Gold Dust (16 page)

Which, a little less conspicuously, was how the process went. One by one, Connolly would isolate a singer from the group, ask him to hit a note or two, then weed that guy out.

Until in the end there was one lone voice. And that voice was so strong and clear, and surprisingly high—he hit a note like that little whistle piping an admiral aboard ship, and held it a long time—that everyone in the room just stood there gawking silently. We did a lot of gawking in this group, but usually not silently.

I had so much time, during the miracle of that long note, that I traveled, through January, and February, through the snow and ice and muck and arguments and symphony and Pier 4 and above all, across baseball fields, snowy ones and arid rock-frost ones and asphalt ones and finally fantastic grassy springtime ones, hitting and pitching and fielding and coaching and talking and even, unbelievably, learning.

Napoleon’s one unbelievable otherworldly note ran through me.

When he had finally let go, Mr. Connolly went practically mental with clapping, and the rest of the class followed. I thought Connolly was going to cry.

“That was... that was...” With the words not coming, Mr. Connolly went back to the hand-shaking thing. He really was a fan by now.

I had to slap my man on the back. I didn’t know if this was what you did to singing stars, but I knew it was what you did to athletes who scored. And that’s what this felt like.

“You didn’t even sound human, man. That was great. Does everybody in Dominica sound like that?”

“No,” he said, looking down, shaking his head. Then he looked up at me, shaking his head again.

“What?” I asked. I couldn’t believe the million ways it was possible for my mouth to open and his head to shake. I should have stuck to the language I knew and slapped his back a few more times.

Which was what I did. It was a spasm, but the right spasm, as he started laughing... along with shaking his head.

For the most part, Napoleon looked a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Which must have made it a whole lot harder for him when Sister Jacqueline stood side by side with Mr. Connolly at the head of the class at the end of the day to make the big announcement.

“... and this is such an honor, such a banner day for St. Colmcille’s, as we have never placed one of our students with the prestigious and nationally famous Archdiocese Choir School in all the years they have been testing us. And for our Napoleon to be offered a full scholarship...”

When the time came, I clapped as hard as anyone. I felt proud, like somewhere in there I had something to do with Napoleon’s achievement. I was the one who took him under my wing, after all.

And besides, it wasn’t as if he was actually going to go. I clapped harder as I thought that. And harder and harder, and my hands turned red, and all thoughts melted harmlessly away.

He was out of school again the next day. Hurt himself singing, I figured. It was a pretty high note he hit after all. Or maybe he was just letting this thing die down since he was obviously not a limelight kind of a guy.

At lunch I got in the game. Stickball. And I was a monster. I hit whatever was thrown at me. First pitch every time. It was as if I couldn’t even wait for the ball to reach me, I was so prepared, so ready, so
ahead
of the game I was in.

He did that for me. All these guys I had been playing with before, they were just a step slower and a thought behind now. Napoleon’s pitching all these weeks, faster and nastier than anything I had faced before, improved me. Even without him here at this moment, we were still operating as one machine, because of all that we had done together. I could not wait for youth league season to start. Napoleon and I were going to eat that league up.

The Gold Dust Twins. Just rolling the words through my head raised bumps on my skin higher than the pimples on the pimple ball.

But.

But.

“So what are you gonna
do
now?” Quin asked. He had his hand on his cheek and his head tilted like this was really worrying him. He was trying anything to crack my concentration before pitching to me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Without your
shadow
.”

Did I imagine it? Or did he really lean on that word? “Shadow.” No. No, I had to stop now. I was getting as bad as...

“Shut up. He’s nobody’s shadow.”

“Whatever. But you’ll be back to being one of us, now that he’s gone.”

“He’s not gone. Jeez, a guy stays out one day and you make a big... there ain’t no way he’s gonna go there.”

“Fool. He ain’t sick. He’s over touring that weenie choir school right now. Sister said so.”

