Gold Dust (8 page)

Even more than saving home runs, though, I loved to watch him come in on a short ball. As if he was somehow doing the calculations of time and distance and trajectory and drop in his head while at the same time running just like a kid who was doing it for plain fun instead of for his profession, Fred Lynn was always arriving to the spot where the ball was trying to get to the ground just in time to stop it from getting there. Flopping and sliding and tumbling all over the place, he still never seemed like he was out of control or one inch off the mark. I swore if he closed his eyes and ran straight ahead he would still wind up with the ball in his glove. And the perfect grass of the Fenway outfield would cradle him like a baby. The finest field in baseball, groundskeeper Joe Mooney’s Fenway lawn. Finest field in the world.

That world now belonged to Fred Lynn. He controlled it totally.

But the stroke was the thing. It was the most perfect and beautiful thing I had ever seen. I know that other people, like Beverly, can hear it in music. I can’t hear music. Some people see what I’m talking about in ballet, or in the shapes of sculpture.

But I don’t see that. I see it, and believe that I see somehow everything that is good and right and important, in a flawless, speedy and powerful swing of a baseball bat in pursuit of a ball.

And I never saw it perfect until I saw Fred Lynn. God gave it all to Fred Lynn.

And he gave Fred Lynn to me.

And I was going to repay him by learning to be great myself. Which was going to require some work. Beginning with the small job of turning myself from a right-handed hitter into a left-handed hitter. I was only half kidding about that. I would in time go back to the right side because I was already too far along. But I felt like I could understand what Lynn did better, I could get him
down,
if I did it by the numbers. By his numbers. I wanted to be over there, in his shoes, and
feel
it.

It felt funny. Strange at first, but not entirely foreign. I had taken a few cuts from the left side before because if you truly want to be the best hitter you can be you have to at least briefly toy with the idea of being a switch hitter. I toyed with it very briefly. Because I ran out of patience quickly when I realized it wasn’t nearly as fun working from the other side. I did okay as a lefty, but I couldn’t smack the ball the way I was used to and if I couldn’t smack it then I got frustrated, and if I got frustrated I pressed too hard and if I pressed too hard I lost control and hit worse and worse little squibbly nothings. Then I would jump over to the right side, crank a few shots, sigh and smile and never want to leave that box again because the right box was the right box, and I was right when I was in it, and Jeez, why should you have to work twice as hard for something if you don’t have to.

I was younger then. That was before I could see very far into the future. That was before Fred Lynn was sent to me to show me.

So the slow pitch machine was fine for the time being. I dug in my feet, rubbed my right hand all the way up to the end of the bat like Fred did, and calmly sat back waiting for what came.

Pop,
not bad.
Smack,
better. I could do this.
Smack
again, I was going with the pitches, just the way Fred was doing in Winter Haven as he prepared to use Fenway’s Green Monster left field wall. I couldn’t muscle anything yet, but I could use what the machine gave me, take what I could get, take advantage. Control I would learn first, and power would follow, as I was certain Fred himself had learned.

But what I did not like. What I did not like was the way, for the first time in a long time, I did not feel right with a baseball bat in my hands. I did not feel, instinctively, that I was where I belonged. I did not know without question that I was doing what god and the world and Fred Lynn wanted me to do and it made me weirdly, dizzily, and scarily, nervous. Like I was in the wrong body, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. Like I did not now understand the world, where I could have sworn I completely understood it a few minutes before.

This could not be allowed. I took a step off the plate and rested the head of the bat on the ground. I closed my eyes and remembered what I wanted. I remembered that baseball would only get better if I learned it better from all angles. I wanted that. Of course I wanted that. I would master this, I would control it. And I would love it even more.

It was going to take a hard head, though.

I stepped back in.

There were a lot of awful swings to get out of my system, and there was nobody there to take it out on when the whole deal made me angry. All there was to do was to keep on doing. Steady. Steady. I could do this.

I took pitch after pitch after pitch, as if to show the pitching machine that it was going to break down before I would. When it ran out of balls I ran to refill it.

Gradually, it came. I’d swing, I’d make contact, I’d recoil into my well-practiced mini-Lynn stance, and I’d snap out at it again. The ball came, I sent it back. The ball came, I sent it back. I was every bit as oiled as the machine that was pitching to me, and after a while just as unconscious of it. The groove I slipped into must have been the thing I had heard long-distance runners talk about, a kind of trance thing that feels like a whole nother kind of life.

Because by the time the machine had emptied once more and sat there just humming at me, wanting to throw something at me but having nothing left, the college guys were already gathering around at the sides, and I never even noticed them coming in. I didn’t even stop hovering over the plate waiting on the next pitch that wasn’t coming, until several of them started clapping for me.

