by David Wright
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My phone wakes me—early, like six thirty. It’s Juliette.
“Freeman.” I can hear she’s sobbing. “He won’t speak to me. He just lies there. He won’t even remove his bloody clothes.”
“Bloody clothes?”
I hadn’t even noticed. We were both all sooty and grimy.
“Still,” she says. “Since yesterday.”
“I’ll be right there.”
When I come out of my room, dressed to leave, Françoise, who was in the kitchen baking or some such, stands between me and the door. “You disappear during the troubles two nights ago, and now?” Her eyes are more pleading than angry. “Please, please, Freeman, don’t return there anymore.”
“I’m not,” I tell her. “It’s Matt.”
She looks like she doesn’t believe me. Georges comes out of their room in a bathrobe.
I take Françoise’s hands in mine and turn to face Georges. “You have to believe me. I am not putting myself in danger. I’m not. It’s Matt. He’s having trouble.”
I write Juliette’s number down on a scrap of paper.
“Here is his cousin’s telephone number. I will be there.”
Françoise steps aside. She kisses me like Mama would, not the peck-peck-peck on the cheek like usual, but so as the kissing says, I trust you; don’t do anything that will let me down.
FREE
Juliette opens the door but doesn’t greet me. She just turns and leads me to her room, where Matt is lying curled up in a ball on top of the covers and facing the window. He’s still got on the Morts pour Rien T—everything he was wearing the last time I saw him. Even his shoes.
I sit on the bed, down by his feet. “You okay?”
Such a stupid question, the answer obvious.
Juliette leans against the doorjamb, a cigarette in her hand that she ain’t even smoking.
“Is it Sidi?” I ask Matt. “Did you hear something from Aïda?”
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even move.
“Juliette,” I say, as gently as I can, “do you mind?”
She backs out and closes the door.
“You got to let it go, Matt.”
He just lies there in them sooty clothes, with finger streaks of blood I didn’t notice the other day on the thighs of his jeans, across his chest, the nubs of his nails all scabbed over.
“Wasn’t nothing you could do,” I say, “about Moose and them.”
He rolls onto his back, looks me in the eye.
“You don’t know what I did,” he says.
“What did you do, aside from survive when it wasn’t sure any of us would?”
“I did more than that.”
I see his face is streaked where he has been crying.
“You acted,” I say. “You organized a march, and you got folks out into the streets. You helped Jorge when it looked like he was about to get stomped. You been looking after Aïda.”
He turns toward the window.
“You don’t ask to be leader,” I say. “Something happens, and you act. It’s just who you are.”
I slap his shoe.
“Let’s go,” I tell him. “Get up.”
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I stay out in the front room while Matt showers. Juliette sits in the window, dragging on cigarette after cigarette, her eyes dark, looking out over the rooftops. I figure him and me can walk a bit, over by Les Halles where he likes. He takes a long time, but I don’t press him. The other day was rough. Rougher for him than for me, it seems.
Sitting in the storefront mosque all that time before Matt showed up and we found each other, I ended up thinking on things, just like Matt has been. On Moose and Mobylette, on Sidi. On Monsieur Oussekine collapsing, and Madame Oussekine’s wail. What might I have done different so it hadn’t all come to this? Or just what might I have done, period? Because it sure can feel like you did nothing when something like this happens.
But sometimes maybe we’re all just flies on the ass of an elephant. The interior minister keeps saying that Moose and Mobylette and Sidi were juvenile delinquents and that we had been vandalizing the construction lot, so the police had to intervene. But folks in Villeneuve see straight through the bunk. The interior minister isn’t just calling us vandals and thieves, Moose and Mobylette and Sidi and all of us that were with them that night. He’s laying that charge on every kid from the projects. And kids keep taking to the streets, and what can you do about any of that?
