by David Wright
Yaz steps forward. “Papa Oussekine,” he says.
Then it shifts, Monsieur Oussekine’s face. Not the rest of him, just his face.
“My son!” he cries—it fills the whole hallway—and he collapses against the door.
Yaz catches him and carries him inside. “My son! My son!” And the kids behind, stunned to stillness, look blank-faced at their father as the door slowly swings closed.
Me and Matt stand there in the darkened hallway.
There’s a wailing from inside. Madame Oussekine.
We just stand there, me and Matt, the sound of commotion and “My son!” coming through the closed door.
Matt turns toward the stairwell, and we go.
He stops two floors below, heads toward an apartment and knocks.
“Sidi’s place?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond, just knocks more urgently.
There’s no answer.
“They’ve got to be at the hospital,” I say.
“Do I go there? Or call?”
Bad idea. He and Aïda have been hanging some, and I know he’s worried about her, but Sidi’s people need to be alone together. I say it as gently as I know how.
“Naw, Matt. Not yet.”
He doesn’t agree or disagree.
We leave the building.
“Should we go by practice?” he says. “Let everyone know?”
“There’s no practice. They know.”
We head toward the RER. Are silent on the train.
Matt says toward the window, “With the cops earlier, I was embarrassed. To be standing there like that, handcuffed. You know?” He looks my way, then back. “Like, ashamed.”
“Wasn’t nothing else to do.”
“There’s always something you can do.”
“What?” I say. “What were we going to do? Bust the lot of them free?”
“I don’t know.” He looks me in my eye. “Maybe if we’d have run too, the cops would have come after us and not them.”
Maybe. And maybe it’d be us zipped up in them bags.
I turn my phone on, and the list of text and voice-mail messages fills my screen. Two texts are from Françoise. The first reads: Please call. Let us know you are safe. F. I don’t read the second. Am fine, I write in French shorthand. Am not in Vllnve. Dont worry.
At Gare du Nord, my transfer, I stay on the train. I mean, I don’t want to have to explain this stuff, any of it, to Georges and Françoise. Or to anyone else, for that matter. I just want to hang with Matt, who saw exactly what I did.
Matt doesn’t question my staying. We ride to Cité Universitaire.
FREE
I’m hoping Juliette won’t be at Matt’s place, but she is, and she’s a hot mess. She comes running at Matt as we walk in the door, looking like she’s been crying, and she scolds, “I called and texted! Why didn’t you call me back?”
Matt lets himself be hugged. After she lets him go, she hugs me.
Matt plops down on the couch, and I slide down the wall and sit on the floor.
“You’ll be more comfortable here.” Juliette brings in a chair from the kitchen. “Or sit on the sofa beside Mathieu.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
She sits next to Matt. “When I didn’t hear back, I almost called your parents.” She pauses, like for effect. “Putain, kiddo. Your mother would kill me.”
She lights a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table. Matt takes one too. Juliette doesn’t say anything, just hands him the lighter. She drags on the cigarette a long time and then starts in again.
“So what happened? Did you know those boys that attacked the police?”
“Attacked the police?” Matt says. “Nobody attacked the police.”
“It’s all over the news,” she says. “The radio and TV.”
“Nobody attacked the cops, Juliette.” Matt looks like he’s about to cry. “We were playing soccer before practice and…”
“You were with them?”
“Freeman and me both. A bunch of others. We were just…playing soccer. And they chased Moose and Mobylette and Sidi.”
“You were with those boys that vandalized and stole!”
“Nobody vandalized; nobody stole.”
“The police chief says so. On the TV, on the radio.”
“They’re lying, Jules,” he says. “I was there.”
Matt looks dazed, at a complete loss. I don’t know what I look like, and I don’t know what to say either.
Juliette gets up and paces between the kitchen and the window. She crosses her arms over her chest, the cig dangling from her lips, her mind clearly working. “They’re spinning the story,” she says, “to cover for the cops? You guys have to stay away from Villeneuve for a while then. Who knows what might happen now.”
