Home of the Braves
Page 14
LaFarge looked a little nervous. “Yes, well,” he said, “umm, yes, well.” He glanced down at his pad, and blinked. “The question was posed why we don’t detail the recent acts of violence. Chiefly, we want to prevent notoriety, which can lead to emulation and escalation.”
“Speak English,” somebody shouted, and there were hoots of laughter.
LaFarge shifted uncomfortably. I got the feeling this wasn’t his usual type of audience. “Well, in plain English, then, there’s such a thing as a copycat effect,” he said. “If we publicize acts of violence, students may envy how other students became famous, and may decide that they want to become famous, too. And they may think they can become even more famous by doing something even worse. And that can lead us to some very bad places, where none of us want to go.”
There was an uneasy silence.
The president of the School Board, Mr. Hamilton, stood up in the first row, and he didn’t have to shout out—someone brought him a portable microphone. “Professor,” he said, “I wonder if you could answer for us the question that our principal posed early on: why is this … phenomenon … appearing now? Why here, in our peaceful community?”
LaFarge rustled a few papers. “This is an area of some dispute,” he said. “Many factors have been cited. They include the stresses of being an adolescent these days, violent media culture such as action movies and video games—”
“Yeah, but when I went to school there was a cold war and we were building bomb shelters,” Board President Hamilton pointed out. “That was pretty stressful. And we had our share of violent games back then. But we didn’t need a metal detector in front of our school, or bars on the windows.”
“Yes, well, hmm,” LaFarge muttered, and glanced back at his pad. He continued with his laundry list of possible causes: “Access to firearms and incendiaries, TV news coverage of graphic violence and acts of international terrorism, the Internet, lack of parental supervision—”
That was as far as he got. There were loud jeers and boos and hisses, and an enormous man in a faded T-shirt reared up near the front, and roared, “THAT’S ENOUGH, POINDEXTER. I DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW SQUAT ABOUT THIS SCHOOL. AND IF YOU BLAME US PARENTS, SOMEBODY’S LIKELY TO TIE YOU IN A KNOT, AND IT MIGHT BE ME.” He half turned and smiled at the audience, as if silently enlisting our support.
I recognized the big man immediately—he looked about the size of a rhino, and the strange smile out of one side of his mouth was unmistakable. This was Kevin Hutchings, father of Jack and Dianne, and uncle of Slade.
“I’m sure you don’t mean to publicly threaten a man who came here to help us,” Vice Principal Tobias said. Deputy Police Chief Coyle stepped up right next to him, for support.
“ONE THING I DON’T NEED IS FOR YOU TO TELL ME HOW TO BEHAVE,” Kevin Hutchings shouted back. His physical presence, and sense of menace, brought silence. He looked around at us all, and his rumbling voice seemed to carry to all corners of the big gym without effort. “I’LL TELL YOU WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. ONE WORD. RESPECT. WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENED AT THE SCHOOL—SOME BOY WAS BEING PICKED ON, AND INSTEAD OF FIGHTING BACK LIKE A MAN, HE GOT A SCREWDRIVER AND STABBED SOME OTHER KID. THAT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED IN MY DAY. WE KEPT EACH OTHER IN LINE. WE TAUGHT PEOPLE HOW TO ACT.”
“YOU NEVER TAUGHT ANYBODY ANYTHING.” I thought I knew the voice, and then the man stood up near Kevin Hutchings, to challenge him, and I felt a wave of cold shock as I recognized my own father. “YOU COME TO OUR GYM, IN OUR TOWN, TO THREATEN OUR SCHOOL OFFICIALS, AND YOU TALK ABOUT RESPECT? WHY DON’T YOU SHOW SOME?”
“WHY DON’T YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND GO WASH SOME CARS,” Kevin Hutchings rumbled back ominously.
I know this may sound strange, but until that moment, I had never realized how big a man my father was. I knew he was tall, and had big arms, but now, as he squared his shoulders, and put his hands on his hips, he looked every bit as massive as the man who glared back at him. They were like two bull moose who had fought each other years ago as bucks, and now had wandered into the same forest glade, and were circling.
