by Dan Gutman
And then I disappeared.
7
A Little Incentive
THE NEXT THING I KNEW I WAS FLYING ACROSS MY LIVING room, tripping over the coffee table, and almost slamming headfirst into the TV. I swerved out of the way at the last instant, landing on the floor next to the couch.
I was all messed up. Nothing was broken as far as I could tell. But I had scrapes on my arms, and I was sore all over. My head hurt.
I looked up and saw my mom and that FBI agent, Mr. Pluto. He was holding his briefcase; but he dropped it when he saw me, and they both came running over. My mom had tears on her face.
“Joey!” she screamed. “You’re safe!”
“I’m sorry, Joseph,” said Agent Pluto. “I came over as soon as I realized—”
His voice trailed off because my mom had stopped crying suddenly. She was examining me very closely, sniffing me.
“Joseph, you smell like smoke,” she said sternly. “Have you been smoking?”
“Smoking?!” I said. “Yes, of course I was smoking! That’s what you do when you’re on fire!”
I turned to Agent Pluto and just about lost it.
“You didn’t send me to 1941!” I yelled at him. “You sent me to 1953! Did you know that Ted Williams was a fighter pilot in the Korean War? I was in a plane with him! We got hit by anti-aircraft fire and had to crash-land!”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Agent Pluto said, and he looked like he meant it. My mother was back in crying mode again.
“It was the wrong year!” I shouted at Pluto. “The wrong war! I risked my life! You almost got me killed! Don’t you research this stuff in advance before you send people out on a dangerous mission? You’re supposed to be the FBI!”
“I accept full responsibility for the error,” Agent Pluto said, trying to calm me down. “We’re not infallible. As soon as I realized that I had given you the wrong baseball card, I rushed over here. But you had already left….”
“You’re !@#$%! right you gave me the wrong card!” I shouted.
“Joseph!” my mother said. “Where did you learn such language?”
“From Ted Williams,” I told her.
It took a few minutes for me to regain my composure. I had been through a lot that day. Mom went to get me a glass of milk and came back with a plate filled with cookies too. I have to admit, the milk and cookies made me feel better. Mom got an ice pack from the freezer to put on my scrapes and bruises. The three of us sat down on the couch.
Agent Pluto took a card out of his jacket pocket and placed it carefully on the coffee table. This one looked more like a traditional old-time baseball card, with a cheesy illustration on the front….
The 1941 card.
“This is the 1941 Ted Williams card,” he said.
“You’re sure now?” my mother asked, shooting him a look as she picked up the card to examine it.
“We’ve researched this card extensively to make sure it’s authentic,” Agent Pluto told us. “It was produced by a company called Gum Inc. and was part of their Play Ball series. The series was discontinued when World War II started.”
“Why?” my mom asked.
“Every scrap of paper was needed for the war effort,” he replied. “So no baseball cards were produced during that time. This card would have been sold as a penny pack. A kid would buy a wax paper pack for a penny and get a baseball card along with a square piece of gum.”
“I wonder how much it’s worth today,” I asked.
“Hundreds,” Agent Pluto replied, “especially the Williams and DiMaggio cards.”
I knew that 1941 wasn’t just the year Ted Williams hit .406. It was also the year Joe DiMaggio had his famous 56-game hitting streak. Neither record has been seriously challenged in over seventy years.
“So this card should work?” my mother asked.
“It will take Joseph to sometime in 1941,” said Agent Pluto. “We can’t say exactly when, of course. But we know Pearl Harbor was late in the year: December 7th. So chances are Joseph will arrive in 1941 before the attack. That will give him time to warn the president.”
“I’m going to be very honest with you,” my mother said, a worried look on her face. “I don’t feel good about this. Maybe what happened the first time was an omen. What if something else goes wrong next time? What if Joey lands at Pearl Harbor exactly on December 7th, and planes are dropping bombs all around him?”
