Gold Dust by Chris Lynch Page A

you’re gonna love it, trust me, you are gonna love this, I know you are.”
    “Fine. And then, I will teach you cricket, and you will love that. Trust me, I know you will.”
    “Oh, well, ya, sure, we’ll see... y’know, take it one step at a time, right?” I knew once I showed him baseball, the way I knew baseball, that the cricket stuff just wouldn’t be an issue anymore. I just knew this, inside.
    But I also knew that at this moment he didn’t care one lick about baseball. And he was coming with me anyway. That was something.
    Behind me, Napoleon Charlie Ellis was laughing. Which I figured meant he was aware of it too.
    He stopped walking and flattened out his feet, letting me pull him like a sled to the snowfield. Which I was happy to do.

FOREIGN TERRITORY
    F ROZEN HOURS IS WHAT they were, the time Napoleon and I spent on the tundra of the Christian Science Center. I would lob my perfectly sculpted ice balls after stacking them in a neat pyramid by my side like cannonballs. Easy at first, but after Napoleon had loosened up—he was out there in his Symphony Geek outfit after all—I could see that it would do no harm at all to throw him harder, then harder stuff. The extra speed, the extra motion of it all was good for both of us, not just because it was a lot more fun—which it was—but also because it helped us to stave off death. It was cold out there.
    Which Napoleon had to be feeling even more than I did. But you’d never know it. He stood in there, taking his cuts, blowing on his hands, taking his cuts, missing a lot of pitches but now and then catching one and smashing it to smithereens so spectacularly that we had to try and do it again even before all the hundred million little crystals had landed back on earth again.
    In fact, we got it going so well, I didn’t even take a turn hitting.
    I said, I didn’t even take a turn hitting.
    I was more regular than the pitching machine in the cage, cranking and cranking, until my gloves got so wet and frosty it was warmer to throw them off. Napoleon, for his part, was taking one mean cut after another even though I could see, after a while, that he was slowing down and stiffening up, in his leather-gloved hands, his wool-jacketed arms.
    Finally I just stopped pitching and walked up to him. He stood there, as if waiting for the next pitch, as if he was a statue and couldn’t even tell that I was walking up close. Only then, two feet away, could I really tell how cold he was. His lips were a very unusual and couldn’t-possibly-be-healthy shade of purply charcoal. His grip on the bat was so hard it was like one of those guys who get themselves stuck to a frozen sign pole by licking it.
    “You want to quit?” I asked.
    He didn’t even answer.
    “Hello? Hey, are you all right?” I patted his shoulder, mostly to test if anyone was still in there.
    Even his voice was frozen. “We... can... continue... for... a... while... if... you...”
    I was afraid if I waited for him to finish he might not survive. “You better get home before you die,” I said.
    He nodded, and did not struggle as I removed the bat from his hands.
    “Anyone ever tell you you were kind of stubborn?”
    “N-no,” he stammered.
    I shook my head.
    It occurred to me as we shuffled across the broad snow plain that I had never before seen a person so far out of his element.
    That is, until we got me to Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant.
    The very idea of me going to a fancy restaurant was so out of the normal that this is how it went when I left the house, calling back over my shoulder from the front porch:
    “See ya, I’m going out to Anthony’s Pier Four with the new kid in school and his father who’s a university professor.”
    “Hey,” my father barked from the living room. If you knew my house, I would not have had to add the part about barking from the living room. If he speaks, odds are pretty strong he is barking from the living room. “Young man, you are not going anywhere