Jim & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “About what?”

  “I know your little secret,” Bobby said in a low voice.

  I rolled my eyes. Here we go. I knew this day would come. It was only a matter of time before Bobby would try to blackmail me.

  There are only a small number of people who know my secret. Bobby happens to be one of them. And now you are too.

  My secret is that I can travel through time.

  Oh, I know. You’ve seen it all before. You probably saw Back to the Future or read The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. People are always traveling through time in stories. But I can really do it—with baseball cards.

  It all started when I was little. I would pick up one of my dad’s old baseball cards and feel this strange tingling sensation in my fingertips. It was like they were vibrating or something.

  I didn’t think much about it, until one day I found an old card while I was cleaning out the attic for this lady named Amanda Young. I held the card in my hand and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, I was back in 1909. Baseball cards sort of act like a plane ticket for me, and they take me to the year on the card.

  Scientists say time travel is impossible. But what do they know? I’ve done it. For me, time is like a video. You can rewind it or fast-forward it. I swear I’m not making this stuff up. I’m not some crackpot who hallucinates that I’ve been abducted by aliens.

  But if word got around that I could travel through time, people might think I was a little strange. So I haven’t exactly advertised the fact that I have this “special” power. A few people know: You. My parents. My coach, Flip. My Uncle Wilbur. My cousin Samantha. That’s how Bobby Fuller found out. Samantha can’t keep her big mouth shut, and she happens to be in the same class as Bobby’s little sister.

  But you know what? I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of keeping my secret. So I can travel through time. Big deal. It’s not like I’m a criminal or anything. I’m just a little different from other kids. It’s sort of like having red hair or being left-handed. Nothing to be ashamed of.

  “Go ahead. Tell anybody you want,” I told Bobby. “Knock yourself out.”

  Maybe that would make him go away. If I didn’t keep it a secret, then he couldn’t use it against me. I turned around to go back inside the house.

  But Bobby didn’t go away. He grabbed my sleeve and looked me in the eye.

  “Stoshack,” he said. “I didn’t come over here to blackmail you.”

  “Then why did you come over?” I asked.

  “I need you to take me back in time.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Are you crazy?” I finally said.

  No way was I going to take that lunatic back in time with me. I almost got killed a few times doing it myself. With Bobby Fuller along for the ride, there was no telling what might happen, what could go wrong.

  “Stoshack,” Bobby said, “I need to meet Jim Thorpe.”

  JIM THORPE?

  Who’s Jim Thorpe? I searched my memory for the name. Jim Thorpe wasn’t a baseball player, that I knew of anyway. And I know a lot about baseball history. I have a collection of baseball books, and I’ve read them all. I know the name of just about every player in The Baseball Encyclopedia.

  But that name was familiar. Jim Thorpe may have been a pro football player, it seemed to me. And I thought he had something to do with the Olympics a long time ago. One of the kids in my class did a report on him a while back. I didn’t remember any details.

  “Who’s Jim Thorpe?” I finally asked.

  “Only the greatest athlete of the twentieth century,” Bobby told me.

  “And he played baseball?”

  “Sure, he played baseball!” Bobby insisted.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  Bobby is probably the dumbest kid in our whole school. I heard he flunked gym last year, and I have no idea what you have to do to flunk gym.

  “I read a book about him,” Bobby said.

  Bobby Fuller read a book? Now, that was a shocker.

  “So why do you want to meet him so badly?” I asked.

  “Jim Thorpe was my great-grandfather.”

  3

  Bobby Fuller’s Secret

  I SAT DOWN ON THE STEPS, AND BOBBY SAT DOWN NEXT to me. Bobby Fuller was related to Jim Thorpe? Who knew? He never mentioned it before. It wasn’t one of those things that everybody talked about at school.

  Before Bobby could tell me anything else, the screen door opened and my mom came out.

