by Dan Gutman
“Where did you get that stuff?” I asked.
“A guy I know on the high-school football team takes ’em,” Bobby said. “He sold me some.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked him. “Steroids are dangerous! You don’t know what the side effects might be! You probably don’t even know how much to give him. He could have an overdose!”
“Will you lighten up, Stoshack?” Bobby said, his eyes flashing with anger. “Lots of athletes take steroids. It’s not that big of a deal. And think about it. Nobody has them here. They haven’t been invented yet. Jim Thorpe is the greatest athlete in the world. If he was the only guy in his time who had steroids, he would be better than Ruth, Aaron, DiMaggio—all of them put together! We would go back home and find the record books rewritten. Most home runs: Jim Thorpe. Most RBIs: Jim Thorpe. Highest slugging average—”
“That’s insane!” I shouted. “You think injecting something into him is going to help him hit a curveball? He’s a great athlete, but he’s just not a great baseball player. That’s all there is to it. Steroids aren’t going to make him great.”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Bobby said.
Suddenly it all made sense to me. I relaxed my grip on Bobby. Now I knew the real reason he had showed up at my door that day.
“So that’s why you wanted to go back in time!” I said. “You didn’t want to meet your great-grandfather. You didn’t want to help him get his medals back. You just wanted to shoot him full of drugs and turn him into some pumped-up muscle freak who would rewrite the record books!”
“What’s so wrong with that?” Bobby protested. “Y’know, you gave me the idea, Stoshack. You said that coming here was my chance to right a wrong, remember? You said not many people ever have the power to do that. Well, I’m doing it. I think giving Jim steroids is the right thing to do.”
Suddenly, Bobby reached down and grabbed the syringe off the floor. He was about to jab it into Jim.
So I slugged him. Right in the jaw.
“Owww!” Bobby yelled as he fell over. The syringe sailed across the room. Bobby landed right on top of Jim, who bolted up from his bed. He looked like he had seen a ghost.
“Wh—what are you kids doing here?” he demanded.
Jim couldn’t possibly understand what steroids were. This was a man who had never seen television, never surfed the web, never heard of DNA or atomic bombs or space travel.
“Mr. Thorpe,” I said before Bobby could get a word in. “We’re really sorry. We thought we might be able to do something that would prevent you from losing. But we messed up.”
“Here,” Bobby said, pulling the bills and coins out of his pocket. “We won this from those guys playing football in the park. We pulled the Dig on them, and it worked.”
“Take it,” I said. “Your bartender says you owe him money.”
“Thanks, boys,” Jim said, accepting the cash.
Before we left, I wanted to ask him one question that had been on my mind ever since I’d talked to my dad.
“After the Olympics, why didn’t you just cash in and get rich?” I asked. “You could have been a millionaire. Why did you go back to college and play football for free?”
“The team needed me,” he said simply.
It was just a different time, I guess. I couldn’t imagine anyone in the twenty-first century giving up the chance to make gobs of money. I hear about athletes who already earn ten million dollars a year, and as soon as their contract is up they jump to the first team that offers them eleven million. There’s no loyalty anymore. Or maybe there never was. Maybe Jim Thorpe was just a really good guy.
“Jim,” Bobby asked. “Who’s Charlie? You were talking in your sleep to somebody named Charlie.”
Jim grimaced and picked up a picture of two little boys from his night table.
“Charlie was my twin brother,” he said.
“You have a twin?” I asked.
“He was my best friend too,” Jim said. “But Charlie died when we were ten. Typhoid.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, as Jim buried his face in his hands.
While Jim wept and Bobby comforted him, I took the opportunity to retrieve the syringe and bottles and bring them down the hall to the bathroom. I squirted the liquid inside the syringe down the sink and poured out the contents of the two bottles. Jim didn’t need steroids. Nobody needed steroids. Bobby Fuller could be so stupid sometimes.
When I got back from the bathroom, Bobby and Jim were sitting on the bed next to each other. Jim was listening to Bobby’s iPod. His eyes were closed and he was bobbing his head up and down with the music.
Bobby’s eyes were closed too. In one hand, he was holding a baseball card. In the other, he was holding Jim’s hand.
21
Good and Bad
BOBBY FULLER HAS DONE SOME TERRIBLE THINGS TO ME over the years. But this was the ultimate. I couldn’t believe he would try to leave me behind. That kid simply had no morals. No sense of right or wrong. No conscience. I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” Bobby said, letting go of Jim’s hand. “Jim’s rocking out.”
I saw Bobby slip the baseball card behind his back. I reached into my pocket for my new pack of cards. It was there, but it had been opened.
“You’re trying to take Jim home with you,” I accused him, “and leave me here!”
“That’s ridiculous, Stoshack,” Bobby claimed. “I was just showing him how we do it.”
“We?” I said. “We? I’m the one who has the power! The power isn’t in the card, you dope! The power is in me. You can’t use it by yourself.”
“I know that,” he said. “We weren’t going anywhere. We were just fooling around.”
Jim’s eyes were still closed. He was nodding his head to the music. He couldn’t hear us.
“So you’re a pickpocket too,” I told Bobby.
