The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  In every high school, one can make a list of the names of students no one would test or mock. Welles never made any such list. Even his car was a target. It was a decidedly uncool van/box truck contraption, teenage self-consciousness on four wheels if ever there was such a vehicle. The truck had its bumper torn off and a screeching backup safety beeper that emitted sound levels somehow higher and more shrill than a car alarm. Jody Steinglass, a classmate, remembered the echo, and the mockery it inspired. “It beeped when you put it in reverse,” he said. “When he pulled away from a party, it was BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. . . . I would’ve died if I had that car.”

  The vehicle was an endless source of derision, which Welles accepted and laughed at for its obvious truth.

  • • •

  In the landscape of youth sports, there will always be a special place for the hockey family. While other games require only an open field or a dirt diamond or a hoop on a pole, hockey needs more—a lot more, starting with ice. Sure, there are frozen ponds aplenty in Canada and Scandinavia, and more than a few in New England and Minnesota, and even some in Rockland County. But by and large around New York City’s suburbs, the game is played indoors, in half-freezing warehouses on oval-shaped rinks.

  There is no sunny side of the stands for spectators or shady dugouts to fill, no spring breezes to enjoy, only the stale cold air and the empty hum of the overhead fluorescents. You don’t play hockey, or drive through the dark freeze of winter mornings to watch it, because it’s easy. For the vast majority of Americans, it will never be the game of choice. You don’t play it by default. Skating is not just running. It’s running across sheets of hoarfrost. The first fundamental is balance, and only after that’s mastered does a player receive a stick, and then a puck on its end. The ice is a cold floor to receive your fall, and young players fall often and land hard.

  Welles also played the easier games, but hockey held a special place for him. He was still undersized, but his coordination and effort lent him a quickness, a burst that served him and at times separated him. The game was physical and often reckless, with players crashing into the boards and one another, and the collisions gave the atmosphere a dash of chaos. From his first few games and practices, he was an elusive skater, able to navigate his way around traffic and avoid the big hits.

  By his freshman year at Nyack High School, he was playing varsity, spending his time with the bigger boys, ready to compete in games. He played right wing—a glamour position, where a player earns looks at the net and chances to score if he flashes into the spaces where the puck is going to be.

  Welles played smart and hard, his skill and speed developing. By the start of his junior year, he saw himself as a leader, but when coach Dave Moreno named the team’s captains before the season, Welles wasn’t chosen. Two other teammates, Matt Dickey and Chris Varmon, were selected. The same day, Welles sought out Moreno.

  “Coach,” he said, “can we talk about something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m curious. I want to know what I’m doing wrong.”

  Moreno understood immediately Welles was talking about the captaincy.

  “What do I have to do?”

  There were many ways for Moreno to answer. Clearly, his player was disappointed, hurt, even. But Welles came to him directly, without sulking or taking an attitude, or becoming a divisive presence in the locker room. He wanted to know. The coach’s answer was clear.

  “It’s not what you’re doing wrong,” Moreno said. “It’s just . . . there’s more. You’re a leader by example. But you can do much more.”

  “Okay,” Welles said, turned around, and left.

  His response came on the ice, in how he talked to other players, and in how he challenged other teammates in the locker room, to care about each shift with the same intensity and effort, and to hold one another accountable when their effort flagged. The team’s ultimate goal wasn’t only to win but to move up the rungs of the league, to face greater competition.

  The coach watched to see how Welles would react to the snub. He listened as the voice grew louder and the demands sharper. He was impressed. Two weeks later, Moreno called Welles in to see him. The meeting was short.

  He placed a large C on Welles’s Nyack Indians jersey, naming him the team’s third captain.