  “Robert Fuller!” she said, looking just as surprised as I had when Bobby showed up at the door. Mom recognized Bobby right away because of all the times I played baseball against him. She knew the horrible things he did and said to me over the years too.

  “Hello, Mrs. Stoshack,” Bobby said pleasantly, shaking her hand. Like a lot of bad guys, he knew how to act like a little angel when he was around grown-ups. That way, the grown-ups didn’t know what a jerk he was.

  I figured my mom would probably slap Bobby across the face or call the police. But when all is said and done, she’s still a mom.

  “Would you like some cookies?” she asked.

  Why is it that we never have any cookies in the house when I want some, but they always magically appear whenever company comes over? And how come I’m not allowed to eat cookies before dinner, but it’s okay when company comes over before dinner?

  Anyway, I wasn’t going to complain. Mom went inside and came out with a huge plate full of chocolate-chip cookies. Bobby and I each took two.

  I could tell my mom was dying to know why Bobby was there, but I threw her a look that said we needed privacy. She scurried back into the house, leaving the plate of cookies with us. I knew she’d pump me for details later.

  “Jim Thorpe was a Native American,” Bobby said when the door slammed shut. I guess I looked puzzled, so he added, “an Indian.”

  “Yeah, I knew that,” I said, not all that convincingly.

  “He had seven kids, and one of his daughters was my grandma,” Bobby continued. “She died when I was little, so I don’t remember her. But I’m one-eighth Sac and Fox Indian.”

  Bobby Fuller was part Indian? He didn’t look Indian. I figured he was Irish or German or something.

  “That’s cool,” I said, and it was. I wish I was related to somebody famous. “How come you don’t tell everybody?”

  “Tell people I have Indian blood?” Bobby said. “I don’t think so.”

  “What, is there prejudice against Indians?” I asked.

  Bobby looked at me like I was an idiot so I didn’t press it. I know we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a lot of prejudice in the world. White kids don’t often see it because it doesn’t affect us directly. So we assume it doesn’t exist.

  “Stoshack,” Bobby said. “I want to meet my great-grandfather.”

  Well, I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t want to do it. Time travel is not an exact science. It’s not like I could step inside some time machine, push a few buttons, and poof—I would magically appear in Jim Thorpe’s living room. There are usually some complications, to put it mildly. I could get killed.

  One time, I went back to 1919 to try to prevent the Black Sox scandal. I ended up getting kidnapped, tied to a chair, and shot at.

  Another time, I went back to 1863 with my mom to see if Abner Doubleday really invented baseball. But we landed in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, with a bunch of Confederate soldiers shooting at us.

  And that time when Flip and I went back to 1942 to see Satchel Paige, some guy tried to shoot us because his daughter fell in love with Flip.

  Come to think of it, I’ve been shot at a lot.

  The point is, if I’m going to use my power to go back in time, I’ve got to have a really good reason. I won’t risk my life just for the fun of it or to meet some famous baseball player.

  Besides, why should I do any favors for Bobby Fuller? What did he ever do for me? He’s been tormenting me since our T-ball day
s. It’s not my job to help arrange his family reunions.

  It was obvious that the only reason Bobby was suddenly being nice to me and my mom was because he wanted a favor.

  “I know you don’t like me, Stoshack,” Bobby said.

  He got no argument from me there. Bobby reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills. There were some tens and twenties in there. He might have had a hundred dollars or more. I didn’t even want to guess what illegal thing he had done to get that much money. But he held it out to me.

  “Here.”

  “You’ll pay me to take you back in time to meet Jim Thorpe?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Fuller said, “like you’d pay a cab driver to take you someplace.”

  I’m not a cab driver. I didn’t take the cash. If I went back in time with Bobby Fuller and got hurt—or even killed—his money wouldn’t do me any good. My life is worth more than a hundred bucks.

  But there was another reason I didn’t take the cash. Even if I’d wanted to help Bobby, I couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but in order to go back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, I would have to have a Jim Thorpe baseball card. And I don’t even know if there WERE any Jim Thorpe baseball cards.”

