Willie & Me Page 6

  So I made a run for it.

  “Grab him, boys!” Durocher shouted.

  Maglie dove at me like a football player making a tackle. He managed to grab one of my ankles. I tripped and went down before I got to the door. Stanky piled on top of me, just to be sure I couldn’t get away. The two of them were crushing me. My nose was pressed against the cold floor.

  “Oh, he’s a squirmy one, this kid,” Maglie grunted, twisting my arm behind my back.

  “Owww!” I moaned.

  “Pick him up, boys,” Durocher ordered. Now he was really mad.

  Maglie and Stanky grabbed my arms roughly and yanked me to my feet. They were holding me tight.

  “Owww! That hurts!” I shouted. “I won’t tell anybody! I promise! I’ll pretend I didn’t see anything.”

  “I don’t trust you, kid,” Durocher said.

  He went over and closed the door to make sure that I couldn’t make another break for it. It would muffle the sound if I started screaming, too. Then he stuck his face next to mine again.

  “Do you know how many years it’s been since this team won a pennant, kid?” Durocher asked me.

  I didn’t know. But he didn’t wait for my answer anyway.

  “Thirteen years,” said Durocher. “That’s a long time. I don’t like to lose, son. My boys have come a long way this year. We started the season lousy. We were thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers with just forty-four left to play. But we fought, and we scratched, and we clawed to get where we are right now. Tied for first place. And if we win today, it’ll all be worth it.”

  “That won’t make it right,” I told him. “You cheated. How can you sleep at night? You stole signs. That’s the only reason you came from behind and caught the Dodgers. Without the telescope, your season would have been over weeks ago.”

  “Oh yeah?” Durocher shot back in my face. “Are you too young to remember the war, kid? We decoded secret messages sent by the Japanese and Germans. We used our technology and our intelligence to steal their signs. That’s how we won. Was that cheating? What’s the difference now, kid?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” I told him. “Hitler was trying to take over the world. That was a war.”

  “Baseball is a war, kid,” he said, “and I say you win any way you can as long as you can get away with it. And we’re gonna get away with it.”

  There was no point in arguing with him. I remembered the name of his autobiography, which I had seen on the shelves at the library—Nice Guys Finish Last.

  “What are you gonna do to me?” I asked, expecting the worst. I felt sweat dripping down my armpits.

  “Good question,” Durocher said. “Boys? What do you think we should do with this kid?”

  “We can’t let him blab, Leo,” Stanky said, tightening his grip on my arm. “We’ve come too far to have some punk kid mess everything up now.”

  “We could throw him out on the street,” Maglie said. “Or call the cops.”

  “Nah, he could still squawk,” Durocher said. “We can’t let him go.”

  “Break his legs,” Stanky suggested. “That’ll shut him up.”

  I thought I was going to faint.

  “Nah,” said Durocher. “We gotta take him somewhere and keep him quiet, at least until the game’s over.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” Maglie said. “I gotta go warm up.”

  Durocher snapped his fingers.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He opened the door and made a right turn down the hallway, the same hallway I had walked down to get into his office. Stanky and Maglie dragged me by my arms. There was no use struggling. They were stronger than me, and there were two of them.

  “Stop! Let me go!” I shouted. I started to scream, but Stanky put his hand over my face to muffle the sound. I tried to bite him. He shoved the bat in my mouth.

  Durocher stopped at the equipment room and yanked open the door. The other two dragged me into the room. The door closed behind us. It smelled musty.

  “Tie him to the chair,” Durocher ordered Stanky and Maglie.

  Oh no, not again.

  They shoved me down onto a wooden folding chair. Durocher stood back and watched as the other two took some rope off a shelf and started tying me up with it. It didn’t look like they had a lot of experience tying people up, and they fumbled with the rope. Durocher was impatient.

  “Hurry up!”

  While they worked on the ropes, I looked around the little equipment room. One bare light bulb dangled down from the ceiling on a wire. The shelves were filled with baseball caps, rosin bags, tubes of pine tar, boxes of jockstraps, and other baseball paraphernalia. I tried to take it all in. If I could get out of the ropes, some of this stuff might come in handy.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

  “If you don’t shut up we will,” Durocher told me. “You ask too many questions, you know that, kid?”

  Stanky and Maglie were almost finished tying my arms and legs to the chair. They weren’t sailors, but the ropes were reasonably secure.

  “Better pat him down,” Maglie said, “to make sure he doesn’t have a knife or something.”

  I prayed that they wouldn’t find the eyepiece from the telescope in my pants pocket. Or my pack of new cards. That would be the worst thing to happen. If I lost those, I’d be stuck in 1951 forever.

  They didn’t pat me down very well, and they didn’t find the eyepiece or my pack of cards. What they did find was the Ralph Branca baseball card in my shirt pocket. That was the card I’d used to get back to 1951.

  “Well, well, well, what’s this?” Durocher said as he looked at the card. “You’re a Dodger fan! That figures. So you are spying on us for them.”

  “I am not!” I protested. “I’m just a fan.”

