Gold Dust

by Chris Lynch

  And then it was over, and I waited. Kids and kids and kids started piling out of the auditorium, into the lobby, out of the lobby, and onto Mass. Ave. There must have been seating for a million in that place because not only could I not see Napoleon and Red-headed Beverly, I couldn’t really make out any faces at all. It was like a sea of faces, and they all looked pretty much the same, pale and bombed-out and focused on the snow that was coming down hard out there.

  I just kept looking, and looking, going high up on my toes, then scrunching down low like a nut, as if I could find them under the throng. The crowd was getting thinner, and I still was getting nowhere, and may have even missed them already. Finally, I took off my Bruins hat and put it up on the end of my bat, and held the bat high in the air. If that didn’t stand as my own personal flag, nothing would. If I got the chance to hit the moon with the next Apollo mission, that was what I would stick in the moon dirt so all my friends would know it was me.

  But this was not the moon, even if the symphony was pretty close.

  “What are you doing, kid? Go on, get outta here,” one of the white-haired doormen said. The nice guy, the baseball guy, stepped in and told me I could stay, but I wanted to go by now anyway. The last stragglers were filing out. I had missed my chance.

  “You know what I would do in weather like this,” the baseball guy said. “I would go over to the Christian Science Center. Pack a stack of hard iceballs, then hit ’em out of my hand. I used to do that down the field for hours and hours, in the winters when I couldn’t get nobody to play with me. And the Christian Science Center is the closest thing to a field. In snow can’t tell the difference, right?”

  “You are really crazy, Richard, you know that?”

  I looked up to see the very last two symphoniacs, or whatever their kind are called, stepping gently down the stairs. It was Beverly doing the talking, but Napoleon Charlie Ellis was grinning pretty hard.

  All at once it hit me, as they took the steps in sync, graceful as a couple of movie musical dancers, and as close as a wedding couple.

  There they were. They were a they.

  So? So. That didn’t bother me. Why should that bother me?

  “I’m not crazy,” I said, finally thinking to remove my Bruins cap from the end of the bat.

  “Was its little head getting cold?” Beverly said, patting the top of my bat.

  They were all dressed up, as if it was nighttime and they were forced by their parents to do something boring and awful. Only nobody was forcing them. It made less and less sense. Napoleon was wearing a long navy blue wool overcoat, black leather gloves, and new-looking shiny black galoshes. Beverly had on a coat of similar length and material, only red, with a kind of lamby collar and a matching hat.

  They were such a they. How and when had that happened, and exactly what, I was asking myself, what business was it of mine? They looked good, like a shrunk-down dressed-up pair of fancy classical music adults, or a pair of pumped-up plastic dolls off a wedding cake. And anyway, why even notice?

  Because it felt like somebody was stealing from me. Who, stealing what? I had no idea Stupid. I felt angry. No, no, just stupid. I was out of my element, was the thing. I really needed to get back where I belonged.

  “What are you doing here?” Napoleon asked.

  “I came to rescue you,” I said, pointing at him.

  “From what?” Beverly asked. “From culture? From music? From civilization, pleasure, me?”

  I stared dumbly at her. “Yes,” I finally said. “Come on, Napoleon, you served your sentence, now I’m here to spring you.”

  “You do not know what you missed,” he said to me. “You really should have come.”

  “Really,” Beverly agreed, “it was marvelous. Even you would have appreciated it.”

  The “even you” bit didn’t even bother me. “Ya, well, you don’t know what you missed. All I did was teach myself to be Fred Lynn, over there at Northeastern, that’s all. And if you’re gonna be Jim Rice with me we have a lot of work to do starting right away.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Is that who we are going to be? Can’t we be who we already are?”

  Beverly put a hand lightly on Napoleon’s hand. My eyes went to it like a laser. “If he’s this worked up, they must be pretty decent baseball players.”

  “These are not just decent baseball players. This is Lynn and Rice. The best pair of rookies, ever. The Gold Dust Twins...”