  And with that, Fuller reached into his pocket and handed me this:

  I started to feel that tingling sensation in my fingertips.

  The card was worn and wrinkled. Probably not worth much in that condition. But as I held it in my hand, I started to feel that faint tingling sensation. It was sort of like the feeling you get when you touch a TV screen. It didn’t hurt. It was a pleasant feeling.

  “This card has been in my family for years,” Bobby said.

  The tingling got stronger, and in a few more seconds my whole hand felt like it was vibrating. Then my wrist. Then my arm. I knew from experience that if I held on any longer, I would reach the point of no return.

  I dropped the card.

  “Let me think about it,” I told Bobby.

  “Think hard, Stoshack,” he said. “This is important.”

  He snatched the last cookie off the plate before I could get it, jumped down the steps, and walked away.

  4

  Pros and Cons

  WHENEVER I WANT TO IMPRESS MY TEACHERS AT SCHOOL, I use the word “ambivalent.” It’s a great word because most kids don’t know what it means.

  Well, I’ll tell you what it means so you can use it at school and impress your teachers. It means having mixed feelings. Like when you can’t make up your mind about something and it really tears you apart. This is a problem I seem to have a lot.

  When Bobby Fuller asked me to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, I promised him I’d think it over. So I did.

  Before I made any decision one way or another, I figured I’d better get some information. The Louisville Library is just a couple of miles from my house, so I hopped on my bike the next day after school and rode over there.

  Yeah, I know the Internet is easier. I could have just Googled “Jim Thorpe” and found a zillion websites about him. But I like to look through books. I like the feeling of paper on my fingers. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. And I get sick of staring at a screen all the time. It hurts my eyes.

  Anyway, there’s only one number in the Dewey Decimal System that I know by heart—796. That’s the number for sports. If you walk into any library in America and go to 796 in the nonfiction section, you’ll find a shelf or two of sports books.

  I scanned the shelves until I found some books about the greatest athletes of all time. If Jim Thorpe was as amazing as Fuller said he was, he should be in there, right?

  Well, what I found was a little bit suprising. Not only did Jim Thorpe play major-league baseball, but he also played professional football. So I was right! In fact, he was one of the original members of the Football Hall of Fame. But the most interesting thing was that Thorpe didn’t become famous for playing baseball or football. He became famous because, in the 1912 Olympics, he won gold medals in the decathlon and the pentathlon.

  I didn’t even know what those events were at first, so I looked them up in a book about the Olympics. In the decathlon, it said, athletes compete in ten different track-and-field events, everything from sprinting to pole vaulting to throwing the javelin. So the winner of the Olympic decathlon is considered to be the best all-around athlete in the world. The pentathlon, which isn’t in the Olympics anymore, was made up of five other events. Thorpe won that too.

  These days, hardly any pro athletes play more than one sport. Most of them specialize, and many even specialize within their sport. Like in baseball they’ve got “closers,” whose job is to come in and pitch just one inning. They’ve got designated hitters who don’t have to play the field. In football they’ve got guys who only punt, or do nothing but return punts.

  But Jim Thorpe did it all—baseball, football, plus all those track-and-field events. He must have been like Superman in his time.

  I know a lot about sports, but I had no idea how great Jim Thorpe was. It didn’t make sense that somebody who was that good wasn’t more famous. Why hadn’t I heard about this guy before?

  Then I got to a part in the book that caught my eye:

  “…seven months after his Olympic triumph, it was discovered that Jim Thorpe was not an amateur athlete, as the rules required. He had played semi-pro baseball for two summers before the Olympics, earning as little as two dollars per game. Thorpe was forced to return his Olympic medals.”

  What?! The guy was the greatest athlete in the world and they took his Olympic medals away because he made a few bucks playing baseball? Wow. That was unbelievable. Jim Thorpe really got screwed over.

