by David Wright
A police minivan arrives, and the hoodie boys dart away into an alley. The van slows to turn and follow them in. But it’s an ambush! A larger group, maybe ten hoodie boys, encircles the van and starts hitting it with sticks and metal pipes. And I’m like, Wow.
The van shifts into reverse, peels out backward, but it hits one of the burning cars.
A cop fires a Flash-Ball from his window into the hoodie boys—pop!—and a boy carrying a metal pipe takes a direct hit; he comes straight off his feet.
Another shot. This time the Flash-Ball splits a green plastic trash bin in two.
“Jesus, Matt, wake up!”
Free is screaming at me, tugging at my sleeve.
“We gotta break!”
We sprint away from the ambush as other police vans arrive. We hear a siren coming from the direction we’re moving in. Free cuts hard toward the Avenue des Quatre Routes—which leads away from city hall—but we’re sprinting like crazy, no time to discuss it. We’re just running.
The avenue is jammed with people going in every direction. There are thudding explosions and, before long, the smell of tear gas. A green municipal bus burns, orange heat and black smoke rising from it. People—passengers—stand huddled off to the side under the awning of a bakery, coughing, shielding their faces. A woman in a long coat lies on the ground. Two other passengers tend to her. She looks burned pretty bad.
A little farther on: a white tank-like thing, with a cannon in front. I only recognize what it is as the cannon fires full blast on us. The jet of water knocks me off my feet; it’s like getting rammed by a tree trunk. Free collapses backward too.
CRS charge from behind the tank. I help Free up, but there’s nowhere to run, nowhere without cops or water spraying or people falling over each other.
“This way!” I scream, indicating the alley between the bank and the pharmacy, but there are people everywhere and suddenly no Freeman.
“Free?”
People pushing, running.
“Free! Freeman! Free!”
Cops swinging.
I can’t just stand here. I take the alley, Allée Victor Hugo, hoping this is the way he went, as it leads to the Cinq Mille. Somewhere familiar. That’s where we’ll find one another again.
But I end up face-to-face with a cop in full riot gear. Before I can dodge or duck or even flinch, he flips up the dark visor of his helmet.
“No,” he tells me, “that way,” pointing with his baton.
But it’s like a disconnect. I can’t make sense of his familiar face inside the dark helmet or fit the directions his mouth speaks at me with my immediate task, which is finding Free.
His hand is grasping my arm. “Listen to me, Quebec!” he says, and I recognize him finally: the cop with a brother in Montreal, Lieutenant Petit. “This isn’t a game. There’s a corps of CRS up there. Go that way instead. Now!”
And I do. I run toward the alley. It’s long, all the doors and shutters closed. I run past a burning car. The heat singes my cheeks.
Right, onto Rue Berlioz. There’s hardly anybody on the street, so I slow to a jog but keep moving. I try to call Free on his cell. Straight to voice mail.
Left, onto Rue Malraux. And there, just ahead, is about a dozen CRS, marching in the other direction. I stay far enough behind that they don’t notice me. They turn the corner—and five hoodie boys with bandannas and scarves tied bandit-style over their mouths spring out from between two buildings! They pelt the cops with rocks, then run.
Toward me.
I’m running too.
The first of the hoodie boys catches up. We turn the corner together.
Helmeted CRS with dark visors masking their faces are there. They’re firing guns. At us!
The hoodie boy ducks behind a car. Me too. Gunfire pop-pops off the side of the car, off the wall behind us.
“Rubber bullets,” the hoodie boy says. “Don’t sweat it.”
Karim. I recognize his voice.
A helicopter whoosh-whooshes above, its searchlight looking for us.
Riot police beat their shields with T-batons and march to the cadence.
People at windows above throw pots and pans down at the police.
Karim pulls his cell from his pocket and flips it open, reads the screen. “C’mon!” he says and takes off. And I do too.
We’re scaling a padlocked gate two buildings down. We cut through a deserted lot, climb a brick wall and jump into an alley. I have no idea where we are.