“I would advise Joseph to abort the mission if he arrives on or after December 7th,” Agent Pluto said. “He should just pull out one of his new baseball cards and return home immediately.”
The two of them were talking back and forth as if I wasn’t even there.
“What happens if I open my eyes and I’m inside a plane again?” I asked. “Or in a submarine or something?”
“I realize this is still a dangerous mission, and both of you have every right to be concerned,” Agent Pluto said, turning to face me. “That’s why I went back to the Bureau with a special request, which my superior granted. Here’s the deal. We’re willing to offer you a reward this time if the mission is carried out successfully.”
He went over to get his briefcase and put it on the coffee table. He popped the latches and opened the top.
The briefcase was filled with cash—stacks of twenty-dollar bills.
Mom and I both flinched. She let out a whistle. I had never seen so much money in my life.
“How much is it?” my mother asked.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” Agent Pluto said, lowering his voice as if anyone else could hear. “If Joseph is able to complete the mission and warn the president about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance, this money will belong to him. It should cover a good part of his college education, I would think. I know that’s a concern of yours, Mrs. Stoshack.”
I picked up a stack of bills and ran my finger along the edge like it was a flip book. It felt good, and it smelled like money.
“But if my son dies, he won’t be going to college,” my mother said, “will he, Mr. Pluto?”
“I suppose there is a very slim chance of that happening,” he admitted.
“You’re a big boy, Joey,” my mother said. “I leave it up to you.”
I knew one thing for sure. This time I was going to do my homework. After Agent Pluto left, I went to my room and studied the newspaper articles Flip had given me. I leafed through the baseball books on my shelf. I went online and learned a few things I didn’t know about Ted Williams.
He was really young in 1941, I discovered. His birthday was August 30, 1918, so during the summer of 1941 he would be turning 23 years old. A baby, practically. He was only in his third year in the majors when he hit .406. He was so sharp that season that he only struck out 27 times. That’s about once a week.
Hitting over .400 was a big deal in 1941, and Williams’s accomplishment would be even bigger today. I learned that since 1941 the rule was changed so that a sacrifice fly was no longer counted as an at-bat. Ted had a number of sac flies that season, and if he was playing under today’s rules, his average would have been even higher: .411.
I went to Google Images and found hundreds of pictures of Ted Williams. I wanted to get a good look at him so I would recognize him as soon as I saw him in 1941.
I also read the article Agent Pluto had given me about Pearl Harbor. The naval station was attacked by 350 Japanese planes that day, and the whole attack lasted just two hours. In the end, 21 ships were sunk or damaged, over 300 of our planes and all 8 battleships were damaged or destroyed. When the USS Arizona was hit, more than a thousand men died almost instantly. It was a horrible tragedy, and so many more deaths would follow. And I was the only person in the world who could do anything about it.
I decided I would try again, with the 1941 card.
I would be lying if I didn’t admit that getting a briefcase with $100,000 in it was a factor in my decision. I did want to go to college someday. And maybe, I thought, there might be a few dollars left over s
o I could buy myself a decent used car when I’m old enough to drive.
“Mom, I’m ready,” I said as I opened my bedroom door.
I took a new pack of baseball cards out of my drawer while I waited for her. I would need them to get back home when I was finished. I also grabbed the newspaper articles that Flip and Agent Pluto had given me, just in case.
My mother and Uncle Wilbur came into my room. Mom was carrying a little brown lunch bag and a portable umbrella.
“Mom!” I protested, but I knew it was no use.
“You’re going to get hungry,” she said. “They didn’t have fast-food joints on every corner back in 1941.”
Uncle Wilbur had a pair of corduroy pants with him, which he handed to me.
“Only farmers wore blue jeans back in those days,” he told me. “These should fit you.”
While I was putting Uncle Wilbur’s pants on, he stuck his fingers in a jar of Vaseline and started smearing the stuff on my hair.
“Stop it!” I told him. “Why do I need that goop?”