“I am not,” he replied. “I…found it.”
I used to be a pretty emotional guy. I used to throw tantrums and lose my temper when somebody got me mad. I had to learn to keep my anger in check.
But this was the last straw. I’d had it with Bobby Fuller.
So I just jumped on him and started punching. I got a few good shots in before Jim realized what was going on.
“Knock it off!” he said, taking out the earbuds. “I thought you boys were friends.”
“He was never my friend!” I yelled.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so mad in my life. I was punching Bobby in the face and he was punching me back. It was the way little kids fight. No defense, all offense. I wasn’t about to let up. I wanted to inflict more pain on Bobby than he was giving me.
Suddenly, Jim’s huge hand grabbed the back of my shirt, pulling me and Bobby apart. I was panting like a dog. Bobby was too. I would have kept fighting anyway, but Jim wouldn’t let go of us. He just held us like that until we calmed down.
“Say you’re sorry,” Jim ordered.
Bobby and I made some weak apologies to each other and Jim let us go.
“Stoshack,” Bobby said, “think it over. We should take Jim home with us to Louisville! It would be great!”
“What would be so great about it?” I asked, still angry at him.
“Jim would be a superstar if he lived in the twenty-first century,” said Bobby. “Nobody would care that he played baseball before the Olympics. He could make millions of dollars and live in a giant mansion and drive around in a Corvette or whatever car he wanted. Just imagine! They’d be making Jim Thorpe posters and Jim Thorpe bobble heads. He’d be dating supermodels and doing commercials for Coke and McDonald’s and—”
“What’s a bobble head?” Jim asked.
“It’s a little statue that…oh, never mind,” Bobby told him. “You like my iPod? Wait until you see an IMAX movie! We have satellite radio and high-definition TV too!”
“Jim doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” I told Bobby.
“They don’t even have regular TV or radio here.”
“So what?” Bobby said. “He would love the future.”
“Could you really take me with you?” Jim asked.
He looked like he actually wanted to come. Nobody had ever wanted to before. I met Shoeless Joe Jackson just before he was about to be kicked out of baseball forever. It was all over for him. His life was ruined. He was disgraced. But when I offered to take him home with me, he said no. He wanted to stay in his own time, no matter how terrible it was.
And who could blame him? If some stranger from the next century came and offered to take me away from the world I knew, I’d probably tell him to buzz off.
“You want us to take you to the twenty-first century?” I asked.
“Maybe I wasn’t meant for my time,” Jim said. “Maybe I…maybe I was born too soon.”
It never occurred to me that somebody could be born too early or too late for the time they live in. But I suppose a person might not fit into their time period, just like we might not fit into a shirt or a certain social group.
It made me think of Josh Gibson. He was very possibly the greatest power hitter in baseball history. They said he hit 800 home runs in the Negro Leagues. Josh died when he was thirty-five, just ten weeks before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. If he had been born ten years later, he might have been as famous as Babe Ruth. Maybe even more famous.
Jim was looking at me with pleading eyes. I weighed the pros and cons of bringing him home with us. The pros were obvious. We could make him a superstar. He was a natural athlete. With a smart hitting coach and a patient manager, he might become as good as any baseball player in the world. In the twenty-first century, he would be Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Lance Armstrong all rolled into one.
But there were some cons too. What if Jim couldn’t handle the shock of living in modern times? Going from a Model T to a Corvette might be too much for him.
For another thing, I’ve never taken two people with me before. It might not work. Maybe there’s a limit, like when you fly on an airplane and they only let you take a certain number of suitcases. What if our bodies get ripped apart in the time-travel process?
“I can’t do it,” I finally decided. “If anything went wrong, I’d be responsible. It wouldn’t be right to play with Jim’s life.”
“Stoshack,” Bobby argued, “the whole reason we came here was to play with Jim’s life! If we had kept him out of the Olympics, that would have changed everything for him.”
He had a point. There was no big difference between changing Jim’s life in 1913 or changing his life by taking him away from 1913.
“Excuse me,” Jim said. He looked at Bobby. “You said you’re my great-grandson. Is that the truth?”
“Yes,” said Bobby.
“Well, if I went with you boys to your time,” Jim said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t have any great-grandchildren there, would I? I wouldn’t have any great-grandchildren at all.”
He was right. It was the same reasoning behind our decision to stop Jim from committing suicide. If Jim died or if he came with us, he wouldn’t get married and have children in his own time. His children obviously wouldn’t have children either, so Bobby Fuller would never be born. Jim and I would return to the twenty-first century and Bobby would simply not exist.
“It’s your decision, Bobby,” I said.
I could see he was thinking it over. Bobby could sacrifice his own life to save Jim’s reputation. Or, he could just save his own skin and leave Jim behind. Honestly, I’m not sure which I would choose if I was in his position. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.
But Bobby never had to make the decision.
“I’m not going,” Jim said. “I refuse to ruin someone else’s life just so I can make mine better.”
It didn’t look like he was going to change his mind, so Bobby and I got up to leave. We said good-bye and told Jim we were sorry for the trouble we had caused him. He shook my hand and then held Bobby’s for a long time.