Karim’s path leads to a parking lot. He stops and plops down on the ground, his back against the tire of one of the few cars remaining. I slide down beside him.
He pulls down the bandanna and reaches a hand toward me.
“Got a smoke?”
MATT
We’re behind Moose’s building. I recognize it now. Renoir.
We sneak a look over the hood of the car. It’s chaos all around. Bus-stop shelters and phone booths vandalized and scorched. The entire area reeks of wet burnt chemicals.
The courtyard between buildings, forty, fifty yards away, brims with cops in tight groups. Clusters of guys, most with their faces covered, launch stones at them, then duck back behind park benches and trees. The cops pick up the stones and chuck them back. Stuff comes raining down from windows and from the roof—scrap metal, a toaster, books. A Molotov cocktail lands beside one knot of cops, the flames bursting in a spray of red over the ground. The cops scatter but regroup right away.
One boy gets too close. The cops swarm him, punching and kicking him. A police van comes screeching to a stop beside them, but the cops keep on. Kicking and kicking.
I pull a rock the size of a baseball out of the ground, screaming, “Fucking murderers!” as I launch it at the van. It sails through the air and hits; the windshield splinters.
The cops don’t let up on the kid.
I’m searching for another rock. “Here,” Karim says, and he hands me a bandanna. I tie it over my mouth and follow him.
We sprint from the car to a side street off the parking lot, what sounds like gunfire in the distance. The street is old, cobbled. Two more hoodie boys catch up to us, and Karim and the two others start prying a paving stone loose. I start in too, prying stones free. One hoodie boy takes off his sweatshirt and ties the top closed, and we use it as a sack. I feel searing pain in my fingers, and when I raise them to my face, they’re covered in bloody gashes.
We get the sweatshirt sack half-full and Karim says, “C’mon.” We follow him the long way around, to the other side of the building. Karim launches a stone at a line of cops standing thirty yards away. He reaches back. I hand him one and take another for myself. Mine fits in my hand like a miniature football. I throw a spiral, wobbly but true: it arcs, then hurtles down and into the visor of the helmet of a cop leaning out from behind a tree, hitting him flush in the face. He drops in a heap and does not move.
“Ouais, mec!” Karim says, and the other boys cheer me.
We have to fall back behind some trees, but when the rubber bullets stop pinging around us, I throw another stone. Then another. One of the hoodie boys screams, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” as he winds up and launches. I join in. With each volley, the four of us shout France’s national motto. Under the bandanna, I can feel myself smiling.
Karim taps my shoulder. The sweatshirt sack is empty. We fall back but don’t go to the cobblestone street. Karim leads us behind the building and into an underground car park. We’re tossing knuckles and laughing.
“Trop cool!” one hoodie boy says.
“I got a text from Pierre,” says the other. He pulls down his bandanna. “Molière High School is destroyed!”
“Tchut!” Karim warns, and we still.
There is a beating of feet on the concrete ramp. We all tighten—I’m ready to run.
Three hoodie boys round the corner.
“Ouais, mecs!” Karim says.
They all greet each other. Me too.
“Did you guys get some?”
one of the new boys says.
“It was us that got the pig van on Rue Blériot.”
“We heard about that!”
Another of the new boys says, “We did you better. Came upon a pig by himself.”
“No!”
“Got him on the ground. Stomped him till his buddies showed up.”
Another says, “I felt his ribs crack under my Timberlands.”
“Ouais!” Karim says.
“It’s just the beginning,” the leader of the new boys says. “Villeneuve is hell for pigs tonight.”
He removes a book bag he’s wearing and sets it carefully on the ground as we circle around. Then he pulls his Morts pour Rien T-shirt over his head. The butt of a pistol sticks out of the waistband of his jeans. We all see it. No one says anything.
“Jacques texted,” the leader says. He’s taking glass Evian bottles filled with what smells like gasoline out of his book bag. He lines them up and begins tearing the T-shirt into strips. “He says the cops are regrouping at the Quatre Routes.”