  That year the team had 10 wins and 2 losses in league play, Welles turning a sharp wrist shot from the circle into a key weapon. He also used the shot as a ploy in developing a role he’d refine late in his tenure on the team. Toward the end of his career, he became known to the younger players as the veteran most willing to help them get their first goals for the Indians. When a player was still searching for the net, he asked Moreno to put him on his line. Off the right wing, Welles would sweep in with a move to shoot, but then flip the puck across him to a teammate he’d set up, having instructed him ahead of time to trail the play down the middle of the ice. When the play worked, the goalie unable to adjust in time and change direction, the teammate would redirect the pass into the net for his first career score. Welles would fly past, retrieve the puck, and bring it to the bench as a keepsake for his teammate.

  By his senior year, when the Indians played some of their games against League 1 opponents—the highest level of competition—the team finished with 6 wins, 5 losses, and 2 ties.

  With the red bandanna tied around his head, worn beneath his helmet in every game, Welles was one of the section’s leading scorers.

  • • •

  Christmas morning, 1993.

  Into the holy silence shrouding the house, indifferent to the gifts wrapped beneath the tree and the plans for church and feast and family, the call came, its shrill notes bleating out from Jeff’s beeper. The annunciator device he kept in the house spoke in minimalist code.

  Signal 10. Working fire—to be worked by father and son, together. It was Welles’s first fire call.

  Two years earlier, Welles finally asked the question Jeff had long awaited. His son wanted to apply to become a junior firefighter, to start down the path toward joining him at Empire Hook and Ladder as more than a company mascot and ready hand. He wanted to answer the call. Welles was fourteen, still too young in his father’s view. Jeff told him he needed to be sixteen before he could apply and begin training. Two years later, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Welles asked again. Dad agreed.

  Welles completed the county’s firefighter training program that summer, learning the fundamentals of fire prevention and suppression, and spending time in the county’s “smoke house,” putting out supervised fires. He was hungry to start. He’d seen his father rush off to fires since he was a boy, and wanted to join him. This Christmas morning was his chance.

  Jeff was out of bed, slipping pants on and looking for a shirt. He often slept with his socks on in case an alarm sounded overnight, but apparently the trick wasn’t saving enough time. Welles heard the beeper go off from his bedroom below and was dressed instantly, and now he was exhorting his father to step on it.

  “Dad,” he shouted up the stairs. “Better hurry up!”

  Without a second glance they passed the tree and the spread of gifts beneath and pushed out the door. Jeff flipped on the blue flashing lights on the dashboard of his truck and they made the turn to Empire. They were too late; the truck was already gone. The dispatcher sent out the call in more detail, a structure fire in Grand View-on-Hudson. Lights blinking, they raced to the address a little more than three miles south, directly on the river. They caught sight of Empire’s truck before getting there, and followed behind to the scene. The flames were plainly visible through the windows of the house.

  Grand View-on-Hudson, a tiny village of less than a quarter of a square mile, was best known for its homes directly on the west bank of the Hudson, giving the hamlet of fewer than three hundred residents its name. The house on fire was more than a picturesque river cottage. It belonged to the most fa
mous person in town, Toni Morrison.

  At sixty-two years old, she’d returned from Stockholm two weeks earlier after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. A giant of American letters, the author of Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Jazz, she’d won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for the novel Beloved.

  Morrison wasn’t at home. Since 1989, she spent most of her time an hour and a half south, living and teaching in Princeton as a professor of creative writing. The house in Grand View-on-Hudson was primarily a retreat, and a beautiful one. Now it was ablaze. Morrison’s son Slade was alone in the house at the time the fire started, and according to police, he’d tried to react when an ember leaped from the fireplace and landed on a nearby couch, igniting it. He moved to tamp down the sparks, but quickly the flames mounted, growing out of control. He called the fire department, and within minutes, the four-story wooden Colonial was nearly engulfed.

