Willie & Me (4 page)

Of course! For a school project, I had traveled back to 1947 and met Jackie Robinson. I was there the day he broke the color barrier. Jackie played on the Dodgers, too. He must have told Branca about me. And I had a feeling that I knew why Branca wanted to talk to me.

“You might have heard this, but a couple of years ago,” he said, “we had this game against the Giants. It was a big game, a
really
big game. We had a two-run lead. And they brought me in to close it out in the ninth inning. And I—”

“I know all about it,” I told him. I didn't want him to have to tell the painful story one more time.

“So I was wondering . . . if maybe you could . . . y'know . . .”

“Make it not happen?” I guessed.

“Yeah,” Branca replied, lowering his head. “Make it not happen. Do something so it didn't happen. Make it go away.”

“I don't know if I can do that,” I told him honestly.

It wasn't just that I was reluctant to help the guy out. I had tried to go back in time and change history before. I tried to prevent the Black Sox Scandal from happening and save Shoeless Joe Jackson's
reputation. I tried to warn President Roosevelt that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. I tried to prevent Ray Chapman and Roberto Clemente from getting killed tragically. Each time, I had failed. Maybe history just doesn't
want
to be changed. History wants to be left alone.

“I just thought that maybe you could go back and . . . I don't know, change things,” Branca said softly. “I'm tired of being introduced as the guy who gave up that home run. I can't walk down my own street without somebody reminding me about that pitch. At home at night, I have nightmares about it. That one pitch ruined my life. No matter what I do until the day I die, that's all anyone's going to remember about me.”

He looked so sad, almost desperate.

“If you rob a bank, they throw you in jail, and at some point you get paroled,” Branca told me. “Sometimes even murderers get out of jail. But I'll
never
be forgiven for what I did. Do you understand what I'm saying? I want another chance. Can you help me?”

I thought it over.

“Will you sign this baseball card for me?” I asked, handing him the plaque.

“Sure, kid, anything.”

I got a pen from my desk drawer, and Branca signed the card.

“I'll see what I can do,” I told him. I wasn't sure I would be able to help Branca out, but I didn't want the poor guy to have a miserable life forever, either.

“Thanks, Stosh,” he said, shaking my hand again. “So, how do I get out of here?”

“Probably the same way you got here in the first place.”

I climbed back into bed with the plaque in my arms, closed my eyes, and tried to will myself back to sleep. It was probably just a dream, I remember thinking. It
had
to be a dream. Baseball players don't just show up in your bedroom in the middle of the night.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, Ralph Branca was gone. The first thing I did was look at the plaque.

His baseball card was signed.

It really happened.

M
Y HOMETOWN
, L
OUISVILLE
, K
ENTUCKY, IS ON THE
O
HIO
River, about halfway between Indianapolis and Nashville. It's a pretty cool city, I think. Churchill Downs is here. That's where the Kentucky Derby is run every year. The Muhammad Ali Center is out on Museum Row, and Colonel Harlan Sanders, the guy who started KFC, is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery. For baseball fans like me, there's the Louisville Slugger Museum. They have a huge bat outside. It's 120 feet tall and 68,000 pounds. I've been there a few times.

The next day after school, my mom drove me over to Norton Audubon Hospital. It's just a few miles from our house, across the street from Clark Park. The lady at the front desk told us that Flip was in the ICU, which stands for Intensive Care Unit. It's on the third floor.

The Louisville Slugger Museum

Hospitals are creepy. There were a lot of old people in the rooms we walked by, and some of them were lying on rolling beds in the hallways. Some of them were in bad shape. We had trouble finding Flip's room, so we had to ask a nurse. She told us where to go and added, “You can't miss it.”

She was right. We couldn't miss it. There were so many flowers and balloons, they were spilling out of the room and into the hallway.

Flip acts like such a regular guy that sometimes I forget how famous he is. But as soon as Flip got hurt, the story hit the newspapers and the Internet, and get-well wishes must have poured in from people all over the country.

When we opened the door, Flip was sleeping. His wife, Laverne, was sitting next to the bed looking out the window. She smiled and got up to greet us, giving me a big hug as she always does. Laverne knows that she and Flip never would have met if it hadn't been for me taking him back to 1942.

She brought us over to the far corner of the room so we could talk without waking up Flip.

“How's he doing?” my mom whispered.

“It was a femoral neck fracture,” Laverne whispered back. “It's bad, but the doctor told me the operation went well.”

I figured that meant Flip broke his neck, but my mom is a nurse and she told me a femoral neck fracture is in the hip. As we get older, apparently, our bones get thinner and weaker. It's much easier for a guy Flip's age to break a hip. It's also really serious with older people because a hip fracture can trigger other problems and dangerous complications after surgery, like blood clots, infection, and pneumonia. Mom and Laverne talked about a bunch of other medical stuff, but most of it went over my head.

“Could Flip die?” I asked.

“Possibly,” Laverne replied. “The doctor told me that mortality rates in the year following a hip fracture are very high for men of Flip's age.”

“That ain't gonna happen,” said a rough voice from the other side of the room. “Fuhgetaboutit. I ain't dead yet.”