Karim helps him, pouring gas over the strips and stuffing them down into the mouths of the bottles. “At the Quatre Routes?” he says. “Let’s go greet them.”
The leader takes the sweatshirt we were storing stones in and puts it on, they load the bottles back into the bag, and we take off up the ramp. There are a few boys at the top, who join us. We jog down a dark alley, the streetlamps shot out. I let myself fall behind. And once we round the corner onto Rue des Près, I drop down behind a parked car. I squat there until I can’t hear them anymore.
I’m breathing hard, panting. I rip the bandanna from my face, chuck it into the gutter.
“What the hell?”
I’m talking aloud to myself.
“What the hell was that?”
MATT
Behind me I hear police whistles. Up the road, an Esso gas station burns. Firemen spray water on the blaze, but they get bombarded from windows and rooftops and have to crawl for cover under their truck. I scoot away in the other direction, the direction of city hall. That’s where I have to get.
But Freeman? Where’s Freeman? Did I just do him like I did Moose and Mobylette and Sidi, leaving them when I should have done something, something that would have prevented what happened?
I stop and squat down beside a car. I try his cell again.
Straight to voice mail.
“Freeman, man. Come on, pick up. Let me know where you are.”
Do I go after him?
But where?
Where I am is deserted and creepy quiet, but there are cops all around, and it’s chaos out there. How can I find him with toasters and Molotov cocktails raining from windows, and cops everywhere?
I push on, onto another street, then stop and squat again. There’s no one around. I walk on. I come to an intersection, stop again. Deserted in every direction. I pass the post office—a two-story gray block, every window splintered or busted out. The yellow-and-blue La Poste sign dangles above the main entrance by a thread of electrical cord. On the street in front are the scorched carcasses of three cars, one still smoldering.
Then I hear gunfire up ahead. An explosion—boom! Orange-black smoke streams up above the buildings. I hear police whistles headed my way.
Not again.
A couple rounds the corner, the woman tucked beneath the man’s trench coat, his arm draped over her. They run toward me but duck into a doorway two doors up. I sprint there too before the door shuts.
It’s a storefront mosque, and the guy at the door—he looks like a grand frère, though I don’t recognize him—lets me in, then closes the door behind me. The place is dark but packed. Silhouettes, huddled together. There’s murmuring. In the corner, someone sobbing. I hear the ritual humming of prayer.
I stay near the door, by the plate-glass window—the only place where there’s room still—beside two veiled women who tchut-tchut, tchut-tchut their whimpering children. I squat. Then stand. Then squat again, my face in my hands. I kind of want to cry. Or laugh. I want to feel something other than this.
The cop I tagged who dropped in the courtyard beside Moose’s building didn’t have a face. He was nobody, just a helmet and visor in a squad of helmets and visors. But real all the same. He could have been Lieutenant Petit. Maybe it was him. Just like maybe he was one of the cops who kicked and kicked and kicked that boy who got too close.
Real and not real. Like a music video, Rage Against the Machine, and all you can hear is a bass line thumping. Bandit-faced kids chucking stones and helmeted cops kicking and kicking. And him, the cop I tagged who dropped in a heap.
What have I done?
My phone’s display glows fluorescent green in the dark of the room. F-r-e-e-m-a-n flashes as my ringtone, this silly jingle, starts up.
“Matt?” I hear across the dark, and I see a silhouette stand up.
I push my way to him. We meet halfway. Hug.
“You okay?” he asks just as I ask him the same thing.
Such a stupid question.
We look around, find a place to squat back by the door. Outside the plate-glass window, shadows sprint by, sometimes helmeted cops, other times hoodie boys. There are sirens, gunshots and, over everything, an eerie red glow: fires raging, just beyond where we can see.
We’ll wait it out. We don’t say so; we don’t have to agree out loud. We both just know.
FREE
Normally, the first RER passes through at about five, so me and Matt cluster with a group of ten or twelve folks who’ve holed up at the mosque with us and intend to get out of there. Businesspeople, an imam, a bunch of women still carrying yesterday’s shopping.
