Roberto & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “Hey, leave her alone,” I told him.

  “Okay…”

  That’s when he hauled off and punched me in the nose.

  I staggered backward. He had taken me completely by surprise. There were tears bubbling up in my eyes, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me wipe them away. I touched my nose. There was a trickle of blood on my fingers.

  I’ve been in a few little skirmishes with kids my age, but I’ve never been flat-out punched in the nose by a grown man before. I’m usually pretty good about holding my temper. But when somebody socks you in the face, you can’t just stand there and take it.

  I charged at him and tried to punch his lights out, but he got his arm up quickly to protect his face. My best chance, I figured, was to go all out. I started flailing at him with both fists as fast and hard as I could. The more blows I threw, the more I would land. That was my strategy.

  “Stop it!” Sunrise yelled, trying to pull us apart.

  But I wasn’t listening to her. Me and the crew cut guy were really going at it. I think I got a punch or two in there. But this guy was much stronger than me. And he knew how to fight. He managed to get me off my feet and onto the hard concrete.

  He was on top of me now. He would be able to kick me or hit my head against the ground.

  “Hey!” I heard the dumpy-looking lady say. “I’ll bet the Pirates are coming out of Gate F tonight!”

  Suddenly, everybody was rushing away. Even the guy who was on top of me got off and went running toward Gate F. Sunrise and I were all by ourselves. I was on the ground, and she was holding my head, trying to stop the bleeding.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I told her, gasping for breath. “You should go home.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Sunrise said, sobbing. “I shouldn’t have said a word to that jerk.”

  Sunrise cradled my head in her arms. It felt good to be taken care of. It was almost worth getting beaten up.

  She was tending to my wounds when I looked over her shoulder to see a tall man standing behind her. I recognized him from pictures.

  It was Roberto Clemente.

  14

  Dinner at El Cochinito

  ROBERTO’S FACE LOOKED LIKE A SCULPTURE. HIS EYES WERE fierce and dark. His skin was smooth and shiny, like it had been stretched tightly over his bones. He could have been a movie star. I couldn’t believe he was standing right in front of me.

  His face looked like a sculpture.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Sunrise saw the look on my face and turned around.

  “Is that…him?” she whispered. “Roberto?”

  Ever since I’d left home, I had been mentally rehearsing what I would say if I was lucky enough to meet Roberto Clemente face-to-face. I didn’t want to mess it up.

  “¡No subas el avion, Roberto!” I said.

  “What plane?” he replied, looking around. “Are you okay?”

  “You speak…English?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah. You need a doctor, man.”

  He spoke with an accent, but he wasn’t hard to understand. His voice was soft.

  “I heard you only spoke Spanish,” I told him.

  “People talk a lot of garbage,” Roberto said. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  He was dressed in white pants, a flowered silk shirt, and brown boots. He looked sharp. I noticed a thick book in his hand but couldn’t make out the title.

  “Tonight was my first baseball game,” Sunrise told Roberto. “You were amazing.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “What happened to your boyfriend here? Was he defending your honor?”

  “He beat up a bully,” Sunrise said. “He was very brave!”

  Roberto called me her boyfriend, and Sunrise didn’t dispute it! I was in heaven.

  He put his book on the ground next to me and knelt on it so he wouldn’t get his pants dirty. I looked at the title: The Art of Chiropractic. Huh! Interesting. My mom went to a chiropractor once for her sore back.

  Roberto took a handkerchief out of his pocket.

  “You should have ice on this,” he said as he dabbed my nose with his handkerchief. “You know, fighting never solved any problems. But you can’t let bullies push you around either. What are your names, anyway?”

  “Joe Stoshack,” I replied. “Stosh. And this is Sunrise.”

  Roberto shook hands with both of us and helped me get to my feet.

  “It’s pretty late for you kids to be wandering around,” he said.

  “We wanted to meet you,” Sunrise said. “Where’s the rest of your team?”

  “Out,” he said. “Drinking, chasing girls, looking for trouble. You know.”

  “Why aren’t you with them?”

  “Life is too short to waste time on nonsense,” Roberto said.

  I was surprised that he was wasting a minute on me. I figured I’d better get down to business while I had the chance.

  “Mr. Clemente, there’s something very important I need to talk to you about,” I told him.

  “Are you two hungry?” Roberto asked. “I know a Cuban place not too far from here. We can talk there.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “It’s on me,” he said. “C’mon.”

  Almost all of the fans had left the ballpark by that time. Roberto led us around a corner, where a taxicab was waiting.

  Sunrise and I got in the backseat of the cab. Roberto got in the front and said something to the driver in Spanish.

  Sunrise whispered in my ear, “We’re going out to dinner with Roberto Clemente! Can you believe it?”

  “So, Stosh,” Roberto said as the cab pulled away. “You play ball?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, “but I’m in a batting slump. Right now I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a boat.”

  “Everybody slumps sometimes,” Roberto said. “But I know a little trick that works for me.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ve got to answer a question first,” he said. “Who do you think has more chances to hit the ball: a batter who takes three swings—or a batter who takes one swing?”

