Free Gold Dust by Chris Lynch Page A

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