Matt is red-faced angry. “Don’t you get it, Jules? It was Moose.”
“I do, Mathieu, I get it.”
“Moose!” he screams.
She goes to Matt and pulls him into her arms. “I get it,” she says.
They sit like that for a while.
Finally she says, “So you have to do something then. Don’t let them make your friends out to be criminals.”
Matt and me spend the next several hours calling and texting folks while Juliette follows the media circus on the TV in her room and hollers updates to us. We call Coach Thierry, Le Barbu. I get Yaz’s number from our DB coach, Celestin, but Yaz’s phone just rings and rings. Matt talks to Monsieur Lebrun for a long time.
Juliette pokes her head out. “How about some sort of public protest,” she says, “to counter all the spin?”
“We’re on it,” I tell her.
Matt jumps in. “There’s going to be a silent march tomorrow from the electric substation to city hall.”
“Good,” she says. “The team’s putting it together?”
“Some cité elders,” says Matt.
“Even better!”
“Everybody knows,” Matt says. “Everybody is outraged. They want to fill the streets to let all of France know the truth of what happened.”
I look over at the clock—it’s 3:00 AM. I’m exhausted. For real.
“Any news about Sidi?” I ask Matt. “Anything from Aïda?”
He shakes his head no and stares through the window into the dark outside.
I need to sleep. “I’m going to head home.”
I had talked to Françoise earlier, told her I was okay and that I was at Matt’s. When she asked about Villeneuve, I told her I was calling folks up there—which I was—but not a lot more.
Juliette kisses my cheek, and Matt walks me to the stairwell.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he tells me. “We’ll head up early.”
MATT
First thing I do when I wake up is flip open my phone. Twenty-two new messages.
Juliette and I kept talking after Free left, and she’s still asleep, curled up on the other end of the couch. I silence the ringer so the alerts don’t wake her. Most of the texts are from Villeneuve, the same one forwarded from different people, confirming the silent march this afternoon. The message reads that kids plan on skipping school, parents on leaving work, for Moose and Mobylette and Sidi. But there’s nothing from Aïda. I want news about Sidi, but I want to know how she’s doing too.
A text comes in from Free: Gare du Nord station in 45?
I tap back: 30.
I get there first and buy some Mars bars and potato chips at the newsstand on the far end of the platform.
“Check it out,” I hear Free say.
He has Le Monde, holding it out toward me as he walks up.
“Looks like it got hot last night,” he says, indicating the page the paper is open to. “They set some cars on fire, busted some windows out of a school.”
“Did you see the interior minister’s press conference?”
“I heard it. Why would he lie like that?”
“I wonder who’s going to chime in next. The president of the
Republic?”
We shake hands finally, a proper greeting. Then Free looks down the tunnel for some sign of the train.
“There’s hardly nothing in the paper on Sidi,” he says. “Just that he’s in critical condition.”
“And you believe them? Le Monde can’t even get Moose’s and Mobylette’s ages right. Sidi could be dead for all we know.”
An incoming text alert on my phone. It’s my dad.
What happened to Moose?!?! YOU OK? Please answer my calls.
I don’t know how he knows. The story isn’t even twenty-four hours old, and Le Monde didn’t mention Moose by name.
Juliette?
Then a text from her: Your parents keep calling. PLEASE answer your phone.
I didn’t even feel it vibrate, but there is a list of voice mails. One is from my mom. “Please tell me you’re not involved in any of this,” her voice scolds.
Still nothing from Aïda.
I turn my cell off.
» » » »
The train is crowded, but at Villeneuve station it’s even more packed, both platforms filled with people, North African and African and white, filing out the exits—old people in traditional robes, kids like us in jeans and T-shirts, city workers in green jumpsuits. I wonder if they’re Monsieur Oussekine’s co-workers.
Outside the station grands frères from the Cinq Mille are giving away white T-shirts, Morts pour Rien—Dead for Nothing—printed in block letters across the chest. Police in riot gear—bulletproof vests, body armor, plastic shields—stand clustered in groups. Even more are in their white buses. They stare out over the crowd.
