If Wishes Were Horses. W. Kinsella P.

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