Outside it’s still. There’s broken glass everywhere and scorched cars here and there, and every now and then a group of riot cops that stare but leave us be. But by and large it’s still. Matt is quiet the whole way to the station, just like he was all night—when I asked if he had been able to avoid the cops, when I asked if he had texted Juliette, when I asked if he had heard from Aïda.
On the train too. He’s in his head, slumped down in his seat, staring out the window. At Gare du Nord I kind of hesitate. I’m not sure I shouldn’t go on home with him to Juliette’s. But I’ve still got Georges and Françoise to face. They wigged when I spoke to them yesterday, after Matt and me got split up and I ended up at the storefront mosque; they just kept calling and calling till finally I had to turn my phone off. Matt smiles at me, this fake smile. He says he’s okay and waves for me to go on, and so I do. I go.
Françoise is on the couch in a robe, puffy-eyed, when I walk in the door, and Georges comes charging out of his office. “Ah, mon dieu, mon dieu,” he says, his eyes all red and puffy too. They don’t wig or holler or threaten to send me home right that instant. They start in to hugging on me so much I can’t hardly move or breathe, and Georges keeps saying, “Ah, mon dieu, mon dieu.”
I repeat the lie I told them from the mosque—that I was in Villeneuve when it popped off but found shelter right away and was never in danger—and when they finally quit peppering me with questions, I let on that I’m more sleepy than I actually am so I can get off to myself in my room. I close the door and strip off what I’ve been wearing twenty-four hours straight now, the Morts pour Rien T that still smells of newness but is sticky and stiff with soot and dried sweat. I rinse my face and my neck, my hands and arms, at the little sink in the corner.
I sit on my bed. I can hear Georges talking on the phone. “Yes, yes, he’s all right,” he says.
I try Matt’s number to see if he got in okay. He doesn’t pick up. Maybe I doze off, maybe I don’t—it’s hard to say. My mind keeps rewinding all the madness from yesterday so that it feels like I’m wide awake the whole time. But before I know it, it’s going on noon. I turn onto my side, close my eyes, and then it’s half past six.
I try Matt again. His phone rings and rings. I shoot him an email. There are all kinds of emails in my inbox from everybody, but nothing about Sidi. One fr
om Marc Lebrun is calling a general assembly of the entire team for tomorrow, Saturday, at three at Villeneuve city hall, and I’m like, Right. Go back up there? Who knows but that stuff might start popping off again?
I try to write Mama an email but can’t find the right words. Françoise knocks on my door to let me know dinner’s ready. She still looks all happy, like I have risen from the dead.
Georges brings in the radio from the other room, and we listen while we eat. The news station reports that there were thirty-seven arrests last night, that twenty-eight cars got torched, along with that city bus me and Matt saw. They say twelve people had to be hospitalized, and I wonder if they’re including Sidi.
A reporter breaks in, and, sure enough, there are “new outbreaks of violence in Villeneuve, in the Cité des Cinq Mille,” he says, the sound of tiny explosions in the background.
We leave our plates and go into the other room, turn on the TV. Georges and Françoise see exactly what it was I went through. Cars burning. Riot cops and kids with bandannas over their faces, sparring. Chaos. The news cuts to a storefront, and I recognize it right away.
“That’s where Matt and I hid out!” I tell them.
It’s surrounded by police cars and CRS vans, the cops have fired tear gas canisters inside, and I’m like, “What’s that about?” Folks—women in headscarves, with little kids, and old men in djellabas and skull caps, no hoodie boys among them—come spilling out, coughing and covering their mouths with their hands. The cops grab them up and push them, pretty roughly, into the back of a police van.
“But…what an aberration!” Georges says. “What could those elderly people have done to warrant such treatment?”
They both look to me, like I can explain it.
They stay glued to the set, but I go to my room. I try Matt’s cell to see if he has the news on. I get his voice mail. I try again at nine thirty, at ten fifteen, at eleven, before nodding off. He never answers.
