by David Wright
He was only half right. We were still in the game, so our plan was on track. Only now I had to produce the two scores we were down by, and I was a little banged up.
I had played safety in the first half, the fifth back in our nickel scheme, and on one third-down play I took on their running back, “Choo-Choo,” who had a good thirty pounds on me, all muscle. I stopped him, but he about broke me in two. Now I could barely turn my head to the left.
The stands were more empty than not. It was a cold, wet day. The Anges Bleus kicked the ball off to open the third quarter. They’d learned their lesson in the first half and kicked it away from Free, high but not too deep. Sidi fielded the ball—and got hammered the instant he touched it. The scattered crowd went “Oomph!” as he got hit, then started to roar, cheering, even though it was our own guy getting clobbered. I could see the hoodie boys by the oak pumping their fists in the air.
“Allez, Sidi! Get up!” I heard over the crowd. “Show them you can take whatever they dish out!”
It was Aïda, in a red-and-white headscarf—the team colors—standing down the sideline a little ways. Sidi wobbled back to the bench.
“And that goes for you too, mec,” she growled at me as I passed, jogging out to our forming huddle. “Get it going!”
The Anges Bleus knew I was a little shaken up, so they came after me extra hard on each play. Still, I got us back in it on our first drive, hitting our tight end, a French kid named Jean-Marc, on two straight passes, then lofting a long one to Moose on a skinny post.
Anges Bleus 24–Diables Rouges 21.
Our defense forced them to punt on the next drive. Free brought it back to their forty, the punter pushing him out of bounds on our sidelines.
He flipped me the ball as he passed where I was standing. “Now go get ’em,” he told me.
And I did. We did.
The Anges Bleus kept putting eight men in the box, blitzing off the corner, trying to get to me. Our O-line did a great job, and I picked them apart. Five passes to Moose on five different routes: a hitch, a curl, a slant, a drag, a quick out. Mobylette ran it in from eight yards out.
Anges Bleus 24–Diables Rouges 28.
Their Canadian quarterback was on the bench, screaming at their offense to bury us. But we put eight men in the box too, with Free at middle linebacker so he could roam. He was too quick for their lineman to get to, and he took on Choo-Choo on every play. They tried a pass to change it up, and our defensive end, Chorizo (his real name was Felipe), came off the corner and stripped the Anges Bleus’ French QB, scooped up the ball and ran it in.
Anges Bleus 24–Diables Rouges 35.
It went on like that, Free and the D blowing up their offense, me picking apart their defense. Sidi was a little off after getting tagged on the opening kick; I kept throwing at him, and he dropped every ball. But Moose and Mobylette, everyone else, had a field day. Flag routes, stops-and-goes, even a flea flicker. We won 49–27.
» » » »
Almost the entire team, forty guys or so, goofed off in the locker room afterward, boasting about big hits they’d made, singing group songs, laughing. Their retelling of the game went like this: all looked lost, and when Sidi got steam-rollered to open the second half, everyone expected more of the same. (“The line didn’t block for me!” Sidi protested. “Go screw yourselves!” And he stormed into the showers.) Then we turned it around the very next drive, the story continued. Like Drew Brees and the Saints in the Super Bowl. Like champions.
Outside in the parking lot, Aïda and Yasmina waited for us. Yasmina’s headscarf was team-colored too.
“You should’ve seen the faces of the Anges Bleus when they boarded their bus.” Aïda couldn’t speak a word without her fingers dancing on the air, restating her sentences in this other odd language. “They looked shell-shocked, like they couldn’t believe they’d lost to the lowly Diables Rouges.” And she laughed.
Others made their way over. Moose, Mobylette and the rest retold—yet again—the story of how David slew the mighty Goliath, one talking over the other. Even Sidi joined in.
