Willie & Me (9 page)

I had seen a book about Stanky in Flip's store.

He was a little guy, not much taller than me. But a baseball bat tends to make you look a lot tougher. Stanky pounded the barrel against the palm of his hand. He looked like he really wanted to bust my face.

The third guy hadn't said a word. I didn't know who he was. I looked around for an escape route.

“Who sent you here?” Durocher snapped, stepping
forward to stick his face close to mine. I could smell his breath. “Dressen?”

“I'm not dressing,” I said. “I was just—”

“No, you
dope
!” Durocher interrupted me. “Charlie Dressen, the manager of the Dodgers. Did he send you here to spy on us?”

I thought about saying yes. Maybe it would get me off the hook if I could blame it on somebody else. But I couldn't bring myself to do that.

“No!” I replied. “Nobody sent me. I sent myself.”

The third guy, the quiet one, finally opened up his mouth.

“Maybe
we'll
send you someplace, kid. Someplace where nobody will find you for a
long
time.”

“Shut up, Sal,” said Durocher. “Don't be stupid.”

Sal “the Barber” Maglie

Sal.
That had to be Sal Maglie, the pitcher. They used to call him “the Barber” because he liked to throw at batters' chins and knock them down. It also looked like he hadn't shaved in a few days. He had a five o'clock shadow. All three of them looked like mean guys, like bad guys in cowboy movies. I couldn't imagine any of them ever smiling.

This was not good. I had been in a situation like this once before, I remembered. It was the time I went back to 1919 trying to prevent the Black Sox Scandal from happening and save the career of Shoeless Joe Jackson. I got caught by some gamblers who were trying to “fix” the World Series. They tied me to a chair and actually
shot
me. It was a miracle that I got out of that one alive.

I didn't think these guys were going to shoot me. They weren't criminals. In a worst-case scenario, I figured, they might beat me up pretty bad. Or they could just call the police and have me arrested for trespassing. That wouldn't be good. But they had caught me red-handed in Leo Durocher's office.

Of course, I had caught
them
red-handed, too. That was my only advantage. I touched my pocket to make sure I still had the eyepiece.

“What are you doing with that telescope?” I asked Durocher.

In retrospect, it was a dumb thing to say. But when you get caught by three guys in a place you shouldn't be, and one of them is menacing you with a bat, you tend to say dumb things. Whatever they
were going to do to me, they were going to do to me no matter what. I had nothing to lose.

I shot a glance around the office. The window had that wire mesh over it. I wasn't going to be escaping that way. The door was still open.

“
I'll
ask the questions around here, kid,” Durocher barked, his hot breath in my face. “This is
my
office. You got no business being in here. This place is private. I could call the cops on you.”

“You're cheating,” I said, pointing my finger at him. “You're not playing by the rules.”

At that point, Durocher took a step back away from me. A little smile crept across his face. But it wasn't a happy smile. It was sort of a sneering smile that you have when you just beat your worst enemy.

“I'll tell you what I'm doing with the telescope,” Durocher said. “I like lookin' at the stars. It relaxes me before a big game.”

Maglie and Stanky laughed. Durocher told them to knock it off.

“If you're looking up at the stars, then why is the telescope pointing a few inches above home plate?” I asked. “There are no stars at home plate. You're stealing signs and using a buzzer system to tip off your batters which pitch is coming next.”

“That's a load of crap!” Stanky shouted.

“Calm down, Eddie,” Durocher said, turning to face Stanky. “He's a smart kid. I'm sure he'll listen to reason.”

Maybe he was going to offer me money or an
autographed baseball to keep quiet, I thought for a moment. That would be nice.

Nah, if he wanted to keep me quiet, it would be easier for him to beat me up and threaten me with something worse.

In the moment Durocher was facing away from me, I thought I saw an opening. Maglie was looking at Durocher, and there was about two feet of open space between him and a file cabinet. If I could make it through that opening, I might be able to get out the door before they caught me. If I could find my way through the hallways to the center-field bleachers, I would be in the clear. They wouldn't want to be seen chasing a kid through the stands. The only thing I had going for me was the element of surprise.

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.