  “The guy who takes three swings, naturally,” Sunrise said. “Even I know that.”

  “Of course,” Roberto said. “So make sure you get three swings every time you come up to the plate. If you get four at-bats in a game, you’ll get 12 swings. One good swing will break you out of that slump. You can’t hit the ball if you don’t swing at it. So don’t let any strikes go by.”

  “But what if you don’t get a good pitch to hit?” I asked.

  “Just swing!” Roberto said. “They say I swing at bad balls. Well, if I hit ’em, I guess they weren’t so bad, no?”

  As he spoke, Roberto gestured with his hands. They were large, and he had long fingers—the kind you imagine a guitar player might have. When he lifted his left arm, I could see a big bruise on it.

  “Did you get that when you crashed into the wall?” Sunrise asked. “It looks like it hurts.”

  “Everything hurts,” Roberto said. “I got bone chips in my elbow, a curved spine, and arthritis. One of my legs is shorter than the other. I had malaria a few years ago. And I was in a bad traffic accident when I was in the minors. Every part of me hurts.”

  We pulled up outside a restaurant called El Cochinito. Roberto gave the cab driver a bill and told him to keep the change. We got out.

  The manager of the restaurant greeted Roberto like an old friend and led us to a table in the corner. It was late, so there weren’t many people in the place.

  “You ever try fried bananas?” Roberto asked us.

  “No, I just put bananas on my cereal,” I replied.

  “Well, you are in for a treat, my friend.”

  The menu was in Spanish, so Roberto ordered his favorite dishes for us: pork chops and crabs. He said he loved milk shakes, and gave specific instructions to the waiter to combine milk, a peach, egg
yolks, banana ice cream, sugar, orange juice, and crushed ice in a blender.

  Roberto seemed different from most of the other ballplayers I had met in my travels. Some of the guys—like Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Jackie Robinson—had big, exciting personalities. They seemed to fill any room they were in. But Roberto was quiet, serious, intense. He didn’t smile a lot, crack jokes, or say outrageous things. There was an honesty and openness about him. He didn’t seem as famous as he was.

  I wondered why such an important man would be so nice to a couple of total strangers. Maybe he was lonely on the road. Maybe, because of his accent and culture, he couldn’t relate very well to the other players on his team.

  Or maybe he just needed somebody to boop his neck.

  “I need you to boop my neck,” he told us as we waited for our food to arrive.

  “Huh?” I asked, figuring he said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand.

  “My disks,” he said. “A vertebra in my neck and one in my lower back. They move. It’s like a car with the wheels out of alignment. It doesn’t drive right. After I hit the wall in rightfield, I knocked a couple of them out of position.”

  It made a certain amount of sense, I suppose. Roberto took off his shirt and leaned forward over the table. He had a very muscular neck and wide shoulders.

  Sunrise got up to rub Roberto’s neck, but she wasn’t doing it hard enough, and he asked me to take over. My mom knows a lot about massage. A few times when my muscles were really sore after a game, she would rub my back. The pain would melt away. She showed me how to do it.

  It was hard to grab Roberto’s skin because there was no extra fat on his body. I did the best I could, pushing and pulling at the flesh on his upper back.

  “Dig your fingers in,” Roberto told me. “Don’t be afraid.”

  I worked harder, pushing my fingers against the bones of his neck until my own arms were sore. And then, suddenly, there was a pop. A boop. You could hear it. I took my hands away. I thought I might have broken something.

  “What was that?” Sunrise asked.

  “Ahhhhh,” Roberto sighed. “¡Excelente!”

  “Is it booped?” I asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Roberto said as he put his shirt back on. “You did a good job, Stosh. Now, what can I do for you? What was that important thing you wanted to talk to me about?”

  I looked at Sunrise, and she nodded to encourage me.

  “You’re going to find this hard to believe,” I began, “but I don’t live in this century. I live in the twenty-first century, in the future. I traveled through time to find you.”

  Roberto didn’t laugh in my face, and I was grateful for that. He looked at me for a moment.

  “And how did you do that, my friend?” he asked.

  “With this,” I said, pulling out my Roberto Clemente card. “I can travel back to the year on any card. This one is kind of messed up, but it got me here.”

  “You too?” Roberto asked Sunrise.

  “No,” she said. “I live here in Cincinnati. I ran away from home. I’m just helping Stosh.”

  “I believe in signs, omens,” Roberto said. “In 1960 we were on a hot streak. Something said to me it was because of the sweatshirt I was wearing. So I didn’t change that sweatshirt for two weeks. We won eleven games in a row.”

  The waiter came and put a bunch of food on the table. But none of us dug in yet.

  “Why did you want to find me?” Roberto asked.

  “I have bad news,” I told him. “You’re going to die.”

  “We’re all going to die,” Roberto said.

  “Yes, but I know when you’re going to die,” I said. “It will be on New Year’s Eve—”

  “You must be confusing me with my brother Luis,” Roberto said. “He died on New Year’s Eve. It was 1954. He had a brain tumor.”

