Gold Dust (2 page)

Other people’s public schools.

And that’s when the “community” thing got big. It was all over the papers. People were defending their “community schools” as something sacred. So lots of people bailed out and started sending their kids to Catholic schools. For the community. No matter how far away the community happened to be. I had to wonder if I just didn’t know what the C word meant, or if somebody was changing it.

“What time is it, boys?”

“Oh no, please, not this.”

“Come on, Manny, what time is it?”

Manny sighed. Glen stared at me very serious, like a teacher. “Can’t you talk about anything else?” Glen asked. Glen was about the sharpest guy we had. Knew all kinds of things. Most of which I figure a person doesn’t really need to know. “There are lots of other things worth thinking about.”

I gave him back the look. “No there ain’t.”

Manny lifted the top of his flip-top desk and made like he was disappearing into it. Glen just shook his head and returned to reading.

Napoleon Charlie Ellis entered the room and sat in an empty seat behind me. “Hello,” he said to me.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ll ask you, then. What time is it?”

Napoleon looked deeply puzzled. He peered up at the very big and obvious white moon-face clock hanging at the front of the room.

“Aw,” I said, “if you have to look at the clock, you’re lost.”

“I do not understand...” Napoleon started.

But Manny couldn’t take it anymore. “It’s freakin’ Freddie time!” he blurted from inside his messy desk.

“Yesssss!” I said.

Freddie time.

Gold Dust time.

We had been waiting for this for a long time. Since 1918, to be exact. The arrival of Fred Lynn and Jim Rice to the Red Sox major league club. Everyone who knew the game knew that Lynn was going to be the best, ever. And that Rice was probably going to be the second best. The papers had already been calling them the Gold Dust Twins, the best pair of rookies ever to come along to one team in the same year. I had been charting their progress through the minor leagues since the Sox signed them, and finally, this was their year. And today. Today was the glorious first day, the ritual, where the huge eighteen-wheeler equipment trucks were packed up and dispatched to Winter Haven, Florida. Spring training. Every newscast in town showed footage of the trucks heading off. It was breathtaking.

Fred Lynn. My man. Breathtaking.

Jim Rice. Breathtaking.

Finally. Hallelujah.

“Excuse me?” Napoleon asked.

I ran through the whole scenario again. Happily. I half-hoped he would ask me to do it again.

“Oh,” he said instead. “Baseball. I’m sorry, I don’t follow baseball. I play cricket.”

My turn. “Excuse me?”

He shrugged.

I had never even heard of this condition before.

“Everybody likes
baseball,
” I pointed out.

“No, actually,” he said politely but firmly. “Everybody does not.”

Both Manny and Glen started laughing at this. Not loud mocking laughter, but the low, teasing, challenging kind. “So,” Manny said in his exaggerated accent, “Meester Beisbol, whatchu gonna do about thees?”

I looked at Napoleon behind me, then over to Manny, then back to Napoleon. “I’m going to help him,” I said calmly. “He needs help.”

“I need no help, thank you.”

“You’ll be happier. ...”

He scowled at me. “I am quite happy.”

“Look,” I said. Napoleon was turning out to be a kind of challenge, like a sneaky tough pitcher who kept making me hit fouls, and I had to figure him out. “These guys here were new once. They listened to me, and look at them now.”

Glen gave a little embarrassed wave, and Manny a big, smiley one. It would be hard to notice now, but they really were raw material when the two of them moved in over on Fortuna Avenue five years ago. They didn’t need a whole lot of work since they came from Cuba, where Louis Tiant came from, so baseball was already wired into them. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t come a long way, although I might have stretched it to say they did it by listening to me. Stretched it only a little, though.

As long as you have baseball on your side, you can overcome anything.

I just sort of hung there, turned around in my seat, smiling very friendly at Napoleon, like I was some kind of ambassador or something. He did not smile back. He did not do anything that I could tell. He was flunking.

“So then, the goal is to be like you? That is the key to happiness?”

I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before. Not in those very words. But hearing them now... I didn’t know. A guy could do a lot worse.

I apparently had dwelled on this for a while without answering. “Turn around please,” Napoleon said coolly.

