by David Wright
McDonald’s restaurants in Paris are swankier than back home, more McBistro than McSupersize Me. Moose, Claude, Yasmina and me stood in line; Aïda went off to the bathroom. A ten-foot plastic Ronald looked down at us, his face a lot warmer than those of the two security guards standing by the cash registers. An Arab and a Brother, like at the Pizza Pie. They eyeballed us the whole time we were ordering. We took our grub to a bank of tables off to the side and sat next to three girls eating strawberry sundaes. Hotties. Brunettes, very French.
Through the glass, I watched Sidi extend the doobie toward Matt. Matt shook his head but said something to him; he looked like Moose does when he’s jawing at me about something I already know. Sidi didn’t respond, kind of ignoring him, looking off down the avenue. Then he hit the doobie hard and flicked away the roach. He got up and came inside. Matt followed. The security guards hawked them as they walked to where we were sitting.
Matt could be naïve, it was true. Like outside the Pizza Pie. Or with the riot cops up in Villeneuve. He couldn’t see that the cops weren’t interested in him, only in me and Moose, that they were leaving him be.
But he made a good point too—like right then. It wasn’t Sidi being North African, having the wrong zip code and whatnot, that had caught the attention of those two guards. It was that he was camped outside their glass doors smoking a doobie, straight up out in the open, for everyone to see.
Come on now. For real? How were they not going to be sizing him up?
Sidi sat next to Aïda, closest to the French girls.
“Want something?” Matt asked him.
Sidi pulled some coins out of his jeans pocket, tossed them onto the tabletop. “Bring me a strawberry sundae,” he said, kind of dismissive, and Matt moved off.
Sidi smiled a sleazy smile at the French girls. “They really do look good.” He was eyeballing the girls and not their ice cream. “Are they as good as they look?”
The girls ignored him, Aïda slugged his arm, but he still leered.
“Eh! I’m talking to you,” he said.
“No you’re not,” one of the girls shot back. “You’re slurring at us.”
I couldn’t tell who laughed first, the girls or me, but it was my arm that Aïda clutched. “Don’t get him started,” she whispered.
But it was too late. Sidi moved to a chair at the girls’ table. “You too good to talk to me?”
He grabbed the sundae of the one who had cracked on him and put a spoonful into his mouth.
“Give it back!” the girl said.
“You don’t look so superior now,” he said, his mouth full of pink and white ice cream.
“What’s your problem, espèce de grosse merde”—You piece of shit.
“Takes one to know one, and I can tell by looking at that tight bourgeois ass of yours that you’re a dirty little piece.”
Matt was off at the register, ordering. Moose and Aïda and Yasmina just looked on. Claude was picking at his food like nothing was happening.
The French girls gathered their stuff to leave, but Sidi pushed in close to the sassy one, blocking her in, his face only inches from hers. “We should go for a walk, just you and me.”
“Fuck off,” the girl said, now flushed and about to cry.
“Enough!” I said and reached over and grabbed Sidi by the sleeve.
He snapped it free.
“Come on, Sidi,” I heard Matt say, suddenly there beside us. The lady at the register called after him, saying he had left behind his order.
The three girls, ghost white, scooted off up the aisle and out the door.
“Stop making an ass of yourself,” Matt said.
Sidi turned from me and got all up in Matt’s face.
Moose and Aïda, Yasmina and Claude, they just looked on.
“Me? Making an ass of myself?” Sidi’s voice quavered. “Bitches talk down to me and you get their backs instead of mine?”
“You gave them all the reasons in the world to treat you like shit,” Matt said, all calm.
Sidi shook his head from side to side, disappointed-like. Then he grabbed Matt by the collar and drove him back into the wall!
“You think you can just come here, all grand seigneur, and tell us how to live?”
Matt’s a head taller, but Sidi has probably been in a jillion more fights. Matt, his collar bunched in Sidi’s fist, said, “Let go of me,” his voice still calm.
“You need to let him go,” I said—in English, to make my point.
Moose was there too then, but he was fronting up on me. On me! Like he was about to throw down.
