W. Kinsella - If Wishes Were Horses

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 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

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.