Shoeless Joe & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “No,” I said, stopping Katie before she could get a pen. “I didn’t come for an autograph. Mr. Jackson, I came here to give you an important message.”

  “What might that be?” Joe asked, smiling as if to say no message delivered by a kid could be of much importance to him.

  “Don’t take the money!” I urged him. “It will ruin your life! You’ll be banned from baseball forever. You’ve got to believe me!”

  “Whoa!” Joe said, chuckling. “Slow down, son. What money? Ah don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout.”

  “The World Series is fixed!” I informed him. “I overheard some gamblers. They’re paying some of the players on the White Sox to lose on purpose. Then they’re going to bet against the Sox and make a fortune for themselves.”

  Joe threw back his head and laughed.

  “That’s crazy talk,” Katie said.

  “Nobody could fix the Series.” Joe chuckled. “They’d have to pay off seven or eight guys, a coupla startin’ pitchers—”

  “They did!” I insisted. “I heard them. Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams are in on the fix. And they plan to get you in on it, too.”

  “Well, Ah ain’t gonna be in on it.”

  “Cheap cheap,” the bird chirped. “Cheap Commy.”

  “Ah don’t care how cheap Commy is,” Joe said. “Ah wouldn’t do that. That’s plain wrong. Ah play to win. That’s the only way Ah know how to play.”

  “Who’s Commy?” I asked.

  “Charles Comiskey,” Katie told me, “the guy who owns the Sox.”

  The phone rang. It wasn’t the kind of ring I was used to back home. Our phone at home rang sort of like tootle. This one sounded like a little jangly bell. Joe’s wife picked it up. It was one of those black phones I’d seen in old movies, where you pick the whole phone up in one hand and then hold the little receiver to your ear with your other hand.

  “It’s Eddie Cicotte,” Katie said, glancing at me before handing the phone to Joe.

  Joe listened for a few seconds, shaking his head. He looked over at me, too.

  “Ah want no part of that,” was all he said before hanging up.

  “What did he want?” Katie asked.

  Joe sat down on the bed, a dazed look on his face. “Eddie said he’d give me ten thousand bucks to help the boys kick the Series.”

  Katie sat down on the bed next to Joe. “Ten thousand dollars?” she said, awed. “Joe, that’s more than you earn all season.”

  Joe turned to me suddenly. “How’d you know that was gonna happen?”

  I wasn’t sure if I should tell Joe and Katie that I came from the future and knew all about the Black Sox Scandal. They might think I was crazy or something.

  “Like I told you,” I said. “I overheard some gamblers talking about it.”

  “Ten…thousand…dollars,” Katie repeated. It occurred to me that in 1919, ten thousand dollars might sound like a million. “We could sure use ten thousand dollars.”

  “Don’t do it, Joe,” I warned.

  “Course Ah’m not gonna do it,” he snapped.

  Joe got up off the bed and grabbed Black Betsy with his right hand. He stood in the middle of the room and held the bat outstretched, his arm perfectly straight. The end of the bat nearly reached the wall. He closed his eyes and stood like a statue.

  “You want me to send the boy away, Joe?” Katie asked.

  “He can stay if he wants.”

  “What’s he doing?” I whispered to Katie.

  “That’s how he relaxes and gets ready for a game,” she replied. “It keeps his muscles strong.”

  “How long does he hold the bat out like that?”

  “A half hour,” she replied. “Then he’ll switch to the other hand.”

  Once I was in science class and Mr. Kane wanted to show us how our muscles worked. He asked us to take a book in one hand and hold it out in front of us. He had a stopwatch and he called out the seconds. In fifteen seconds my arm was sore. In thirty seconds it was really hurting. After one minute, I had to drop the book because I couldn’t take the pain anymore. Most of the kids in the class didn’t even make it to thirty seconds.

  Joe just stood there calmly, holding the bat—bigger than any bat I’d ever seen—like it was a feather. His arm wasn’t even trembling.

  “You hungry?” Katie asked, holding out a brown paper bag. “We have some leftovers from dinner.”

  I suddenly realized I was starving. I took the bag thankfully and pulled out a piece of steak.