Aïda, she was looking at her feet. Yasmina and Claude too.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe, là?”—What’s going on here?
“Let’s go! Out, out!”
It was the security guards, both barking. One had Sidi by the scruff of the neck, the other had Matt, and we were all being ushered toward, then shoved through, the front doors. On the sidewalk, in the mass of moving people, we all gathered ourselves. But we were clearly of two camps: Matt and me, and the rest.
Matt stared at Moose, looking all puppy-dog hurt. “Moose?”
Moose smirked, then turned to the others. “You know how it is with les blancs”—with white boys—he said, like it meant me too. “Sometimes you just have to put them in their place.”
He started walking away. The others followed. Aïda glanced back at us as she left.
“Fuck you, Moose!” Matt shouted. “No wonder they call you racailles! If you act like scum, people treat you like scum!”
I grabbed him, held him back from following them, all the tourists on the avenue staring. “Come on, Matt,” I said. “It ain’t nothing.”
He pulled free of my hold. We watched them saunter off toward the RER. Sidi shot us the bird over his shoulder.
“Fuck this shithole,” Matt said and walked off in the other direction.
CAÏMANS (3–1) V. DIABLES ROUGES (3–1)
MARCH 29
FREE
“Come on, Free,” Matt kept saying, “it’ll be fun.”
It was the Friday after the dustup on the Champs, and me and Matt were on the RER, headed back to Paris after the last practice before our game against the Caïmans on Sunday. The Caïmans were ranked right behind the Jets, but it wasn’t the importance of the game that made me be like, Tsst. Hitchhike to Normandy? I was thinking. People got killed hitchhiking. Or kidnapped or who knew what.
But he insisted. “An adventure…”
Like him and me needed more adventure.
“What about all that ‘you act like you’re on vacation’ stuff you was snapping at me about at practice?” I said.
“Well, when we aren’t at practice or a game, we are on vacation.”
I stayed silent, staring straight ahead.
Practices had been terrible all week. Scattershot attendance, guys acting cold to me and Matt, Moose and Sidi avoiding us altogether. At flag-team practice, Aïda and Yasmina weren’t particularly warm either. I knew it was because of the madness at the McDonald’s, but still and all, two wins from qualifying for the Under-20s title seemed like a bad time to go blasé-blah on the season.
At that last practice, there hadn’t even been enough folks to field two full sides—seventeen, maybe eighteen total, and a lot of those present were some real scrubs. Coach Thierry ran us instead, more wind sprints than I’d ever done in one session: ten 20-yard dashes, then ten 30-yard dashes, then ten 40-yarders, then back down the ladder, hardly any time to recover in between. Like us who had turned up were to blame for the others not being there.
So I asked, “Have you even hitchhiked before?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Listen, it’ll be Saturday morning, so lots of traffic headed toward the coast.”
“Can we even make it there and back in one day?”
“It’s two hundred kilometers—like, a two-hour drive each way. We’ll be home in time for supper.”
I looked out the train window,
even though there was nothing to see but dark tunnel.
“It feels like spring already,” he said. “Beautiful days.”
“And still freezing at night.”
He was all excitable. “Free,” he said.
“Tsst.”
“Freeee…”
Hitchhiking. For real?
» » » »
At eight the next morning I walked the few blocks to Charles de Gaulle–Étoile RER station. Matt was already on the platform waiting for me when I arrived.
“It’s on like Donkey Kong,” he said, still all excitable.
He’d made this sign, a rectangle of cardboard with NORMANDIE/LES PLAGES written in thick black marker. He’d told Juliette, like I’d told Georges and Françoise, about the day trip, just not about the mode of transportation. We let them assume we were taking the train. “This trip will be very educational,” Georges had said. “You do very well to take this initiative.”
I was wearing my letter jacket over a jean jacket. I’d even put on a knit cap. “It’s nippy as all get-out,” I said to Matt.
“Buck up, laddie!” he said in this hokey Brit accent.
It wasn’t funny.
