Gold Dust (3 page)

“You had no business doing that,” Butchie said.

“Nevermind,” I said. “He didn’t know.”

“What?” Napoleon Charlie Ellis wanted to know. “What did I not know?”

“What you did not know was that we have been doing this for a long time, and you weren’t supposed to give Arthur back his lunch yet.” Butchie was taking this very seriously, like we were some military outfit and the new scrub hadn’t been read the rules. “For your information, Arthur
likes
this game and as a matter of fact he has been playing it for so long that he can’t even eat right if he hasn’t chased after his lunch for at least five minutes to stimulate his appetite.
Isn’t that right,
Arthur?” Butch shouted, though straining in Napoleon’s direction.

Everyone looked at Arthur.

“Um. I probably could eat it anyway.”

Napoleon Charlie Ellis nodded, then walked to his own locker.

Butchie followed him. “So, you don’t have to save him,
Charlie,
and you don’t have to mess around with things you don’t understand, like how things run here. Maybe you were in charge back in the school where nobody wore any shoes, but it ain’t gonna be that way here.”

Napoleon slammed his locker. That tin old-locker noise filled the concrete corridor and seemed to echo a hundred times.

“I did not ask you to call me Charlie. If you wish to talk to me you may do so, and you may call me Napoleon, and you may do it more quietly. I’ll not be shouted at by
you.
And as for being boss of you, I have no ambition to be a pig farmer.”

I had never seen anyone speak to Butch like this. I don’t suppose Butch had ever seen it either, since the idea of it was making him go spastic.

“Who do you think you
are,
man. ...” Butchie said, inching up too close and staring down at Napoleon from his extra few inches of height.

“I know well who I am,” said Napoleon calmly, so calmly he nearly closed his eyes all the way as he said it.

This, I thought, was a good time to join in. I slipped between them.

“He just never played throw the lunch before, Butch,” I said, giving him a healthy shove, but not so hard that he’d shove me back. Almost no one is allowed to shove Butchie. I am. But I’m not keenly interested in testing it beyond that. “He’s still getting used to everything.”

Butchie stared as I threw my arm around Napoleon’s shoulders. Then Napoleon stared, at my arm. I don’t think he was all that accustomed to this kind of contact. But he didn’t do anything about it.

“Right,” Butchie grunted. “Well, he better get used to everything. Quick.” He turned to go back upstairs. He signaled Arthur Brown to follow, even though Butchie would not ordinarily be walking with Arthur. It was just one of those moments you’re not supposed to walk away from alone.

“That boy has got a problem, Richard,” Napoleon Charlie Ellis said.

“Butchie’s just kind of... tense.”

“He’s not tense with you. He is tense with me.”

“And
you’re
tense with
everybody.
Maybe the two of you are too much alike, what do you think of that?”

He removed my arm from his shoulders like he was removing a putrefied fish.

“You couldn’t really believe that,” he said, opening his locker again to get out his lunch.

“Well, you are kind of a hard guy yourself, Napoleon. It could just be that you make people be worse than they are, because of the way you are. Maybe it’s you.”

He closed the locker, stood with his own perfectly creased brown bag. It smelled incredible to me, all mixed and spiced, like Chinese food, only I couldn’t imagine anybody bringing Chinese food for lunch, and anyway, it was a whole different spice smell.

“I am certain you do not believe such nonsense, Richard.”

We headed over to my locker.

“Can we trade?” I asked. “Half of your lunch for half of mine? I never smelled a lunch like that in my life. I don’t even want to know what it is. Can we trade?”

He sighed. “Possibly.”

I opened my locker. It smelled like it usually does. like Spam.

“No,” he said immediately.

But as we walked up the stairs, he reached into his bag and handed me a small, breaded, spiced knot of some meat thing. I was almost afraid to eat it because that meant I wouldn’t be able to smell it anymore.

“A gift,” Napoleon Charlie Ellis said. “Now, please tell me you don’t honestly believe...”

“Where was I?” I interrupted. “Oh yes, Jim Rice is going to be in left field, with Fred Lynn in center. They are talking about putting them number three and four in the lineup, with Rice batting cleanup. ...”

