Abner & Me (3 page)

MY DAD TAUGHT ME JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING I KNOW
. He taught me how to play ball, of course, and all about baseball card collecting. He taught me how to fire a rifle and how to throw a Frisbee, how to play gin rummy and how to put together model cars. When I was little he taught me how to fix my bike. When I got bigger, he taught me how to jack up the car and change a flat tire.

My dad once told me that the night I was born he made a list of all the things fathers should teach their sons. He went down the list and checked off the items one by one as he accomplished them. Even after my parents got divorced, Dad would still come over every week and teach me something from his list.

“Every kid needs to know how to build a campfire,” he would say. “Someday you'll grow up and I
won't be around to do it for you.”

He won't be teaching me much anymore, though. My dad was nearly killed in a car accident with a drunken driver. He's lucky, actually, because he was able to gain back some movement in his upper body after a lot of therapy. He still can't walk, though. Dad and I used to spend hours just throwing a baseball back and forth in front of our house. He can't do that anymore, of course, and he really misses it. So do I.

Mom doesn't usually hang around when she drops me off at Dad's apartment. They get along okay, I suppose. But sometimes the old bad feelings come up and they start to argue.

“I've got something cool to show you, Butch,” he said. Dad always calls me Butch.

He waited to make sure Mom was gone and then pulled a baseball out of his pocket. It was in one of those clear plastic cases that prevents you from getting fingerprints on it.

I looked at the ball carefully, turning it around until I could see the signature on the other side…

“Wow.”

I knew a little bit about Paige. He was a star pitcher in the Negro Leagues for a long time. When the major leagues finally opened their doors to
black players in the late 1940s, he was pretty old. The Cleveland Indians signed him anyway, and he could still get guys out. He was still pitching in the majors when he was about sixty years old. Now he's in the Hall of Fame.

“How much is this worth?” I asked my dad.

“A couple of hundred,” he said. “I got it on eBay for half that.”

My dad used to be into collecting baseball cards big time. But he got tired of that hobby and sold off most of his collection so he could start collecting autographed baseballs instead.

Ever since his accident he can't work, so he gets disability checks. They're supposed to pay for food and rent and stuff he needs. But I think he spends a good chunk of it on the Three Bees, as he calls them—beer, blackjack, and baseballs. That's one of the reasons he and my mom split up. She didn't like the way Dad spent their money.

“Hey Dad,” I said, handing him back the ball. “Did you ever hear of Abner Doubleday?”

“Sure. He's the guy who invented baseball. Everybody knows that.”

“Some people say that's just a myth,” I told him.

“I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame once when I was a kid,” Dad said. “I remember they had this display case with a beat-up old baseball in it. They said it was the Abner Doubleday Baseball, and that they found it with Abner Doubleday's stuff after he died. That's good enough for me.”

The first baseball?

“Well, I was thinking…” I started.

At that, Dad got this look in his eye that he gets when he thinks he's come up with a great idea. He looked like he might hop right out of the wheelchair. I'm sure he would have if he could have.

“You're gonna go back in time to meet Abner Doubleday!”

“I don't know if it's going to work,” I said, “but it would be cool to find out whether or not he really invented baseball.”

“Cool? Forget about cool, Joe!” Dad gushed. “You can make yourself a million dollars easy!”

Dad was always thinking of ways to make a million dollars easy. It had never even occurred to me that I could make money by meeting Abner Doubleday.

“How, Dad?”

“It's simple,” he said, holding up his autographed Satchel Paige ball. “You ask him to sign a baseball for you!”

“You think a baseball signed by Abner Doubleday would be worth something?”

“Are you kidding?” Dad said. “You will have in your hand the only baseball in the
world
that was signed by the man who actually invented the game! Remember when Barry Bonds hit his seventy-third homer in 2001? That ball sold for around half a million. A ball signed by Abner Doubleday should be worth twice as much as that. The sky's the limit!”

“I don't know, Dad,” I said.

I had never told my dad that I got two Shoeless Joe Jackson autographs when I went back to 1919. If he had known that I gave Flip Valentini a million dollars' worth of autographs, Dad would have gone ballistic. But Flip really needed the money, and I
wanted to help him out.

There's probably nothing
illegal
about going back in time and using what you know about the future to make money. But I don't feel comfortable with it. Something about it feels wrong. It's like stealing the answers to a test and getting an A on it without having to study. It's cheating.

“Oh come on, Joe!” my dad said. “It's just
one
baseball. All you have to do is get the guy to sign it. That's not asking a lot. It wouldn't hurt anyone. And think of the payoff! You would be able to buy just about anything in the world, Joe.”

I tried to come up with reasons not to do it. I told Dad that I would have to use a photograph, because there were no Abner Doubleday baseball cards.