“I never let you tell me what to do, and I’m not about to start now,” my father said. “Why don’t you go back to Bankside.”
Kevin Hutchings began moving toward my father, and he was no longer shouting, because it had become personal: “Why don’t you find a wife your own age, so you can keep your hands off other people’s daughters.”
Meanwhile, somebody had picked up on what my father had said, and shouted, “YEAH, BANKSIDE’S THE PROBLEM. THEY ONLY CAUSE TROUBLE.” More voices joined the chorus: “YOU’RE ALL THUGS!” “GO BACK TO BANKSIDE.” “GO BUILD YOUR OWN SCHOOL.”
Bankside parents rose to shout back, “YOU TAKE OUR TAX DOLLARS.” “IT’S OUR SCHOOL, TOO.” “WHY DON’T YOU TRY TO GET US OUT OF HERE?”
There were screams, and a punch was thrown, and suddenly pandemonium broke out. I heard Vice Principal Tobias at the front, begging: “EVERYONE, PLEASE, SIT DOWN, PLEASE …” And I saw Deputy Police Chief Coyle give a signal to some of his men, who blew whistles, and began to make their way up the bleachers.
A sneaker whizzed down and hit Ed the Mouse in the back of the head.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, and tried to pull him away.
But he picked up the sneaker, turned, and whipped it back blindly, but at high speed. As luck would have it, the sneaker hit Tony Jaws Borelli right in the nose.
Jaws went for Mouse, but chaos had erupted, and a half-dozen people got in between us. I managed to get Mouse safely down from the bleachers, and find our way to a side exit.
I looked back once and saw at least a dozen men fighting near the platform at the front of the gym, while police blew whistles and tried to break them up. I spotted Vice Principal Tobias trying to crawl underneath the stage platform, looking for a safe spot to hide. The last thing I saw was old Principal Landisman standing on a chair, waving his thin arms back and forth, and shouting, “Stop it, stop it, all of you, this is our school, our community.” And then someone bumped into his chair, and the old man tottered, and fell to the gym floor.
19
Our school was a mixed-up, nutty, out-of-whack, off-kilter, discombobulated place on Monday morning.
The near riot in the gym had gotten a lot of press coverage over the weekend. Some kids decided to stay home for a few days, till things cooled down. Others had to endure the unheard-of embarrassment of their parents walking them to school. Some of these concerned parents paused to exchange strong opinions with Vice Principal Tobias, who was standing outside the front door with an expression that was more wary than welcoming. I watched some parents shake his hand, and others shake fists at him.
When all the students were safely inside the school, and all the nervous parents had departed, there was an attempt to return things to a normal state. The riot in the gym wasn’t referred to in the morning announcements. Our homeroom teachers didn’t mention it. Clearly, a decision had been made that our school day should be business as usual.
But that was impossible. Guys were bragging about whose father punched out whose father, and whose mother got arrested for kicking a cop. Dozens of Lawndale kids—including ones I wasn’t even friends with—came up and congratulated me on my dad’s standing up to Kevin Hutchings, as if I had done something brave or noteworthy. The surging crowd had kept the two big men apart, but I got the feeling everyone wished my father and Kevin Hutchings had had a chance to duke it out.
I could feel the anger and watchfulness between Lawndale and Bankside kids bubbling over in every class, and seething near the boiling point in the corridors. No one did anything violent because of all the cameras and police. Three uniformed cops with pistols in their holsters and billy clubs in their belts patrolled our school’s halls, looking a little self-conscious as they whispered into headsets, and tried to avoid knocking into open locker doors, or getting tangled up with hurrying students. Everyone at our school—teachers
, students, and even the cops themselves—seemed angry, upset, and uncomfortable. Nothing made sense.
That feeling of things not being normal—of the familiar having been thrown wildly off balance—continued after school, as our soccer team prepared to take on Emerson. Half an hour before game time, as I led our team through stretching, I glanced at the stands and saw fifty people already seated.