“In my day,” Uncle Wilbur informed me, “we slicked our hair back with this stuff called pomade. We wanted to look like Valentino.”
I didn’t know who Valentino was, and I didn’t care.
“You want to fit in, don’t you?” my mother asked.
Finally, they were done fussing with me. My mother stepped back to look me over.
“You look like a real boy from the Depression,” she said.
“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Now I’m depressed.”
“Nervous?” Uncle Wilbur asked.
“A little,” I admitted.
“I’d love to go back to 1941 again,” he said wistfully. “See my old friends. I sure wish I was in your shoes.”
“You can wear ’em while I’m gone,” I told him.
My mother hugged me and kissed me good-bye.
“Remember,” she said, “if you get into any trouble at all, you come straight home. Hear me?”
“Don’t worry.”
They left and closed the door behind them. I picked up the Ted Williams card that Agent Pluto had given me and thought about 1941. Where would I land? Ted Williams played for the Red Sox, so I figured I would probably show up in Boston. I had never been there before. Maybe I would go to Fenway Park. See the Green Monster.
What would the world be like in 1941, I wondered? Would everybody be running around in those zoot suits I’d seen in old movies? Would they be singing show tunes and dancing around with top hats and canes?
I closed my eyes. A few minutes went by before I started to feel the tingling sensation in my fingertips. I was used to it by now, so I didn’t freak out. It felt good. I relaxed. The card was doing its thing. Just another trip to…somewhere.
Goose pimples formed on my arms as the tingling spread across my body. I shivered a little as the feeling washed over me. It wouldn’t be long now. I felt myself losing weight, almost like I was rising up off the bed. But that wasn’t it, I knew. The atoms, or molecules, or whatever it was that made up my body were disappearing from the twenty-first century so they could reconstitute themselves in 1941. I wished I could open my eyes to see it happen. But they wouldn’t open. They were sealed shut.
It didn’t matter. I was already gone.
8
Where Am I?
I OPENED MY EYES, BUT THERE WASN’T MUCH TO SEE. IT WAS dark out. I was standing on a street corner, and the streetlights were dimmer than I remembered them. There were tall buildings around, and cars parked on both sides of a wide avenue. It was a big city—Boston, I figured. So far, so good. At least I wasn’t in another plane.
I looked up to read the street sign. The wide street was called Market, and the smaller cross street was 8th.
It was warm out, but not hot. It felt like the end of the summer when it’s just starting to get chilly at night in anticipation of fall. Good. If it was really cold, I would worry because that would mean I might have arrived after December 7—the date Pearl Harbor was attacked.
One of the first things I noticed was the cars on the street. It wasn’t that they were old. I knew that cars from the 1940s were big and rounded, and a lot of them had whitewall tires. No, the surprising thing about the cars was that they were filthy. Back home there’s an antique car show every year, and the cars are always shiny and perfect. So I naturally assumed that cars in the old days looked like that too. But now that I was seeing them with my own eyes, I noticed that a lot of them were dirty and dented. They hadn’t been restored.
Not many people were out on the street. It must be pretty late at night, I figured. I certainly didn’t see Ted Williams anywhere.
But it was okay. That was the way it always worked—I would land in the general vicinity of the player on the card. Then I would have to find him. Time travel is not an exact science.
Maybe I was a few blocks from Fenway Park, I guessed. I used the old eenie, meenie, miney, moe system to pick a direction and started walking down Market Street. I kept turning around as I walked to make sure nobody was following me. More than anything else, I didn’t want to get mugged. If somebody took my pack of new baseball cards, I would never be able to get back to my own time. I patted my pocket to make sure I still had it.
The first cross street I came to was 7th Street, so I made a mental note that I was walking downtown. On the corner was a little brick house with a sign in front of it. I had to get up close to it to read the words…
Huh! I didn’t know the Declaration of Independence had been written in Boston.
