Abner & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “What time is it?” I barked at a lady on the sidewalk in front of the theater. She glared at me, but pulled out a watch anyway.

  “Eight minutes past ten,” she said. “But you should get some manners, young man.”

  “We’re late!” Mom exclaimed, pulling me toward the front door of the theater. “Booth went inside one minute ago! We’ll have to change plans! He’s going to shoot the president in seven minutes!”

  A guy in a uniform was standing in the doorway, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  “We need two tickets, please,” Mom said as politely as she could, under the circumstances. She pulled some money out of her purse. “And hurry, please.”

  “We’re sold out tonight, ma’am,” the man said. “Not a seat left for tonight’s show. Mr. Lincoln is here, you know.”

  “I know,” Mom said hurriedly. “We don’t mind standing.”

  “No standing room, ma’am.”

  “This is an emergency!” Mom said.

  “A national emergency,” I added.

  “I’m sorry,” the guy said, unimpressed. “I suggest you come back tomorrow. A new play called The Octoroon is opening. We’ll have plenty of seats once the president is gone.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Mom snapped. “Look, did a man just come in here about a minute ago? Handsome guy? Mustache, bushy dark hair?”

  “Sure. I seen him.”

  “Did he have a ticket?” Mom demanded.

  “No.”

  “Then why did you let him in?”

  “He is a very highly regarded actor,” the guy said. “He comes here all the time. That was Mr. John Wilkes Booth.”

  Mom and I looked at each other in a panic. It figured. Here we were trying to save the president’s life, and we weren’t allowed inside the theater. But the guy who is going to kill the president can waltz right in the front door, no questions asked. Life wasn’t fair.

  We had five minutes, tops, to save Lincoln. I thought about trying to take a run at the guy and bowl him over, but he was a lot bigger than me. Mom grabbed my hand and pulled me down the steps.

  We ran around to the side of the theater. There was a dark alley there, with a horse tied up to a post. I looked around desperately for a fire escape I could climb onto and sneak into the theater, but I guess they didn’t have fire escapes back in 1865.

  “Joey! Look! A door!”

  I was about to pull the large wooden door open when suddenly a man stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me.

  “Hold it right there!” he said.

  I turned around and gasped. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  It was Abner Doubleday.

  I didn’t recognize him at first because he wasn’t wearing an army uniform.

  “What are you doing in Washington, General Doubleday?” Mom asked. She was smiling nervously, almost like she was flirting with him.

  “I work here,” Doubleday said. “A better question is what are you doing in Washington? Don’t I know you two from somewhere?”

  “Yes, we met at Gettysburg, sir. Two years ago. I’m a nurse. You mentioned something about the Medal of Honor. But I really don’t have time to discuss that right now. It’s very important that my son and I get inside the theater right away.”

  “That won’t be possible,” Doubleday said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I’m placing the two of you under arrest.”

  “What for?” Mom asked.

  “For the attempted assassination of President Lincoln.”

  “What?”

  “There have been rumors circulating that a conspiracy is afoot to kill the president,” Doubleday said as he grabbed Mom by the shoulder. “It said in the newspaper that Mr. Lincoln would attend the play this evening. So I decided to stop by the theater in case there was any trouble. It looks like I found some.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong!” Mom said desperately. “We came here tonight for the same reason you did. We’re trying to prevent the assassination! The assassin entered the theater just a few minutes ago! And we only have a few minutes before he is going to shoot the president! We must get inside!”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about this plot,” Doubleday said calmly. “Obviously, you must be in on it.”

  “We’re not in on it!” I shouted. “We’re trying to stop it!”

  “I suspected something about you two back in Gettysburg,” Doubleday said. “I recall you were wearing a bizarre nurse’s uniform, and you could not name your regiment. And the boy here proposed some preposterous notion that I invented the game of baseball. Obviously, both of you are lunatics, and possibly dangerous. The president will thank me when he learns that I apprehended you. Perhaps I will finally be reinstated to my rightful command.”