It didn’t make sense to me that soccer had become a big spectator sport at Lawndale—but then nothing made much sense anymore. The two cops who took up positions in front of our bleachers didn’t make sense. Vice Principal Tobias trudging across the field in a suit to watch the first soccer game he had ever attended didn’t make much sense. Though I was no longer surprised to see Kris and Jewel Healy show up, I was surprised to see a dozen of the most popular and beautiful trendsetters of our school. Lawndale High soccer had suddenly become the hot ticket in town.
The Emerson team arrived in their bus, ready to crush us, as they always did. We had twenty players on our squad, but Emerson had forty, and they were big guys—some of the best athletes in their school. They bounded off their bus, and began walking across the parking lot. You could tell from their relaxed, smiling faces that they were ready for a romp, a walkover, a couple of rounds with a punching bag. The last time we played, they had pounded us six to nothing. And then they slowed and started glancing around, noticing the noise volume, and the number of fans in our bleachers. I think they were wondering if they were headed for the wrong field. Because there were two hundred people in our stands, and a TV camera crew was filming their entrance.
I was standing next to Coach Collins, who was so excited he was hopping from one foot to the other. “That’s Channel Five!” he said. “And that’s a reporter from the Bergen Record! They might want to interview you after the game, joe.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the captain,” he said, as if that explained it. “How’s the team? Are the guys ready?”
“Ready as they’ll ever be.”
“It won’t be six to nothing today,” Coach Collins muttered. We watched the forty Emerson players troop onto our field. “Look how smug they are. They’ll never know what hit them.”
“Don’t be too disappointed if things don’t work out,” I cautioned him.
Coach looked at me. “You don’t think we can beat them?”
“One player doesn’t change a team.”
He thought about what I said, and for a moment his shoulders sagged as if a heavy weight had just been lowered onto them. Then he shrugged it off and smiled. “Just play hard defense,” he told me. “Give us a chance. Give our secret weapon a chance. Uh—’scuse me, I’ve got to go do a quick interview before the game.”
I wasn’t sure if the Emerson guys had seen the news spot on Antonio and knew what all the fuss was about. Then I decided they must have seen it, because as we took the field, several of their guys talked trash to him. “Hey, superstar,” their center half, a big, mean-looking guy with tattoos on both his arms, said to Antonio, “you’re hot stuff, huh? I’m gonna cool you off, man.”
Antonio didn’t say anything back. But, as I told you early on, the Phenom had this quality. There was something about the way he walked onto a soccer field that spoke volumes. The Emerson center half saw it, too. He kept talking trash, but I could tell he was a little spooked.
The ref blew his whistle to start the game. Emerson’s forward touched the ball back to the center half. Antonio was on him in a flash, and when the big guy held the ball a split second too long, looking for the right pass to start the attack, Antonio stripped the ball away, and started a solo run.
He didn’t mess with passes or fancy dribbling—he just streaked straight for the Emerson goal, and his speed caught their defense by surprise. He made the transition from midfield to deep penetration in five lightning strides, and as he neared their fullback line he kicked himself a twenty-yard through ball—a perfectly placed pass to himself, if he could catch up with it. He burst between their left back and their sweeper to chase the ball down.
Then it was just a contest of acceleration and a test of speed, a pure footrace between their two defenders and Antonio. He started out even with them, but by the time he reached the ball he was four steps in front. He let loose a bazooka blast of a shot from thirty yards out. The ball SMACKED the right upper corner of the crossbar, and bounced down and into the net.
One to nothing, Lawndale. I don’t think ten seconds had ticked off the clock.
There was a stunned silence, then applause that swelled louder and louder, till it became wild cheering. I glanced at our sideline and saw Kris standing on a high bleacher, clapping and shouting, “Way to go, Antonio!”
The Emerson goalie dove for the ball, and landed hard. He got up slowly, retrieved the ball from the back of the net, and whipped it disgustedly at one of his own fullbacks, yelling, “Come on, Jack! You let him make an idiot out of you! If he tries that again, rip his legs off!”
Well, they tried to stop him, and when that didn’t work, they tried to knock him down, and once or twice they even tried to rip his legs off. I thought that Antonio had been showing off at our team practices. But midway through the Emerson game, I realized that he had, in fact, been holding back. Now he let it all hang out.