The Diables Rouges are set to rendezvous at the Beach. Free and I stand in line for our Morts pour Rien shirts, and then we head that way. Le Monde talked about “an urban disturbance,” broken windows and torched cars, but everything looks pretty much the way it always does. On one corner, Free points out what’s left of one of the city’s plastic trash bins—a dark green circle, melted onto the sidewalk.
We head up Rue du 19 Mars 1962. At the end of the block are two unmarked cars full of cops. “It’s funny,” Free says. “They just sit there, like they’re waiting.”
“Must be scared of the march.”
“With all these folks here?” says Free. “I’d be scared too.”
There’s already a big gathering when we arrive at the Beach. Many faces look familiar—friends and family of teammates. I see most of the guys that we were with when the cops charged us. Jean-Marc. Ibrahim. Off to the side, crying, is Adar. And the reality of it hits me again, suddenly, harder than any hit I’ve ever taken. Moose is gone. Mobylette too. Maybe Sidi.
I turn my phone back on. There are more messages, but I ignore them and punch out a quick text—Please know I am thinking about you—and send it to Aïda.
More and more people arrive. We’re seventy or eighty now, milling around, greeting one another with handshakes but staying mostly silent.
It’s nearly four when Monsieur Lebrun finally climbs the bleachers, Yaz behind him. Behind Yaz is an imam. He wears a dark turban and has a bushy beard. Monsieur Lebrun speaks into a bullhorn, his voice crackling. “We’re here to pay respect to fallen…Be respectful of…”
The imam follows. “The families are grieving…Our unity and silence must honor…”
I don’t really hear much of it, or maybe it just doesn’t stick.
Coach Thierry and one of the senior team players unfurl a twenty-foot banner that reads the same as the white T-shirts everybody is wearing: MORTS POUR RIEN. The rest of us crowd behind. We exit the Beach and slowly head toward the substation. It’s not far, but it takes nearly twenty minutes to get there, the mass of us making the going slow.
A huge crowd is already there. The mayor of Villeneuve stands near the front. We wait in silence for a while; I look at the gray sky. Finally the mayor lays a wreath on the wall Moose and Mobylette and Sidi climbed over. He makes a short speech, offering condolences to the families, reminding us about the fragility of life.
“Like we don’t know already,” says Free.
“Tchut!” Coach Thierry snaps.
The mayor heads the procession, beside the giant banner. Our march is really a kind of side-to-side rocking, the size of the crowd so huge and the pace so slow. We number in the hundreds easy, hundreds and hundreds, pushing in the direction of the town center. Free and I are forty or fifty people back from the front, with our teammates.
We walk past six-floor walk-ups, rows of bunker-like bungalows. People stare from windows. A few hang sheets made into impromptu signs: Morts pour Rien. One reads: Nos Fils!—Our Sons. Some watchers join us.
On the Rue de Sévignié two busloads of cops wait for us. Two more arrive as we push onto the street. CRS in full gear line both sidewalks. Behind their helmets and visors, they remind me of Cylons, and because the street is so narrow, they seem right on top of us.
We ignore them and march on. The crowd gets pretty dense; people start spilling up onto the sidewalk. The cops use their shields to force them back into the road. Some shove with their telescope batons. They bark at us to stay in the street. The police have set up metal crowd-control barriers at the corner that force us to go left, toward the Charlotte Petit roundabout.
Jorge, next to me, grumbles, “Dirty pigs. This adds a good kilometer to our route, through Ville-Blanche.”
Overhead, a police helicopter appears out of nowhere. It flies real low in circles above us, its engine roaring, its rotors whipping up waste paper and dirt. The dust gets in my eyes. I hear Coach Thierry shouting over the helicopter’s rotors, something like “Remain calm…” and “…pay tribute to our teammates.”
At the roundabout, a cop in full body armor starts to laugh for no apparent reason. I don’t initially hear him, but I hear Jorge—“Our friends are dead, and you think it’s funny!”—and when I look, I see the broad, mocking smile through the clear visor. The cop is giving Jorge a you-want-something-with-me look.
