Gold Dust (7 page)

“Yo, Mowgli,” Butchie called, “you deaf, or ignorant?”

I winced.

Napoleon Charlie Ellis did a rapid veer maneuver across the street toward the stop. I followed quickly after him. “Come on,” I said, “you don’t have to pay any attention to this.”

“
You
don’t have to pay attention to it,” Napoleon said. “I do.”

Once more, as seemed to be happening more frequently, Napoleon was suddenly up close with Butchie. “I am neither hard of hearing nor ignorant,” he said evenly. “That is not my name, and you know it is not my name.”

“I just thought,” Butchie said, smiling, “that that’s what your papa said he called you.”

This was really, really close. I had never seen somebody get as mad as Napoleon was now, without somebody swinging at somebody.

“My
father
,” Napoleon answered, “never said any such thing.”

Butchie half-turned to face his group, which included Jum McDonaugh, Redheaded Beverly, and a dozen or so other kids who were only half-listening before but were inching closer now.

“I am sorry,” Butch said. “I thought that was you he was talking about, Mowgli Tommy Ellis. And you love soup. Mowglitommy soup.”

He got a few laughs with that, but less because people thought it was funny and more because they figured they were supposed to laugh. With Butch that was the quickest and most sensible way to get through something sticky. It was wise.

Napoleon Charlie Ellis was not wise.

“Is that supposed to be an imitation of me? Or of my father?”

“What?” Butchie said, in the broadest, stupidest, most simpleton voice he could muster. “Mowglitommy soup? You mean, Mowglitommy?”

“Shut up, Butch,” I said. “You sound like a jerk.”

He just grinned at me, like a jerk.

“Do you take this bus, Mowgli?” Jum McDonaugh threw in. “I never seen you on this bus. You wouldn’t be going our way, would you?”

“I do not have to take any—”

“Right, your bus would be going the other way, huh? Takes me an hour and a half to get home. Must take a real long time to get you bused home, huh? It’s, ah, south, isn’t it?
Long
way south. Let us know if you need any help getting home. We could help you out,
bust
you home good and quick. Any ol’ day.”

“Let’s go, Napoleon,” I said, gently tugging on the front of his jacket. He squirmed out of my grip.

“If you don’t like it,” Napoleon said, “maybe you should not take the bus a’tall.”

Both Jum and Butchie laughed hard at the sound. “A’tall. Naht a’tall,” Jum said.

“That is right,” Napoleon went on, composed but still angry just the same. You had to know him to really be able to tell when he was angry. And I was just getting to know him. “Maybe you should go to school where you belong, and leave us alone.”

I had never seen a face go as red as Butchie’s face went then.

“Where we
belong?
” He was bearing down on Napoleon now, with a stare so intense, his eyes were crossing, bulging, and going pink with bloodshot all at once. “What,” Butchie said, “do you know,” Butchie said, “about where,” he said, “I be-long?”

If this was a film with no sound, and if you had never seen a fight build up before, you would still know, this was a fight building up.

“Shut
up,
” Redheaded Beverly said, yanking Butch’s arm.

He stopped moving toward Napoleon and turned on Beverly with enough force that it was almost as if he was moving on her now. He shook out of her grip violently.

So it was my turn to put a grip on him, and my turn to have his hot breath up my nose. “What’s this, like one of them mass hysterical things? You all goin’ nuts at the same time?” He was looking at me mean, but I was all right. I could do this with Butchie, at least this far. But as I said, I wasn’t really willing to test it much further. I stood.

“You’re just embarrassing everybody, Butch,” Beverly said. And true enough, all the others, including Jum, had sort of backed away from him. They were like most people, happy to make noise, in a crowd, but not much more than that.

Butch was different. Butch wanted more than that.

The others all made a serious show of watching for the bus instead, as it now came into view.

“Stop giving the Ward a bad name,” said Beverly.

The bus was pulling up to the curb when Butch gave me the smallest little shove in my chest, enough to push me back about three inches. But as he did it he was looking at Napoleon. And talking to Beverly.

“Okay Bev, I’ll stop embarrassing you. Let’s get on our scummy bus back to our scummy neighborhood where we can be ignorant and nobody’ll notice, huh?”

