Jim & Me Page 4

  On the next play, Reggie faked right and went deep.

  “He’s going long!” one of the guys on the other team yelled desperately.

  Bobby threw a long bomb and Reggie caught it right by the tree we had agreed would be the goal line.

  Touchdown! Me and Reggie and Bobby high-fived each other.

  I had to admit that Bobby could really throw a football. No wonder he gave up baseball.

  The guys on the other team were good too. After Reggie kicked off to them, they marched down the field in five or six plays and scored on us to tie it up.

  I was getting a little beat up blocking and trying to rush their quarterback, but nothing serious. Hopefully, it wasn’t too obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing.

  “Hey, I gotta be home in half an hour,” one of the guys on the other team said after they scored.

  “Okay, next touchdown wins it,” Reggie said, and everyone agreed.

  We dropped back to receive the kick. Bobby caught it on one bounce near our goal line. He handed it off to Reggie, who made it to midfield before he got tagged.

  “Okay, let’s fake them out and win this thing right now,” Bobby said to me as we huddled. “After you hike the ball, you go out for the pass and Reggie will stay on the line.”

  “Yeah!” Reggie said. “That’s brilliant! Cross ’em up.”

  “Me?” I said. “Wh—what should I do?”

  “Just go deep!” Bobby told me. “They’ll be so surprised, they won’t know what hit ’em. Okay? Hike the ball on ‘mozzarella.’”

  I didn’t want to do it. But I didn’t want to look like a dork, either. We got into position for the play. I wondered what the deal was with Bobby and cheese.

  “Muenster!” Bobby called. “American! Mozzarella!”

  I hiked the ball to Bobby and took off downfield. Nobody blocked me at the line. The defense was confused because I was going out for the pass instead of Reggie. It took them a second or two before they figured out that the guy who normally covered Reggie should cover me instead. By then, I had a ten-yard head start off the line.

  As I streaked for the goal line, I turned around to see Bobby chucking the ball long and deep.

  It was like slow motion after that. The ball was in a tight spiral, the laces turning clockwise. It was a high, arching pass against the sky. I had the defender beat by about five yards, but he was gaining on me. As the ball was coming down, I reached up with both hands to pull it in.

  But somehow, the ball bounced off my hands.

  It popped into the air. I tripped and fell, and the guy who was guarding me fell on top of me. I could see the ball was still a few feet off the ground, but I couldn’t get up to grab it.

  The guy on top of me could, though. He snatched the ball just before it hit the grass and started running upfield with it. Bobby and Reggie took off after him, but it was no use. The guy was really fast, and he ran the whole length of the sideline for a touchdown. His teammates pounded him on the back.

  “You are an idiot, Stoshack!” Bobby yelled at me. “I put that ball right in your hands! How could you drop it? You are useless, man!”

  I was filthy, lying in the dirt. There were grass stains on my clothes and bruises all over my body. My jeans were torn at the knee. I was a mess.

  Everybody said their good-byes, and Reggie told me the best way to get back to my neighborhood. Bobby just split without a word. I guess he was mad at me for dropping the pass.

  I dragged myself home, where my mom was waiting with hugs and kisses.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “Did Jim Thorpe beat you up? Where’s Bobby?”

  “We were playing a little touch football,” I said.

  “Touch?” she said. “I’d hate to see what you’d look like if you played tackle.”

  After I took a shower, I looked more presentable. But I felt sort of depressed. Depressed about the football game, and even more depressed because I was still thinking about Jim Thorpe. It wasn’t fair. Here was a guy who was the greatest athlete in the world, and he was digging ditches for a living.

  Thorpe reminded me a little of Shoeless Joe Jackson, who played for the Chicago White Sox. He was one of the best hitters ever, but some of his teammates took money from gamblers to lose the World Series on purpose. Jackson was innocent, but he got kicked out of baseball for the rest of his life. That wasn’t fair either.