Back home, after the chaplain and the casualty-notification officer showed up at our door and I decided to keep on playing anyway, I thought that was doing something. For my teammates, for my team. But I figured out quicker than quick that Pops wasn’t any less dead for me doing it. Seeing Ahman and Jamaal and Juan watching me, seeing all my boys looking to me for…something—well, I just locked up. Now here I am, sitting in this apartment in Paris, my friends dead all the same, not for something I did or something I didn’t do, but still, that’s all I know to feel.
Responsible.
But that’s not it, is it? Matt talks about how his pops always tells his teams about accountability. Maybe that’s what we are, Matt and me: not responsible for what happened to Moose and Mobylette and Sidi, but accountable to them. Just like I’m accountable to my pops, to his memory.
Juliette, framed by the window, a cigarette in her lips, is staring at me. “You’re going back up there,” she says. “Aren’t you?”
MATT
We leave Jules’s building, Free and me, and the sun is blinding. Brilliant-blue sky and light reflecting off every windshield and every window. We head toward the RER station.
“You look like you’re carrying a sack of cement over each shoulder,” Free says.
I feel like it too.
I don’t say this. I mean, what’s to say? I’m finding it hard to be here in Paris. I’m not even sure what it was that made me want to come, all those months ago, or what it is that’s made me stay. Some vague desire for freedom? To do any old thing—anything—regardless of what gets broken or who gets hurt? And I’m not sure why I agree to go to Villeneuve now. But I do. It feels like I have to.
Passing by the bakery, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window. There are dark rings under my eyes, and my skin is all saggy. Two cops stand on the sidewalk across the street, next to the pedestrian crosswalk. They wear regular duty uniforms and don’t look mean or particularly dangerous.
Funny.
Free says, “Down here, it’s like ain’t nothing going on.”
Down here, nothing is.
Up in Villeneuve, it’s even stranger. The town feels as quiet as a country village. There are scorched places here and there on sidewalks and in the streets, but if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d think nothing had happened out of the ordinary. There’s not a single blackened car carcass. The Esso gas station is roped off, but the post office is running like normal, people coming and going, all the windows replaced, the La Poste sign gone altogether.
“Feels fake, don’t it?” Free says. “For show.”
More CRS buses line the streets than usual, the cops inside behind tinted windows.
“But who are they trying to show what?” Free says. “Folks up here know what happens after dark.”
We get to city hall and the general assembly is already under way in the main conference room. All the Under-20s look to be present, most of the flag-team players too. No Aïda. The mayor is seated at the front, beside Marc Lebrun and the coaches. Our fullback, Adar Traoré, swearing and waving his arms, tears into them.
“Putain de merde! The cops are everywhere and worse than before!”
Some faces light up when they notice Free and me standing just inside the door. Jorge smiles and lifts his cap and turns his head; there’s a white bandage where he got struck. Free flashes a peace sign and moves off to the side, toward a couple of empty seats.
I don’t know what I expected to feel, coming up here, but honestly I don’t fee
l anything. Just blank. I follow Free, sit down beside him, as Adar starts in again.
“They beat my brother and his friend last night, sprayed tear gas in their faces and clubbed them! Just because they wouldn’t submit to a random frisking.”
“Yes, of course,” Monsieur Lebrun says. “I hear you.”
“And the mosque?” Salim Hassan, a backup linebacker, says. “Why shoot tear gas into a mosque during evening prayers?”
The mosque where Free and I hid out.
“Of course, I hear you,” Monsieur Lebrun says, acting as a kind of proxy for the mayor, who just sits there, his head bowed. “The police maintain that it was an accident.”
“An accident!”
“Come on!”
The mayor stands up then. “Perhaps it would be useful, and therapeutic even, if we held workshops for you as well as other youth, perhaps in the cités themselves, on how to properly express our anger…”
Jorge jumps out of his seat. “It’s not our job to pacify the violence! We didn’t cause it. The cops did!”
And a Cameroonian kid called Souffe yells, “It’s on you, Monsieur le Maire! On the interior minister and the other so-called leaders who have allowed this to happen.”
