Roberto & Me

by Dan Gutman

“I hope I did,” I replied. “I guess I’ll find out when I get home.”

  “It must be exciting, being able to do what you do,” she said quietly. “Does anybody else in the future have the power to travel through time with baseball cards?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I guess you can take stuff with you, huh?” she asked. “Your backpack, your clothes, and all. It would be pretty funny if you went back in time and your clothes didn’t go with you.”

  “It would be,” I said, imagining it. “I don’t know if there’s a weight limit. Like on an airplane when they weigh your suitcase.”

  “Is it possible to take a person with you?” Sunrise asked.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I took my mom with me one time. My dad too. Oh, and my baseball coach, Flip Valentini.”

  I finally realized that Sunrise was dropping hints. She wanted to go home with me. Maybe she liked me as much as I liked her. Or maybe she just wanted to see the future. I couldn’t blame her. I always wanted to travel to the future too. But that’s impossible, of course. I would need to have a future baseball card, and they haven’t been printed yet.

  “I wish I could see one of those VD players you were telling me about,” she said.

  “That’s DVD,” I corrected her.

  “Yeah, one of those. They sound cool.”

  There were so many reasons why it would be a big mistake to take Sunrise to the twenty-first century with me. She would never see her friends or family again. That would be the biggest reason. They would report her as missing, if they hadn’t already. It would be all over the news. People would think she had been kidnapped. The police would waste a lot of time and money searching for her. As time went by, her parents would assume she was dead. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.

  I also had to consider how jumping to the twenty-first century would change Sunrise’s life. She wouldn’t finish her education. She would miss four decades of history that she should have lived through. And what if she was going to have children of her own someday? They would never be born. Or they would be born 50 years later. It would be very risky to take her along.

  On the other hand, she was really pretty.

  “Do you…want to come with me?” I finally asked.

  “You would take me?” she said, looking up with those great eyes of hers.

  I opened my backpack and took out my new baseball cards. I tore off the wrapper and picked a card out of the stack.

  “Hold my hand,” I said, “and close your eyes.”

  I explained to Sunrise that nothing would happen for a minute or two. And then, gradually, she would begin to feel a tingling sensation in her fingertips. That was the signal that we would be going to the year on the card.

  “And then what happens?” she asked. “We…vanish? Just like that?”

  “Yeah, just like that.”

  “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “let’s go.”

  I felt a tingling sensation right away. But that was only because I still wasn’t used to holding hands with a pretty girl. Soon that feeling was replaced by the other tingling sensation, the one I was used to. It tickled my fingernails.

  “Do you feel anything yet?” Sunrise whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just relax. Think of the future. The twenty-first century. Think of Louisville, Kentucky.”

  That’s what I was doing. The vibrations were getting more powerful, moving up my arm, across my chest, and down my other arm to the hand Sunrise was holding.

  “I feel something!” she said suddenly.

  “Shhhhh!”

  My whole body was starting to vibrate. We were approaching the point of no return. And then…

  I pulled my hand away and let go of the card.

  “What?” she asked. “Did something go wrong?”

  “I can’t do it,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  “Roberto was right,” I said. “You should be home with your family. It would be wrong to just rip somebody out of their world like this.”

  Sunrise sighed. It looked like her eyes were moist.

  “I don’t want to go home to my parents,” she said softly. “And school starts in a few weeks. I want to get out of here. I want to go with you.”

  “Do you love your parents?” I asked.

  Sunrise took a moment to think it over. Then she nodded her head.

  “My mom and I fight all the time,” I told her. “It’s even worse with my dad. Everybody has problems getting along with their parents. It’s, like, part of growing up.”

  “I know, I know,” she said.

  “Look, in a few years, you’ll be finished with high school and off to college,” I told her. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And you know what? You’re gonna see DVDs and all that other stuff for yourself. You’re 14 now. So you’ll be 24 in 1979, 34 in 1989, 44 in 1999, and 54 in 2009. You can get a DVD player then. And a flat-screen TV that just about fills a whole wall. Hey, maybe you can invite me over and we’ll watch movies together.”

  “But I’ll be old,” she said, “and you’ll be a teenager.”

  “We can still be friends.”

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “But will you do one favor for me?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Let me watch?”

  I don’t usually let people watch me travel through time. It would be weird to see somebody disappear before your eyes. But this was special. I told her it would be okay.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  After Sunrise assured me she would be able to take a cab home, I picked up the baseball card again. I closed my eyes and concentrated on going home. It didn’t take long for the tingling sensation to come back. It was like it had just been interrupted.

  “Is it happening?” Sunrise whispered. I felt her breath on my ear.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s happening.”

  The vibrations washed over me as if I was lying at the edge of the beach and a wave came in.

  “Good-bye, Stosh,” I heard Sunrise say.