The bus doors opened, the 17s filed on. Except for Beverly. As Butchie stepped up, she stepped back, and away. “I’ll catch the next one,” she said just before the driver snapped the door shut.

Butchie really was a silent film this time, as he stood staring wide-eyed and openmouthed at us through the bus window at bold Beverly the traitor.

“What a goon,” Beverly said, then paused. “Shall we walk, boys?”

We walked, Redheaded Beverly in between Napoleon and me.

“I think you just need to ignore it,” I said when we’d gone a silent half-block up Centre Street.

“I think you need to not ignore it,” Napoleon said quietly.

“No, I just think... It’s not really about you personally, right? I mean they really don’t like that long ride to school... you wouldn’t... I wouldn’t. Really, you can’t blame them, entirely.”

“Why can’t you?”

“If you knew them, that’s all. I know they sound like jerks, but... especially Jum, he’s not like that... they just don’t speak their minds real well.”

“Butch does,” Beverly said. “He speaks his mind very well. It’s just that there’s not much in there.”

With the added weight of Beverly’s brain it would be fairly ridiculous to argue that. “Okay. Butch. Butch can be, y’know... but if you take away Butch—”

“The problem remains,” Napoleon said. This time he didn’t sound like he was fighting. He sounded like he was despairing.

Napoleon simply shook his head, saying no more through the rest of the walk to the next bus stop where Beverly would be getting aboard for real. She looked at me. I shrugged and looked back. The bits of snow still lying around from last night’s blanketing were turning to crunch by the minute as the temperature dropped.

“It is so cold here,” Napoleon finally said.

“It will warm up eventually,” I said. “You learn not to feel the cold so much. Just like you learn not to be so stubborn, and not to listen to stuff. You’ll learn.”

“I will not,” he said firmly.

“I don’t want to talk about them anymore,” Beverly said. “The real reason I didn’t take the early bus even though I’m
freezing
my toes off, is I wanted to tell you that I think your father is incredible, Napoleon. He’s a real artist. And a performer.”

Napoleon looked at his feet.

“And really handsome,” she added.

Napoleon looked up. So did I.

“You must be very proud,” Beverly said.

“I must be,” he answered, and I believed I could see the first evidence of bashfulness out of Napoleon Charlie Ellis. He was always kind of reserved, but it was never the same as shyness or anything like that.

I liked it.

“Didn’t know you could be bashful,” I said.

“I am not,” he said, to his feet again.

“Leave him alone,” Beverly said, laughing a bit. She shoved me off the curb. “I bet you’d be bashful too, if anybody ever had a reason to compliment
you.
”

I got back up to the curb. “I’m full of a lot of things, but bash ain’t one of ’em,” I said, and shoved her this time, into Napoleon.

He barely reacted, even though Redheaded Beverly knocked him off his straight and narrow and he had to have noticed since he was watching his feet so closely. He did manage a smile, though, even if he did try not to share it.

“My bus is coming,” Beverly said. “But also, I wanted to ask, are we on for this Saturday?”

Napoleon Charlie Ellis and Richard Riley Moncreif answered simultaneously.

“On
what
?” said I.

“Certainly,” said he.

He and I looked at each other while Beverly enlightened us. “The youth symphony. It’s this Saturday morning, and you said you would go. Remember the bet?”

Rats, I thought. But I had to do better than that.

“Can’t. Napoleon and I have the batting cage booked for then.”

“We can cancel that,” he said. “The symphony would be grand.”

“Grand?”

“Cool,” Beverly said. “It’s at ten.”

The bus was almost there. She stepped off the curb.

“Beverlyyy,” I whined.

“You gave your word,” she said.

“So give it back,” I said.

She waved me off, disgusted. “If you really don’t want to go, Richard, I’m not going to force you. That would be pointless.”

“Dynamite,” I said. “Thanks, you’re a sport, Bev. Tell us all about it on Monday.”

“We will,” Napoleon said slyly.

“Dynamite!” Beverly said as she jumped on the bus.

I was so dumbfounded all I could do was stutter and splutter at him. “Wha... baseball, Nappp... we were suppp... you can’t just...”

Napoleon’s mood had gone up several notches, and it was his turn to try and pull me through a rough spot. He did a bad job of it, though.