  “Well that is interesting, if they are twins. I didn’t even know they were related.”

  “No, not actually... come on, Napoleon. I’ll explain it while we’re, you know, while...” Somewhere in there I must have suspected the baseball-in-a-blizzard idea was not quite all there, if I couldn’t even speak it.

  But it didn’t change my mind.

  “Tell me you’re not here to force poor Napoleon to play baseball in this? Tell me that, Richard.”

  “I... I’d like to tell you that”

  “Nut,” she said, but she didn’t say it the way a lot of people would.

  “The Gold Dust Twins,” I said again to Napoleon. “I just had this thought... all right, there is a possibility that this will sound a little nutty... anyway... you can hit, I can tell that already. I just feel like... that could be us.”

  As the words came out, I felt as if the ground had been whipped out from under me. I was hanging there, floating and exposed in the snow. I looked away.

  If Napoleon thought I was a nut he was doing a very kind job of not letting me know. “I don’t have much of an idea of what you are talking about, Richard.”

  I was feeling really foolish now, at the symphony, during a snowstorm, blurting out my mental vision that now was starting to sound like nonsense even to me because the air of the real world was now all over it.

  “Nevermind,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I like the sound of it anyway, Gold Dust Twins.” He nodded, looking out at the sky where you couldn’t see a thing. Flakes of snow settled on his face, and melted there, leaving small shining dots.

  “Oh you’re not seriously...” Redheaded Beverly was openly laughing at the two of us now.

  “Do you mind if I go?” he said to her.

  “Well, I don’t suppose even baseball—even snow baseball—can undo what the symphony does for a person. But you still owe me a trip to Brigham’s.”

  Now it was Napoleon’s turn to shake his head at her. “I cannot understand why you people up here are so interested in ice cream in this weather.”

  Beverly gave Napoleon a mysterious grin, pulled her collar tight around her neck, and headed off through the snow, humming loudly some classical something that did not have cannons in it.

  “So,” Napoleon said, producing from his pocket his black Bruins cap and pulling it low over his ears. “This had better be good.”

  My man. I knew it. My snowstorm-baseball-hardhead partner.

  “I knew I was right about you,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  I handed him my Adirondack and started towing him along by it. “Ill pitch you snowballs. This is excellent quality snowball snow. I know this great great place, the Christian Science Center—been there?—and anyway, you’re gonna love it, trust me, you are gonna love this, I know you are.”

  “Fine. And then, I will teach you cricket, and you will love that. Trust me, I know you will.”

  “Oh, well, ya, sure, we’ll see... y’know, take it one step at a time, right?” I knew once I showed him baseball, the way I knew baseball, that the cricket stuff just wouldn’t be an issue anymore. I just knew this, inside.

  But I also knew that at this moment he didn’t care one lick about baseball. And he was coming with me anyway. That was something.

  Behind me, Napoleon Charlie Ellis was laughing. Which I figured meant he was aware of it too.

  He stopped walking and flattened out his feet, letting me pull him like a sled to the snowfield. Which I was happy to do.

  FORE
IGN TERRITORY

  FROZEN HOURS IS WHAT they were, the time Napoleon and I spent on the tundra of the Christian Science Center. I would lob my perfectly sculpted ice balls after stacking them in a neat pyramid by my side like cannonballs. Easy at first, but after Napoleon had loosened up—he was out there in his Symphony Geek outfit after all—I could see that it would do no harm at all to throw him harder, then harder stuff. The extra speed, the extra motion of it all was good for both of us, not just because it was a lot more fun—which it was—but also because it helped us to stave off death. It was cold out there.

  Which Napoleon had to be feeling even more than I did. But you’d never know it. He stood in there, taking his cuts, blowing on his hands, taking his cuts, missing a lot of pitches but now and then catching one and smashing it to smithereens so spectacularly that we had to try and do it again even before all the hundred million little crystals had landed back on earth again.