  I had done my job. I had arranged for Bobby Fuller to meet Jim Thorpe. That could have been the end of it. We accomplished what Bobby said he wanted to accomplish. We had a little adventure and returned home safely.

  But something was gnawing at me. So the next day after school, I did what I usually do when I need to talk to somebody. I rode my bike over to Flip’s store.

  Flip was signing an autograph for some kid when I came in, but as soon as the kid left, Flip waved me over. He could tell that something was wrong.

  “What’s eatin’ you?” Flip asked.

  I told him what happened when I went back to 1931 and met Jim Thorpe. Flip knew the whole story of Thorpe losing his Olympic medals. Flip knows just about everything about old-time sports.

  “When I was a kid,” Flip explained, “the Olympics were for rich folks. It was their exclusive little club for people who didn’t have to work to earn a living. They acted like it was beneath a ‘gentleman’ to compete for money. The glory should be enough, y’know? So they banned professional athletes from the Olympics. It kept out the riffraff, regular working people. But they made it seem like it was some big ‘virtue’ to be an amateur.”

  The more I learned about the situation with Jim Thorpe, the madder I got. Banning professionals from the Olympics was almost like banning African Americans from major-league baseball. As far as I was concerned, all the world records and stats and gold medals didn’t mean anything if certain people weren’t allowed to compete for them.

  “It’s just not fair,” I said to Flip.

  “Yeah,” Flip agreed, “but it’s like I tell ya, Stosh. Life ain’t always fair.”

  “But maybe I can fix it,” I whispered, just in case any customers came in. “I could go back and do something to help him. I just need to get an earlier Jim Thorpe card. Will you help me find one?”

  Flip sighed.

  “Stosh, fuhgetaboutit,” he said. “You always think you can fix stuff. But what’s done is done. It’s history. Nobody remembers Jim Thorpe anymore. It wouldn’t make a difference to anybody.”

  He was probably right. Other than Bobby Fuller, who really cared about Jim Thorpe anyway?

  The bell on the door jangled and Flip and I looked up. It was Laverne, Flip’s wife.

  Flip’s wife.

  I knew what Flip was thinking when Laverne walked in. He knew what I was thinking too.

  If it wasn’t for me, Flip wouldn’t have a wife. It’s true! When Flip started coaching my Little League team, he wasn’t married. But when we went back in time together looking for Satchel Paige, we met this pretty waitress in a restaurant. She fell for Flip big-time. I had to leave the two of them back in 1942. But when I got back from the past, there were Flip and Laverne, an old married couple who were happy and totally in love with each other. And Flip was in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Time travel is the strangest thing.

  One time I asked my science teacher about time travel. He told me it was physically impossible. He said traveling through time would defy Newton’s laws of physics, or Einstein’s theory of relativity, I don’t remember which. But it was against some law.

  “You can’t change history,” he told me.

  But I knew something that my science teacher didn’t know. I can travel through time, and I can change history. Maybe I didn’t save Shoeless Joe Jackson’s career. But I saved the life of my great-uncle Wilbur. And I got Flip a wife. If it wasn’t for me, Laverne wouldn’t be standing there right now.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she asked Flip.

  “Because you’re so beautiful, ho
ney,” Flip said.

  “Oh stop it!” she replied, and they started hugging each other.

  I knew what I had to do. I had to go back in time and try to help Jim Thorpe, just like I had helped Flip and Uncle Wilbur. Maybe things would turn out differently. Maybe people would remember the name “Jim Thorpe.” I could right a wrong. I could change the world in a small way. I had to at least try.

  Flip knew it too.

  “Okay,” he said to me. “I’ll help you.”

  8

  Little Pieces of Cardboard

  FLIP VALENTINI KNOWS EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD OF card collecting. These guys are all buddies and they’re constantly swapping and buying each other’s stuff. They even go to conventions so they can sit around and tell stories about cards they bought, cards they almost bought, cards they should have bought, and cards they never should have sold. Collecting cards is their lives. I’m telling you, they’re obsessed. Who would think that little pieces of cardboard could be so interesting to somebody?

