Gold Dust by Chris Lynch

was out of my element, was the thing. I really needed to get back where I belonged.
    “What are you doing here?” Napoleon asked.
    “I came to rescue you ,” I said, pointing at him.
    “From what?” Beverly asked. “From culture? From music? From civilization, pleasure, me?”
    I stared dumbly at her. “Yes,” I finally said. “Come on, Napoleon, you served your sentence, now I’m here to spring you.”
    “You do not know what you missed,” he said to me. “You really should have come.”
    “Really,” Beverly agreed, “it was marvelous. Even you would have appreciated it.”
    The “even you” bit didn’t even bother me. “Ya, well, you don’t know what you missed. All I did was teach myself to be Fred Lynn, over there at Northeastern, that’s all. And if you’re gonna be Jim Rice with me we have a lot of work to do starting right away.”
    He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Is that who we are going to be? Can’t we be who we already are?”
    Beverly put a hand lightly on Napoleon’s hand. My eyes went to it like a laser. “If he’s this worked up, they must be pretty decent baseball players.”
    “These are not just decent baseball players. This is Lynn and Rice. The best pair of rookies, ever. The Gold Dust Twins...”
    “Well that is interesting, if they are twins. I didn’t even know they were related.”
    “No, not actually... come on, Napoleon. I’ll explain it while we’re, you know, while...” Somewhere in there I must have suspected the baseball-in-a-blizzard idea was not quite all there, if I couldn’t even speak it.
    But it didn’t change my mind.
    “Tell me you’re not here to force poor Napoleon to play baseball in this? Tell me that, Richard.”
    “I... I’d like to tell you that”
    “Nut,” she said, but she didn’t say it the way a lot of people would.
    “The Gold Dust Twins,” I said again to Napoleon. “I just had this thought... all right, there is a possibility that this will sound a little nutty... anyway... you can hit, I can tell that already. I just feel like... that could be us.”
    As the words came out, I felt as if the ground had been whipped out from under me. I was hanging there, floating and exposed in the snow. I looked away.
    If Napoleon thought I was a nut he was doing a very kind job of not letting me know. “I don’t have much of an idea of what you are talking about, Richard.”
    I was feeling really foolish now, at the symphony, during a snowstorm, blurting out my mental vision that now was starting to sound like nonsense even to me because the air of the real world was now all over it.
    “Nevermind,” I said.
    “No,” he said. “I like the sound of it anyway, Gold Dust Twins.” He nodded, looking out at the sky where you couldn’t see a thing. Flakes of snow settled on his face, and melted there, leaving small shining dots.
    “Oh you’re not seriously...” Redheaded Beverly was openly laughing at the two of us now.
    “Do you mind if I go?” he said to her.
    “Well, I don’t suppose even baseball—even snow baseball—can undo what the symphony does for a person. But you still owe me a trip to Brigham’s.”
    Now it was Napoleon’s turn to shake his head at her. “I cannot understand why you people up here are so interested in ice cream in this weather.”
    Beverly gave Napoleon a mysterious grin, pulled her collar tight around her neck, and headed off through the snow, humming loudly some classical something that did not have cannons in it.
    “So,” Napoleon said, producing from his pocket his black Bruins cap and pulling it low over his ears. “This had better be good.”
    My man. I knew it. My snowstorm-baseball-hardhead partner.
    “I knew I was right about you,” I said.
    He shrugged.
    I handed him my Adirondack and started towing him along by it. “Ill pitch you snowballs. This is excellent quality snowball snow. I know this great great place, the Christian Science Center—been there?—and anyway,