Say three o’clock at my place,’ I say.

‘There’s one other thing I’d like to mention right now,’ says Joe. ‘On top of everything, there’s this feeling that I’ve been living two lives, maybe ever since I left Iowa all those years ago. I don’t know how to put this clearly, but do either of you suppose there might come a time in a person’s life when they have a choice, only they don’t know it’s a choice, at least not consciously; when they either follow the life they’re in or veer off in a completely different direction? Do you think it’s possible, that those who veer keep on living their original life in another dimension or a deep inner life?’

‘You’re experiencing that, too?’ I ask.

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up just yet. But I keep getting flashes, like an amnesia victim must when they’re starting to recover, scenes of the life I’d have lived if I’d stayed in Iowa. What I wonder is, if those who live their straight-arrow lives get little glimpses of the unknown, little fragments of eternity dropped on their heads, so they get an inkling of what would have happened if they had veered?

‘Anything can happen,’ says Gideon.

Joe laughs, causing the waitresses and the few remaining customers to stare at us. We have been speaking so quietly for so long most of them have forgotten we were there.

‘“Anything Can Happen,” that was the Seattle Mariners’ slogan the year I played for them,’ says Joe. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘What you’re saying,’ I ask, ‘is that you think you’re living or recalling bits of your life as it would have been if you’d stayed here in Johnson County? I know there was some kerfuffle about you not playing in the State Tournament. The story made it all the way to Sports Illustrated, didn’t it?’

‘I’ll get to that. I’ll get to everything if you give me time. Three o’clock, then. At Ray’s farm.’

Karin is home from school by the time Gideon arrives with Missy. Gideon drives a very old pick-up truck. I fix coffee, and thaw some of Annie’s strawberry muffins.

‘You’re not,’ Annie had said to me before anyone arrived, ‘going to get us into something crazy? I mean this Joe McCoy is wanted. Wanted. Dangerous.’

‘We’re going to listen to the rest of his story. That’s all. No involvement. Nothing.’

‘You’re not a good liar, Champ. You’ve already decided this guy’s legitimate or you wouldn’t have invited him here. Watch yourself, okay? Don’t do anything really foolish.’

But at the same time she is admonishing me, Annie is hugging me, letting me know she trusts me. Annie is sunshine, she is. And when I see how few people have someone who truly loves them, I realize for the thousandth time how lucky I am to have her.

Late in the evening, after Joe has related several more adventures, after Gideon and Missy have left in Gideon’s truck, I suggest to Joe that we have a look at my baseball field.

‘I feel privileged,’ he says.

The floodlights bathe the field in gold. A few wisps of ground fog cattail about the outfield. The players are warming up, playing catch; a grizzled coach hits fungoes. The sounds and smells of baseball envelop us, frying onions, fresh-cut grass, newly watered infield dirt. There is the low buzz of fans, as the bleachers begin to fill. Joe doesn’t seem to notice, but there is a line-up of perhaps thirty cars waiting to cross the cattle guard onto my property, park their cars and visit the field. Gypsy, my brother’s lady, dark and mysterious as her name, collects fees from the visitors, money they willingly hand over, for what they lack is peace and harmony, not ready cash.

We find a spot a few rows behind first base.

I can’t decide about Joe McCoy. Listening to his tales has been like scouting a rookie, trying to decide if he deserves a positive scouting report.

‘I don’t know when I’ve felt so relaxed,’ he says. ‘Being on the run takes a lot out of a fellow. You know some of those players look familiar. What are they, local guys in old-time uniforms? Where do the fans come from? Are they locals, too?’

What wonderful, reassuring questions. Joe McCoy sees. I feel much better about him.

‘Those are the 1919 White Sox on the third-base side.’

‘Go on!’

‘That’s Shoeless Joe Jackson down in the corner tossing balls with Happy Felsch.’

‘For whatever reason, I believe you,’ says Joe.

I offer to buy him a beer and hot dog and he accepts.

‘The opponents are often different. A couple of weeks ago it was the 1927 Yankees. Murderers’ Row. Gehrig had four hits. Ruth hit a home run down each foul line.’

‘Who’s playing tonight?’

‘I think my desires have some effect on who plays here. And you don’t have to be dead to play on the dream field. One of my favorite World Series was 1946. I always wished I could have seen Harry “The Cat” Brecheen and Howie Pollet pitch, Enos “Country” Slaughter and Whitey Kurowski hit, Marty Marion play short stop. Every once in a while I get my wish, like tonight.’

‘Is that Joe Garagiola catching?’

‘You got it.’

‘The 1946 Cardinals against the 1919 White Sox?’

‘That’s it.’

