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going to agree that baseball is it. ”
    He paused, politely. Then spoke. “Cricket.”
    He couldn’t have been serious, or if he was it was simply out of misinformation or improper training or some other form of messing up somebody did to the guy when he was supposed to be taught the critical fundamentals of life like crossing at the lights, four basic food groups, and baseball.
    I paused long enough to let him gather his thoughts more properly. “Cricket,” he repeated.
    Right. What was I doing? Let him eat cricket.
    “Okay,” I said slowly, “look at it this way. You could spend your time playing one-man cricket, which I don’t know the game but I figure is not a lot of fun, or you could take a shot at a game that you can play with lots of the guys.”
    Napoleon looked at me very seriously. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully, but when they came out they didn’t sound all that carefully chosen. “From what I can see, Richard, I can’t imagine why I would want to play with the guys. ” The way he snorted those words, the guys, it sounded as if he had a rocket of blue cheese crammed up his nose.
    “You see there,” I said, pointing at a spot on his chest, as if I was identifying there. “There you go. There you go being impossible. You could try, you know. You could just... try.”
    “Try,” he echoed.
    “Try.”
    “Why?”
    Why. There’s one for you. Why indeed? What was I doing? So what if I knew baseball was the key to life? That didn’t mean he had to know it. So what if Napoleon Charlie Ellis seemed to be orbiting me for whatever reason since he showed up? That didn’t make him my responsibility. As long as I had a field of live bodies around me in a game of baseball I never cared much whose bodies they were. So what difference did it make now?
    My world was a pretty tight diamond-shaped thing before, first-second-third-home, and that worked fine for me. So if Napoleon didn’t want to try, then fine. If he didn’t want to get along, then fine. That was his right. He didn’t want to change his way and I didn’t want to change mine. Fine. We really didn’t need to do this. We didn’t need anything.
    “You gonna play ball with me, or what?” I snapped.
    “Yes I am,” he snapped.
    When we had paid our money and taken up residence in the cage, I decided the best thing I could do for my man to start him out was to lead by example. I handed Napoleon the bucket of balls and nodded toward the pitching machine.
    “See what I’m doing here with my feet, Napoleon?” I asked. He was staring at me, but not at my feet.
    “How did we decide that you would go first?”
    “What? Of course I’m going first. I’m leading by example.”
    “I know how to swing a bat.”
    “Ya, but I’m going to show you the right way.”
    I could see his one eyebrow go way up higher than the other and disappear under his shiny red batter’s helmet. “You mean you are going to show me your way.”
    “Right,” I said. “The right way.” This time I didn’t look at him long enough to give him a chance to be difficult. If we were going to do this right, I was going to have to let a lot of Napoleon’s stuff just pass me by. Later, when he was great, he’d thank me for it. I looked down and began scratching in the dirt with my feet like a bull about to charge.
    “Why do you do that thing with your feet like a chicken?”
    I stood back out of the box. “Like a bull, Napoleon. I do it like a bull, not like a chicken. And I do it to get a good firm grip of the earth beneath me.”
    “I see. Without it you will slip off the earth, is that it?”
    Clearly it was time to block out the taunting and concentrate on the important business of addressing the ball. One of the many critical skills you learn from baseball is to focus on the job no matter what kind of nonsense people are talking at you.
    There is no room in the game for the junk parts of life. That’s why the game is better than life.
    My feet