“Call me when you need me,” I said.

My concentration had been broken for too long now anyway. This was not like me, in late winter, sitting at my desk in school, before the start of lessons. I had to focus.

Fred Lynn. ...

Fred Lynn. ...

Fred Lynn. ...

T
HE TEMPTATION IS TO
say that it’s a sound like nothing else in the world. But that wouldn’t be true. There are variations on the sound that I make when I hit a ball with my bat just right, and all those variations have relatives out there in the non-baseball world.

There is the crack. It sounds so much like the sound a tree trunk makes when an old maple goes down that you have to take cover just in case. Jim Rice is already getting famous for the crack. They say that even coaches who have been in the game for forty years flinch when Rice cracks the ball like he does. When I hit a ball and it goes
crack,
that is as good as I can hit it. It might not be a home run because maybe I didn’t get under it enough and it’s a line drive, or maybe I got under it too much and it’s a sky-high fly ball, but whether the thing gets out or not I am one happy and satisfied ballplayer because here is a secret I can share: I don’t care a ton about scoring runs or winning games. What I care about is hitting a baseball.

Baseball is not about teamwork, no matter what anybody says. It is about pitching and catching and hitting a ball. Especially about hitting a ball. And all of those things get done by one guy alone. Baseball is a selfish game. I don’t mind that. That’s why it works.

There is the snap. If I am going with the pitch, like when Quin or Butchie is particularly cute with the curves and screwballs and I have to go with whatever I get, then bat-meets-ball is more like a snapping sound, a slapping sound, and I knock the thing into right field with less authority than I might like, but all the same it is very satisfying. Because that stuff can be devilishly hard to hit, and you have to be both smart and quick with your hands to change your stroke on the fly and get the ball out there in play. Fred Lynn does this, and I have seen it in the news. Balls you are sure he can’t hit until,
smack,
there he goes, reaching out after it, putting the ball out there in play, and looking like he’s just going to go with the flow and follow the thing right out there into the outfield, just to watch it land where he tells it to. The ball in play. I love the ball in play. I hate the ball in the catcher’s hands.

Pop. Pop
is a bad sound, the way I hear it. Because I hear it pop-pop. Double pop, like a mock. Because that to me is the sound of striking out, and striking out is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Anybody can miss a ball—pop—one time, because, sure, there are some good guys out there who can throw, and they can get lucky now and then. And if conditions are right for them and wrong for you, you can even get caught a second time—
pop
—and find yourself in jeopardy.

But a third strike. I have never been able to see the reasoning behind a third strike. Not in one at-bat, uh-uh, no way, no excuse. Nobody should be able to fool you or overwhelm you three times in one at-bat. No one. So the ultimate insult, the unbearable nightmare of a noise is the pop-pop of that third strike. The first
pop
being the ball landing in the catcher’s mitt. The second being me banging the bat off my helmet.

Because striking out is not okay. Striking out means somebody else has the control. When the ball is over the plate, you should be able to hit it.

Nothing else makes sense.

The crack of the bat is churchbells to me. The sound of all is well.

T
HE ARRIVAL OF THE
Ward 17s this past year was the first big import of new faces since Manny and all those guys came up from Cuba a few years back. But this bunch made even more of a difference, because the 17s didn’t just bring new faces from outside the neighborhood, they brought
stuff.
Attitude. Butchie was a Ward 17 guy, and he was a good example of
stuff
I could see where he might be a hard guy to handle, except for the baseball thing that got us together right away. He’s a good ol’ ballplayer. Mean pitcher. Loaded with intimidating, tough stuff.

But the everyday stuff mostly had to do with the fact that they weren’t crazy about being here. All right, so it was school, so nobody was crazy about being here. But the 17s were the only ones who were here strictly because they didn’t want to be someplace else. They were kind of angry about the busing deal and they didn’t care who knew about it.

I didn’t want to know about it.

“I can’t stand this one more day,” Butchie said, throwing his big self down into the desk next to me. He looked miserable, his long hair hanging straggly three inches below his ski hat. The hair, frozen as it was, looked like brown icicles.

