If Wishes Were Horses. W. Kinsella P.

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?’

      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