“Flip!” I said, rushing over to his bedside. I
grabbed his hand. Flip's voice was weak, but he had a smile on his face and a strong grip. “How are you feeling?”

“I won't be dancin' anytime soon,” he replied. “That'll teach me not to argue with umpires, huh, Stosh?”

My mom came over, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and asked if there was anything she could do for him while he was laid up in the hospital.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Have your kid go back in time a couple of days and stop me from fallin' on my butt.”

“Language, dear!” Laverne scolded him. “There are children present.”

“What, ya think Stosh never heard that word before?” Flip asked. “I'm an old fart and I could drop dead any minute. So I'm allowed to say what I want.”

Flip was in good spirits. Laverne told us she was sure he would make a full recovery, but it might take a year for him to walk again. Flip joked that he didn't mind, because Laverne would have to push him around in a wheelchair all the time.

“Why don't we leave these two boys alone for a while so they can talk boy talk?” Laverne said, escorting my mom into the hallway.

I pulled a chair up close to Flip's bed so I could hear him better.

“Listen, Stosh,” he said hoarsely, “I need to talk to you about somethin'. I'm not gonna be able to coach the team next season. They're gonna have to get somebody else.”

“I know,” I assured him. “Don't worry about that.”

“Another thing. Laverne and I decided that when I finally get out of this joint, I should retire for good. Close down the store, liquidate the inventory. You know, the whole nine yards.”

“You're going to turn all those baseball cards into a liquid?” I asked. “Why? How would you even do that?”

“No, you dope!” Flip shouted, coughing. “Liquidate means to sell off all the stuff. I'm gonna get rid of it all. So if you want anything, you can have it before the vultures descend on the store and clean it out. I got a lot of good cards in there, you know, Stosh. You might want to use some of them to, uh . . . do that thing you do. The time travel thing.”

Wow. That was some offer. Flip had
thousands
of baseball cards, from every decade. They could keep me busy for the rest of my life.

“Thanks, Flip,” I told him, and then I lowered my voice. “You know, speaking of cards, I need to talk to you about something, too.”

“Shoot, Stosh.”

“Remember I told you about the night Honus Wagner showed up in my bedroom a few years ago?”

“Yeah. That was when you first found out about your . . . power.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, I had
another
visitor last night.”

“Was it Cobb?” Flip asked, his eyes wide.

“No.”

“Lou Gehrig? DiMaggio? Stan the Man Musial?” Flip guessed.

“No,” I told him. “Ralph Branca.”

“Ralphie?” Flip smiled as he struggled to sit up in the bed. “The guy who threw the pitch that Bobby Thomson hit over the wall to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants?”

“That's the guy,” I replied. “Did you know him?”

“Sure I knew him,” Flip told me. “He was my teammate. We were on the Dodgers together. But tell me this—how did you know the guy in your room was Ralph Branca? He coulda been anybody.”

“He looked like the pictures I've seen of Branca,” I said. “He was wearing a Dodger uniform and he knew stuff that only Ralph Branca would know. He was depressed because he had a good career going, but then he threw that one pitch to Thomson and it ruined his life.”

“It made him famous, too,” Flip told me. “Did he mention that? Nobody ever would know Ralphie's name today if he hadn't served up that gopher ball to Thomson.”

“He doesn't see it that way,” I told Flip. “He doesn't want to be famous for being a loser. He says he can't walk down the street without people pointing at him and whispering. Everybody he meets asks him how he feels about losing the pennant. He wants his life back, and he thinks I can give it to him. He wants me to erase the mistake.”

Flip sighed and shook his head.

“We
all
wanna go back in time and erase the mistakes we made when we were young and stupid,” he said. “How did Branca know you can travel through time with baseball cards, anyway?”

“Jackie Robinson told him.”

“Of course,” Flip said, nodding.

“So what do you think?” I asked. “Should I do it?”

Flip leaned back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling for a while. I gave him the time to think things over.

“Let me ask you this,” he finally said. “
How
would you do it? What could you do to help him, anyway?”

“I'm not sure,” I admitted. “There are a
million
things I could do to stop Thomson from hitting that homer. I could go back to 1951 and tell Branca to walk Thomson intentionally. That would make sense. First base was open. Or I could tell him to throw a different pitch. I could pull out an air horn and blast it at the moment Thomson is about to swing. I could poison Thomson's food before the game. Hey, I could poison
Branca's
food so he can't pitch that day. Something.
Anything
. It wouldn't take much.”

Flip crossed his arms in front of him and closed his eyes. I thought that he might be taking a nap, but he was just thinking things over.

“Life is life,” Flip finally said. “What happened, happened. Ninety-nine percent of the time I would say don't do it. Don't mess with history. You could make things worse. But . . .”

“But what?”

“But I see both sides,” Flip continued. “Sometimes, breakin' the rules can be the right thing to do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Who am I to say you shouldn't help Ralphie?” Flip told me. “If you hadn't taken me back with you and changed my past, I never woulda had a career in baseball. People wouldn'ta sent me all these flowers and cards and stuff. And most important, I never woulda met Laverne.”