“Hey Butch,” I said casually, since it wasn’t unlike him to be just like this. I knew his story. Everyone knew his story. He liked to tell his story anyway.

“Walk a half-mile. Take the bus to Forest Hills. Wait in the freezing cold for another stinking bus. Walk another two blocks. And for
what?
”

“To get to school?” I suggested.

Just then, Napoleon Charlie Ellis entered the room, walked the aisle, and took the seat on my right. Butch gestured through me, toward Napoleon.

“And why am I even doing this? Why am I even here? I’m sittin’ with
them
anyway now, and tomorrow I’ll probably be sittin’ with more of ’em. Until my old man finds me a school
three
buses away.”

Napoleon leaned forward, looked past me at Butchie, expressionless, but not without a message anyway. Butchie looked back.

“Forget about it,” Butch said. “Nothing personal.”

Napoleon shook his head. “Nothing personal? Tell me, is it that you think I am deaf, or that I’m stupid and cannot understand the words?”

I was now a hot sandwich.

“Of course it is personal,” Napoleon went on. “You are talking about persons, and I am one of them. You traveled two buses to get here. So? I traveled two thousand miles. And to sit with
you
?”

“So who asked you to?” Butchie said. “It’s not like we had a shortage of you people.”

I did not want to be in the middle of this, but that is literally where I was. This did not have to happen. I had to do something.

“Listen,” I said, making a slicing motion between them with my hand. “Butchie said forget about it. Didn’t you hear that? He said forget about it. When a guy says forget about it, it’s supposed to be the end of it, so... that’s the end of it.”

Butch was in deeper than he wanted to be anyway, I could see from his embarrassed red face. Of course I could see nothing of the kind on Napoleon’s face. Napoleon had a different kind of face. I didn’t really know Napoleon’s face in that way.

But I assumed that he wouldn’t want to be in this messiness. I assumed we would feel the same way. Wouldn’t we?

Butch just turned away and sat rigid in his seat. I looked to Napoleon, who was slowly turning away as well.

“See,” I said, “you just need to not make such a big deal out of stuff. Relax, Napoleon.” I was hit with a timely inspiration from TV. “Like the commercial says, right? ‘No problems.’ Right? ‘No problems.’”

I thought I’d done pretty well, coming up with a smooth culture reference to ease things up. Maybe I knew more stuff than I gave myself credit for.

“That’s the Bahamas,” Napoleon said.

Now he didn’t look too thrilled with me either. Cripes. It was all so unnecessary. I couldn’t imagine it all wouldn’t blow over by lunch.

Pre-lunch, down in the basement getting our food out of our lockers. There was a daily ritual, always brought the guys together no matter what kind of lousy day it was. Beating up on Arthur Brown’s brown-bag lunch.

“Throw it here,” I called to Butchie. Butchie lobbed me a perfect spiral, the length of the corridor and right through Arthur’s outstretched hands. It was no fun unless Arthur at least had a shot at reaching it.

“Arthur, what’s in here?” I asked, looking at the bag. “It’s leaking already after only three passes.”

“Tuna. Jerk,” Arthur snapped, lunging my way.

Butchie was about to catch it, then let it fall. He loves that move. “Too much mayonnaise. We told you last time on tuna day, you gotta tell your mom to go easier on the mayo. Makes our hands all slippery. And it’s making you too fat and slow to catch us.”

“Give me my lunch,” Arthur Brown growled at Butchie. He was very serious about it, which meant we only had three or four tosses left in the game. Butchie let it fly in my direction.

Just as I was about to catch it, a hand stuck up in my face, snagging the bag.

“Good grab, Napoleon,” I said. Arthur was grimly heading our way. “Here he comes,” I said. “Unload, unload.”

Butchie was waving his hands madly from the imaginary end zone. Arthur was bearing down on Napoleon.

Napoleon handed the bag to Arthur, who was so taken by surprise that he dropped it.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“It’s the man’s lunch,” Napoleon said. “Is it not?”

Butchie was headed our way, quite disgusted at the turn of events. “What happened?”

“He gave me my lunch,” Arthur said.

“Dope, whatja do that for?”

“Don’t call me that,” Napoleon said.