  “General Doubleday, if you don’t let us in this door right now, the president is going to get killed!” Mom yelled. “He won’t be able to thank you for anything!”

  “Tell it to the police,” he said, pulling us down the alley toward the street. “You two have some explaining to do.”

  The sound of audience laughter could be heard from inside the theater. I saw Mom reach into her purse for something. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but then I saw it.

  The stun gun.

  “Do it, Mom!”

  Bzzzzzzzzzzttttttttt!

  Doubleday froze for a moment, just looking at us. His eyes got really big and his hair stood on end. Then he slumped to the ground and hit the dirt like a sack of potatoes.

  “Let’s go!” Mom said.

  She was about to pull open the door when a gunshot echoed into the alley, followed by a woman screaming.

  18

  The Escape

  IT WAS TOO LATE. PRESIDENT LINCOLN HAD BEEN SHOT.

  The door we were about to open was suddenly pushed open from the inside, and almost slammed me in the head. A man charged out, his eyes wild, and a grimace of pain on his face. He was waving a knife around.

  “Make way!”

  It was obviously John Wilkes Booth. He ran out the door with a pronounced limp and almost tripped over Doubleday, who was lying still on the ground. Booth untied the horse and galloped away.

  “We’ve got to stop him!” I shouted.

  “Don’t bother,” Mom said wearily. “I know what will happen to him. They’ll hunt him down. Twelve days from now, they’ll shoot him in a Virginia barn. They don’t need any help from us.”

  Mom was leaning against the wall, like she was too tired and depressed to stand up. She looked like she might break down in tears.

  I couldn’t let it end like that. She had tried so hard to prevent the assassination. We weren’t failures. If it hadn’t been for Abner Doubleday, we might have saved the president. I put my arm around Mom and held her. And suddenly, I got an idea.

  “Maybe you can still save Lincoln,” I said. “Couldn’t you do your lifesaving stuff on him or something?”

  Mom rested her head on my shoulder for a moment without saying a word. Then she lifted it, and her eyes were bright again.

  “You’re right!” she said. “Lincoln isn’t dead yet! He won’t die until tomorrow morning!”

  “Right!”

  “The bullet was only a half inch in diameter,” she said excitedly. “It entered slightly above his left ear in the back of his head and it was lodged behind his right eye. The doctors won’t know that until after he’s dead. But I know it now. Maybe I can save him!”

  “Yeah!”

  Mom pulled out her first aid kit. We stepped over Doubleday and rushed out into the street. There was already a crowd forming in front of the theater.

  “The president has been shot!” people were shouting.

  In seconds, it was pandemonium. Women started screaming. Men started weeping. People started pushing, pointing, shoving, yelling, and bumping into each other. We couldn’t get to the front of Ford’s Theatre.

  The front doors finally opened and four or five men came out carrying
a stretcher. The only part of Lincoln I could see at first was his shoes.

  “They’re going to carry him to that house over there!” Mom said, pulling me across the street. “I’ve got to get inside.”

  “Clear a passage!” yelled one of the men carrying the stretcher.

  As Mom and I struggled to get past the people crowding the street, I caught a glimpse of Abraham Lincoln’s face. His eyes were closed. There was blood on his head. He was a very tall man, and he barely fit on the stretcher. One limp arm was dangling down, almost touching the street.

  “The carriage ride to the White House will surely kill him,” one of the stretcher-bearers said. “He must be taken to the nearest available bed!”

  “Bring him in here!” yelled a man standing in front of the house Mom had pointed out.

  There were so many people clogging the street that by the time we got to the front of the house, Lincoln was already inside it.

  “I might be able to save him!” Mom yelled to the man who was closing the door behind him.

  “I am a doctor, ma’am,” he said. “The wound is mortal. It is impossible for him to recover.”

  “You’ve got to believe me!” Mom shouted at the guy. “I know things about medicine that you don’t know. I know things doctors won’t know for more than a hundred years!”

