by Dan Gutman
She gave my hand a squeeze! All my life has been leading up to this night, I said to myself as I slipped the dress down my legs. I had waited and waited and waited for puberty to arrive. First, my voice had changed. Then, hair started growing under my arms and my sweat started to stink. And now, I had a real date with a girl! An older woman, no less! Merle was probably twenty!
With all respect to Lou Gehrig, today I was the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
I washed my armpits in the sink in the storage room and dried myself off with paper towels. I put on my clothes and did my best to smooth them out. I wanted to make myself look as good as I could. There was no mirror, so I checked my reflection in a large glass jug. I wished I had a comb. Some toothpaste. Deodorant. Nicer pants.
Oh, forget about it. If Merle didn’t like the way I looked, she wouldn’t have asked me out on a date. Whistling to myself, I made my way to the front gate of Borchert Field.
Nobody was there when I found it, but a few minutes later I heard the sound of a car horn and Merle shouting “Yoo-hoo! Stoshie!”
My heart shifted from fourth gear to fifth. My date had arrived. I turned around to see Merle behind the wheel of another one of those PT Cruiser clones.
And Connie Wisniewski next to her. And Tiby in the backseat with Ziggy. My heart downshifted into reverse.
“Hop in, honey pie!” Merle hollered. “Let’s hit the road. We’re starved!”
Nobody had told me it was going to be a group! I tried not to let my disappointment show as I climbed in the backseat between Tiby and Ziggy. Maybe this would be even better, I tried to convince myself. I was being taken out on a date with four girls.
They looked a lot different than they did in their baseball uniforms. Checkered blouses, jeans, and cowboy boots seemed to be the style of the Chicks.
“I thought jeans were against the rules of conduct,” I said.
“The heck with the rules of conduct,” Ziggy declared. “Nobody tells me what to wear.”
Merle drove a few miles until we reached an area where there were more farms than houses or stores. The girls broke into the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” a song I knew because my mom forced me to listen to one of her CDs, which I had titled Stupid Old Songs to Puke By.
I thought they would be taking me to a health food restaurant—seeing as how they were athletes and all. But when Merle pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Bar-B-Cue, I realized I was wrong. For all I knew, health food didn’t exist in 1944.
The place was a bit of a dive, with peanut shells on the floor and cowboy stuff on the walls—ropes, saddles, hats, and so on. There was a pool table by the bar, which I assumed was the “Cue” in Johnny’s Bar-B-Cue. The place was almost empty.
The girls ordered ribs, hot dogs, malteds, and Cokes. Tiby got tomato soup too. I ordered a burger.
“Something to drink?” the waitress asked.
“I’ll have a Sprite,” I said.
“A what?” The waitress looked up from her pad.
“Uh, Mountain Dew, please.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I looked around. Everybody was looking at me funny.
“A Coke,” I finally decided. “Give me a Coke.”
“Sure thing.”
While we waited for our food, there was a loud noise on the front steps and—to my astonishment—a chestnut horse walked right into the restaurant! And riding the horse—with a cowboy hat on her head—was Mickey Maguire.
“Yee-haw!” she bellowed.
I was sure that “yee-haw” was just one of those things you only heard in the movies and not in real life. You know, like “yippee-I-oh-ki-yay” and all that hokey cowboy talk.
Nobody seemed to think it was weird to see a woman ride into the restaurant on a horse. I assumed Mickey must do it all the time.
Mickey tied up the horse to a pole outside and joined our table. The waitress came with the food and I dug in. The burger tasted good. I realized that I hadn’t eaten since the macaroni and cheese I’d shared with my cousin Samantha about four hours earlier.
“You like tomato soup?” I asked Tiby.
“No, I hate it,” she said, slurping up a spoonful.
“Then why are you eating it?”
“The last time I ate it, I went four for five.”
“You think the tomato soup helped you go four for five?”
“Didn’t hurt,” she replied.
The girls rehashed the game, congratulating me again on my baserunning and mascoting skills. But they agreed that they should have won the game much earlier than the ninth inning. If they had made a couple of key hits, if they hadn’t made a few errors, they would have beaten the Peaches easily.
I thought about standing up and proposing a toast. That’s what grown-ups did when they got together for meals, wasn’t it? I would thank them all for being so nice to me, and I’d make a special toast to Mickey because her husband would be coming home from the war soon.
Something stopped me, though. Nobody else had mentioned it, and Mickey had acted kind of weird when she had heard the news that the Allies captured Rome. I decided to drop the idea of a toast.
When everybody was done eating and they had divied up the check, Merle leaned over to me.
“How would you like to go to a special place?” she whispered in my ear. “Just you and me?”
“Just you and m-me?” I wanted to make sure I understood her this time.
“Alone,” she whispered, her blond hair brushing me again.
I gulped. This was it. She wasn’t kidding this time.
“Sure,” I croaked.
Merle got up from the table. “Girls,” she announced, “Stoshie and I are stepping out. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Have fun, you two,” Mickey said. The others giggled.
Then Merle shot them a wink. I’m positive about that. It was a wink.
“Oh, we will,” Merle replied, taking my hand. My heart shifted back into fifth gear as she led me to her car.