  “How about a drink?”

  “Do you have a can of Coke?” I asked.

  Katie and Joe looked at me strangely, and I knew I had made a mistake. Maybe Coke hadn’t been invented yet.

  “You…uh…don’t have Coke?” I asked.

  “Oh, we have Coke,” Katie replied.

  “But it don’t come in cans.” Joe chuckled.

  Katie looked at me suspiciously, but she handed me a bottle of Coke and used a little metal can opener to pry the top off. Then she grabbed a towel from a drawer and went into the bathroom. Joe kept holding the bat up.

  “Is it okay if I talk to you while you do that, Mr. Jackson?”

  “If it pleases you.”

  “Say a player did want to lose a game on purpose,” I asked. “How could he do it without anybody knowing?”

  “Easy,” Joe replied. “He could get a late jump runnin’ for a fly ball. Then he could dive for the ball and miss it by an inch. He’d look like he was tryin’, but all he did was turn an out into a triple. There’s other ways. He could make his throws slightly off target. Hittin’, he could swing a little late. There’s a million ways to lose a ball game if you set your mind to it.”

  Beads of sweat were starting to form on Joe’s face, but the bat didn’t droop or shake. He held it out steadily. I heard Katie brushing her teeth in the bathroom.

  “Where are you from, Stosh?” Joe asked me.

  “Louisville, Kentucky.”

  “You don’t say?” Joe replied, smiling with his eyes still closed. “Ah’m a South Carolina boy. Born and raised in Greenville, just a coupla hundred miles from you. You came all the way to Cincinnati from Louisville?”

  “I guess you could say that,” I replied.

  I wasn’t afraid Joe was going to brain me with Black Betsy anymore. We were getting downright chummy. I was relieved that he showed no interest in taking money to throw the World Series.

  “Mr. Jackson,” I asked, “how come they call you Shoeless Joe?”

  Joe grimaced. The bat was beginning to shake a little.

  “Ah was just startin’ out in the minors.” He grunted. “And one day my new spikes was givin’ me blisters. They hurt so bad Ah couldn’t put ’em on. The manager wouldn’t let me sit out the game. So Ah took off my spikes and went to the outfield in my stockin’ feet. Some reporter noticed and he called me Shoeless Joe in the paper the next day. That was all it took.”

  “You only did it that one time?”

  “Sometimes you do just one dumb thing in your life and that’s all anybody remembers about you.”

  Joe was really struggling now to keep holding the bat up. His face was twisted with pain and wet with sweat. He was breathing heavily. I didn’t want to distract him anymore. Katie came out of the bathroom.

  “Do you have a TV in here?” I asked her.

  “TV?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Television.”

  “Television?”

  Suddenly I realized my stupid mistake. There was no television in 1919. Looking around the room, I didn’t even see a radio. That probably hadn’t been invented yet either. I had to think fast.

  “I meant, can I use the telephone,” I said abruptly.

  Joe lowered the bat with a gasp and rubbed his shoulder. He and Katie looked at each other. Joe nodded. He picked up Black Betsy in his other hand and held it out in front of him.

  I didn’t really need to use the telephone. But it was the first thing I thought of when I rea
lized television hadn’t been invented. I picked up the phone and held the receiver to my ear the way Katie and Joe did.

  “How do you dial this thing?” I asked.

  “Dial?” Katie asked. “What do you mean, dial?”

  Joe and Katie looked at me strangely. Oh no. I’d made another stupid mistake! Telephones must not have had dials or keypads in 1919. Now I was really in trouble. I felt like a jerk.

  “Just tell the operator who you want to talk to,” Katie instructed.

  “Ain’tcha never used a telephone before?” Joe asked with a snort. “And they say Ah’m dumb!”

  “The, uh…the phones in Louisville are different,” I explained lamely.

  I didn’t go any further, because a woman’s voice came on the line.

  “Cincinnati operator,” she announced pleasantly.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “What can I do for you?” the operator asked.

  “Uh…”

  Joe and Katie were staring at me, like they didn’t quite know what to make of me.

  “Do you wish to speak with someone?” the operator asked.