  “We will do the best we can, ma’am.”

  “Please!” Mom begged. “I come from the future! I can help!”

  “Lunatic!” the doctor said, and then he slammed the door in Mom’s face.

  While Mom was arguing with the doctor, I turned around and saw the one thing I really did not want to see at that particular moment.

  Abner Doubleday.

  He looked groggy, staggering across the street like a drunk.

  “We gotta get out of here, Mom!” I said. “Doubleday woke up.”

  “I don’t care!” she said, pounding on the door for them to let her in. “I’ve got to save the president!”

  Abner Doubleday looked like he was coming our way.

  “Mom!” I shouted. “You zapped him with the stun gun before Lincoln was shot! Doubleday probably thinks we ran in the theater and killed the president!”

  “You’re right,” Mom said. “We’d better get out of here.”

  “Stop them!” Doubleday hollered as we ran down the steps. “They’re the ones who killed the president! The woman is insane, and she has a weapon of some sort!”

  I’m not the fastest runner in the world. Mom is no Olympic sprinter either. But we tore out of there so fast, we could have set a world record. A few people chased us for the first fifty yards or so, but then we got lost in the crowd. Just to be on the safe side, we didn’t stop running until we were at least a mile away from Ford’s Theatre.

  We collapsed to the ground, exhausted, under a tree in the middle of a grassy field. Nobody was around. It was actually quite peaceful. The only thing I could hear was my heart pounding.

  “Do you know what they did to the people who conspired with Booth to kill Lincoln?” Mom asked me as we caught our breath.

  “What?”

  “They hanged them,” Mom said.

  “Let’s go home,” I suggested.

  “Good idea.”

  She pulled the pack of new baseball cards out of her purse and handed them to me.

  “You know what?” Mom asked as I ripped open the wrapper. “I recognize this spot.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “What is it?”

  “This is where they’re going to build the Lincoln Memorial.”

  I took a card from the pack. Mom and I held hands and closed our eyes. I felt a drop of rain hit my head, and then a few more. It wasn’t long before the tingling sensation started to flow across my fingertips, down my arms, legs, and throughout my body. The rain was picking up.

  “Where’s my umbrella?” Mom asked. “I thought I brought my umbrella.”

  And then we faded away.

  19

  The Rematch

  “HEY STOSHACK! YOUR MOTHER IS A REFRIGERATOR repairman!”

  I hate Bobby Fuller. I’m not talking about the kind of hate like when you hate broccoli or hate math class. I’m talking about true, deep-down, wish-somebody-would-die kind of hate. Sometimes I think the world would be such a better place if only people like Bobby Fuller weren’t in it.

  It was Thursday, and we were playing Fuller’s team. The game had just begun, and he didn’t waste an inning before he started getting on me. Fortunately, there weren’t many parents in the bleachers to listen. It was after school, so I guess a lot of moms and dads were still at work. My mom wasn’t there, as usual.

  I looked at the first pitch, and the ump called it a strike.

  “You can’t hit, Stoshack!” Fuller hollered at me from third base. “Why bother trying? You should take up a sport that suits you better. Like gymnastics.”

  Be cool, I said to myself. What I really wanted to do was fling the bat aside, charge over to third base, and stomp him into the dirt. But I knew from experience that it wouldn’t help me any. I had to try to ignore him.

  All he wanted to do was rattle me, throw me off a little. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to let him do it. The next pitch came in, and I let it go by for ball one.

  “We missed you, Stoshack!” Fuller yelled. “We missed you when we were all standing in line for brains and good looks!”

  How come nobody ever shuts him up? Why doesn’t his coach say something to him? I know that if I ever started harassing somebody on another team, Coach Valentini would pull me aside and tell me to knock it off.

  The next pitch sailed over the catcher’s mitt and went all the way to the backstop. Ball two. Two and one.