  “I see your pal Branca even signed the card for you,” Durocher said. “You must love the Dodgers. Well, you know what you can do with this.”

  With that, Durocher pinched my Branca card between his fingers and ripped it in half. Then he laughed, ripped it into quarters, and flipped them in the air like confetti.

  “No!” I shouted as the pieces of cardboard fluttered to the floor.

  “That card was worth a hundred bucks!” I shouted. “Maybe more. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “A hundred bucks?” Maglie said. The three of them cackled as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “You’re a real comedian, kid,” Durocher said. “Too bad we can’t let you hang around and tell us some more jokes.”

  He pulled a T-shirt off the shelf and ripped it to make a long strip of cloth. Then he tied it around my head tightly, so that the cloth was jammed in my mouth. He put another T-shirt over my head.

  “Just to make sure you don’t get any ideas about screaming for help,” he said.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Maglie said. “We can deal with the kid after the game.”

  “After we win the pennant,” Stanky added.

  The three of them went out the door. Just before it closed, Durocher came back, as if he’d forgotten something.

  He turned off the light.

  “Enjoy the game,” he said.

  Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

  TOTAL DARKNESS.

  Why does this always have to happen to me?

  I was kicking myself. I couldn’t believe that I had screwed up again. Why can’t everything go smoothly, just once? No matter how carefully I plan things out, whenever I go back in time, something goes wrong.

  It occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t do any planning at all. I should just wing it. I’d probably be better off. I couldn’t be any worse off, that was for sure.

  Desperately, I pulled on the ropes that were binding my arms and legs to the chair. They weren’t tied expertly, but there were a lot of them and I couldn’t get them loose. I might have made things worse for myself by making the knots tighter. I pulled until I was out of b
reath and I felt my heart beating fast.

  I tried to twist my head all around and to bite the cloth over my mouth, but I couldn’t get it off. I couldn’t yell for help. I tried to rock the chair back and forth. It may have been possible to topple it over, but that seemed like a bad idea, because it would be so easy for my head to hit the floor when I fell.

  There was nothing to do but sit there. I was stuck. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I was so stupid.

  After my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I thought I could see a sliver of light under the door. I hoped there was an opening there. If not, I might run out of air. Maybe I was just hallucinating. My arms and legs were sore from pulling against the ropes.

  Still, I was grateful just to be alive. Leo Durocher and his henchmen could have tortured me, burned me, or killed me. Who knew what those guys were capable of doing in order to win the pennant?

  This is it, I said to myself. This is the last time I would travel through time. My mom was right. It’s just too dangerous. There are too many things that can go wrong.

  I was lucky Durocher and his boys hadn’t found my pack of new baseball cards in my back pocket. Without them, I would be stuck in 1951. Stuck in the past forever.

  I didn’t know how much time had passed since they locked me in the equipment room. I may have fallen asleep at some point. I wasn’t sure. It could have been hours, or it could have been twenty minutes. I thought I heard some cheering at one point. It could have been another sound. It was hard to tell.

  The Giants may have had another eyepiece for the telescope, I figured. Maybe the game was over. Maybe the pennant was already won.

  There was a sound outside the door. Footsteps, and then a hand on the doorknob. Oh, no, they were back! I prepared myself for the worst. The door opened. I squinted from the bright light.

  “Don’t kill me!” I tried to shout through the cloth over my face. “I won’t say anything!”

  The light flipped on and the cloth was pulled off. There was a guy standing in front of me. An African-American guy. He was a kid, really. He wasn’t much taller than me, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. He was wearing regular clothes with a light gray sports jacket. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

  “Say hey!” he said in a high-pitched, sort of squeaky voice. “What are you doing in here? You shouldn’t be in here.”

  I tried to tell him what happened, but the gag in my mouth muffled my voice. He went behind me and untied the knot at the back of my head. The gag fell away. My jaw hurt, but it felt good to be able to communicate.

  “Thank you!”

  “Who did this to you?” the guy asked.

  “Leo Durocher,” I told him. “And Stanky. And Maglie. They brought me here and tied me up.”

  “That wasn’t a very nice thing to do,” he said as he started working on the knots that were binding my hands. “I’m sure Mr. Leo must have mistaken you for somebody else. He’s a good man at heart. I’m going to talk to him about this. Yes sirree. He shouldn’t be doing this to people. That’s just not right.”

  “Oh, don’t talk to him!” I said urgently. “If you could just let me out of here, I’d be so grateful. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “No problem,” he said. He untied the last knot that was holding my right wrist down. It was such a relief to be able to lift my arm off the chair.

  “Who are you?” I asked him. “The bat boy?”

  “No sir,” he said, laughing a little. “I play ball for the Giants. You probably haven’t heard of me. My name is Willie Mays.”

  Willie Mays

  Wait a minute. What? For a moment, I thought I heard him wrong. Willie Mays? The Willie Mays?

  I studied his face more closely as he worked on my other wrist. It was Willie Mays!