Emerson was a proud team, and they fought hard. But Antonio scored four beautiful goals that day, and our defense was rock-solid. It helps a defense to have an offense that can hold the ball, and score goals. When the ref finally blew his whistle, Zigler and Murray and Cavanaugh lifted Antonio on their shoulders and the team paraded back and forth in front of our bleachers, while our fans cheered.
I couldn’t enjoy the hoopla. I was proud we had beaten Emerson, and that we still had a chance of making the county tournament, but these cheers, which I had waited so long to hear, only made me angry and jealous. I knew who they were for, and I knew he deserved them. I managed to congratulate Antonio and even shake his hand. “Thank you, Joseph,” he responded. “See, today we played soccer. Isn’t it more fun this way?” Then I watched him walk over and sling an arm around Kris’s shoulder, and when she turned to see who it was, he kissed her on the lips. She blushed, but she didn’t pull away.
Coach made me do an interview. “How does it feel to be the team captain of a losing team,” the reporter asked me, “and then to get a star player and start winning overnight?”
“It feels … different,” I managed to get out.
“So you guys feel really lucky, huh?” he pressed. “Like you hit the lottery?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Excuse me.”
I wandered off by myself for a while, and ended up sitting on the bench that Kris and I had had our final fight on, by the waters of Overpeck Creek. I told myself that I should go hang out with the guys, but I couldn’t get up off that bench. A beautiful purple sunset unfurled across the sky above the creek, and a whole flock of gulls wheeled in from the marshes, swooping through the purple haze, hunting fish for their dinner. I listened to them screech, and watched them dive, and tried without any success to sort out my mixed-up feelings. A month ago, this victory would have meant the world to me, and now I felt like I was the one who had lost.
The gulls finally flew off in search of a better fishing spot, and I got up and headed in. I didn’t know exactly how much time had passed, but I figured the guys would have showered and gone off to celebrate. I entered the school through a side exit, and sure enough, the basement hallway was empty.
As I passed one of the football team’s big storage closets, I heard a most peculiar sound. It was a scream with no clear words—an anguished cry that was as close to the ghostly wail of a lost and tormented soul as I had ever heard. “Yyyaaa-woooo.”
The muffled wail faded to silence. I stopped and waited, a deep chill of fear prickling the back of my neck. Then I heard it again: “Wooo … heee … helllllppppp!” And I heard a faint thumping sound, as if someone was kicking inside the supply closet.
“You sure about this?” he asked me.
“Someone’s in there,” I told him. “And they wanna get out.”
We reached the storage closet. All was silent. Mr. Murphy looked at me. “This some kind of a joke, Joe?”
And then he heard it, too—first the pounding, and then a muffled, ghostly voice: “Woo … hee … heelllpppp!”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and fumbled with the keys. He must have tried a dozen of them before he finally found the one that fit. He yanked open the door, and we stepped into the dark supply closet.
It was a cavernous space, filled with helmets and pads and old cartons. At first I couldn’t see anything except shadowy mounds of equipment. Mr. Murphy found a light switch and flicked on an overhead bulb. Ten feet away, between two cartons, something moved.
I ran over and tugged away a carton, and then I pulled back for a second in fear and surprise. Because I hadn’t uncovered a person, even though it was a human shape. There was no face or arms or legs. Rather, I saw a faceless head, an armless torso, and two thrashing bound-together legs, all trussed up like an Egyptian mummy.
Mr. Murphy saw me react and hurried over. I recovered from my shock, and the two of us reached down and hauled the mummy up. I realized that it was indeed a living person, wrapped from head to foot in yards and yards of athletic tape, his arms taped to his sides. Space had been left around his nose for him to breathe, and he had managed to bite through the tape over his mouth, so he could scream a bit. Somehow he had freed his legs enough to kick.
We unwrapped him, starting with the very top of his head. As soon as I saw his hair, I knew who it was, and I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. And then I started to get angry. We kept unwrapping, and soon the Mouse’s eyes gleamed back at me, filled with fear. Then we got the tape off his mouth, so he could breathe easier, and speak clearly. He was hyperventilating. “Oh God, oh God, oh my God.”