After walking a couple of blocks, I was beginning to get discouraged. Maybe I was walking in the wrong direction. What if Ted Williams was uptown somewhere? I decided to ask for directions.
A man wearing a hat was walking down the sidewalk toward me.
“Excuse me,” I asked him, “which way to Fenway Park?”
The guy gave me a weird look and walked by without responding. He probably thought I was going to hit him up for money.
A man and a woman were coming toward me arm in arm. The guy also was wearing a hat. It occurred to me that all the men were wearing hats. I guess men wore hats in those days, even in the summer.
“Am I heading toward Fenway Park?” I asked the couple.
The woman giggled and pulled her man away from me as if I had a contagious disease.
“What are you, a wise guy?” the man said as they hurried past me, laughing.
Maybe this wasn’t Boston, it occurred to me.
I spotted a garbage can on the next corner and rushed over there. Just as I’d hoped, there was a newspaper in it. I grabbed it.
Philadelphia?
Of course! The Declaration of Independence wasn’t written in Boston. It was written in Philadelphia. We learned that in school. No wonder those people looked at me strangely when I’d asked them how to get to Fenway Park.
I sat down on a bench between 6th and 5th Streets to think things over. What was I doing in Philadelphia? Ted Williams played for the Red Sox in the American League. The Phillies were in the National League. I knew that back in the old days, there was no interleague play. The Phillies and Red Sox would never play each other. Something must have gone wrong. Again.
I cursed my bad luck. How come I never land where I want to land? The last time, when I went to see Roberto Clemente, I landed in New York even though Clemente was in Cincinnati. Now I had landed in Philly even though Williams was in Boston. Just once I wish it was easy.
It looked like I would have to take a train to Boston. I didn’t know where the train station was or if the trains ran at night. And I didn’t even think to bring money with me. This was not looking good.
I scanned the front page of the newspaper. I always liked newspapers. You can learn a lot of stuff from them. A lot of people, I know, use electronic readers now. But I like the feeling of paper.
A nearby streetlamp was bright enough so I could read. I squinted to see the date at the top of the front page: September 27, 1941.<
br />
Well, at least my timing was right. It was about ten weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The front page was filled with stories about the war raging in Europe. An article said that Nazi U-boats were terrorizing the North Atlantic Ocean. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, was bombing England. Germany’s biggest battleship, the Bismarck, had been sunk on May 27. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, and the Nazis had just reached Leningrad.
Nothing about Japan. At least according to the newspaper, Japan wasn’t even considered a threat. No wonder the attack on Pearl Harbor came as such a surprise.
I turned to the sports section. The Brooklyn Dodgers had won the National League pennant, and the Yankees had won in the American League. The World Series was scheduled to begin in three days at Yankee Stadium. The second page of the sports section had an article about Ted Williams.
September 28—the next day—would be the last day of baseball season. Ted’s batting average stood at .39955—just below the magical .400 mark. It would all come down to a doubleheader the next day against…THE PHILADELPHIA ATHLETICS.
That’s right! Back in the old days, Philadelphia had a team in the American League called the Athletics, or the A’s. The Red Sox were going to play the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the season. That meant that Ted Williams was in Philadelphia!
So that’s why I landed here. I didn’t have to take a train to Boston. Ted Williams was somewhere near me. I just had to track him down.
He was probably staying in a hotel nearby, I figured. I stuffed the newspaper back into the garbage can and looked around. There was a grassy field behind me and a grand-looking building at the other end, about a block away. It could be a hotel. Somehow, it looked familiar. I walked toward it.
I remembered the building. We had learned about it in school.
As I got closer to the building, I remembered that I had seen it before. Twice, in fact. It was in my Social Studies textbook and also in that movie National Treasure. This wasn’t any hotel. It was Independence Hall! Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence a few blocks away from this spot, and then he must have walked down Market Street to this building, where the declaration was signed. I remembered that the United States Constitution was also written in this very same building. I had a test on all this stuff at school just a few weeks earlier.