“My great-grandson, there’s an old Indian saying,” Jim told him. “Bad in good and good in bad. All men have good in them. Let the good show itself.”
“I will,” Bobby said. “Is there anything I can do for you before we go?”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “Can I have that pod thing?”
Ooooooooh, iPods are expensive. Bobby probably saved up for a long time to buy his. And there would be no way for Jim to charge it up once the battery ran out. He would only get a few hours of music out of it.
“Sure,” Bobby said, handing him the iPod.
We took the stairs down to the lobby and turned right onto Eighth Avenue. It was nighttime. The streets were empty. Most of the stores were closed for the day. I figured we would go back to the park and find a quiet spot where Bobby and I could relax and send ourselves home.
But we hadn’t gotten more than 20 feet from the hotel when a hand clapped over my mouth. Another hand grabbed me around the chest.
Somebody was pulling me into an alley.
22
The Perfect Crime
“MAKE A SOUND AND WE’LL KILL YOU!” SAID THE GUY who grabbed me. Ugh, his breath stunk.
“Let go of me!” said Bobby.
I looked to my right and saw that Bobby had been grabbed by another guy. It was hard to see in the dim light, but I recognized the guy holding Bobby. He was Fat, one of the guys we had beaten in the football game before we went to Jim’s hotel. The two of them must have been waiting for us the whole time we were upstairs with Jim.
“You guys cheated,” said the one who was holding me. He must have been Tall, because he sure wasn’t Short. “We want our money back.”
“We don’t have your money,” Bobby told them, struggling to get free. “We gave it away.”
“That’s a lie!” said Fat.
I didn’t know if these guys had weapons or not. I also didn’t know what they were planning to do with us if we couldn’t come up with any cash. But there was one thing I knew for sure—I wasn’t going to let them go through my pockets looking for it. If they found my baseball cards and decided to take them, that would be the end of us. Bobby and I would be stuck in the past forever.
Frantically, I looked around for something I could use to get free. The only thing in the alley was a bunch of garbage cans that were lined up a few feet to our left. The old metal kind. They would have to do.
Tall was already pulling me from behind. I had to take the risk that he didn’t have a gun or a knife. I leaned back so I was pushing hard against him. Then I rammed him into the garbage cans.
“Hey!” was all he managed to say before the two of us fell over backward. His body took the brunt of it, slamming into the cans with the added weight of me on top of him. Tall also cushioned my fall, and in the process of crashing into the cans, he let go of me.
I don’t know how Bobby got free, but when I jumped up, he was holding a garbage can over his head. Fat was on the ground below him. Bobby slammed the can down on Fat. Then he picked up another can. I thought he was going to hit Fat or Tall with it, but instead he tilted it and dumped the garbage over their heads. Nice touch. And they didn’t have Hefty bags in 1913. It was disgusting.
“Run!” I yelled, and we tore out of the alley onto Eighth Avenue.
“Let’s get ’em!” I heard one of them shout behind us.
“Split up!” Bobby yelled when we reached the corner. “It’ll make it harder for them to find us.”
I ran down the street and into the park where we had been playing football. There were lots of good hiding places in there. I hoped Bobby had the same idea. We would be hard to find in the dark.
The problem was, it was hard to find those hiding places because the streets were lit with these dinky little gas lamps and I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. I found that out the hard way when I tripped and almost took a header over a tree root. I decided it would be safer to hide behind a bush and wait there until Fat and Tall got
tired of hunting for us.
I was sweating, and I could feel my heart pounding. There was some shouting in the distance, but it didn’t sound like Fat and Tall were heading in my direction. It sounded like they were running down the street. I wondered where Bobby was.
As I crouched there in the dark, I checked my pocket for my pack of baseball cards. Got ’em.
It would be so easy, I thought as I took out one of the cards. I could get out of here. I could go back home, and be safe. I wouldn’t have to worry about those guys chasing us. And I wouldn’t have to worry about Bobby Fuller ever again, because I could just leave him in 1913.
Would that be so horrible to do? I mean, he was going to do the same thing to me. He just couldn’t. But I could. What would be so wrong with leaving him behind?
I started feeling the faintest tingling sensation in my fingertips.
I tried to imagine what would happen if I left Bobby behind. I would get home and Bobby Fuller simply wouldn’t exist anymore. He could never bother me again. He could never bother anybody again. Maybe I would be doing the world a service. I could even be saving lives, if Bobby were to grow up to become a murderer or a dangerous criminal.
The tingling sensation in my fingers started getting stronger. It was moving up my arm.
If I left Bobby behind, nobody would ever know what had happened to him. The police would search all over Louisville, with dogs. They might question me, because I was the last person who had seen him before his disappearance. Maybe they’d bring in one of those psychic detectives you see on TV. There would be newspaper articles, flyers stapled to telephone poles around town, and pictures of Bobby on milk cartons.
But eventually the police would have to give up. They’d never find a body or any evidence of wrong-doing. They’d have to conclude that Bobby Fuller had just vanished. It would be the perfect crime.
I dropped the card.
What was I, crazy? What kind of a monster had I become? I was seriously thinking about doing away with someone!