  I unzipped my backpack and took out the newspaper clipping Flip had given me.

  “No,” I said, handing him the article. “It will be three years from now, in a plane crash. You’ll be on a mission to deliver food, medicine, and supplies to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua.”

  Roberto read the first few paragraphs of the clipping, then looked up at me.

  “Are you a seer?” he asked.

  “In a way, I guess.”

  “He’s trying to save your life,” Sunrise said.

  “I have seen more than enough death in my time,” Roberto told us. “Besides Luis, my sister Anairis died from burns at five years old. Three years ago, two of my brothers died within a few weeks. I have always believed I would die before my time.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you this,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “So you’re saying that if I try to save these people, I will die,” Roberto said softly. “And if I let them die, then I will live?”

  “Yes, basically.”

  “How many lives will be lost?” Roberto asked.

  “Thousands,” I said. “It’s hard to say. Some will die immediately when the buildings collapse. Some will die afterward, from starvation or disease. Some probably would have died even if there hadn’t been an earthquake.”

  Roberto pulled a card out of his pocket.

  “This is what guides me,” he said, handing me the card. There was handwriting on it:

  If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.

  “I like to work with kids,” Roberto continued. “I’d like to work with kids all the time if I live long enough. When I was your age, we couldn’t afford to buy a baseball. So we hit empty soup cans. My first glove was a coffee-bean sack. Someday, I want to build a sports city for the poor kids of Puerto Rico. There will be ballfields, a swimming pool, and a lake. The kids will get involved with sports instead of drinking and drugs. They’ll learn about being good citizens and respecting their parents. That is my dream.”

  Roberto filled our plates with food and then his own.

  “What about donating money?” Sunrise suggested. “Instead of flying to Nicaragua, you could give money to the Red Cross or some other organization, and they could deliver the food and medicine to the earthquake victims.”

  “Money is pieces of paper,” Roberto said. “It is paying someone to do the dirty work so you don’t have to.”

  He stopped talking and dug into his food. I tried the pork chops and crabs. They were really good. I didn’t want to try the fried banana, but Sunrise said it was tasty and insisted that I have a bite. It was okay, but a little strange. Too sweet for me. The milk shake was great, though.

  I thought about what Roberto had said. It was hard to argue with him. He was determined to use his celebrity to help people and make the world a better place. But I was determined too. And I knew that if he got on that plane, he would die.

  “You won’t be able to help anybody if you’re not alive,” I told him. “You won’t be able to start a sports city for kids. You can do so much more good for people if you don’t go to Nicaragua.”

  Roberto stopped eating and looked at me.

  “You are stubborn,” he said. “Like me. You went through a lot to deliver this message to me. I respect that.” Roberto paused before adding, “Okay, Stosh. I will do as you say.”

  I let go a breath of air that I must have been holding in for an hour. Sunrise smiled and nodded to me. We finished eating quietly. I didn’t want to say anything that might screw up what I had accomplished.

  The waiter brought the check. Roberto paid it and asked if the owner of the restaurant could call him a taxicab. He told us he was tired and had to go back to the hotel. The Pirates were scheduled to fly to Houston in the morning to play the Astros.

  “I want to give you something,” he said as we walked outside.

  “You’ve already given us so much,” Sunrise said.

  Roberto pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and stuffed it in m
y hand.

  “For your doctor bills when you get home,” he said.

  “I couldn’t possibly—” I started to say, but he pushed my fingers closed around the bill.

  “It was because of me that you got hurt,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  Roberto hugged us both. A cab pulled up and he got in. He said something in Spanish to the driver. Before the cab pulled away, Roberto rolled down the window.

  “And you,” he said to Sunrise, “go back to your home and family. Family is more important than any game. It is all we have. Family is everything.”

  Roberto waved to us as the cab pulled away.

  15

  Good-bye

  I DIDN’T FEEL SAD WHEN ROBERTO LEFT. JUST THE OPPOSITE. Such a feeling of satisfaction came over me. I had done what I had set out to do. Once we found our way to Cincinnati, it had all been fairly easy, really. I was lucky enough to meet Roberto Clemente. He didn’t think I was a crackpot. He saw that what I was saying made sense. And he agreed not to get on the plane. So I had accomplished my mission. Now it was time to go home.

  There was just one problem: Sunrise.

  We were sitting on a bench in front of El Cochinito. It was dark out and probably close to midnight. The streets were almost empty. It was quiet. The lights went out inside the restaurant. It had been some night. Sunrise and I would be going our separate ways. We both knew it. She put her arms around me.

  I know I’m too young to fall in love with anybody. But I liked Sunrise a lot. We had fun together. I felt completely at ease with her. I didn’t have to wonder if I was saying the right thing all the time or what she was trying to tell me.

  I don’t have a lot of friends at home in Louisville. If I met somebody like Sunrise back home, she would definitely be my best friend. I didn’t want to leave her, especially after all we had been through together.

  “That would be so amazing if you actually changed history tonight,” she said.