We took the red line to the end, Poissy. The entrance to the highway was three or four kilometers away, apparently, and Matt figured out which bus would get us closest. I let him do the work. The number 51 dropped us at this huge hospital complex, and a security guard pointed us in the right direction. We walked up the sidewalk, Matt’s pace determined. He led me to the A13 highway, a steady buzz of cars zipping by even at nine fifteen on a Saturday morning.
“We’re not supposed to actually go onto the highway, I guess,” Matt said. “The cops will run us off.”
“How will we get a ride then?”
“We’ll stand here.” He stopped at the base of the on-ramp. “Lose the tuque,” he said. “Makes you look thuggish.”
I did as I was told. Matt, beaming this huge smile, faced the oncoming traffic, one foot on the embankment, the other nearly in the road, holding the NORMANDIE/LES PLAGES sign way out. And just like that, a brown Peugeot swerved over onto the shoulder and stopped a few yards past where we were standing.
And I was like, For real?
Matt jogged to the passenger door, which the driver had pushed open, and leaned in. “We’re headed to Caen,” he said.
The driver, a darker-looking guy, maybe North African, said, “You are fortunate.” He didn’t smile, and his French was heavily accented and choppy. “I can take you.”
Matt climbed in back, which left me to sit in the front seat beside the dude. He pulled out into the traffic, and we headed for the coast. Not even two minutes on the side of the road. Just like that.
He drove really fast but didn’t say anything. He wore a suit coat and shirt but no tie and had a head of thick graying black hair, high on top like a pompadour, and a thick black mustache. Wired eyes aside, he kind of looked like that old-guy actor Burt Reynolds.
From the back, Matt introduced himself.
I said, “My name is Freeman. Bonjour.”
“You are American?” Burt Reynolds said.
“Canadian,” Matt said, but Burt Reynolds had been talking to me.
I said, “Oui.”
He didn’t say anything more, just faced forward, eyes wired.
Before long we were out of the city, driving through the countryside and flying, pedal to the metal. I tried to give Matt a discreet What’s up with this dude? look, but he ignored me. He asked the driver, “Do you live in Caen?”
“Cherbourg,” Burt Reynolds said, “an hour beyond. I work at port.”
It was silent again.
“We’re students,” Matt said from the back, a straight-up lie. “Study abroad in Paris.”
Burt Reynolds didn’t seem to care. He focused on the road.
“We’re going to visit the D-day beaches,” Matt said. “Not for school or anything. Just because we’re curious. ‘Know your history or repeat it,’ you know. That sort of thing.”
Burt Reynolds didn’t care.
When Matt said, “We’re also semiprofessional footballers,” the dude perked up. He looked over at me, his crazy eyes asking, But you are American?
“Le football américain,” I explained.
“They play here?”
“Our team is the Diables Rouges of Villeneuve,” Matt said.
“Villeneuve,” he said. “I have cousins who live there.”
He looked over at me, then forward again. “Yes, I think I have seen posters of your American football.”
Matt said, “Are you coming from Villeneuve this morning?”
“No,” he said. “From Turkey.”
“Turkey?”
“Thirty-seven hours on road,” he said. “Well, thirty-eight, with the stop in Strasbourg.”
“Do you have family in Strasbourg?” Matt asked.
“My wife. I drove from my family home in Turkey to kill her.”
Neither Matt nor I said anything.
Turkish Burt Reynolds, telling his story in thick English now (for my benefit, I imagined), explained that before taking the job at the port in Normandy, he’d been a long-haul trucker for a company based out of Strasbourg, in eastern France, and he had married a French woman there. He commuted between Cherbourg and Strasbourg on weekends, and when he could, he would book it back to his family home in Turkey. (It was a complicated story to follow.) He said that he had been in Turkey with his mother, father and brothers in a village called Nagdy or Nigdy or some such (I couldn’t make out the word), and he knew—“I just knowing,” he said—that his wife was cheating on him.
“I jump into car on spot”—he snapped his fingers with a pop!—“and drive back to France to cut her throat.”
“Of course you did,” Matt said from the back.
“When I arrive she is gone, with my son and all my valuables.” He threw his hands into the air. “The apartment, empty.” Burt Reynolds looked genuinely hurt, but about her or the empty apartment was unclear.