“You don’t know anything. Shut up and throw me the ball.”

Quin smiled. Figured he had done what he set out to do, which was rattle me. Fine. That’s the game. Nothing more than the game.

The ball came, out of the sky from that big ol’ swooping windup of his. Zinging out over the outside edge of the plate.

And smack, I hit it.

And
smack.
The ball bounced right off Quin’s forehead and went high up in the air.

Manny caught it when it finally came down, and I was out. Fine with me.

I went down to the field that day with Manny and Glen, Quin, Arthur Brown, and Arthur’s brother Gary. It was just too much like spring for people to resist anymore. We took turns pitching and catching, shagging flies, and fielding grounders. This was it now, the transition stage from mechanical-type drills to actual baseball-game activity, and it got my adrenaline pumping. I ran around all that afternoon like a headless haunted ballplayer, chasing every ball, retrieving every foul, catching, throwing, just doing whatever necessary to make myself work, and breathe hard. Breathing
baseball
was what I was doing. The scent had changed already, from mud and frost to mud and grass.

But.

But.

I needed something different than I needed last year or the year before.

And after an hour of this, he appeared. Walking up over the hill that led to the field, I recognized Napoleon Charlie Ellis’s rigid upright stride from well off. I walked to meet him partway, and when I reached him on the left-field sideline, he looked serious. He smiled, but it wasn’t an easy smile.

Maybe it was the clothes.

“Why would you wear your school stuff to baseball, man? In fact, why would you wear your school clothes at all, since you didn’t go to school?”

“I went to the choir school today,” he said evenly. “And I have not been home to change yet.”

“Oh,” I said, and let that hang there. I sort of wanted him to do the talking. He owed me an explanation, after all. Going to that place without even telling me. He owed me an explanation.

“You don’t owe me any explanation,” I said finally, coolly.

“It is a very nice place,” he said.

He was doing the talking, but I had to bring him along. Had to get him to say what I wanted before he made the mistake of saying what I didn’t want.

“You gonna play in those clothes?”

“I think I won’t play today.”

“What?” I said. I looked up at the perfect baseball sky, the perfect baseball day, then at Napoleon. He knew what I meant.

“Come on, will ya?” Manny called from the field. “It’s your ups, Richard. You wanna hit, or no?”

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

This time he smiled for real. He drew two tickets out of his pocket. For the Red Sox’ first Saturday home game of the season, against the Oakland A’s. First-base line. Right behind the coach’s box.

My mouth hung open.

“They were a gift,” Napoleon said. “It appears these people
really
want me to attend their school.”

“For this,
I’ll
go to their corny music school,” I said, still staring at the tickets.

“Actually I believe the deal is, they said I could give you one if you promised
not
to ever sing again.”

“Deal,” I said, snatching the ticket away.

But as soon as I did, I felt as if I’d traded something that I didn’t want to trade. There was now officially no such thing as a purely good thing.

Napoleon nodded. “So go back to your game now. I just wanted to tell you that.” He started walking away.

“There’s still time,” I said. “You could change and come back.”

I was looking at his back, then to the field, almost
placing
him there in the game with my eyes.

“I am just too tired,” he said. I watched his back as he walked. Looked like he was telling the truth.

And sounded like he knew what he was doing.

“So they really want you bad, huh?” I asked.

“Yes they do,” he answered. “It is a nice feeling, actually.”

I turned back toward the field, where somebody was trying to take my turn at bat. “Ya, I guess,” I said.

F
ENWAY IS CONSIDERED A
small park. One of the smallest in the major league. A bandbox, they call it.

But Fenway was enormous to me. In every way. When you approached from the outside on Jersey Street on a game day, the size of everything was enough to blow you right over. The crowds of people could crush you, moving the way they do more in circles than in a straight line toward the entrances. The sausage sellers, themselves mostly pretty giant guys, had big voices on them that went over and through even the wildest fans. We stood there for a couple of minutes that day, me and Napoleon, and even though there was that constant fear that the movement of people could crush us or, at the very least, bounce us right out onto the Mass Turnpike if we weren’t lucky, we had to stop and stare.