Listening to them, I realized how much these guys were what my dad called “born underdogs.” It was like their daily lives were driven by one lone notion: to just get by, in the rough cités, at their sorry ghetto school, even in their huge families. But as much as fighting to get by was in their blood, the idea of prevailing, of coming out on top, wasn’t. It was like our victory had stunned them even more than it had the Anges Bleus. All the pre-game bluster aside, the Diables Rouges would probably have been just as happy playing the Anges Bleus tough and losing in a squeaker. Deep inside, it was likely what they had expected would happen.
“Coach Thierry says the Caïmans, next week, are a much better team,” Free said to quiet things down. “Probably second only to the Jets.”
(His French had really gotten quite good.)
“They are,” Moose said. “They beat the Jets last year in the final and are undefeated so far this season.”
“So far…” Free said, and he grinned.
Guys started to wander off. It was just us four—Freeman and me, Moose and Sidi. And the two girls, of course.
“So, what now?” Free asked, and I said, “Why don’t we go down to Paris?”
Sidi and Moose looked at each other, visibly not so hot on the idea.
“Paris?” said Sidi.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go to the Champs-Élysées. It’s what the French do to celebrate, right?”
Aïda jumped in. “Please take us with you.”
Our tackle, Claude Benayoun, emerged from the locker room and asked what we were up to. I looked at Sidi, who was looking at Moose, who was looking toward Aïda and Yasmina.
“Papa’ll kill me if he finds out,” Sidi said.
“How will he find out?” Aïda shot back.
“What about the cops?” Moose said. “They aren’t too keen about guys from this zip code wandering around down there.”
Free laughed. “If it’s cops that are the problem, we’re more likely to get a rough time here in Villeneuve.”
I looked at my cell phone. “It’s not even dinnertime yet; it’s still early. We can play baby-foot at the Chicago Pizza Pie Factory.”
I knew how much Moose and Sidi loved foosball.
But Moose still looked reluctant. “I was already down there once this week, with your father,” he said. “That’s plenty for me.”
“Unless you guys are afraid to go into the big city, that is,” I added.
“Yeah right,” Moose said, but it didn’t mean, Okay, let’s go. He stood there frozen, Sidi beside him, and Claude beside them, looking silently on.
“We’ll just hang out,” Aïda said, her tone defiant, challenging them. “Only for a couple of hours.”
Being called out by a girl was the determining factor.
Sidi said, “Let’s go.”
MATT
Sidi lit a joint the second we came up from underground. We were clustered in a group under the Arc de Triomphe, a stone’s throw from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The two girls tossed a football back and forth, underhanded, on the gray stone pavement. The tomb was just a roped-off grave, a small flame burning at its head.
Free shook his head when Claude extended the spleef to him, and Moose waved it off too. “You know I don’t do that,” he said. “American football is my drug.”
I took the joint. “I love football too. But hey, it’s a celebration.” I sucked deep, deep, deep and tried to keep the smoke in, down in my lungs.
I burst into a fit of coughing.
The others, smokers and not, were laughing like crazy, but I had to sit on the ground. I rested against one of the Arc’s four pillars to catch my breath and stared out at the horde of cars fighting their way around the chaotic roundabout. Place de l’Étoile: twelve avenues channeling toward the Arc de Triomphe. I’d seen a postcard of it, shot at night from above, and the intersection looked like a brightly lit star. (Or a giant asterisk, really.
)
I looked over at Freeman joshing with Aïda and Yasmina—he snatched the ball from Aïda’s hands and she snatched it back just as quickly—and I realized they both had the same quicksilver temperaments. Over to one side was Moose, kicking up into a handstand. “Wazzup,” he said, walking by me upside down. I didn’t know where Sidi and Claude had disappeared to.
The next thing I knew, Moose went crashing down onto his head. I started laughing like a maniac, but Moose lay on his back, motionless. I jumped up then, and we all ran over to him. Sidi and Claude had come back too. (I couldn’t help it, I was still giggling from the weed.)
“Don’t touch him,” Aïda ordered.
I thought he was out cold, until his chest started bouncing and he was hiccupping spits of laughter.
Sidi and I helped him sit up. He rubbed the top of his head with both hands. “That hurt,” he said.
