Destiny’s detour

Early on in her novel “Until the End of the Ninth,” Spokane author Beth Mary Bollinger states her larger theme.

“Sometimes you live your life without paying attention to anything other than what sits right in front of you,” she writes. “And then something happens in such a way that everything is changed forever. Sometimes it happens just to one person. Sometimes it happens to a group. Sometimes it happens to a whole team of men.”

The basis of Bollinger’s books is a specific team: the 1946 Spokane Indians, the minor-league baseball team best known for being nearly wiped out in a bus accident that occurred on the night of June 24, 1946.

Nine members of the team, including its manager, ended up dying in the crash. En route to Seattle, they’d been heading over Snoqualmie Pass when the bus, sideswiped by an oncoming car, went off a ridge and plummeted an estimated 350 feet before bursting into flames.

Bollinger’s novel, which blends magical realism with straight history, isn’t just a recounting of the accident or of the team’s final, fateful season. From the very start, Bollinger had something bigger in mind.

And that something involves a simple question.

“How does destiny say to you, ‘I am your destiny, I am your fate, and your fate is to die’?” she says.

It was fate, in fact, that brought the 45-year-old first-time author to the project in the first place. The Wisconsin native and former federal public defender, who now runs her own law practice, had been doing research for a friend, looking into the history of a couple of local organizations.

As the author of an as-yet-unpublished account of her own “personal journey,” Bollinger says she became interested in helping others who might need to resolve painful events of the past.

Then one night she heard about the Spokane Indians’ plans to celebrate their 100th anniversary.

“I had gone out to Indians baseball games,” Bollinger says. “And I thought, ‘Gosh, I wonder if they have a tragedy in their past that I can help with?’ I was really getting good at this exploration of the past and looking at tragedies and trying to create some healing there.”

And even though the club politely rejected her proposal (“It was pretty late in the game,” she says), Bollinger couldn’t let the bus-crash story go.

As she told former Spokesman-Review reporter Jim Price, ” ‘Jim, I’m going to have to write something.’ And he said, ‘Yep. That’s the way this story is.’ “

But what, Bollinger thought, should she write? Where should she begin?

“I just picked up one of the microfilmed articles that I had,” she says.

The article she’d chosen by chance was an account of the game the Indians played against Victoria on May 15, 1946 – a game in which the team rallied in the ninth, forcing extra innings before winning finally in the 12th.

“I can tell you the first words I wrote were the words that begin Part Two,” Bollinger says: “To the victor goes the Victoria,” she wrote. “Or so it seemed on May 15, 1946, the day the game was played.”

From there, Bollinger proceeded to the question of fate.

“So what is the consequence when you tie victory in the ninth, and then have the audacity to surge on beyond it, going all the way to the twelfth to beat victory itself?” she wrote. “Is it transcendence? Or is it a foolhardy version of Russian roulette?”

The bookend that Bollinger uses to make about such transcendence is, of all things, the story of Joan of Arc.

Why Joan of Arc? She can’t say for sure.

She had read about the 15th-century saint and, having battled a large corporation in court the year before, felt a connection with Joan’s “fighting against all odds.”

“But,” Bollinger adds, “I think what happened was as I was reading about these guys and thinking about their lives, I began thinking, ‘Wow. How does destiny betray you like that?’ You know you have a calling. You know you have the warrior in you, both on the baseball field and because you’re coming back from World War II. And you want to live the passion of your heart – and you die by fire as a young person.

“To me,” she adds, “the parallels were stark. They were right in my face, the dying by fire, dying too young, the having been in war, living your destiny despite all odds, choosing to live your destiny.”

“Until the End of the Ninth” even steps into “Field of Dreams” territory by having the dead talk to one another.

The test of just how well that would go over, Bollinger says, occurred when she interviewed the sole living survivor of the crash, pitcher Gus Hallbourg.

“I asked him if I’d gotten the personalities (of the players) right,” Bollinger says. “And he said I did.”

As for the rest, she says, “He said that he didn’t know if there was any spirit woman who whispered in (manager) Mel Cole’s ear. But I think the fact that he thought I got the personalities right, he was gonna let that go. That was gonna be OK with him.”

If nothing else, Bollinger hopes that readers get three things from her novel.

“One I want Spokane to get a piece of its own history and legacy,” she says. “Two, I hope the book helps people feel safer about death and about dying, particularly about death and dying with whole groups of people.”

And, finally, “I really hope that people learn about these guys,” Bollinger says. “They were a really special group of guys. … I’m hoping people learn about them and feel inspired by them.”