The exposed green girders that held up the stands all around were about the most massive hunks of steel I had ever seen. There were loads of taller buildings around, especially the Prudential and the Hancock towers, which we could see just as well if we decided to turn a few degrees one way. But for my money there was nothing this
big
anywhere in the whole city. Fenway made a constant rumble and roar on a game day, and even seemed to be laughing, in a way a giant would laugh. It was scary, in a way. But a thrilling scare.

“I have not seen anything like this,” Napoleon said, as bigger people rushed past, bumping me into Napoleon, and him into me. “Carnival, in Trinidad, is a spectacle and very exciting. But
that
,” he pointed up at the highest bit of the grandstand and then at the huge mouth of the entrance dead ahead of us, “that is like a monster that swallows people and then hollers for more.”

I was pleased. There was the thing, right there, that kept us going. Whatever little things went wrong and whatever little signs came up that we were just too different...
bam,
he would come up with the goods and remind me that we were not that far apart at all, when you dug underneath and got to what was really in there. That was why I could keep knowing things would work out right.

Was the place magic, or what?

“So,” I said, “you want to let it swallow
us
?”

“Let’s.”

In we went, with the crush of people narrowing and narrowing through the gate until it felt like we would be squeezed through the eye of a needle eventually. But we got through, and ran up the concrete ramp that delivered us, like some kind of fantastic trick, into the inside/outside of Fenway Park.

The grass that spilled wide and far in front of us was the greenest grass you would ever see. And it led, like a carpet, out and out to the walls of the outfield, telling us when it got there just how far it had traveled. Painted in yellow on each bit of wall, three hundred and fifteen feet to the foul pole in right, four hundred and five to dead center, and, famously, a mere two hundred seventy-nine feet down the line in left. You would think almost anybody could hit a ball out of the park in Fenway’s left field. Except that at the end of the line was the Green Monster—a piece of wall that went up, and up and up, thirty feet up, and topped by the nets to catch balls that actually did clear it and keep them from konking heads out there on the street. And the old mechanical scoreboard was built right into that wall, with little squirrelly people inside working to post all the results from Fenway and every other game in the country.

It was impossible that anybody, anybody in the world, could stand here and not be swept totally away by it. That’s what I thought then, and I was sure Napoleon Charlie Ellis was thinking the same thing. I was dead certain of it.

“So they want you bad over there at that singing school,” I said, still looking off. “How soon?”

“Whenever. I can go next week, if I like. Though next September is probably what they are thinking about.”

That was a test. It was like Napoleon was a turkey in the oven and I had just poked him with a fork to see if he was done. If he was done, he would have said, Ah, what singing school. Why would I leave all this for some dumb old singing school? He would have said, I’m sticking with you, twin. He would have said, This is the dream, right here, us at Fenway Park, not warbling away in some church choir someplace.

He was not done yet. Not quite ready. But he would be soon. He had to be. Nothing else made sense.

Fenway Park, though, had to do the work. The Red Sox would do the work, better than anything I could say. “Hmm,” was all I did say. Then I let myself drift away from that again.

You could not avoid the smell of grass, and popcorn, and hot dogs, even if you held your nose. You could not avoid the music of John Kiley’s organ if you blocked your ears, because it would come up from the floor and travel through your legs and your whole body to reach your brain. And when Sherm Feller the announcer, with that voice so much deeper and thicker than any human sound I ever heard anywhere else, announced that it was time for us to stand for the national anthem, Napoleon and I scrambled, realizing that we had once again been caught flatfooted and staring, like a couple of yokels up to the big city for the day. This was a new experience for Napoleon, but for me there was no excuse.

When we were finally seated, it was a thrill all over again. I had never had seats this good before.