  Jeff and Welles pulled up to a home overwhelmed by flames, drawing roughly a hundred firefighters to the scene. The two reported to the captain seeking instruction. Welles was dispatched with a third lieutenant to the side of the house, to assist with ventilation efforts. Jeff watched him walk to the edge of the riverside property and disappear. Whatever worries he had about his son crossing the bridge from training to task were meaningless now. Welles was on the line, in the company, answering the call, a responder. Besides, Jeff had his own assignment to handle in the front of the house as the fight wore on.

  Slade escaped unhurt. The house, however, contained precious material. A portion of Toni Morrison’s original manuscripts and other writings were inside, invaluable works of art on the most fragile of canvases—paper. The firefighters understood that the priority was to extinguish and contain the flames, but, also urgently, to preserve the works and treasures of an American master.

  Ultimately, the effort would last more than five hours before the fire was put down. A few of the firefighters sustained minor injuries. The house was gutted by the fire, but the manuscripts and writings survived intact. It helped that they’d been stored in a special study in the house, with some extra measure of fire protection.

  Jeff and Welles crossed paths only once, during a water break, with the fire still alive. By the time it was done, likely they never saw the anxious homeowner at the edge of the property. After her son called her, Morrison rushed north, arriving to see the final stages, and the smoldering shell of her home.

  The firefighters received the Signal 14. Return to quarters.

  When they got in the truck, Jeff looked over at his son.

  “How you doing there?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I’m great.”

  The reply was redundant. As the truck pulled away, the smile through the grime was answer enough.

  • • •

  High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of,” the great American novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once wrote. So many experiences find ready, if unattractive, parallels to what we live through from grades nine to twelve. It’s all there: the cliques and stereotypes, the wise and the cruel, the popular and the marginalized, and the first discovery of our pursuits and limits as we take the halting steps into our adult selves. Life is high school without scheduled study hall. Vonnegut’s truth was alive and on display in its modern rendering twenty-five years later, in the hallways of Nyack High School.

  The old high school, where Welles and his classmates spent some of their middle school years, looked idyllic from the outside. Opened in 1928, the school sat high on a ridge above the Hudson. A two-story Georgian Colonial of red brick and white trim, it easily could’ve been lifted from the fields of a New England prep school. A clock tower sat at its center, crowned by a cupola. By the time Welles was a freshman, his class was in a new high school, a modern structure of drab brown brick and utilitarian shape. The drop in curb appeal was steep, even though the view from the back athletic fields out to the Hudson could be breathtaking.

  But on this particular afternoon in 1995, many students weren’t pondering the riverside. They wanted a close-up view of what was about to happen in the hallway. They were watching two students fixing for a fight.

  Lee Burns sat directly in front of Welles in Mr. Antonetti’s twelfth-grade advanced English class. They were friends and fellow seniors, part of a group who congregated at Karim Raoul’s house, a classmate who had his own separate space on his father’s property where the boys would gather. It was their spot. Welles was welcomed, but at times failed to blend in entirely.

  “We were always at Karim’s,” Burns said. “People would drink. . . . A lot of us were athletes who maybe had a beer, but we weren’t smokers, we weren’t into drugs. But there were kids around us who were into those things.” It was high school. Kids got drunk and got high, and sometimes got out of control and got themselves into trouble.

  The high school had a self-appointed group to limit the damage. VAASA, Varsity Athletes Against Substance Abuse, was a collection of varsity athletes who pledged to be clean and sober. Some of the athletes in the group drank or smoked, and used the extracurricular group to pad their college applications while flouting its mission. To their partying classmates, the group was sometimes viewed as preachy and laughable, the kids who wouldn’t be invited to parties anyway but were somehow expected to provide an example to their cool counterparts.

  Welles was invited to the parties, at least some of the time, but neither Burns nor others had ever seen him drink. Welles took his role with VAASA seriously, and was the designated driver at every party he attended, according to his friends. Burns never heard him preach to anyone, or sound judgmental, but Welles spoke up when he thought he should. Burns had heard him often, and seen the eye rolls.

  The best example he’d seen of Welles’s self-imposed sense of duty came whenever there was a fire call.