13
Alone at Last
IT HAD TO BE PAST TEN O’CLOCK NOW. THE ONLY LIGHT outside was the blinking Johnny’s Bar-B-Cue sign and a thin sliver of the moon. We managed to find Merle’s car in the darkness. “You sit up front with me,” Merle said. The front seat went all the way across, with no gap between the driver and the passenger. I slid in and she said, “Closer.”
She gunned the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. I had no idea where she was taking me. It didn’t matter, really. I was finally alone with Merle. I was out on a real date with a pretty girl! I couldn’t wait to tell my friends back home.
Merle hadn’t driven even a mile when she pulled off the road and into a gravel driveway with a stone pillar on either side. A few short lefts and rights past there, the headlights reflected off some slabs sticking out of the ground, and I realized we were in a cemetery.
Now, I’m not one of those kids who gets creeped out by death and stuff. People die. It’s part of life. It’s no big deal. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything.
“This is my special place,” Merle said, slowing the car to a stop. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Peaceful,” I replied. I couldn’t see anything except the headstones. The only sounds were the wind blowing through the trees and the hum of the motor. “Rest in peace.”
Merle switched off the headlights, and we were in near total darkness.
I had seen a lot of movies. One of two things is going to happen right now, I thought to myself. She is either going to kiss me, which would be really cool. Or she is going to kill me, which wouldn’t be quite so cool. Merle didn’t seem like the psychotic murderer type, so I licked my lips in preparation for my first real kiss. My heart was beating madly. I turned to face her.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said, flipping on the lights again.
“Uh, okay.”
“I’ll park the car,” Merle said. “I’ll meet you over there, under that tree.”
If i
t had been anybody else, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car. I’m not stupid. It’s a graveyard. It’s dark out. I’m by myself. I’m far from home, I have no money, and I’m even in the wrong decade.
But she was beautiful, so none of that mattered. I opened the door and got out of the car.
No sooner had I taken a step when she hit the gas. The tires spun, shooting gravel all over until the rubber got a grip and the car peeled away.
“Wait!” I shouted, shielding my face from the chunks of flying gravel. “Come back!”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” she cackled as the car turned the corner and zoomed away.
I screamed out every curse word I could think of and sprinted after her. But it was so dark that I couldn’t see anything, and the sound of the motor was fading in the distance. Fearing that I might run into a tree or trip over something in the dark, I stopped.
She had done it to me again! How stupid could I be? I filed it in my mental-mistakes-to-never-make-again folder—do not get out of a car in a graveyard at night, no matter how pretty the driver is.
There was no point in running. I didn’t know the way back to the restaurant. I hadn’t paid attention to those lefts and rights she made, so I didn’t even remember how to find the entrance to the cemetery.
“This is the thanks I get for helping the Chicks win the game,” I muttered to myself bitterly. I never should have let them put that uniform on me. I never should have stolen those bases. I should have done a striptease down to my underwear right in the middle of the field. That would have shown them.
That’s when I heard a sound in the woods. A movement, like a footstep. It could have just been an animal, but that was no comfort to me. What if the animal was a bear or something?
I was going to die.
If I had been smart, I would have just gone back home the minute I realized I wasn’t going to meet Mickey Mantle. I could have gone home right after the game, too. None of this ever would have happened.
Wait a minute! If I could have gone home right after I arrived, and I could have gone home after the game was over, nothing was preventing me from going home right now! I had my baseball cards in my pocket. I was certainly in a nice, quiet place. I’d just bail out of here right away.
That will show Merle, I thought. Sooner or later, she’ll get worried about me and come back. But she won’t find me, because I’ll be home safely in the twenty-first century. For the rest of her life, she’d think about me every time she heard that somebody was murdered. She’d wonder if it was me. She’d feel responsible. She’d feel guilty for pulling that trick on me in the graveyard. That would show her! Nobody was going to humiliate me and get away with it.
Then there was that sound again. I turned around. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark, but I couldn’t see anybody. Maybe I was just being paranoid.
Better safe than sorry, I decided. Holding my hands in front of me, I felt my way to the nearest tombstone and sat on the ground. I took the baseball cards out of my pocket and slipped one out. I put the other cards back, and then I tried to relax. It had all been a big mistake. Soon I’d be home in my house, in my time. I’d be able to laugh about the whole thing.
In about thirty seconds, the first tingles started to hit me. I smiled. I was going home. The tingling sensation spread through my fingertips, across my arms, and down my chest. So long, 1944!
That’s when a hand reached around the tombstone and grabbed me.
14
Hooray for War
“AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I SCREAMED, DROPPING THE CARD.
I jumped up to run away, but I bumped into something or somebody. I wasn’t sure which, but I knew that it wasn’t there a minute ago. I turned around and bumped into something else. Suddenly there were people all around me, surrounding me, their arms clasped so I couldn’t escape.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”
A flashlight beam appeared, shining up at one of their faces.
It was Mickey Maguire.
“Boo,” she said simply. “Did we scare you?”
Connie, Tiby, and Ziggy turned on flashlights too as they broke out into giggles.