“Now I must return to work at port or lose my job,” he said. “Without port, I would have to drive truck again. This is no life.”
“Not any life I can imagine,” Matt said from the back.
» » » »
Turkish Burt Reynolds turned out to be a real Chatty Cathy once he got going. He jawed at us the whole way, steady, in English. It was like talking helped him keep his mind off having failed to kill his wife. He told us about Caen and the Normandy beaches and everything. Really useful stuff, actually. As a former trucker, he knew all about the region.
He dropped us in the town center, way out of his way, just past noon. “You must remember to visit memorial museum,” he said. “The Museum of Peace, it is called. Also buses there, take you to beaches.”
We waved like mad as he pulled away. His car turned the corner and I was like, “Matt, man, a killer just spent mad energy counseling us to visit the Museum of Peace. Peace, man.”
We were both bent over double, laughing.
“Hitchhiking is fun!” I said.
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed.
Matt tossed out knuckles, and I bumped my fist against his.
The sun was high overhead, and the sky ocean blue, a cool wind breezing. It must have been pushing seventy degrees. I took off my letter jacket.
Matt said, “Let’s find some lunch.”
There was a crepe stand on the corner. I ordered ham and cheese. The lady behind the round flat grill fried an egg and put it over the ham and sprinkled grated Gruyère over it all; it was so good that after one bite I ordered another.
“Ah, the Americans are hungry today,” she said in English.
“Very hungry,” I said.
“Hungry for experience,” said Matt, looking all proud at his wit. He added in French, “And I’m Québecois, by the way.”
Me and Matt did that a lot—switching from French to English, back and forth, like they were both just one language. It w
as funny how speaking French so much had gotten me speaking English better too—understanding things about grammar I’d never thought on before, using more varied vocabulary. Mama would get a kick out of that.
We sat on a city bench to eat our crepes, and Matt, suddenly all serious, said, “Do you think I should apologize to Moose and Sidi?”
“For what?”
He looked off up the street. “For bad-mouthing them.”
“Sidi had you by the neck!”
“But I treated them like white people always treat them.”
I wanted to say, But Matt, you are white…
I didn’t. It would have been mean. And it didn’t feel quite right either. I just focused my attention on my crepe.
“Okay, maybe not Sidi,” Matt said. “He was acting like an ass. But Moose is my friend.”
He wasn’t your friend that night, I thought, but I didn’t say that either.
“I said something stupid, okay?” Matt said. “Still, that doesn’t explain what’s going on with the team.”
“Sure it does,” I said between bites. “They’re acting all Three Musketeers. ‘One for all, and all for one.’ You mess with one of them, all of them get mad behind it.”
“No, it feels like something else. Like the guys are afraid all of a sudden.”
“Afraid? Of what? We’re killing folks.”
“My dad always tells his players that being a middle-of-the-pack team is easy,” Matt said. “Being on top, that’s a totally different pressure.”
He finished his crepe, wadded the paper and leaned back, all stretched out on the bench.
“Fear of failure,” he said. “It’s like they’re paralyzed by the idea of coming up short against the Caïmans. Like, if they don’t show up to practice, if they act like they don’t care and don’t give it one hundred percent, then they don’t have to step up. If we lose, they can pretend it was because they weren’t really invested in winning in the first place.”
“Fear of failure?” I said. “Or of success maybe.”
I wadded up my empty crepe wrappers and wiped my greasy lips.
“My sophomore year, we were playing John Jay High,” I said. “The Mustangs—huge rivals. It was our homecoming, and they were ranked at the top of our district, number two in Texas 5-A, had a couple of All-Staters on defense. I was on though. I was playing running back, and in our first offensive series we drove the length of the field on two of my runs, a thirty- and a fifty-yarder. We had the ball first and goal on the seven, and Coach Calley called an inside dive to me. I popped through a quick hole, past the linebacker. Number 56. He grunted, Shit! as I blew by. Nobody left but the free safety, and I juked him, cut hard against the flow.”