Free Gold Dust by Chris Lynch Page B

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?
    Because it felt like somebody was stealing from me. Who, stealing what? I had no idea Stupid. I felt angry. No, no, just stupid. I