Sidi shot the bird and waved it back and forth in front of Moose’s face. “How many fingers do you see?”
Free said, “Let’s go to the Pizza Pie Factory.”
Everyone but Aïda and me took off running into the street, zigzagging through the lock of traffic around l’Étoile. Cars honked, drivers yelled the usual French insults: “Connards!” “Enculés!”—Assholes! Fuckers! She and I took the pedestrian tunnel that passed underneath l’Etoile to the Champs-Élysées.
“So what do you do with all your free time?” Aïda asked. She was carrying the football. “I mean, when you’re not playing or coaching.”
The tunnel was well lit but empty. Classical music played from speakers that I looked for but couldn’t see.
“Free and I go to movies. Sometimes we visit museums, or people-watch at the Jardins du Luxembourg or at the Tuileries.”
We were speaking French, only French. It felt good. With Freeman, even when we were speaking French, I tended to think in English because with him we shifted back and forth so much.
“Sometimes, if we don’t have practice,” I told her, “there’s a bar in Les Halles where we hang out.”
(Well, twice we’d hung out there, and we’d only ordered sodas.)
Aïda tossed me the ball. “You and Freeman are like a married couple.”
“Ha! Right.”
I jogged ahead a little and tossed the ball behind my back to her. She caught it naturally, with her hands.
“No, Free and I mostly walk around and try to get to know the greatest city on Earth.”
She put the ball in her backpack, did that thing with her mouth like Freeman sometimes did. “Tsst. You say that because you only know postcard Paris.”
“I play football in Villeneuve, remember?”
“But you don’t live there.”
“And you’re in a position to judge?” I said. “Your father doesn’t even let you spend time down here in the city.”
She didn’t respond immediately. “I know more than you think I do, Mathieu Dumas,” she said finally.
The honking from the street above faded in then. I’d forgotten where we were.
“Do you read?” she said.
“Books?”
She laughed. “What else is there to read?”
“I read Libération every day, on the metro or having my café du matin,” I said. “And lots of magazines too.”
“No books though?”
I felt kind of small all of a sudden. “Not as much as I should.”
“I have one I think you’ll like. I’ll bring it to practice Monday.”
We were walking side by side.
“You’re seventeen?” I said.
“Same as you.”
I hesitated, not knowing how to ask my question. So I just said it. “Who makes you wear the headscarf?”
“Why, Al-Qaida, of course.” She started to laugh. “Stupid.”
“It’s not funny—I just don’t know.”
“You know why I wear the hijab?” she said. “Because I can. Because it’s part of my heritage.”
“No one forces you?”
“Do I seem like the submissive type?”
We were nearing the exit.
“Nobody compels me to wear it. Not my father, not my Imam. The French government tells me I can’t wear it at school, which makes me want to wear it everywhere else all the more.”
She removed it, a wave of brown hair spilling over her shoulders. I felt kind of uncomfortable seeing her like that. It was almost like she’d taken off her shirt or something.
“Aïda!” We heard Sidi’s voice from just outside the tunnel.
She backed away from me, gathering her hair up in the white-and-red cloth.
“What’s going on?” Sidi said, halfway down the stairs.
Aïda didn’t answer. I stayed silent too.
He was glaring at her. “The others are waiting,” he said.
We walked in an awkward silence, Sidi between us. All the same, I got stuck on the image of Aïda with her hair down.
Moose, Free, Claude and Yasmina sat crammed together on a public bench outside the tunnel. The sidewalk was noisy and chaotic, filled with people speaking many different languages.
“All right,” I said, “foosball time!”
“Sidi and I are going to whoop your North American butts,” Moose boasted, popping up off the bench and striding down the Champs-Élysées.
“Bring it,” Free shot back. But then he whispered to me in English, “You best be good, ’cause I ain’t hardly ever played before.”