It goes on like that. Guy Martinez, who plays safety, says, “My papa’s car got torched. Because…well, why?” And Claude tries to speak but starts to cry. He just slumps in his seat, the hulking mass of him, his shoulders lurching. Monsieur Lebrun is standing, asking us to be respectful and to please sit down, but it’s everyone—Under-20s and flag players—screaming at the mayor, who is back in his seat, his face in his hands.
It’s Freeman who regains control of the room. He climbs up onto his chair, so quietly I don’t even see him do it. He stands there until all the others finally notice him too.
“Seriously?” he says. “This is the best we can do?”
The room is silent, all eyes on him. The mayor looks up at Free.
“We’re gathered here screaming and angry, and we should be angry for what happened,” he says. “But what are we doing?”
He looks over the room.
“Sidi,” he says, “he’s lying in a hospital bed, wrapped up like a mummy in bandages. Sidi, Moussa, Amadou—they worked so hard and would love nothing more than to play the Jets tomorrow. But they’re not here, and so something would be missing for the rest of us.”
I remember Free in Normandy, telling me what it was like trying to play after his dad was killed.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he says. “We’ll boycott the final. We’ll take the loss, we’ll forfeit the game, in honor of our friends. Because they are more important than any game. But we’ll do it actively, in suits and ties, like for a funeral. In front of the Jets and the entire crowd. So that everyone will know that Moussa and Amadou haven’t died for nothing.”
Everybody latches on to the idea right away. Guys begin tossing out suggestions: we’ll make flyers with pictures of Moose and Sidi and Mobylette on them, spread them all over Paris; we’ll create a web page and hit all the teams; one guy suggests we contact the Skyrock FM blog. Everyone agrees there’s just enough time to get the word out.
My dad says you can read a person’s true character by what you see of them on the field. I think back to the first Jets game, the way it ended—Free lighting up that kid at the final whistle, screaming at him—and realize that what my dad said isn’t all true. What we do on the field isn’t really a stand-in for who we are. Sometimes we do what we do on the field because there’s a helmet covering up who we are as individuals, and we can only vent under cover of the group.
No, we are what we do when we’re exposed, when everyone can see. And that person, if he has the courage to, can change and grow every day. The Freeman I know is the guy from Normandy; from Moose’s apartment, with Monsieur Oussekine; from this morning at Jules’s place; and from here, just now.
My friend, Freeman Omonwole Behanzin.
I look over at him. He has sat back down and is looking at his feet, and he doesn’t look back at me.
THE UNDER-20s CHAMPIONSHIP
DIABLES ROUGES V. JETS
APRIL 19
FREE
Stade Jean-Bouin is a real stadium: manicured turf, electronic scoreboard. It seats something like twelve thousand. The sky is bluer than I’ve ever seen. No clouds, no wind. No cop cars in sight either, no CRS vans, even though the stadium is full to capacity. Folks pack the bleachers and stand ringed around the field, not for the game but for Moose, Mobylette and Sidi.
Georges lent both me and Matt suits that don’t fit either of us particularly well. Georges was solemn as we tried on one jacket after another, so unlike him. It was Françoise who tried to lighten the mood, teasing us and telling us how good we looked and that our families would be proud of what we’re doing.
Georges and Françoise are in the crowd somewhere. Matt says Juliette is too. The only game any of them have come to. The Jets line the opposite sideline. All their players wear dark suits and ties like we do.
The crowd stills when Monsieur Lebrun and the mayor of Villeneuve guides the families out of the dressing room. They stand alongside us Diables Rouges in utter silence, faces blank, everything around us just empty air between earth and sky. Monsieur Oussekine, in a dark suit and tie that doesn’t seem right on him, silent and erect, his arm around Moose’s mom. Pinned to his chest is Moose’s grandfather’s medal. Next to them are Moose’s brothers and sisters. Then Mobylette’s people, the Konates: dark complected and in traditional African clothes, so colorful compared to the dark suits the rest of us wear. His big brother Khalil. The Bourghibas stand next to them: a huge family, eight, nine kids, Aïda, in a dark dress and her red-and-white Diables Rouges headscarf. Sidi’s absence is loud, as though he is dead too.
