Free Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella

I explore gingerly, trying to walk without crunching gravel, ready to leap into the underbrush like a shy animal. A two-car garage is built into the side of the hill, like a bear’s den at a zoo. One side of the garage stands open and empty. I look up through the lacy leaves, and the sky seems very high.
    What I remember most vividly about the landscape is that on the way into Windsor, from a high point on the road, I could look out over the very area where I now sit. Everywhere was a smooth, liquid green, with no indication of habitation, no sign of houses or towns. Yet here I am, near a very real house, on a road with other houses on it that are all camouflaged by leaves.
    I walk back to the car, get in, roll down the window, and wait. The sweetness of honeysuckle fills my senses.
    A jeep grinds up the road behind me, swings sharply into the driveway, sending up a spray of potato-colored dust. As if by afterthought, the jeep brakes, spewing up more dust, and stops, with only the rear end visible, protruding from the ferns and low-hanging branches that swaddle the driveway. I wait, tense as if my neck were tipped back, my mouth agape, and I was preparing for the dentist’s needle.
    A tall, graying man appears from the driver’s side of the jeep. He walks confidently, even a little arrogantly, toward my car.
    Panic falls over me like a net. It is as if my bills are due while my corn sways in a dark rain. Is it Salinger? The only photographs I have seen are over twenty-five years old. The one in Mademoiselle shows a very ordinary young man with downcast eyes. The other …
    “What do you want?” the man says, frowning. His hair is gray and white, the color of street slush, and is combed straight back. There are tension lines, like two ruts, between his brows. If it is him, he looks older than I imagined he would.

    “Are you J. D. Salinger?”
    “What can I do for you?”
    “I—I want to talk to you.” What a banal, hopeless thing to say! I have promised myself, for close to 1500 miles, that I will say something brilliant, witty, charming. Entice him into my car like I was sugar and he an ant.
    “I suppose you’re a writer,” he says, and smiles, not unkindly, through snowy dentures.
    “I—no.”
    “Not a reporter,” he says, taking a step backward, as if the Datsun and I were fire or boiling water.
    “No.”
    “Then what is it you want?”
    He is wearing faded blue jeans, a khaki work shirt, and a spruce-green down vest like duck hunters wear.
    “I want you to come with me,” I stutter, and let my trench coat-covered left hand peek above the car’s window ledge.
    It is wrong. All wrong. Completely wrong. I feel like a rookie runner caught off first base by a wily pitcher, hung up in that vast area between first and second, fluttering back and forth like a wounded bird who knows he’s doomed.
    What must he think? Is he used to dealing with crazies? I should have brought Annie. She could smile at him, bouncy as a red squirrel, and say, “My honey here has come to take you to a baseball game, because he thinks you need to go,” and he would believe her.
    Salinger frowns, and the stress lines between his brows deepen. His forehead is furrowed. There are long age lines from cheek to chin, making him resemble a tired but friendly hound.
    “Are you kidnapping me?”
    “Oh, please, that’s such an awful word. I’m sorry. I planned things so differently. I wanted to convince you to come with me. I never wanted to have to do this …”
    “Then you are .”
    “I just want to take you for a drive. I have tickets for a baseball game. A baseball game,” I say again. Even though I emphasize the last line, it has no visible impact on him.

    “And if I don’t?” His eyes look quickly to the jeep submerged in forest.
    What can I possibly say? I am inarticulate as a teenager at the end of a first date, standing in the glare of the porch light, a father hulking behind the curtains.
    “I’m Ray Kinsella,” I