I hear Free tell Jorge, “Relax, mec.”
Jorge is six-four and weighs at least two-sixty. “C’est quoi ton problème?” he snaps at the cop. “Tu me cherches?” What’s your deal? You want something with me?
“Let it go,” Free says. And I see Coach Thierry heading back toward us.
But it’s too late. Jorge says, “Fucking murderers!” and he spits into the cop’s visor. A plainclothes cop next to me, who I hadn’t noticed, pulls out and flicks open a steel T-baton and strikes Jorge on the back of the head—plink! Just like that.
Jorge’s head splits open, a bloody pink gash, and he collapses onto all fours.
It’s like everyone around me is suddenly still.
Then it’s all motion and commotion. “Dang!” I hear—Free—and then people are pushing, running in all directions. Screaming. A stampede.
I lean over Jorge, trying to protect him from the crowd. Free does too. Jorge is not out, but he’s dazed, sitting in the middle of the street, his eyes glassy.
The next bit happens in slow motion. I see from the corner of my eye the riot cop who was grinning, rearing back to take a broad swing at us with his T-baton. I raise my forearm over my face—it’s just instinct—but Freeman pops up and straight-arms him in the chest, which sends the cop flying back into the metal railing, his helmet askew, other cops dropping their batons to catch his falling body.
“Break!” Free screams, grabbing Jorge by the arm. “Go, go, go!”
Free and I are struggling to get Jorge to his feet. People jostle us. I hear whistles blowing—the cops. One sprays a canister into the air. I can feel my lungs fill with thickness, my eyes burning. But we have Jorge up, and we’re moving.
With the crowd, which is moving away from the roundabout. Away from where the mayor is, at the head of the marchers—which is where, it seems to me, we should be heading. They wouldn’t attack the mayor, would they?
I’m wiping at my eyes with one hand; Jorge’s arm is in the other. We’re trying to push out of this m
ess.
“Don’t rub,” Free shouts, his face scrunched and his eyes squinting. “The tears will clear the crap out.”
It’s hard to breathe. We’re all three coughing, pushing toward a nearby alley. L’Allée du Côteau, the sign reads. Men and women and kids, running. Cops among us, swinging. Jorge kind of gets his wits back, and he’s running on his own now, crimson wet all over his face and his white Morts pour Rien T-shirt.
At the top of the alley, on Rue des Près, a pack of CRS runs toward us, full steam. We take off in different directions—Jorge in one, Free in the other. Not because we’re trying to split up; just because we do. I follow Free. We run along a row of closed-down warehouses and, at the top of the street, climb the cement stairs two by two.
We’re in a kind of plaza, the top of city hall visible above the buildings on the other side. Hardly anybody else here. No cops. We lean over, catching our breath, both of us still coughing from the pepper spray.
Free says, “What just happened?”
“Dang,” I say, my throat raw and burning.
“Dang is right,” says Free. “For real.”
MATT
Night is falling fast. The police helicopter flies circles above the plaza but ignores us. It points its searchlight at a cluster of hoodie boys that Free and I hadn’t noticed, huddled beneath a tree at the other end. When the light hits them, they run.
“Look,” Free says, pointing toward the Cinq Mille.
A chimney of orange-black smoke rises from between two of the buildings. Two fire trucks zoom past, sirens blaring, followed by a CRS bus. We dodge behind a tree.
“We got to get out of here,” Free says. “The RER, bus, something.”
“Cops were all over the RER earlier,” I say. “And will it even be running?”
We both take a knee beneath the tree.
“City hall?” I suggest.
“Cops will definitely be all over there.”
“But it’s where the march was supposed to end up. And the mayor will be there.”
He doesn’t look convinced. Still, we start walking that way, fast but not running. Voices and odd noises fill the air. Spurts of laughter—one a high-pitched cackle. Glass breaking. Dogs barking, one baying. Down the street, Free and I see two cars side by side, burning. Four or five guys, hooded and with bandannas over their faces, dance around them. The windshield of one car explodes as we watch.
