Willie & Me (10 page)

He turned off the light.

“Enjoy the game,” he said.

Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

T
OTAL 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 breath 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 wide 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.