  I shifted my left foot over just a little to increase my chance of pulling the ball down the third-base line. The thought briefly flashed through my mind that it would be so cool to hit Bobby Fuller in the head with a line drive.

  That’s when I hit Bobby Fuller in the head with a line drive.

  I didn’t mean to, honest. But the pitch was a little inside, and I got around on it pretty good. I hit a rocket right at him. I wasn’t even out of the batter’s box when I saw him put his glove up, a millisecond too late. The ball bounced off his head and ricocheted about twenty feet straight up in the air.

  I didn’t stick around to see what happened after that. I was digging for first. Kit Clement, who was coaching there, waved his arms for me to keep going, so I did.

  As I was rounding second, I looked up and saw Bobby Fuller. He was flat on his back next to third base, his arms and legs spread out as if he had been making snow angels. He wasn’t moving. The ball was sitting on the infield dirt a couple of feet away from him.

  This wasn’t any decoy. He was really hurt.

  “Somebody call a doctor!” Flip Valentini yelled.

  I know that when a kid on the other team gets hurt, you’re not supposed to help. It’s just not cool. You’re supposed to stand around quietly and not crack any jokes or anything until the kid looks like he’s okay. But Bobby Fuller was just lying there like he was dead. I was the one who hit the ball, so I suppose it was my fault. I was the closest one to him too. So I ran over and knelt beside him.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  No response.

  “Don’t help him, Stosh,” one of the guys on my team yelled. “He’s a jerk.”

  I tilted Bobby’s head back with my hand and put my ear to his mouth to listen for breathing. I couldn’t hear anything. A bunch of Bobby’s teammates had gathered around.

  I pinched his nostrils shut with two fingers and opened his mouth with my other hand. Then I covered his mouth with mine and blew some air inside.

  “Oh man!” Burton Ernie said. “Stoshack is kissing Fuller!”

  “Oh, shut up, Burton!” somebody said.

  Fuller’s chest went up slightly, and when I took my mouth away it went down again. I took a deep breath and did it again, a little harder.

  Suddenl
y, Bobby opened his eyes. I took my mouth away. He was going to be okay. Everybody on both teams started cheering.

  I didn’t mean to hit Fuller with the ball, and I didn’t mean to save his life or anything. Sometimes you just do things without thinking. Your instincts take over. But at least some good will come of this, I thought to myself. He can’t hate me anymore. If I hadn’t acted quickly, he might have died. He owed his life to me.

  “Get your filthy lips off me, Stoshack!” Fuller said, spitting on the ground and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “You’re a sick freak!”

  I didn’t know what to do. I never expected him to like me, but I thought a little thank-you was in order.

  Then Fuller did something that shocked me even more. He picked up the ball lying on the ground near him and tagged me with it.

  “You’re out, Stoshack!” he said.

  “What? You gotta be kidding!”

  The umpire came over. Fuller held the ball up to him.

  “He’s the base runner, right?” Fuller said. “And he isn’t on a base. So I tagged him. He’s out, right?”

  Everybody looked at the ump. He thought it over for a minute, scratching his head.

  “The base runner is out,” he finally announced.

  Well, I went ballistic.

  “I came over to help!” I shouted at the ump. “I might have saved his life! Why didn’t you call timeout when I was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? This is so totally unfair, it’s ridiculous!”

  “Yer out,” said the ump. “I don’t change my calls.”

  Well, I felt like walking off the field. Forever. I felt like giving up baseball. I felt like punching somebody too.

  But I didn’t do any of those things. Flip Valentini put an arm around me and walked me around the outfield for a few minutes. Flip has a way of calming a guy down. He told me I had done a wonderful thing helping Bobby, even though he was a big jerk. He said he was proud of me. And he told me how much respect I would earn if I would be able to control my temper and come back and play the rest of the game.

  So I did.

  Bobby Fuller’s coach tried to talk him into seeing a doctor to make sure he was okay, but he wouldn’t do it. I guess he didn’t want to admit he was hurt.