  The great Willie Mays—very possibly the best all-around player in the history of the game—was on his knees in front of me, untying the ropes that held me to the chair. I couldn’t believe it.

  I knew all about Willie Mays, of course. What baseball fan didn’t know his name? I had just about memorized his whole career. He hit 660 home runs. He was the National League MVP in 1954 and 1965. He also won twelve Gold Glove Awards, in a row. He was a Hall of Famer—a five-tool player, as they call the ones who can do it all. And most people don’t know this fact about Willie Mays—he was the only player in history to hit four home runs in a game and three triples in a game. You could look it up.

  Most of the pictures I had seen of Mays showed him when he was older, as an established star or a retired player. I thought of him as an old man. But in 1951, I realized, Willie was in his rookie season. His career was just getting started. He looked so young, more boy than man.

  Willie’s forehead was sweating while he worked on freeing me from the ropes. Finally, he got the last knot loosened and I was able to stand up. Willie tossed all the rope off to the side. He shook my hand and I didn’t want to let it go. I thanked him over and over again.

  The door was open, and Durocher and his boys could come back at any minute. The smart thing to do would be to run out of there. But I was still in awe of the fact that I was in the presence of the great Willie Mays, before he was great. It was tempting to ask him for an autograph, but I didn’t have a pencil or paper on me.

  “Is the game over?” I asked him. “Did the Giants win the pennant?”

  “The game didn’t start yet,” Willie told me. “I just came in here to think for a few minutes.”

  “Think?” I asked him. “Think about what?”

  Willie sighed and sat on the chair I had been tied to.

  “Stuff,” he said. “The game. The pitcher. What I’m gonna do. I just needed to be by myself for a while. To clear my head, y’know? I come in here sometimes. Usually nobody’s around.”

  Willie looked nervous and afraid. I actually thought he might break down in tears. I didn’t know if I should leave him there.

  “Are you gonna be okay?” I asked him.

  “This is the biggest game of my life,” he said, in a whisper. “Somebody’s gonna win the pennant today. Somebody’s gonna lose. And somebody’s gonna get the blame. I just don’t want to mess up in front of all those people. It’s gonna be on TV coast-to-coast, y’know.”

  “You’re going to be great,” I told him, which was an understatement.

  The fact was, I had no idea how Willie was going to do in the game. I had studied the box score, but I was concentrating on Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson. The only thing I remembered about Willie Mays was what that baseball card dealer had told me—Willie was on deck when Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World.

  “I don’t know about that,” Willie said as he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “I got the jitters. Since September first, I’m hitting .223. Maybe I’m not good enough to hit big league pitching. Maybe Mr. Leo is gonna send me back to the minors next season. I just hope I don’t have to come to bat with the game on the line. Can’t take that pressure.”

  Willie was terrified that he was going to flop in the majors and he’d have to go back home to Alabama and get a job in the laundry business. That’s what he’d been training for in high school. He told me that his father was a sharecropper, and his parents had separated when he was three years old. His childhood was not an easy one.

  “You won’t come to bat with the game on the line,” I assured him. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be on deck when the game ends.”

  Willie looked at me, puzzled.

  “How do you know?” he asked. “How could anybody possibly know that?”

  “I’m going to tell you a secret,” I whispered. “You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. It’s gonna sound crazy, I know. But I can travel through time. I live in the twenty-first century. I know exactly what’s going to happen in this game, Willie. Bobby Thomson will be the last batter. You’ll be in the on-deck circle when the game ends. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Willie looked at me. Then a wid
e grin spread across his face.

  “You’re crazy!” he said, laughing. “You’re a crazy boy!”

  “Trust me,” I told him. “You won’t come to bat with the game on the line. You can relax.”

  Then I said good-bye to Willie, thanked him for helping me, and hightailed it out of there.

  I RAN DOWN THE HALLWAY UNTIL I SAW A DOOR WITH AN exit sign over it, and I yanked it open. The important thing was to avoid anyone wearing a Giants uniform, except for Willie Mays, of course. If it hadn’t been for Willie, who knows how long I would have been stuck in that room?

  There were steps leading down. I took them two at a time. At the bottom was another hallway, and I caught a glimpse of green to my right—the field. I headed for it.

  Fans were streaming into the ballpark now to watch batting practice. The stands were filling up. It was easy for me to blend into the crowd. I made my way around the perimeter of the field.

  With both teams from New York, there was a mixture of Dodger fans and Giants fans in the stands. They were already chowing down on hot dogs, popcorn, and beer. The smell of roasted peanuts was everywhere. Back home, peanuts come in sealed plastic bags. It’s just not the same.

  “Newk’s gonna mow ’em down today,” some guy wearing a Dodger cap said.

  “No way. I say he don’t make it past the fifth inning. Giants all the way.”

  “You don’t know nothin’.”

  “Fuhgetaboutit.”

  The air was damp and the sky had become overcast. It looked like it might rain. I glanced at the American flag in center field over Leo Durocher’s office. The wind was blowing out to right. I overheard some lady say that Frank Sinatra might be at the game, and she was all excited to see him.