  Maybe I’m dumb or something, but I didn’t even know there was a day when professional athletes weren’t allowed to compete in the Olympics. I mean, pros are in the Olympics all the time now. You see NBA “dream teams” playing Olympic basketball. You see NHL stars playing Olympic hockey. You see Olympic athletes in TV commercials. They have to be getting paid. How else could they afford to train so hard for four years if they don’t get paid? What are they supposed to do for money, deliver pizzas?

  I always thought the Olympics were about being the best, not being the best amateur or the best professional. It shouldn’t matter who you are.

  There was an old newspaper article about Jim Thorpe printed in the book. I made a photocopy in case I might need it later.

  All kinds of thoughts were running through my head as I sat down with the book. Maybe Bobby Fuller was hoping he could warn Thorpe about what was going to happen to him. Maybe he was hoping he could save Jim Thorpe’s reputation, and make his great-grandfather a hero again. Return the glory to his family, and to all American Indians. Maybe Bobby wanted to go back in time and change history.

  And I was the only one who could help him.

  I was feeling…well, ambivalent. And when I’m feeling ambivalent, I’ll tell you what I do. I take a sheet of paper and put a line down the middle. I write PRO on one side of the line and CON on the other. Then I try to figure out which side of the paper deserves to win.

  I thought about that last point on the PRO side. It was a long shot, but maybe if Bobby went back in time and met his great-grandfather it would turn him around as a person, help him solve his personal problems. Maybe he wouldn’t be so angry at the world. And then maybe he wouldn’t be so angry at me.

  I looked over my sheet of PROS and CONS and asked myself if one side outweighed the other. There was no clear winner. I was leaning toward the CON side, but I was still ambivalent.

  “The library will be closing in 15 minutes,” the librarian announced over the loudspeaker.

  I put the books away and rode my bike home.

  My mother was putting dinner out when I opened the kitchen door. Uncle Wilbur was at the table waiting to eat. He’s really old, even older than Flip.

  “Wash your hands, Joey,” said Uncle Wilbur.

  “Where were you?�
�� asked my mother.

  “At the library,” I told her.

  “Doing homework?”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted.

  After I washed up, I told them what I’d learned about Jim Thorpe. Uncle Wilbur said he remembered Thorpe as a football player, but even he was too young to remember the 1912 Olympics.

  “I don’t trust that Fuller boy,” Mom said as she put some vegetables on my plate. “What if you two go back in time and he steals your baseball card? You’ll have no way to get home. You’ll be stuck in the past forever. Did you think about that?”

  She was right. And it hadn’t crossed my mind.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” I said.

  Uncle Wilbur sighed and we looked at him. Oh yeah. If I didn’t have the power to travel through time, I wouldn’t even have an Uncle Wilbur.

  You see, a year ago, my Uncle Wilbur didn’t exist. It’s true! I was always told that he died as a child in an influenza epidemic that killed millions of people back in 1919. But when I went back to that year to meet Shoeless Joe Jackson, I also met Wilbur when he was a boy. I had some flu medicine with me and I gave it to him. When I came back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur was alive. So I guess the medicine saved his life. It was a happy accident.

  “What do I always tell you to do when you get a lemon?” Uncle Wilbur asked.

  “Make lemonade,” I replied.

  “Right,” he said. “And what do I always tell you to do when life throws you a curve?”

  “Hit it,” I replied.

  “That’s right,” Uncle Wilbur said. “Hit it hard.”

  At some moment in time you have to stop thinking about whether or not you should do something and just do it. So I decided I would take Bobby Fuller back in time to meet Jim Thorpe. I would do it for Bobby’s sake, even though he was a world-class jerk. My good deed for the day. For a lifetime, really.

  After dinner, I cleared off the table and helped my mom wash the dishes. Then I looked up Bobby Fuller’s phone number in the school directory and called him.