“There will be other days, Richard,” he said with his hand on my shoulder. “It is only baseball, after all.”

“
Only...
baseball? Only
baseball?
Man, have you been listening to
anything
I’ve been trying to teach you?”

His seriousness came back. At least the appearance of seriousness. “Yes, Richard, I have been listening. But a lot of it... a lot of it is
nonsense.
”

For somebody so polite, he was getting pretty free with knocking
me
around.

We were just about to go our own ways, but I had to make the point. “So, symphony with Beverly on Saturday morning and dinner with me on Saturday night. See? Who says you’re hopeless? Just imagine how many friends you’d have if you made a little
effort
to get along with people?”

He shook his head. “Get along,” he said, brushing me off.

S
ATURDAY MORNING. I WAS
up, as planned, bright and early to get my cuts in. They had the nets strung up all over the humongous Northeastern University gym, for their ballplayers to get in their first work of the season. I was already weeks ahead of them, so it was only right that I should have the place to myself first.

The custodian was good about it as long as you didn’t crank up the machine. His idea of cranking up the machine was getting it to throw pitches hard enough to bruise a banana.

But I didn’t mind. A slow groove was fine enough with me. It was, after all, mighty cold outside, even for me, and my hands would hold up longer over the season if I didn’t freeze them into splinters in spring training.

And there was another reason the slower pace suited me. Fred Lynn.

Fred Lynn.

He was almost here. I could just about smell him.

I had heard about him as far back as his college days at USC. Followed him to the minor leagues, even caught a few glimpses of him on the sportcenter end of the six o’clock news, which will tell you something right there since almost nobody in this town cares enough to look at some kid who might come to the Sox two years from now. Not with the Bruins and the Celtics and once in a while even the Patriots playing big-time major league sports right now.

So I’d been patiently paying my dues, waiting, hearing about him coming around the corner for a while now like he was the bingling music of the ice-cream man a block away on the hottest day of the year. I even went and joined the Boy Scouts for a week in the spring of 1974 because I heard they were making a trip to Pawtucket to see the triple-A farm team with Fred Lynn on it. I went on that trip, and it didn’t matter whether Fred Lynn was hitting or roaming around center field or drinking lemonade in the home dugout of McCoy Stadium, I could not take my eyes off him.

Because he did it all so well. Every stride, every stretch, every gesture, every stroke, he did like nobody I had ever seen before. He did it like he was supposed to be doing it, like he was never supposed to leave the field because he was built purely for baseball and baseball was built purely for him. We had been waiting for Fred Lynn forever. At least I had been. I know a lot of people felt that way, and I know a lot of people thought he was special, but I refuse to believe anyone felt it like I felt it and there is one more thing I was sure of that day at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the end of my one and only week as a Boy Scout of America.

I was sure that, while I could not take my eyes off of Fred Lynn, he was watching me as well.

That is true. Time, after time, after time, when I stared down on Fred Lynn so hard you’d think he would have felt the heat of my vision burning holes in his Pawsox cap, it turned out he felt it indeed. For no apparent reason he would stop looking at the batter from center field, stop sizing up the pitcher from the batter’s box, and he would look right at me.

How many people can say that? If anybody else says it was them he was looking at, they are imagining it.

And then, finally, there he was. February 1975, there he was with the rest of the Sox in Winter Haven. He was doing his thing and doing it on the major league diamond, not with all the kids who were going to play maybe next year or the year after. Fred Lynn was with us, and was never going to be leaving us again.

And I had to be him. There was nothing else to be. Everyone was going to want to be Fred Lynn eventually, I was certain of that. Of course they were. Who wouldn’t? But he was mine. I had believed before anyone. So when there was the big rush to be Fred Lynn, it was only right that I would be Fred Lynn first. Well, second anyway.

His instincts were perfect. When he ran, he did not blow you away with his speed, but at the same time he appeared to reach every ball hit catchably to center field. He could not have covered more ground in less time if he had somebody driving him, and he didn’t run to greet the ball so much as he glided. He never ran the wrong way when he heard the pop of the ball off the bat, and if the hit reached the warning track or was going over the wall into the bull pen, he would time his leap perfectly and never, ever, lose a ball once he got a glove on it.