  In fact, we got it going so well, I didn’t even take a turn hitting.

  I said, I didn’t even take a turn hitting.

  I was more regular than the pitching machine in the cage, cranking and cranking, until my gloves got so wet and frosty it was warmer to throw them off. Napoleon, for his part, was taking one mean cut after another even though I could see, after a while, that he was slowing down and stiffening up, in his leather-gloved hands, his wool-jacketed arms.

  Finally I just stopped pitching and walked up to him. He stood there, as if waiting for the next pitch, as if he was a statue and couldn’t even tell that I was walking up close. Only then, two feet away, could I really tell how cold he was. His lips were a very unusual and couldn’t-possibly-be-healthy shade of purply charcoal. His grip on the bat was so hard it was like one of those guys who get themselves stuck to a frozen sign pole by licking it.

  “You want to quit?” I asked.

  He didn’t even answer.

  “Hello? Hey, are you all right?” I patted his shoulder, mostly to test if anyone was still in there.

  Even his voice was frozen. “We... can... continue... for... a... while... if... you...”

  I was afraid if I waited for him to finish he might not survive. “You better get home before you die,” I said.

  He nodded, and did not struggle as I removed the bat from his hands.

  “Anyone ever tell you you were kind of stubborn?”

  “N-no,” he stammered.

  I shook my head.

  It occurred to me as we shuffled across the broad snow plain that I had never before seen a person so far out of his element.

  That is, until we got me to Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant.

  The very idea of me going to a fancy restaurant was so out of the normal that this is how it went when I left the house, calling back over my shoulder from the front porch:

  “See ya, I’m going out to Anthony’s Pier Four with the new kid in school and his father who’s a university professor.”

  “Hey,” my father barked from the living room. If you knew my house, I would not have had to add the part about barking from the living room. If he speaks, odds are pretty strong he is barking from the living room. “Young man, you are not going anywhere unless you tell me where you are really going.”

  The Pier 4 idea was not even a possibility.

  “Movies,” I said.

  “Be back by ten,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I could be back by midnight if I wanted, since by ten he was always asleep. In the living room.

  I had told Napoleon that he and his dad could pick me up on the corner in front of Woolworth’s. I said it was because my steep narrow hill was rotten in the winter with the ice and with cars parked all the way on both sides up and down making it more likely than not that someone not used to it would have an accident. Which was true. If it was summer, I would have had to think of something else, though.

  “Well, Richard,” Dr. Ellis said when we had been seated by a guy in a suit who made me feel like I ought to have been serving him. “We are very pleased you could make it this evening. Aren’t we, son?”

  “Yes,” Napoleon said. “Thank you, Richard.”

  You might have thought that was the kind of thing a guy was saying because his father was forcing him to, but I could believe him. He sounded sincere. And he had already thanked me about three times in the car.

  “Happy to be here,” I said.

  A guy in a white suit came by then and served us these giant, mushroom-shaped rolls with big tongs. We hadn’t even ordered any.

  “This is cool,” I said. “Nice place.”

  “You have never been here before,” Dr. Ellis said.

  I shook my head. “We eat at home pretty much all the time. I do the cooking a lot even. So this is a treat.”

  “How many of you are at home then?” the doctor asked.

  Oh no. How was I getting into this? I thought we were going to be talking about baseball. Even Caribbean literature would be better than this. Like I said, the way things went there wasn’t a great need to talk about yourself or your home very much. You just figured everyone was aware of everyone and kind of shut up about it. I liked it that way.

  “Just the two of us, sir,” I said. “Me and my dad.”

  “Like us,” Napoleon said, as if we were all a part of this excellent club.

  “Ya,” I said, looking at the two of them all dusted up and starched and looking like one of those Father’s Day sale ads for Filene’s. Napoleon had to be the only guy in the world who got more dressed up after he took off the school uniform every afternoon.

  “Oh my, I wish I had known that,” Dr. Ellis said. “We could have asked your father along.”

  Yikes.