They must have been watching for a while. I felt flushed, embarrassed and proud, but most of all, exposed. I never think of anybody watching me when I’m hitting, because I’m thinking about... hitting. Especially when I had to work so hard at it.

These were baseball guys, though. Not just players, but
players.
Felt kind of nice, the few splashes of applause. From people who appreciated.

I have always sort of assumed nobody properly could. Appreciate it.

I gave them a short little wave, scooped up my jacket and gloves. I pulled my Bruins ski cap down low, put my Adirondack on my shoulder and hurried on out.

I was standing there on Huntington Avenue, crusted snow under my sneakers, and fresh stuff dropping out of the sky in fat wet flakes that were going to put off real out door spring ball just a little bit longer. That only meant that it would be harder to get other guys to play with me, not that I wouldn’t do it myself. But once I taught Napoleon, once I showed him baseball the way I loved baseball I was starting to feel like he might be the one. The one hardheaded enough to go the route with me. The one guy who, when I turned around on a bitter November afternoon, would possibly be standing there, ready to throw.

You can be better, probably, if somebody pushes you, and that was Napoleon Charlie Ellis. He was a lot of things I had never met before.

I could see us in February, and March, and next February and March, taking turns throwing live batting practice to each other while the other guys sat rusting and getting fat before the season. And that with each season we would leave them all further and further behind on our way to being better, and better, and best.

Like Fred Lynn and Jim Rice. The Gold Dust Twins. We could do that. We could
outdo
that.

My heart was pounding.

Except my twin was wasting away over in Symphony Hall, which... was only a block away. I felt I had a duty.

When I got there, the snow was falling heavily, and I took shelter under the big awning in front of the main entrance. “How long before the concert gets out?” I asked the white-haired doorman.

He looked at his watch. “I don’t know,” he said.

There were several doors, each with its own one of those guys in their red coats, sitting on little wooden stools. I tried the next one. “What time does it let out?” I asked.

He looked at my bat. “What do you plan to do with that, kid?”

I looked at my bat. I had forgotten it was there, up on my shoulder. I shrugged, and watched it move while I shrugged. “Play baseball?”

“Get outta here, ya loon, and stop pullin’ my chain.”

Door number three. This guy didn’t have white hair, because he had no hair. And he had a thin white wire running from the inside breast pocket of that red jacket to his ear. He had a look of concentration fixed on his face as he stared off into what looked like nowhere, except I know better. Enough teachers have caught me doing the same thing.

With a start he caught sight of me coming up beside him and after catching his breath and a look at the Adirondack half frosted in snow, he smiled and tugged the earpiece out of his large fleshy pink ear.

He reached out and stuck the earpiece in my own ear, nudging my cap up to get under there. It was Red Sox-Tigers. Grapefruit League from Florida.

He took my bat, gripping it, weighing it, checking the balance. He pulled the wire out of my ear. “February hitter, huh?”

I shrugged. It felt a little like confession.

He was still balancing the bat, looking at it as he talked.

“That kid Lynn, huh. ...” he said, rubbing a thumb up and down over the grain.

“Ya,” I said.

The man handed me back my bat. “You know, you don’t have to turn the label around toward the back when you’re hittin’. That’s just a myth.”

“Really?”

“Ya, the bat won’t break. Unless you hit it wrong to begin with. Then it don’t matter if you got the label in your back pocket, the thing’ll break. But you’ll be all right, huh? You studyin’?”

I nodded again.

He nodded back. “I was gonna be Ted Williams. Teddy Ballgame. You know Ted, o’course.”

I knew Ted, like everybody who knew anything around here knew Ted. He was a legendary figure, still made the news when he showed up as a roving instructor at Winter Haven. Set a lot of records, took off the best four years of his career to be a pilot in World War Two, then came back and did great again. Hit a home run in his very last at-bat. I knew Ted Williams. But he was no Fred Lynn.

I whispered. I felt stupid saying it out loud, about telling the world, but not about telling this man. “I’m gonna be Fred Lynn.”

“I know,” he said. “You waiting on somebody? Get on in here, and wait in the lobby. Get them hands out of the February.”

So I did. I got to kind of wander around in the warm, red-carpeted lobby, and off in the distance, I could hear the big sound of the orchestra playing something I actually thought I recognized. Why? I had no business recognizing anything in there.

Except. Right, the Esplanade on the Fourth of July. Every Fourth, after watching the Sox beat somebody in the afternoon, practically the whole city listens to the Pops orchestra play this very tune as the fireworks blast off. The 1812 Overture. It’s good, it has cannons. But there was no way the rest of the show could have matched it.

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?