‘I heard there was magic here, but Stan Musial, Terry Moore, Dick Sisler. Wow! Thanks for trusting me enough to show me this. I know you must have had misgivings.’

‘Thanks for seeing.’

He looks at me, smiles slightly and nods. We settle back to watch the game.

SEVEN

JOE McCOY

I tried to be honest with gideon and ray, and I’ve done a pretty good job. Sort of. The things I haven’t told them frighten me. For instance, more than once, when I’ve been talking with someone, I suddenly feel what they’re thinking about, events in their lives that I couldn’t possibly know. It started with Rosslyn. We had just finished a dinner that I had cooked—stuffed green peppers, coconut-cream pie, Starbuck’s chocolate-almond coffee—I was pouring cream into my coffee, when I suddenly knew Rosslyn was brooding about an impression she had made that afternoon of the teeth of a man with a bad overbite. ‘I’m going to have to redo Mr. Waller’s impression, and I’m going to have to have a talk with his dentist about what I should do when I get the perfect impression,’ was what she was daydreaming.

‘You’re thinking about Mr. Waller’s overbite,’ I said.

Rosslyn jerked to attention, like she’d just been wakened from a nap. ‘How could you possibly know that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I was hoping you could help me out.’

Rosslyn stared at me fearfully. I wonder what secrets she’s been keeping from me. There are thousands of my thoughts I wouldn’t want Rosslyn to know about. Thousands, millions.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s the first time. I’ll try never to let it happen again.’ Rosslyn kept staring suspiciously at me, as if she’d just caught me rifling her purse.

‘There’s no way you could have known. Mr. Waller was just referred to me this morning.’ She left the table, taking her coffee with her. Rosslyn slept in the spare bedroom that night.

‘Adam and Francie are coming from Boston for a visit,’ Rosslyn announced one morning a few weeks after the extraterrestrial fiasco. ‘Adam says the story barely made the front pages in the east.’

That was all I needed. Adam is Rosslyn’s brother, a tall, square-jawed, pipe-smoking accountant with a pernicious ardor for detail who, like a raccoon, washes his food before he eats it. I’ve seen Adam holding a block of cheese between two forks under the kitchen tap. Adam won’t eat an ice cream cone because it has been touched by human hands. I wonder where his hands have been?

Adam’s fiancée, Francie Bly, is a pert little thing with pale, taffy-colored hair whirlwinding about her face. She is slim and fair-skinned, with a saucy nose that has about fifteen freckles scattered across it. Her eyebrows are sun-blonde, and she has a small crease in the middle of her bottom lip that enlarges when she pretends to pout, or when she looks quizzically at someone as if she is staring over the rim of eyeglasses.

I like Francie, but feel she is hiding some serious character flaw, otherwise why would she have agreed to marry Adam the raccoon? Perhaps there are women truly attracted to men like Adam Quinn. I dismiss the thought. Adam gets up at six o’clock every morning to jog. I have read that jogging plays havoc with one’s sex life. If Francie was my lady, I’d do my jogging in bed.

Cute was the word I would use to describe Francie—in spite of her eastern-girls’-school-looking-down-on-the-rest-of-the-nation-especially-California, mentality.

She didn’t appear unhappy; she openly teased Adam about his stuffiness, made fun of him in person and behind his back, a steady stream of good-natured pinpricks to try and keep Adam from taking himself so seriously. She did not succeed.

‘Since you don’t have anything to do, you can meet Adam and Francie at the airport,’ Rosslyn said. She was just stating an obvious fact. I don’t think she had any idea how cruel her words sounded.

Ever since the night of the extraterrestrials, I have been having the most detailed, clear-as-life, you-are-there, this-is-happening dreams. I have always been a daydreamer, but, though experts claim everyone dreams extensively every night, I seldom remembered my night dreams, until now.

In my dreams I am driving my red, 1956 Lincoln Continental convertible with the classic car plates: MCCOY 1. My Lincoln is the only extravagance from my baseball days. I paid $15,500 for it, and treated it with more concern than my teammates showed for their showgirl-model-trophy wives, their Ferraris, Corvettes, Mercedes, or Porsches. I was never in their league in salaries. If I had had just a little more ability, or a lot more desire, or Maureen Renn waiting after the game …

Eight weeks after the fiasco, when it appeared that my term of unemployment was going to stretch to infinity, I sold my Lincoln to a leering Armenian with gravy stains on his vest. That left me driving Rosslyn’s second car, a 1972 Ford that a transient cousin had abandoned in her carport. It left a black trail of pollution behind it; neither its air-conditioning nor its emission control would ever work again.

Last night I was back in Iowa, but in that way dreams have, I was driving my Lincoln. I was married to a woman who was very much in love with me. We had a child.