“So see if you can use a photograph,” he said.

I told Dad that Mom would probably not let me travel back through time anyway, because with each trip she was getting more concerned about my safety.

“So don't tell her,” Dad whispered. “You're a big boy. Mom doesn't have to know everything you do.”

“I don't know, Dad…”

“Just think about it,” he said. “That's all I ask.”

When I got home that night, I went up to my room and thought about it. I had never lied to my mother. Well, maybe once or twice when she asked me if I liked her new dress or a new recipe she was trying out. But that was just so I wouldn't hurt her feelings. That's the
good
kind of lying.

I brushed my teeth, climbed into bed, and
thought about it some more. It would be easy enough to go back and meet Doubleday, get one stupid ball signed, and come home without my mother ever knowing I was gone.

But what if I did that? Then I would have a priceless baseball. If I sold it and I suddenly had millions of dollars, Mom would know I'd gone back in time without getting her permission. And if I didn't sell the ball, there wouldn't be much point in having Doubleday sign it to begin with.

It was hard to sleep. But finally I decided that it was ridiculous to torture myself over this whole thing. There were no Abner Doubleday baseball cards. I didn't even know whether or not a photograph of Abner Doubleday even existed.

Eventually I fell asleep.

OKAY
,
SO A PHOTO OF ABNER DOUBLEDAY
DOES
EXIST
.

Here's what happened. I usually look through the mail when I get home from school. I give it to Uncle Wilbur, and he looks through it. Then Mom looks through it when she comes home from work an hour later. But it was Friday, the one day Mom gets home before me.

“Joey, there's a package for you!” she hollered upstairs to me.

I came down to the kitchen, and Mom was holding up a large envelope. She was still in her nurse's uniform. Uncle Wilbur was sitting at the kitchen table. The envelope was addressed to me.

I don't usually get a lot of mail. Just a couple of sports magazines and catalogs, mostly. The return address on the envelope Mom was holding said National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

“Hey, maybe you've been inducted into the Hall of Fame, Joe,” Uncle Wilbur joked.

At first I didn't know what was going on. Why would the Hall of Fame be contacting
me
? I had completely forgotten about the e-mail I sent to them a few nights earlier.

“Don't just stand there,” Mom said. “Open it.”

I tore open the envelope. Inside was a letter that said I owed ten dollars for “One black and white, 8 × 10 photo.”

I looked in the envelope again and pulled out the photo. It was a picture of a guy. He was wearing some kind of military uniform. He looked very serious. His curly hair was parted so that almost all of it fell to one side of his head.

Abner Doubleday

“Who's the doofus?” Mom asked.

I knew exactly who it was—the one and only Abner Doubleday. I had to admit, he did look a bit like a doofus.

As I held the photo, I felt something strange. It was that tingling sensation, the feeling I got when I touched old baseball cards.

That was it. I remembered the feeling well. It meant I was about to travel through time! It was going to happen!

I dropped the photo on the table before it was too late. The tingling sensation stopped immediately. The photo landed facedown on the kitchen table. This is what was printed across the back…

 

A
BNER
D
OUBLEDAY
, 1863. I
NVENTOR OF BASEBALL
?

 

“What's going on, Joey?” Mom asked.

I must have had a frightened look on my face. I didn't want to tell her about Doubleday yet. I hadn't prepared what I was going to say to her about it. In the back of my mind, I'd assumed there wouldn't be a photo of Doubleday, so I wouldn't have to deal with it.

I decided to just lay it on the line.

“This guy Abner Doubleday may have invented baseball,” I said. “Or maybe he didn't. Nobody knows for sure. I was…thinking of traveling through time to find out.”

I cringed, waiting for her to tell me it was too dangerous and all that.

Mom picked up the picture and turned it over to look at the front of it again. Then she looked at me.

“I think it's a great idea!” she said.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. All the other times I'd told her I wanted to take one of my “trips,” she'd come up with every possible reason why I shouldn't.

“You're kidding, right?” I asked.

“I am not,” she said. “I think you should do it.”

“You're going to let me go back to 1863?”

“You can go on one condition,” she said.

Here it comes, I thought. She's going to make me bring along my boots or cough medicine or something really dorky that will totally embarrass me.

“You have to take
me
with you,” Mom said.

I shook my head. I couldn't have heard that right. It was time to get my hearing checked.

“Funny, Mom.”

“I want to go,” Mom stated. “Whenever you travel through time, I just sit home and worry. You're out there meeting these big celebrities and having these incredible experiences. You get to witness history as it's happening. This has been so educational for you. I guess I've come around to thinking that these trips are a good thing. I want to see what it's like.”

Educational? Ha! My mother is clueless.