  I searched my brain for a response. I had to make the call look real. If Katie and Joe found out I was a fraud, they’d probably throw me out of the room.

  That’s when I remembered that I did have to make a phone call. There was somebody in Cincinnati I wanted to speak to. I struggled to remember the name.

  “Kozinsky,” I told the operator. “I would like to speak with Gladys Kozinsky.”

  12

  An Offer

  WHEN I TOLD THE OPERATOR THAT I WANTED TO SPEAK with Gladys Kozinsky, I was pretty sure she was going to tell me there was no such person. Or she would tell me she couldn’t make the connection or the number was unlisted or something. Or maybe Gladys Kozinsky wouldn’t be home. I really doubted that my great-grandmother Gladys was going to pick up the phone.

  But the operator did have a listing of one Kozinsky in Cincinnati, and I asked her to connect me. After a few seconds of clicks and scratchy noises, a boy’s muffled voice came on the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Uh,” I said, “is Gladys Kozinsky home?”

  “Who wants to know?” the boy asked.

  “My name is Joe,” I told him. “Joe Stoshack.”

  The phone clattered, like it had been dropped on the floor.

  “Gladys!” the kid hollered. “There’s somebody on the phone for you…and it’s a boy!” He giggled. I heard footsteps and then a few seconds of arguing. One of them must have put a hand over the mouthpiece, but I thought I heard a girl’s voice say, “Shut up, Wilbur,” and his reply, “You shut up.”

  “Hello?” a girl said sweetly.

  “Is this Gladys Kozinsky from Cincinnati?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is. Who is this?”

  I took a deep breath and paused for a moment to appreciate how amazing it was. I was actually speaking with my great-grandmother, who had died many years before I was born.

  “My name is Joe Stoshack.”

  “Joe who?”

  “Stoshack.”

  “Do you go to my school?”

  “No…”

  “Then how do you know me?”

  I hadn’t counted on actually reaching my great-grandmother, so I hadn’t given much thought to what I would say if I did reach her. I couldn’t tell her that I had come from the future or that we were related, of course. But I had to come up with some reason for calling her up.

  I looked around the hotel room. Joe Jackson was holding the bat up in his other hand and his wife was brushing her hair.

  “You and your brother are twins, right?” I asked Gladys.

  “Yes…”

  “I need to take a picture of twins.”

  “A photograph?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s…for a school project,” I lied. “Would you mind letting me take a pic—photograph—of you and your brother?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, then replied simply, “I guess so.”

  “When can we shoot the picture?” I asked.

  “Well, are you going to the game tomorrow?”

  “You mean the World Series?”

  “Of course I mean the World Series!” she said. “What other game could I be talking about?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “My parents always let us go buy hot dogs after the fourth inning,” she explained. “You can meet us at the hot dog stand on the third-base side. Okay?”

  “Okay!”

  There was a loud knock at the hotel room door. Somebody said, “Jackson, you in there?”

  I was afraid it was one of the gamblers who had locked me in the closet. Joe and Katie looked at each other, then they looked at me. Joe put the bat down and put on a bathrobe. Then he picked up Black Betsy with both hands.

  “Get in the bathroom!” Katie whispered to me urgently.

  “I gotta go,” I told Gladys. “See you tomorrow.” I hung up the phone and rushed into the bathroom. After closing the door, I got down on my knees and peeked through the keyhole.

  “Hiya, Chick,” I heard Joe say, after letting somebody into the room. I remembered that the gamblers had mentioned that a player named Chick was in on the fix.

  Looking through the keyhole, I could see that Chick Gandil was a really big guy, taller than Joe and at least two hundred pounds. He had hollow cheeks and he was puffing a cigar. He took off his hat when he saw Joe’s wife. Gandil was dressed neatly in a sports jacket.

  “Evenin’, Mrs. Jackson,” he said politely. Chick Gandil didn’t have a Southern accent like Joe and Katie. “Getting some last-minute batting practice in, Joe?”

  “What do you want, Chick?” Joe asked. It didn’t look like he liked Gandil.