  But I will say one thing: they sure know baseball cards.

  “This is gonna be tough,” Flip said as he opened a big book listing thousands of cards. “Maybe impossible. We gotta find a Thorpe card from before he was in the Olympics.”

  Flip told me to put the CLOSED sign on the door so we could work on the problem without being interrupted. When he didn’t find anything in the book, he fired up his computer and started cruising baseball card websites.

  He poked his stubby fingers around the keyboard, hunt-and-peck style. Flip was pretty computer literate for an old guy. But I guess he never learned how to type.

  The first thing we discovered was that Jim Thorpe played for a team called the Rocky Mount Railroaders in the Eastern Carolina League during the summers of 1909 and 1910. That’s why his Olympic medals were taken away. If there was a Jim Thorpe card from that league, it would be perfect. I could go back to 1909 and convince him to stop playing baseball, or at least to play under a different name so he wouldn’t get caught after the 1912 Olympics.

  But Flip checked all his usual web sources, and there was no such card. Semi-pro teams hardly ever printed cards of their players.

  The first card we found with Thorpe on it was from 1913, the year after the Olympics. It was his rookie year in the big leagues. Right after his medals were taken away, Jim was signed by the New York Giants. That was long before they moved to San Francisco and became the San Francisco Giants.

  Jim was in the front row, first guy on the left.

  The 1913 card had a group photo of the Giants team on it. It was put out by Fatima, a cigarette company. There was Jim, sitting in the front row, first guy on the left.

  “These go from a couple hundred bucks up to a thousand, depending on the condition,” Flip told me as he printed out a copy of the card.

  “That’s too late,” I told Flip. “The Olympics were in 1912.”

  “Hang on a sec,” Flip said. “There’s one more possibility…AHA! Here’s another Thorpe card!”

  We read off the screen together:

  “From 1909 through 1912, a gum company called Colgan’s sold little metal containers with a round card and a piece of mint-flavored gum. They were called Colgan’s Chips and sold for five cents.”

  Bingo! Maybe a Colgan’s card would take me back to before the summer Olympics. That would be too late to tell Jim not to play ball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders, but at least I could warn him not to enter the Olympics. If he didn’t participate in the Olympics, then his life would never be ruined. After all, if you don’t win any medals, they can’t take them away from you, right?

  “That card could work!” I told Flip.

  “There’s only one problem,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There are only two of ’em.”

  “Two of them for sale?” I asked.

  “No. Two of ’em in the world.”

  So much for that idea. It didn’t look like I was going to visit Jim Thorpe again anytime soon.

  The next day I went for my weekly visit with my dad, who lives in an assisted-living development in Louisville. A few years after my parents split up, Dad got into a bad car crash and he’s been in a wheelchair ever since. He can’t work and doesn’t get around very well.

  My dad used to be a huge baseball fan. He’s the one who taught me how to play and got me interested in collecting cards. But when the news came out that a lot of players were taking steroids, my dad lost interest in the game. He said if guys took drugs to build up their muscles and then they hit 70 home runs in a season, it made all the statistics of baseball history meaningless. You can’t compare the stats of a guy who was juiced with those of a guy who wasn’t.

  Since baseball was pretty much my dad’s life, he sort of lost interest in life at the same time. He was depressed. It wasn’t much fun to go visit him. But I had to because, well, he’s my dad.

  Usually, we’d talk about the old days. That seemed to cheer him up.

  “Do you know anything about Jim Thorpe?” I asked him.

  “The guy from the Olympics?” Dad replied. “Sure. You thinkin’ of going to visit him?”

  “I already did,” I said, “but I was too late. I’m thinking of going back and talking to him before the Olympics.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Dad said. “Jim Thorpe totally blew it.”

  “Huh?”