At times the woman was Francie Bly. I have no reason to believe Francie has any interest in me, she seems relatively happy with Adam, who is only slightly less interesting than lint. I rationalize that I dreamed of her because I knew she was due to visit. On other occasions the woman beside me in the convertible seemed to be Maureen Renn. Dreams, memories, wishes, interweave like the colors in variegated thread.

In one dream I was seventeen and Maureen’s arms were tight about my neck, her thighs locked about mine, her mouth hot and thrilling as we made love on a blanket spread over a stack of grain sacks behind the manger in her father’s barn. The scent of dried hay was mixed with the thick, wet odor of cattle. A cow lurched forward in her stanchion, her pink nose protruded beyond the manger wall, her dull eyes stared at us, green straws bristled on each side of her mouth.

Maureen climaxed violently, taking me with her. She slowly unlocked her arms from around my neck, our mouths parted.

I still can’t imagine how, at sixteen, Maureen could instinctively have known so much about sex, and I could have been so unknowledgeable.

Maureen was a tall, strapping farm girl with a mop of dark-red hair. She pitched hay, did farm chores and drove tractors and combines alongside her hulking brothers. My father made his precarious living from his second-hand store in Lone Tree. The most physical duties I performed were helping my father move an oak table or bookcase from the shop to a waiting truck. Though I was athletic, I was neither large nor particularly strong. My older brother worked for an insurance company in Des Moines until my father retired and sold him the business. My sister, Agnes, a year younger than me, was as my father said, ‘Homely as a mud fence and proud of it.’

‘So how did it feel to have my virgin body, McCoy?’ Maureen asked, staring into my eyes in the dim light of the barn, half smiling in the way she always did, so I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me.

‘Well …’ I said. I was watching a tine of sunlight that pierced the roof like a golden laser and angled to the far wall. She had just had my virgin body. It had never occurred to me that it might also have been Maureen’s first time.

She seemed to know so much more than I did. She had been so calm, apparently privy to knowledge I had no access to. I won’t detail the embarrassing struggle I had with one of the contraceptives I carried in my wallet until Maureen pointed out how it should be used. When I was between her thighs, after Maureen had used her hand to guide me into the heat of her, I came almost immediately, but she imprisoned me with her strong limbs.

‘Lie still, Sugar,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gonna be so good,’ and she twitched involuntarily as the sheer heat of her revived my desire.

‘Am I better than the second baseman?’ Maureen asked, a lilt in her voice.

I was too surprised to answer. ‘Well …’ I said eventually.

‘Kiss me, Sugar. Make us so close.’ I did.

‘“Well …” What kind of an answer is that? Am I better than fucking your second baseman?’

‘Much better than my second baseman,’ I said, watching the arrow of sunlight. ‘You were wonderful. He shaves and chews snuff.’

‘All right,’ said Maureen, ‘that’s better.’

I swallowed hard. Everything about me was so incredibly awkward. I have no idea what Maureen saw in me. It was easy to be rowdy and raucous with my friends, my teammates, but put me alone with a girl and I might as well have had a garrote around my neck.

‘I wish you’d look at me, Joe. You never look at me, never make eye contact.’

She shifted out from under me, pulled herself to a sitting position. ‘When we kiss you close your eyes, otherwise you look at some spot in the distance over my left shoulder.’

‘I like to look at you,’ I said lamely.

Maureen had thrown her plaid shirt over her shoulders so she could lean against the outer wall of the barn without scratching her back. She was peeking through thick strands of plum-colored hair, almost as if peering between her fingers.

‘You don’t believe this was my first time,’ she said, fishing in her shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. The shirt hung just to the outside of each nipple. Her large, freckled breasts rose and fell rhythmically with her breathing.

‘I never thought about it,’ I said. But I had. She talked so freely and openly of sex, I’d just assumed she’d had other lovers, though I couldn’t think of who they might have been.

‘I want you to know you’re the first outside the family, McCoy.’ She glanced at me, that same wry, enigmatic smile on her face.

I couldn’t keep a surprised expression off my face.

‘Shit, that’s what you expect me to say, isn’t it? A brother has his sister in bed and says to her, “You’re better’n Ma.” And the girl answers back, “That’s what Pa says.”’

Maureen drew deeply on her cigarette, let the smoke out slowly between her teeth.

She had read my mind. The Renns were, as my father often said, a wild and woolly bunch. ‘Disreputable,’ would be the consensus of the community. Her father was a prodigious drinker. One of her brothers was in jail; the other two were terrors, roaming the countryside in souped-up cars. They drank, fought, fucked, stole anything that wasn’t nailed to the earth. Only the wildest white girls or Indian women from the reservation near Tama were ever seen with Harley or Magnus Renn.

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