  And just before I disappeared, I felt her lips press against mine.

  Then I was gone.

  16

  Homecoming

  I CAME FLYING INTO THE LIVING ROOM. MY FOOT HIT THE floor at a strange angle. I reached out to grab something to steady myself, but there was nothing there. I tripped over the coffee table and did an X Games–quality face plant at the foot of the stairs just as Mom was coming down from the second floor with a basket of laundry. She stared at me for a second with a funny look on her face, like I was wearing a clown nose or something.

  “Is it Halloween already?” she asked.

  I looked at myself. The love beads were still around my neck. I pulled off the headband.

  “Mom! You won’t believe it! I was at Woodstock!” I exclaimed. “It was so cool! And I went to Cincinnati in a Volkswagen van with some hippies. And I saw Jimi Hendrix play!”

  “No way!” she gushed.

  “Yes way!” I insisted. “He played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘Purple Haze’!”

  “I knew I should have gone with you!” my mother said. “You didn’t tell me you were going to Woodstock. You just said you were going to save Roberto Clemente.”

  “I was. I mean, I did!” I said. “Or I think I did, anyway. I got kind of blown off course somehow. Did you see anything on the news about Clemente?”

  “No,” she said. “Like what?”

  Well, of course she hadn’t seen anything on the news about Clemente. The news only reports on planes that crash, not on ones that land safely. They report when people die tragically, not when they live peacefully.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, rushing past her upstairs, taking two steps at a time.

  It would be a simple matter to go on the Internet and find out whether or not I had changed history.

  I was feeling optimistic when I turned on my compute
r. For once, I had accomplished my mission. Roberto was only 38 years old when he died. If he didn’t get on that plane in 1972, he probably would have played a few more seasons and padded his statistics, which were already so impressive.

  He may even still be alive, it occurred to me. I did the arithmetic in my head. Roberto was born in 1934. So if he lived into the millennium, he would have been 66 at that time. It was entirely possible that he was still living, now an old man. And it would be because of me.

  The more hurried I am, the slower my computer runs. What’s up with that? Finally I got online and googled ROBERTO CLEMENTE. There were over four million websites that mentioned his name. I clicked on the first one, and there it was:

  Born: August 18, 1934

  Died: December 31, 1972

  No! It couldn’t be! He shouldn’t have died in 1972! I saved him! He said he wouldn’t get on the plane!

  I clicked down to the second website.

  Died: December 31, 1972

  And the third.

  Died: December 31, 1972

  It was the same for every one I tried. Nothing was different. I didn’t change history. Despite everything I went through, Roberto still died in that plane crash. I cursed as I smashed my fist against the desk.

  I couldn’t help but be angry. I was angry with Roberto. He deceived me. He ignored my warning that the plane was going to crash. He went ahead and got on it, anyway.

  My mother came rushing upstairs.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “I heard a bang.”

  “Roberto lied to me!” I told her. “He said he wouldn’t go to Nicaragua! But he got on the plane anyway; and now he’s dead. He should have listened to me!”

  “Joey…”

  “And what good did it do?” I continued. “He didn’t help the victims of that earthquake. All the medicine and stuff he was going to deliver to them must have ended up in the ocean. Roberto sacrificed his life for nothing.”

  My mother leaned over from behind and wrapped her arms around me.

  “It wasn’t for nothing,” she said. “I bet he inspired a lot of people to do good things. Just like he inspired you. That’s the only positive thing about tragedy, Joey. It makes the survivors better people. This just shows how good a man he must have been; he would go help strangers even though he knew he would most likely die doing it.”

  “You think so?” I asked.

  “Either that,” she said, laughing, “or maybe he just figured you were nuts. That’s what I would think if some kid with love beads told me he comes from the future and knows when I’m going to die.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He probably figured I was just a crazy hippie kid.”

  “A tired crazy hippie kid,” my mother said, kissing the top of my head. “You can save the world another day, Joey. Go to sleep. Flip called, by the way. You’ve got a game tomorrow night, you know. And be sure to put your dirty clothes in the hamper. I’m in the middle of doing the laundry.”

  Mom closed the door, and I put my computer to sleep. I was still a little upset. What was the use? I tried to do something good for the world, and this was the result.

  Maybe it never happened, it suddenly occurred to me. Maybe I never even went back to 1969. What if it was all a dream? What if I really am crazy?

  It had been a long day, a long couple of days. I needed a shower.

  I pulled off my jeans and put them in the hamper. Then I remembered that I needed to go through the pockets carefully. One time I left a pen in my pocket; and when my mom washed the clothes, there was blue ink all over the dryer. She was pretty mad.

  The first three pockets of my jeans were empty, but the back right pocket had some pieces of paper in it. I pulled them out. One of the papers had this 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.