“Of course you scared me!” I shouted, no longer feeling any obligation to be nice to them. Now I knew why the last Chicken quit. “How could you do that to a kid? I could have had a heart attack!”
“Shhhh,” Tiby said. “You’ll wake the dead!” Then she cracked up.
“Don’t get all hot under the collar,” said Ziggy.
“How did you get out here?” I demanded, looking around for the car. “Where’s Merle?”
“We walked over from Joe’s,” Mickey explained. “Relax. We do this to all the rookies. It’s sort of our little initiation ceremony. Merle went to get some Cokes.”
“I thought she…” My heart was still beating a million times a minute. “I thought she liked me, calling me ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey pie’ and stuff.”
“She does like you,” Connie assured me. “We all like you. But Merle calls everybody ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey pie.’ That’s just her way.”
I hung my head. I was so stupid.
“Stosh,” Mickey said, “Merle is married.”
“Married?”
“To an army boy.”
Well, that cinched it. I would have to wait a little longer for my first date, my first kiss. Part of me was angry. Part of me, I must confess, was a little relieved. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that stuff.
The car rumbled out of the darkness. Merle cut the engine, leaving the headlights on to illuminate the area around us. There were about a dozen headstones reflecting in the dark, like a mouth full of crooked teeth. Mickey, Tiby, Connie, and Ziggy turned their flashlights off.
“I’m sorry I gave you the runaround,” Merle said as she got out of the car holding a grocery bag. “No hard feelings?”
“I guess not,” I said, accepting a Coke in a glass bottle.
“Come on, take a load off,” Ziggy said.
The girls flopped on the grass like it was their living room, leaning back against the tombstones. Mickey opened the Cokes with an old-fashioned opener and passed the bottles around. Some of the girls lit up cigarettes. I took a big swig from my Coke. It had been a long day. Merle pulled a newspaper out of the grocery bag.
“Hey,” she said, after turning to the sports section, “the Dodgers traded Eddie Stanky to the Cubs.”
“How are my Indians doing?” Mickey asked.
“Terrible,” Merle replied. “The Cardinals and Browns are still in first place. Musial is hitting .348.”
“One day,” Connie announced, “I’m gonna marry Stan Musial.”
The others busted up laughing at that.
“Who would’ve thought St. Louis would ever top both leagues?” Tiby marveled.
“Hey,” Merle said, “it says here that the Cincinnati Reds are starting this kid named Joe Nuxhall the day after tomorrow.”
“So what?” Ziggy asked.
“This kid is really a kid,” Merle said. “He’s fifteen years old!”
“Get out!”
“That’s not much older than me,” I said.
“Shows how desperate they are for players,” Mickey pointed out. “They have to sign up kids. That ticks me off.”
“You think they’ll ever let a girl in the big leagues?” Connie asked.
“Fat chance,” Ziggy said. “The only reason we even have a league is because so many guys are fighting the war.”
“To war,” Tiby said, taking a swig from her bottle.
“If the D day invasion succeeds,” Connie predicted, “the Nazis will surrender in a year. You can bet on that. Wrigley will shut our league down. When Johnny comes marching home, so will we.”
“Back to the kitchen,” Ziggy said, tossing her empty bottle into the bag and cracking open another one.
“You’re lucky, Mick,” Merle said. “Your husband’s probably on his way home right now.”
“Yeah,” Mickey agreed. “Lucky me.”
<
br /> Mickey turned her head, but a tear going down her cheek glistened in the glow of the headlights. She was trying to hide it, but I could tell that she was crying.
“What’s wrong, Mick?” Connie went over and put her arms around Mickey. The others gathered around her, too.
“I don’t know if I want Tom to come home,”
Mickey whimpered. “Isn’t that terrible?”
“It’s okay to cry, Mickey,” Merle said, pulling out a handkerchief for her.
“In the last letter I got from Tom, he said he wanted me to quit playing ball when he got back,” Mickey said, the words pouring out of her along with the tears. “But I don’t want to quit. There’s two things that I love—riding horses and playing ball.”
“Do you love Tom, Mick?” Connie asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, wiping her face. “I honestly don’t know. Tom and I hardly know each other. He went away to fight right after we got married. That was two years ago. I barely remember what he looks like without a picture.”
They were all quiet as Mickey fought to control herself. She wasn’t the crying type, I could tell. She didn’t want to burden anyone with her personal problems.
Bugs buzzed around the headlights. The girls sipped their Cokes. A minute must have gone by before Tiby broke the silence.
“Men,” she said.
That was the whole sentence, the entire thought. The others nodded in agreement and clinked their bottles together.
I knew what she meant. Every time my father did something mean or stupid, my mother used to say the same thing: “Men.”
It was shorthand for “Men—can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” It seemed to sum up everything. And whenever my mother did something my father didn’t like, he would shake his head and say one word: “Women.”
“We’re not all bad,” I said, feeling a certain duty to defend my gender. “Some of us are actually good guys.”
They all turned to look at me, as if they had forgotten that one of the enemy was in their midst.
“I miss my dad,” Ziggy said. “I’ve never been away from home so long.”