“I am asking you to talk about something serious, Richard.”

“Baseball is as serious as it gets,” I said.

Napoleon shook his head, took a polite bite out of his food.

“Well it’s as serious as
I
get anyway,” I said, also taking a bite of his food.

“SO YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED
baseball,” I said to Napoleon Charlie Ellis as we stood on a smooth slick coating of snow.

“I play cricket. As I said. Will I teach you?”

“Will you t—?” I practically choked on the thought. Somebody in North America teaching
me
what to do with a bat and ball. “Ah, ho-ho. Napoleon Charlie Ellis, we’re gonna have big fun now.”

“Now? No, not now. It is winter. In the spring and summer, then we will—”

I stood there shaking my head at him, and smiling. He shook his head in response, without smiling. I think I was making him a little nervous. “I don’t believe in seasons,” I said.

Napoleon Charlie Ellis looked past me, over my beloved and lovely field, still beloved and lovely with the snow continuing to come down over it. No matter. I knew what was under there, and it was beautiful.

“I don’t know, Richard Riley Moncreif. If I lived here, I think I would believe in seasons.”

I reached out and clapped him hard on the shoulder. It was a firm, square shoulder. “Excuse me? You
do
live here.”

The shoulder sagged slightly, involuntarily. His face showed that his mind was off someplace else. A sudden small shock of sadness ran through me, like I had absorbed it by contact with Napoleon.

“Pretty warm in Dominica right now, I imagine.”

He nodded.

“Stick with me,” I said. “I know what you need. This situation,” I waved my arm in a wide, sweeping circle over my hard-bit kingdom, where icicles climbed the chain-link backstop, and the pitcher’s mound was no greater than any other petrified mound out there, “this situation is all about mind over reality. That’s the trick. Remember, if you put your mind to it, you can do better than reality.”

By now we were both staring off into white space.

“I am ready to put my mind to that,” he said.

Sometimes, when it is cold, you have to connect perfectly to avoid the worst feeling in all the world. The buzzing electrified stinging of the hands after hitting the ball one eighth of an inch too high or low of the sweet spot. It would hurt less if, when you saw the pitch coming, you simply dropped the bat and smacked the ball with your bare hand. And if you really mess up and catch it either high up on the handle or way out on the very tip of the bat because one of the slickmasters like Butchie or Quin can’t resist throwing the funny stuff in February, well, it’s almost enough to put a guy off baseball for good.

Right, I know. Right about here is where I lose most people. I get the look, and the whole, aren’t-you-taking-this-thing-a-little-too-seriously jag.

No. I am not. What really matters? It could be a million different things, and I don’t necessarily have to appreciate what matters to somebody, except that I can appreciate that something does. Right, so, when I am hitting after a baseball, all I can tell you is that is what matters to me, and when I start my swing everything else there is falls away. School, family, friends and food and sky and grass are all gone to nowhere because I exist and the ball exists and that’s pure.

Imagine the thing that matters. Imagine disappearing entirely into your thing that matters, needing
that
feeling. And then,
zinnngggg.

It bites you. It hurts you so bad that you have to throw the bat on the ground, the same bat that has to be pried out of your hands some July days. That is not fair. Your own dog shouldn’t maul you, and your bat shouldn’t sting you. That’s the world not right, right there.

I guessed Napoleon Charlie Ellis would like to avoid that feeling. He would need to be sheltered from the elements to start off.

“A batting
what?
” Napoleon said as we left the city proper on the bus north.

“Cage. It’s a practice facility. Somebody invented this thing so that you could practice baseball against live pitching—well, sort of live—all day, all night, all year even if you were totally friendless and everything. Total baseball. Brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.”

“I will not be getting in any cage.”

I had still not figured out Napoleon’s style. He sounded so proper and serious whether he was doing Hail Marys at church or telling you about the rice and beans and fish he fed his dog.

“No, no, man it’s not that kind of—”

“My uncle back in Dominica told me this would happen. He said if we dared come to this place, some white man would try to put me in a cage. ...”

