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.
‘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
