Roberto & Me (8 page)

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.”