W. Kinsella - If Wishes Were Horses

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?’