“That is
so
unfair... that hardly ever—”

The way he laughed, even, was so controlled you had to pay real close attention to catch him doing it to you. Napoleon Charlie Ellis was very good at being controlled. I would have to get better at paying attention.

“Fine,” I said. “Wait ’til you get conked on the head with a pitch, then it’s gonna be my turn to laugh.”

“No it won’t, because I will not be getting in any cage, Richard.”

I knew there would be this initial slow period, an introductory phase. This was new to him, after all, this was foreign. But it was
baseball.
Even though Napoleon wasn’t a regular player, I knew he had to be familiar with the game. And once familiar, well, like I said, this was
baseball.

“You gotta love it,” I said.

“No, actually. I don’t
got ta.
”

It was possible I was being mocked. But I’d have to let that slide because there were bigger issues at hand.

“Can you just trust me, Napoleon? Please? If you just give it a chance I am certain you are going to agree that baseball is
it.
”

He paused, politely. Then spoke. “Cricket.”

He couldn’t have been serious, or if he was it was simply out of misinformation or improper training or some other form of messing up somebody did to the guy when he was supposed to be taught the critical fundamentals of life like crossing at the lights, four basic food groups, and baseball.

I paused long enough to let him gather his thoughts more properly. “Cricket,” he repeated.

Right. What was I doing? Let him eat cricket.

“Okay,” I said slowly, “look at it this way. You could spend your time playing one-man cricket, which I don’t know the game but I figure is not a lot of fun, or you could take a shot at a game that you can play with lots of the guys.”

Napoleon looked at me very seriously. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully, but when they came out they didn’t sound all that carefully chosen. “From what I can see, Richard, I can’t imagine why I would want to play with
the guys.
” The way he snorted those words,
the guys,
it sounded as if he had a rocket of blue cheese crammed up his nose.

“You see there,” I said, pointing at a spot on his chest, as if I was identifying
there.
“There you go. There you go being impossible. You could try, you know. You could just... try.”

“Try,” he echoed.

“Try.”

“Why?”

Why. There’s one for you. Why indeed? What was I doing? So what if I knew baseball was the key to life? That didn’t mean he had to know it. So what if Napoleon Charlie Ellis seemed to be orbiting me for whatever reason since he showed up? That didn’t make him my responsibility. As long as I had a field of live bodies around me in a game of baseball I never cared much whose bodies they were. So what difference did it make now?

My world was a pretty tight diamond-shaped thing before, first-second-third-home, and that worked fine for me. So if Napoleon didn’t want to try, then fine. If he didn’t want to get along, then fine. That was his right. He didn’t want to change his way and I didn’t want to change mine. Fine. We really didn’t need to do this. We didn’t need anything.

“You gonna play ball with me, or what?” I snapped.

“Yes I am,” he snapped.

When we had paid our money and taken up residence in the cage, I decided the best thing I could do for my man to start him out was to lead by example. I handed Napoleon the bucket of balls and nodded toward the pitching machine.

“See what I’m doing here with my feet, Napoleon?” I asked. He was staring at me, but not at my feet.

“How did we decide that you would go first?”

“What? Of course I’m going first. I’m leading by example.”

“I know how to swing a bat.”

“Ya, but I’m going to show you the right way.”

I could see his one eyebrow go way up higher than the other and disappear under his shiny red batter’s helmet. “You mean you are going to show me
your
way.”

“Right,” I said. “The right way.” This time I didn’t look at him long enough to give him a chance to be difficult. If we were going to do this right, I was going to have to let a lot of Napoleon’s stuff just pass me by. Later, when he was great, he’d thank me for it. I looked down and began scratching in the dirt with my feet like a bull about to charge.

“Why do you do that thing with your feet like a chicken?”

I stood back out of the box. “Like a bull, Napoleon. I do it like a bull, not like a chicken. And I do it to get a good firm grip of the earth beneath me.”

“I see. Without it you will slip off the earth, is that it?”

Clearly it was time to block out the taunting and concentrate on the important business of addressing the ball. One of the many critical skills you learn from baseball is to focus on the job no matter what kind of nonsense people are talking at you.