  “After he won the Olympics, Thorpe was sitting on a gold mine,” my dad told me. “He could’ve made millions, even without any medals. You know what they say: Everybody is famous for 15 minutes. Well, Thorpe was the most famous man in the world. He could have cashed in big-time—movies, ads, exhibitions. He could have toured the world and raked it in.”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  “Because he was stupid,” Dad said. “You know what he did instead of cashing in on his Olympic fame? He went back to college and played football. For free. How dumb was that? A few months later, nobody cared about him anymore. I’m telling you, money makes the world go ’round. Some people know how to make it, and some people don’t.”

  I looked around my dad’s tiny apartment. Everything was old or faded or broken. This was a man who didn’t know how to make money.

  I pulled out the picture of the New York Giants card that Flip had printed for me and showed it to my dad.

  “That’s right!” he said. “Thorpe played for the New York Giants. With Christy Mathewson! With John McGraw! What a team! They owned New York back then. They owned baseball! Oh, you gotta go just to meet those guys!”

  For the first time in a long while, I saw a little spark in Dad’s eyes. He was excited.

  “Remember the time we saw Babe Ruth in the 1932 World Series?” I asked.

  That was one of the best times Dad and I ever had. Ruth hit his famous “called shot” home run in that Series. He pointed to the centerfield wall and then hit the next pitch over it. Or that’s the legend, anyway. Nobody knew for sure whether or not Ruth really called his shot. But we knew exactly when and where he was going to hit it, so Dad and I decided to go back and see with our own eyes. It’s a long story.

  “That was before I got hurt,” Dad said, shifting his weight in his wheelchair.

  I felt bad. There wasn’t a whole lot my dad could do anymore.

  “I probably won’t see any baseball players,” I told Dad. “If I’m lucky, I’ll get to Jim Thorpe before he gets into the majors.”

  “Well, do me a favor, will you?” Dad asked. “If you happen to meet John McGraw, get him to sign something for me. I know a guy who collects nothing but McGraw memorabilia. This guy is nuts. He’ll pay anything for signed McGraw stuff.”

  That old fire flickered in my dad’s eyes again. It made him look younger.

  “I’ll try, Dad,” I said.

  A couple of days later, when I got home from school, Flip Valentini was knocking on the front door.

  “I got somethin’ for you,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “
You tracked down one of the two guys in the world who owns the Colgan’s Jim Thorpe card?”

  “How’d you know?” Flip asked.

  “I was joking!” I said. “You mean, you really got it?”

  Flip took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and pulled out the Colgan’s card, which was in a plastic sleeve.

  “The owner is very protective,” Flip said. “He’s never even tried to sell this card at an auction.”

  “Wow.” I marveled, looking at it. “How much is it worth?”

  “Lemme put it this way,” Flip said as he handed me the card. “You lose this, and you owe me 50,000 bucks.”

  9

  Do Your Own Thing

  BOBBY FULLER’S LOCKER IS MILES AWAY FROM MY LOCKER. But I kept going there all morning between classes, hoping to see him. After my third or fourth try, I figured that Bobby probably never even goes to his locker. If you don’t do your schoolwork and you fail all your classes, what do you need a locker for anyway?

  But finally, toward the end of lunch period, I spotted Bobby at his locker. He was laughing with a few of his pre-juvenile-delinquent friends.

  Some kids, like me, are into sports. Some kids are into music or art. Bobby and his friends, I’m guessing, are into setting off homemade fireworks and pulling the wings off insects.

  As soon as I got within ten feet, Bobby and his friends stopped laughing. I’m sure they were planning something that was illegal, or should be.

  “What are you lookin’ at, choirboy?” this guy wearing a Metallica T-shirt asked.

  I can’t sing and I’ve never been in a choir. I guess he was trying to suggest that I was one of those kids who follow the rules and don’t get into trouble all the time. As if that was a bad thing.

  The first words that popped into my mind were, Just looking at some garbage. But I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  “I asked you, What are you lookin’ at?” the kid repeated.