  “He doesn’t like restaurants much. Kind of... kind of a homebody.”

  “What does he do for work?”

  “He works for Midas. You know, the muffler guys?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and looked at me then with what felt like was a little extra X-ray. As if he was trying to figure out how far to go with these questions. He paused. “So, you are a huge baseball fan.”

  Dr. Ellis was a good man. A very good, polite man.

  Trying to be likewise, I made every effort to discuss baseball without being boring, or nuts. Mostly I talked about the league I played in, the Sox games I’d seen, and about us, me and Napoleon.

  “Should have seen him today, sir. Napoleon was tearing the ball up.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Ellis said, grinning as he half-buried his face in the gigantic laminated menu. “I spent most of the afternoon bringing him large cups of tea and keeping the fireplace tended.”

  I looked at Napoleon, who looked at his menu. “It wasn’t most of the afternoon,” he grumbled.

  I made a pass at joining in the menu reading. But very quickly I got overwhelmed. There had to be thirty different things on the menu, and that was just the appetizer page. And an appetizer cost more than we usually spent on the makings of a whole meal at home.

  I tried to remain cool. I tried not to turn red, but I felt it happening to me anyway. The lights from the chandeliers were getting hotter and hotter. I took a long drink of water, and as soon as I put my glass down some other white-shirt guy was there bang on the spot to refill me. I practically shrank from him. I did not like service, I decided.

  I started thinking of how I was going to repay Dr. Ellis. Shovel his driveway. For two years. Have my father realign his brakes—I glanced again at the menu—and throw in a couple of new tires.

  I closed the menu.

  “Ah, decided already,” Dr. Ellis said.

  No, panicked, actually. But I kept quiet.

  “Are you having the swordfish?” Napoleon asked.

  “Ha-ha,” I said.

  Next thing I knew, Dr. Ellis was ordering from the fancy waiter. Ordering quickly. Ordering what sounded like a lot. In what sounded like French.

  I must have been staring.

  “In addition to Caribbean literature, he is a
n instructor in the French department simultaneously,” Napoleon informed me.

  This was getting pretty heady for me. I drained my water. It was refilled. The French department. My father’s idea of accomplishing two things simultaneously is having a drink in the shower. Normally, I think that’s pretty cool myself, but it doesn’t give me a lot to talk about at times like this. I hate times like this.

  What was I doing here? Napoleon and his dad were so easy with everything, so smooth and natural. I was like... fish out of water doesn’t even cover it. I was embarrassed. Ashamed, like I had done something when I hadn’t done anything. And guilty for even being there.

  Napoleon ordered. In French.

  “I’ll have the chicken,” I said.

  This, apparently, would not do.

  “Sir,” the waiter asked, pointing at a section of the menu that took up roughly the same space as the Soviet Union on the classroom wall map. “Which chicken would that be?”

  I pointed blindly. “That one, please.”

  It might not have fooled anybody, but it did the job. The waiter left. And left me with the Ellis family. I was sure they must by now be dying of embarrassment at the scrub they brought with them to dinner.

  “We were talking about baseball,” Napoleon said, rescuing me.

  “Yes,” his father said. “Tell me, Richard, are you aware of this fellow Jim Rice? I hear talk around campus that he is supposed to be quite a phenomenon. Then I saw him on the news report the other evening, and indeed he appears to be something special. But you must be aware of him, I’m sure.”

  “Well... sure, he is. Rice is going to be great,” I said. “But, you know, really, the big story is Fred Lynn. They must be talking about Fred Lynn, around the campus?”

  Napoleon cut in. “What do you know about baseball, Father? You don’t follow baseball.”

  “I know enough. I played some baseball in my day. It is a fine sport, and I am glad to see you getting involved in it.”

  “He is, sir,” I said. “Getting real involved in it. People are starting to call us the Gold Dust Twins, you know, like Fred Lynn and Jim Rice. You know Fred Lynn, don’t you, Dr. Ellis?”