W. Kinsella - If Wishes Were Horses

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 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

‘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?’