  The other paper looked like this:

  So it wasn’t a dream. It really happened.

  17

  An Unexpected Visitor

  IT WAS HARD TO SLEEP THAT NIGHT. I KEPT THINKING ABOUT everything that had happened over the last couple of days—my talk with Señorita Molina, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Sunrise, Peter and Wendy, the game at Crosley Field, and of course meeting Roberto Clemente.

  There’s a little night-light plugged in near the door of my room. It’s not that I’m afraid of the dark. What I’m afraid of is smashing my toe against the furniture in the dark. I did that once and nearly had to go to the emergency room. The night-light gives off just enough light to see my way around.

  At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up. There was a noise, I think. I looked at the clock next to my bed. It said it was 2:14. Then I looked across the room, over at my desk.

  There was somebody sitting there.

  In the dark.

  Looking at me.

  I didn’t freak out. It had to be a dream. How else could somebody get into my room in the middle of the night?

  The night-light was bright enough for me to tell that the person at my desk wasn’t my mom. And it wasn’t my Uncle Wilbur, who lives with us. It looked like a boy, about my age. He was just sitting there.

  “Are you awake?” the boy whispered, leaning forward in my chair.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied honestly. “If this is a dream, then no.”

  “Are you Joseph Stoshack?” the boy asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Bernard,” he said. “Bernard Stoshack.”

  “Are you related to me?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I’m your great-grandson.”

  Well, now I knew I was dreaming. I’m 13 years old. I’m not married. I don’t have kids, much less grandkids. Either I was having a dream, or somebody was playing a very elaborate practical joke on me.

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  “I know this probably sounds a little crazy,” said the boy, “but I’m telling you the truth. You’re my great-grandfather. I live in the year 2080.”

  Oh, this kid was good. I looked around the room for the blinking red light of a video camera. There had to be one somewhere. This would probably be on YouTube by morning. I figured I might as well play along.

  “Um-hmm,” I said. “And how did you get here, Bernard Stoshack…or whatever your name is?”

  “I climbed in the window,” he replied.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, if you come from the year 2080, how did you get here, to my time? Did you walk? Did you fly?”

  “No,” he replied. “I used a baseball card.”

  “What!?”

  “I know you have the power to travel through time with a baseball card,” he explained. “So do I. My father couldn’t do it. Neither could my grandfather. But it must be genetic, because I have the same power that you do. It must have skipped a couple of generations.”

  “What gave you the idea that I can travel through time with a baseball card?” I asked.

  “I read it in your diary,” he replied.

  Ha! Now I knew the kid was a phony.

  “I don’t even keep a diary!” I said.

  “You will,” he told me, “when you’re an old man. You’ll want to tell your children, and your grandchildren, that you have this gift. You’ll want to alert them that they might have the same power as you. And I do, Grandpa! Whenever I pick up an old baseball card and hold it in my hand, something strange happens. I get this tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers. Then it moves across my body. It feels almost like…like waves on the beach.”

  I fell back against my pillow.

  “I know the drill,” I said. “Let me see the card you used.”

  My eyes had adjusted to the light somewhat. He pulled a card out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was an Alex Rodriguez card, a little beat up and yellowed; but it looked real.

  “You say you found this in the year 2080 and used it to g
et here?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I found it a few weeks ago in an old trunk filled with your diary and some other stuff. But I had a heck of a time finding you, Grandpa. I live in Chicago. I thought the card was going to take me right here. But I landed downtown at the Louisville Slugger Museum and had to figure out where you lived. As I was walking over here, some guys tried to rob me and I ran away. I almost got killed. Did anything like that ever happen to you, Grandpa?”

  It had to be a dream. That was the only possible explanation. The only person I know who can describe the time travel process so accurately is me. Even my mother doesn’t know exactly how it works.

  I looked at the clock again. It was 2:16.

  Usually I don’t remember my dreams. They seem so real while they’re happening. Then I wake up in the morning with this vague memory that I had a dream but with no idea what it was about. This one was particularly vivid.

  I should write it down, I thought, so I won’t forget it. But it’s too much trouble to get out of bed to find a piece of paper and a pen when you’re so tired. I promised myself I would remember. It would be fun to tell my mother about this one in the morning.

  Bernard went on and on, talking about everything he went through to find my house in the middle of the night, how he climbed the tree outside my window and crept into my room.

  What a great dream, I thought, as he kept right on talking. If only it was real. It would be cool to actually meet my great-grandchildren.

  I rolled over and fell back asleep.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but I was lying there in bed for a while and something caused me to wake up again. I punched the pillow and tried to get comfortable. All I wanted to do was get some sleep. If I didn’t fall asleep soon, I knew I would feel lousy all day. And I had a game to play that night.

  I looked at the clock—2:19. This was going to be a long night.

  “Grandpa…” a voice whispered.