  Chick threw an enormous arm around Joe’s shoulder. “Joe, a bunch of us got together and we decided to frame up the Series. Eddie Cicotte told me you weren’t interested in helping us.”

  “That’s right, Chick,” Joe said, breaking away from Gandil’s arm. “Ah play to win. That’s the way Ah do things.”

  “You’re a fine man, Joe,” Gandil continued, “but the men we’re working with want you in this thing pretty badly. They told me they would pay you twenty thousand dollars if necessary. Four payments of five thousand each.”

  Katie gasped loudly enough so I could hear it through the bathroom door, even though I couldn’t see her through the keyhole.

  “The answer is no, Chick,” Joe said firmly. “Ah get money to win games, not lose ’em.”

  Gandil didn’t turn and leave, as I expected him to. He turned toward Katie.

  “Mrs. Jackson,” he said, “maybe you can talk some sense into your husband. Maybe Joe doesn’t quite understand how much money we’re talking about here. You can buy a lot of pretty things for yourself with twenty grand.”

  “Joe knows exactly how much money you’re talking about,” Katie snapped. “Joe makes up his own mind.”

  “Get out of here, Chick,” Joe said, gripping Black Betsy.

  “Look,” Gandil persisted, “the fix is on, Joe. It’s gonna happen with you or without you. Even if you hit four homers tomorrow, Eddie Cicotte is gonna lose the game. You might as well cash in like the rest of us.”

  “That don’t matter to me.”

  Joe had Black Betsy on his shoulder and took a step toward Chick.

  “We’ll lose no matter how good you play, Joe,” Chick said, taking a step backward.

  “Then Ah’ll have to play better,” Joe said, taking another step toward the big man.

  “Joe, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but we already told the gamblers you’re in on it so they wouldn’t back out of the deal. You might as well—”

  “Ah said no!”

  Joe took a swing at Chick with Black Betsy. Gandil bailed out like it was a high, inside fastball. The bat missed his head by less than an inch.

  “Fine!” Chick said, backing ou
t the door. “You play your game and I’ll play mine!”

  Joe slammed the door. I came out of the bathroom. Katie began to sob and Joe went over and hugged her.

  “Ah’m sorry, honey,” he said, stroking her hair. “Ah know that money would be nice, but—”

  “It’s not that,” Katie whimpered. “You’ve been working hard all season. All the fellas have. You’re the best team in baseball. I know how much you wanted to win the Series.”

  “Ah’ll win it anyways,” Joe said. “Ah don’t care how many of ’em lay down.”

  Suddenly, the hotel room door opened again. Chick Gandil was back.

  “Who’s the kid?” he asked, startled to see me suddenly standing there.

  “My nephew,” Joe said, “from Louisville. What do you want now?”

  Chick reached into his jacket pocket. For a second I thought he might be reaching for a gun. Instead, he pulled out a thick envelope.

  “They told me to give you this no matter what,” he said, flipping the envelope onto the bed. “You can do what you want with it.”

  Gandil backed out the door and shut it behind him.

  “They told me to give you this no matter what,” he said, flipping the envelope onto the bed. “You can do what you want with it.”

  13

  Dirty Money

  WHEN CHICK GANDIL THREW THE ENVELOPE ON THE bed, the flap opened up a little, and some bills slid out. Twenties. Fifties. Hundred-dollar bills. When Gandil left, Joe and Katie just stared at the envelope, like it had a contagious disease and they didn’t want to touch it. Finally, Katie picked up the envelope and counted the money.

  “Five…thousand…dollars,” she said, whistling in wonder and flapping the bills in the air. “I’ve never seen so much money in one place at one time.”

  Joe locked the hotel room door. He didn’t want any more uninvited guests. He didn’t seem interested in holding the money in his hand.

  “Ah don’t play ball for money,” he said softly. “Ah play ball to win. Ah would play ball for free. That money is filthy.”

  “What should we do with it, Joe?” Katie asked.

  “Beats me.”

  “You’ve got to report it to the commissioner of baseball!” I exclaimed. “If you tell him how you got the money, he can’t blame you when word gets out that the Sox threw the Series! He won’t ban you from the game for the rest of your life!”