Seeing them like that—the Oussekines, Konates and Bourghibas, pieces missing from the middle of their family pictures—well, it’s been building in me: I got to get back. Back home.
The Jets’ club president crosses the field, carrying this huge wreath. He presents it to Monsieur Oussekine, Monsieur Konate and Monsieur Bourghiba. He says something to Marc Lebrun and Coach Thierry, then speaks into a mic, his voice blasting the stillness that blankets the stadium. “We will not accept a forfeit,” he says. “This game will end in a tie, nil–nil. We will share the league championship, for your young friends.”
The stands boom in a really electric applause, and it goes on as the Jets players, in single file, cross the field and shake hands with us, one by one. Each passing Jet offers condolences. I nod and don’t say anything. The running back I tagged during our first game approaches. I lower my eyes.
As the procession winds down, I look over and Matt has left the line. He’s standing near the end zone with Monsieur Oussekine, Marc Lebrun and the mayor. I step up beside Matt, who is just listening.
“We’ll do our best,” the mayor says.
“That’s not good enough,” Monsieur Oussekine says. His voice is shaky. “My wife and I, my children—Moussa’s brother and sisters—we have no more tears, so many have we wept since what happened to my son.”
“I understand—” the mayor says, but Monsieur Oussekine cuts him off.
“I don’t think you do. We have no more tears, but that doesn’t mean we have forgotten him. Moussa’s dream was to work with the youth of Villeneuve, to teach and give back in this way. I want…my family and I want you to do something—something!—in memory of our Moussa and to honor his wish. For him and his friends.”
Aïda has walked up, and Matt puts his arm over her shoulders. Tears stream down his cheeks.
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Afterward, me and Matt sit on the Pont des Arts, the pedestrian bridge by the Louvre. Neither of us knows what to say. I don’t, that’s for sure. But I appreciate the sitting, the quiet and peace of it.
“Today,” Matt says finally. “It’s what my dad would have done.”
“It was the right thing to do,” I say.
/> Such a beautiful day. We just sit, our ties loosened, our backs to the railing, facing the Île Saint-Louis. Nobody seems to notice us.
I say, “I thought this place was a dream. Paris, I mean. Maybe it’s really a nightmare.”
Matt looks over at me, surprised. “No. There’s always the good and the bad, the black and the white, both.” He looks back out over the Seine. “You can’t appreciate the sun without suffering the rain,” he says. “My dad said that. Or maybe it was my mom.”
I look out over the Seine too. Up at the spires of Notre-Dame, peeking over the rooftops. At the tiny patch of park below the Pont-Neuf, where there’s a statue of King Henri IV on horseback, hidden behind a bunch of leafing trees.
The Pont-Neuf, I think, looking over at it. It means “New Bridge.” Matt says it’s the oldest one in Paris.
“You my boy, you know that, don’t you?” I tell him. “For real. Always will be. Here, there, wherever. No matter what, I’ll get your back like you’ve always gotten mine.”
He doesn’t say anything. The Seine flows on by below. Bateaux Mouches, all the tourists.
MATT
We sit at Nouvelles Frontières on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the travel agency that the Diables Rouges used last January to change our tickets to open returns. The travel agents wear shapeless black skirts and loud red blazers. The one working with Free makes even that look good. She explains that the flights are full pretty much all the time now that it’s after Easter, the start of the high travel season, and that his best option is one that leaves in two days.
“Two days from now is fast,” I say.
“It is,” says Free.
“You’re going to miss my birthday. I’m eighteen in a week.”
“I know,” he says, “but I got to git.”
I understand. I feel pretty sad all the same.
It’s been three days since the memorial at Stade Jean-Bouin. There was no funeral for Mobylette, not here. The Konates had his body sent back to Mali. The Oussekines buried Moose in Villeneuve but in a private ceremony, just them, in an undisclosed location to keep the press away.