  “The most beautiful girl sitting there,” Burns recalled, having seen Welles make his pitch toward a potential date and then hear the fire call. “He’s gone. We’re having a good time, and that alarm goes off. He went to Superman mode and just went to the call.”

  This time the bell wasn’t sounding any alarm beyond the end of English class. Burns, Welles, and the other students flooded out into the hallways, where Burns spotted his girlfriend, a junior, with another classmate, Wykeme Corker. The scene instantly upset him. Whatever history there was between the two wasn’t good, and looking down the hallway, Burns believed Corker was bothering his girlfriend. In his mind, Corker, a sophomore football player, was a serial bully in the school. And now he was acting aggressively toward his girlfriend.

  Burns felt a rage building inside him as he saw Corker coming down the hall. He wanted to defend his girlfriend, wanted to confront Corker, and wanted to release the feeling building in his chest. “I just felt something primal inside me,” he said.

  The floor was filled with students out of class standing at their lockers. Seeing the two approach each other in the hallway, a crowd quickly began to form. They wanted a fight. Burns wasn’t going to disappoint them.

  “I was prepared to do whatever it took,” he said. “In that moment, I was preparing to do something that I would regret the rest of my life.” A quarter century later, the tension in his voice was still there.

  At what point might a life turn? Can it be in a fight in a high school hallway?

  Less than five years after squaring off with Burns in October 1995, Wykeme Corker would get into another confrontation in Nyack, around midnight outside the Signal 13 Bar. He would stab a man in the stomach, slashing the victim’s hand, nearly severing his thumb. He was indicted by a Rockland County grand jury and charged with attempted murder and assault. Acquitted of the more serious charge, he was convicted of assault and sentenced in 2000 to twelve and a half years in state prison. He served most of it before being paroled in 2011.

  Corker returned to Nyack. Just a few months aft
er his release and a few blocks from the stabbing that sent him to prison, he found trouble again. Outside a social club early on a Saturday morning, he was slashed across the neck with a broken beer bottle. The wounds were fatal. Wykeme Corker died at the age of thirty-three.

  There was no way to foretell the darkness ahead for Corker when Burns faced him in the crowded hallway with as many as two hundred students gathering to goad them on. There was also no way for anyone to know what would happen if they charged at each other and tangled. Corker was a football player. Burns was six feet five and well built. Neither was backing up.

  Just then, Burns felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, hearing a voice in his ear.

  It was Welles.

  “Lee,” he said. “Think of everything you have to lose. This guy has nothing to lose.”

  Welles didn’t talk to Corker, or even look at him. He spoke only to Burns. He was the only student to approach either one.

  “I had this peace come over me,” Burns said. “Almost immediately, I could feel my hands releasing, they weren’t clenched anymore.” Burns turned, found his girlfriend, and without waiting to hear what Corker was saying, he walked away. Welles stayed behind, watching them go.

  The crowd, unsatisfied, soon left. In minutes, the hallway was empty.

  Years later, when Burns learned of Corker’s arrest and then his murder, his mind returned to the hallway and the voice in the din that spoke to him. “It was a crossroad to my life,” Burns said. “Truth be told, if he had not said something to me and I would go on to do what I felt I had to do, or what I felt my anger dictated that I should do, I would not be sitting [here] today. I would not be the parent of my daughter. I would not be a lot of things. All because of one young kid . . .”

  Burns paused. “I thank him for that.”

  • • •

  With Welles’s strong grades and high board scores and honor rolls and advanced classes and extracurriculars and varsity letters and captaincy, with his work ethic and firefighting dedication and his family legacy, even with Division I lacrosse talent, it wasn’t enough for the Ivy League. Welles wasn’t going to Princeton, as his grandfather Bosley did. Where his good friend Jon Hess was a freshman lacrosse player. Where he could pledge a dining club or give Toni Morrison a direct account of how he tried to save her house from burning down.