NAPOLEON CHARLIE ELLIS SHOWED up just after Christmas. When he landed here there was almost a foot of snow on the ground. When he took off from Dominica, there probably was not.
That was the first shortchanging he got. The second was that they shoved him back down into seventh grade when he was supposed to be in the eighth. Language problem was what they were talking about. What language did you speak back home in Dominica, I asked him. English, he told me, and told me in some pretty fine English, I must say. So I didn’t quite get why they did that. Anyway.
“They announced my name when I came in,” he said to me. “So you have the advantage of me.”
“Huh?”
“What is your name?”
“It ain’t half what your name is.”
“Ain’t?” Napoleon Charlie Ellis asked me, sounding very surprised. My ain’t never surprised anybody in the past. Mr. Ellis apparently expected Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Hub of the Solar System, Athens of America, to be an Ain’t-Free-Zone. It would be my job to enlighten him.
Richard Riley Moncreif, I told him. Ain’t it purdy? I added. I was loaded with confidence that day, and lots of days before then too. Meeting people, talking to people, mixing... I never had any problem with that the way a lot of people do.
Napoleon Charlie Ellis stuck out his hand, right there in the boys’ bathroom, and after a small pause I stuck out mine. My hand.
It was an excellent shake, kind of formal, kind of hard, little bit of challenge, little bit squeezy. I had very little experience with the hand-shaking bit since it was never really much of a thing in my circle, and I never figured it to be all that crammed with meaning, the way grown men take it so seriously. But if I wanted to try thinking that there was more to it than a couple of guys trying to show each other how firm their grip was, I might have thought, this feels like the hand of somebody I could like.
But I didn’t want to try thinking that. Don’t make things more complicated than they should be would be my philosophy if I had one. So.
It was a fairly tough grip to match squeeze for squeeze if it came down to it. That was what I thought mattered about the handshake of Napoleon Charlie Ellis.
He was well known before he knew it, his story circulating through our little population before he did. He was not a full year older than me, despite the being kept back thing, which they could call lots of other things but we recognized as being kept back. I was on the old side of seventh and Napoleon was on the young side of eighth, so we were pretty close anyhow. I’m sure he recognized that and that was one reason we became friends so quickly. And I was a little bit taller too, so he could respect me, even if this was only my first run-through of the seventh grade.
“I do wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said to me.
“Do what?”
“Making the jokes. About my getting reversed. I don’t care for it. I can forget about it when you don’t mention it, since there is nobody here who knew me when I was in eighth grade, but when you bring it up, I am reminded. I don’t care to be reminded.”
Which was, I guess, the third part of the shortchanging of Napoleon Charlie Ellis. All his people were somewhere else.
“I’ll stop,” I said. Napoleon had a very smart face. Could make me appreciate things I couldn’t manage on my own. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you wanted out of a guy. Mostly, I was happy enough knowing what I knew, and doing what I did. So this was a thing that we’d have to keep an eye on.
But as long as he had me looking, what did I know about being removed from my everything? That was for sure something Napoleon had that I didn’t. All my people were right here around me, always were and always would be. I had what and who I needed right here. Mine was that kind of neighborhood, that kind of life. “I’m sorry,” I said, mostly just to make the thing go away. “I’ll stop.”
“Yes, you said that,” he said.
See there, he could have said, okay, cool, Richard. Great. He could, and obviously did, notice that I felt bad enough to repeat myself. Could have let me off easier then. So what did he do instead? Pointed it out to me, that I had repeated. Threw a spotlight on it. Cold spot. And that was the way he did things. Letting a guy off was not his way. Like if I made a mistake with him I had to feel it twice, as if I couldn’t really get it the first time. Frankly, I didn’t understand why a guy should be that tense.
“Oh right, well I just repeated myself because I know you have that problem with the English and all.”
Times like this, a joke at just the right moment can really smooth things...
“Where are you going, Napoleon? Come back, wouldja please just...”
Did I ask for this? Was I looking for this? Did I go following anybody into the bathroom to spark up a friendship? No, I did not. I was minding my own business, doing just fine, marking off days on the calendar until baseball season started. Next thing I know I’m chasing a guy out of the bathroom to patch things up. Makes no sense. If I ran things, nobody would have names. We would just have batting averages. Then there would be no misunderstandings.
In the meantime, Napoleon Charlie would not get shortchanged by me at least.
“I’m sorry,” I said, catching him at the foot of the yellowed marble steps of the school basement. “I didn’t mean anything. I swear.”
His face remained rigid, only slowly and slightly softening. Then he nodded.
“So, what’s your batting average?” I asked.
He let his face freeze again, then headed up the stairs.
“What?” I said, following. “That one wasn’t a joke. That was a real question. Jeez, man, you eat a box of nails for breakfast, or what?”