Free and I had been to the Pizza Pie Factory three or four times, each time more lively than the one before. It was the closest thing to a genuine American sports joint in Paris: spunky waitresses (mostly Brits and Irish, by their accents), so-so pizzas but good burgers, and buffalo wings (the sauce tasted like ketchup and Tabasco, but it was better than nothing). There were TVs in every corner that looped reruns of NFL games nonstop, and a game room with pool and foosball tables. One time we went, each of us ordered a beer, and they served us.
It was Saturday night, so there was a lineup to get in, twenty people or so standing alongside the plate-glass window with the pink ’55 Chevy in it. Three bouncers—a North African and two black guys—each with a neck as thick as my thigh, monitored the front door, letting one or two people pass, then blocking the entrance. Freeman was chatting up two preppy girls in front of us. Aïda and Yasmina stood together, kind of sheepish, whispering. Sidi was still brooding, off to the side. “They’re not going to let us in,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t they?” I said. “Free and I come here all the time.”
Sidi turned and faced the traffic on the Champs.
One of the bouncers signaled the girls talking to Freeman. Free tagged behind them, and I followed him. As I passed through the entrance, I heard one of the bouncers saying, “Sorry, private party.” The guy draped his huge arm across the doorway. Moose and the others stood on the other side.
“We’re with them,” Moose said. He pointed to Freeman and me, standing beside the pink Chevy.
“Désolé,” the North African bouncer said. “You can’t go in.”
“But why us and not them?” I asked.
“We’re all together,” Yasmina said just outside the door.
The bouncers didn’t seem open to negotiation. One kept his arm across the doorway, and another repeated, “Private party.”
“We heard you the first time,” Sidi jumped in, jabbing his finger at the guy.
Moose turned to hold Sidi back. “Calm down,” he said, but Sidi was screaming, “Answer the question, asshole. Why them and not us?”
Claude was standing next to Sidi now, and he rivaled the bouncers for size. The people behind them, preppy kids and American wannabes, started shifting around, some talking under their breath.
“Why them and not us?” Aïda repeated, her eyes as fiery hot as her brother’s. “I’ll tell you. Because he’s cistera!”—Racist.
The North African bouncer shot her a knowing smile. More of a leer. “Allez, dégagez mai
ntenant.”
He had the same accent as Aïda and Sidi, as Moose, the same you-messing-with-me look as the hoodie boys. He could be from Villeneuve, just like them, for all we knew.
“Forget y’all,” Freeman snapped, pushing past the bouncers and back outside.
I was right behind him. “Yeah, forget y’all,” I said in English too.
We swaggered off down the Champs-Élysées, laughing like we didn’t care about getting in, Sidi a few feet back, pointing back at the Beur bouncer. “We’re going to be out here when you get off!” he threatened. “We’ll be waiting for you!”
Aïda and Yasmina finally dragged him away.
When we were down the street from the club, Moose wheeled into me. “Didn’t we tell you, Matt!” He was red-faced and fuming, the way he’d been with Juliette’s concierge the day I arrived.
“Tell me what?” I said.
“That they wouldn’t let a bunch of Beurs into your club.”
My club?
“But he was Beur too,” I said. “That wasn’t about racism. He let Freeman in.”
“It wasn’t?” Moose said. “What was it about then?”
“The guy was an asshole, that’s all.”
Sidi hawked and spat on the ground. He got out some papers to roll another joint. People around didn’t seem to notice. Moose stared past me.
Aïda said, “It is about racism, Mathieu, but it goes beyond just skin color. It’s as much about where we come from and what we wear as skin color.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
They all burst out laughing. Freeman too.
“You are so white,” Moose said.
I decided to laugh along with them. Not because I agreed, but because they were my friends and I didn’t want to be left out.
FREE
Matt looked all stunned when Moose called him white, even more than he had when Moose and them got shut out of the Pizza Pie Factory. Nobody was really talking anymore. There was a McDonald’s a few doors up the way, so I said, “Royals with cheese, anyone?”
Sidi fired up his doobie, like he didn’t care who was watching. “I gotta finish my smoke.”
The rest of us went on in. Except Matt. He sat with Sidi on a green wooden bench.