If Wishes Were Horses. W. Kinsella P.

in the spare bedroom that night.

      ‘Adam and Francie are coming from Boston for a visit,’ Rosslyn announced one morning a few weeks after the extraterrestrial fiasco. ‘Adam says the story barely made the front pages in the east.’

      That was all I needed. Adam is Rosslyn’s brother, a tall, square-jawed, pipe-smoking accountant with a pernicious ardor for detail who, like a raccoon, washes his food before he eats it. I’ve seen Adam holding a block of cheese between two forks under the kitchen tap. Adam won’t eat an ice cream cone because it has been touched by human hands. I wonder where his hands have been?

      Adam’s fiancée, Francie Bly, is a pert little thing with pale, taffy-colored hair whirlwinding about her face. She is slim and fair-skinned, with a saucy nose that has about fifteen freckles scattered across it. Her eyebrows are sun-blonde, and she has a small crease in the middle of her bottom lip that enlarges when she pretends to pout, or when she looks quizzically at someone as if she is staring over the rim of eyeglasses.

      I like Francie, but feel she is hiding some serious character flaw, otherwise why would she have agreed to marry Adam the raccoon? Perhaps there are women truly attracted to men like Adam Quinn. I dismiss the thought. Adam gets up at six o’clock every morning to jog. I have read that jogging plays havoc with one’s sex life. If Francie was my lady, I’d do my jogging in bed.

      Cute was the word I would use to describe Francie—in spite of her eastern-girls’-school-looking-down-on-the-rest-of-the-nation-especially-California, mentality.

      She didn’t appear unhappy; she openly teased Adam about his stuffiness, made fun of him in person and behind his back, a steady stream of good-natured pinpricks to try and keep Adam from taking himself so seriously. She did not succeed.

      ‘Since you don’t have anything to do, you can meet Adam and Francie at the airport,’ Rosslyn said. She was just stating an obvious fact. I don’t think she had any idea how cruel her words sounded.

      Ever since the night of the extraterrestrials, I have been having the most detailed, clear-as-life, you-are-there, this-is-happening dreams. I have always been a daydreamer, but, though experts claim everyone dreams extensively every night, I seldom remembered my night dreams, until now.

      In my dreams I am driving my red, 1956 Lincoln Continental convertible with the classic car plates: MCCOY 1. My Lincoln is the only extravagance from my baseball days. I paid $15,500 for it, and treated it with more concern than my teammates showed for their showgirl-model-trophy wives, their Ferraris, Corvettes, Mercedes, or Porsches. I was never in their league in salaries. If I had had just a little more ability, or a lot more desire, or Maureen Renn waiting after the game …

      Eight weeks after the fiasco, when it appeared that my term of unemployment was going to stretch to infinity, I sold my Lincoln to a leering Armenian with gravy stains on his vest. That left me driving Rosslyn’s second car, a 1972 Ford that a transient cousin had abandoned in her carport. It left a black trail of pollution behind it; neither its air-conditioning nor its emission control would ever work again.

      Last night I was back in Iowa, but in that way dreams have, I was driving my Lincoln. I was married to a woman who was very much in love with me. We had a child.

      At times the woman was Francie Bly. I have no reason to believe Francie has any interest in me, she seems relatively happy with Adam, who is only slightly less interesting than lint. I rationalize that I dreamed of her because I knew she was due to visit. On other occasions the woman beside me in the convertible seemed to be Maureen Renn. Dreams, memories, wishes, interweave like the colors in variegated thread.

      In one dream I was seventeen and Maureen’s arms were tight about my neck, her thighs locked about mine, her mouth hot and thrilling as we made love on a blanket spread over a stack of grain sacks behind the manger in her father’s barn. The scent of dried hay was mixed with the thick, wet odor of cattle. A cow lurched forward in her stanchion, her pink nose protruded beyond the manger wall, her dull eyes stared at us, green straws bristled on each side of her mouth.

      Maureen climaxed violently, taking me with her. She slowly unlocked her arms from around my neck, our mouths parted.

      I still can’t imagine how, at sixteen, Maureen could instinctively have known so much about sex, and I could have been so unknowledgeable.

      Maureen was a tall, strapping farm girl with a mop of dark-red hair. She pitched hay, did farm chores and drove tractors and combines alongside her hulking brothers. My father made his precarious living from his second-hand store in Lone Tree. The most physical duties I performed were helping my father move an oak table or bookcase from the shop to a waiting truck. Though I was athletic, I was neither large nor particularly strong. My older brother worked for an insurance company in Des Moines until my father retired and sold him the business. My sister, Agnes, a year younger than me, was as my father said, ‘Homely as a mud fence and proud of it.’

      ‘So how did it feel to have my virgin body, McCoy?’ Maureen asked, staring into my eyes in the dim light of the barn, half smiling in the way she always did, so I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me.

      ‘Well …’ I said. I was watching a tine of sunlight that pierced the roof like a golden laser and angled to the far wall. She had just had my virgin body. It had never occurred to me that it might also have been Maureen’s first time.

      She seemed to know so much more than I did. She had been so calm, apparently privy to knowledge I had no access to. I won’t detail the embarrassing struggle I had with one of the contraceptives I carried in my wallet until Maureen pointed out how it should be used. When I was between her thighs, after Maureen had used her hand to guide me into the heat of her, I came almost immediately, but she imprisoned me with her strong limbs.

      ‘Lie still, Sugar,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gonna be so good,’ and she twitched involuntarily as the sheer heat of her revived my desire.

      ‘Am I better than the second baseman?’ Maureen asked, a lilt in her voice.

      I was too surprised to answer. ‘Well …’ I said eventually.

      ‘Kiss me, Sugar. Make us so close.’ I did.

      ‘“Well …” What kind of an answer is that? Am I better than fucking your second baseman?’

      ‘Much better than my second baseman,’ I said, watching the arrow of sunlight. ‘You were wonderful. He shaves and chews snuff.’

      ‘All right,’ said Maureen, ‘that’s better.’

      I swallowed hard. Everything about me was so incredibly awkward. I have no idea what Maureen saw in me. It was easy to be rowdy and raucous with my friends, my teammates, but put me alone with a girl and I might as well have had a garrote around my neck.

      ‘I wish you’d look at me, Joe. You never look at me, never make eye contact.’

      She shifted out from under me, pulled herself to a sitting position. ‘When we kiss you close your eyes, otherwise you look at some spot in the distance over my left shoulder.’

      ‘I like to look at you,’ I said lamely.

      Maureen had thrown her plaid shirt over her shoulders so she could lean against the outer wall of the barn without scratching her back. She was peeking through thick strands of plum-colored hair, almost as if peering between her fingers.

      ‘You don’t believe this was my first time,’ she said, fishing in her shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. The shirt hung just to the outside of each nipple. Her large, freckled breasts rose and fell rhythmically with her breathing.

      ‘I never thought about it,’ I said. But I had. She talked so freely and openly of sex, I’d just assumed she’d had other lovers, though I couldn’t think of who they might have been.

      ‘I want you to know you’re the first outside the family, McCoy.’ She glanced at me, that same wry, enigmatic smile on her face.

      I