I'd never told Mom how educational it was when I went to meet Jackie Robinson in 1947 and a psychotic batboy chased me through the streets of Brooklyn, swinging a baseball bat at my head.

I'd never told her how educational it was when I went to meet Shoeless Joe Jackson in 1919 and these gangsters kidnapped me, locked me in a closet, tied me to a chair, and shot at me.

I'd never told Mom that something has gone wrong every trip back through time. History isn't educational. It's history. And a couple of times, I was almost history too!

“Time travel isn't an exact science, Mom,” I explained delicately. “It's not like in the movies. You don't step inside some booth, twist a few dials, and
poof
, you're standing next to Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle. It's not that easy.”

“Oh come on, Joey,” she said, pinching my cheek. “Working at the hospital is so boring. I need a little adventure in my life. When's the last time we went on a vacation together, anyway?”

“A long time ago.”

“Look,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “we'll zip back to 1863, ask this Doubleday guy if he invented baseball, and zip right back home. It will take five minutes. We'll have fun. Hey, I'll pack a lunch! We can even have a picnic in the past! What do you think?”

“Uh, I don't know, Mom. What about Uncle Wilbur?”

“He'll be fine.” Uncle Wilbur had fallen asleep in his wheelchair. “He'll never even know we were gone.”

The whole thing sounded like a bad idea to me. I
mean, I did want to go back in time again. But I didn't particularly want to go with my
mother
. I mean, I'm thirteen years old! I don't even like to be seen going to the supermarket with my mother. Why would I want to travel one hundred and fifty years with her?

“It's dangerous,” I said. “You might get hurt.”

“Don't worry about me,” she said. “Why should you get to have all the fun?”

She wouldn't give it a rest. She kept egging me on, saying I was a party pooper and that I had no spirit of adventure. It was a total role reversal. She was trying to talk
me
into traveling through time, and I was giving
her
all the reasons why it was a bad idea.

“You took your father,” she finally said, looking a little hurt.

That was true. I'd taken my father with me to 1932 to see if Babe Ruth really predicted his famous “called shot” home run. I was nearly killed on that trip when I got into a car with the Babe and found out he drove like a maniac. But I never told Mom that.

“Okay, okay,” I agreed. “I'll take you with me.”

“Yippee!” She looked so happy. “So how do we do it?”

There were two crucial things I needed to bring with me on a trip to meet Abner Doubleday. First, I needed a new pack of cards. Baseball cards take me to the year on the card, so they would be our return
ticket home. If I didn't have new cards with me, Mom and I would be stuck in the past forever.

Second, I needed a baseball so I could get it autographed for my dad. And a Sharpie marker, of course, to write on the baseball.

I had Mom take the picture of Doubleday and follow me into the living room. We sat on the couch side by side.

“Oh, wait a minute,” she said. “There are a few things I need to bring along too.”

She grabbed her purse and ran back to the kitchen, then ran upstairs while I waited. Finally she came back down and sat on the couch next to me.

“What's in the purse?” I asked.

“A first aid kit,” she said, going through the bag, “peanut butter crackers. Go-Gurt. A couple of juice boxes. Some other snacks. Medicine. A portable umbrella…”

“Do you really have to bring an
umbrella
?” I asked. “You'll look like Mary Poppins with that thing.”

“Don't be silly. It might be raining in 1863!”

“You know, there may be a weight limit on how much we can bring along,” I said. “Like on a plane.”

“Oh, stop it,” Mom said. “This weighs next to nothing. Let's go. I don't want to keep Mr. Doubleday waiting for lunch.”

“Mom, did it ever occur to you that Abner Doubleday might not
want
to have lunch with us?”

“Then we'll have a picnic without him,” my
mother replied. “We don't need that doofus to have a good time.”

I took my mother's hand. It had been a long time since we'd held hands. I picked up the photo of Abner Doubleday.

“Are you scared?” I asked her.

“A little,” she said, “but scared in a good way.”

“Close your eyes, Mom.”

It wasn't long until I started to feel a very faint tingling sensation in my fingertips. It was sort of like the feeling you get when you touch a TV screen. It didn't hurt. It was a pleasant feeling. The familiar tingling got stronger, and then my whole hand was vibrating, then my wrists, and then my arms.

“Do you feel it, Mom?” I asked.

“Yes!” she said excitedly.

I felt the sensation sweep across my chest to the other side of my body, then down my legs. I wanted to open my eyes, but I didn't dare because I thought it would be creepy to see myself disappear.

My entire body was tingling now. I had reached the point of no return. I didn't know what would happen if I dropped the picture at this point, and I wasn't about to find out.

At the last possible instant, I grabbed the stupid umbrella from my mother's hand and tossed it aside.

And then we faded away.