It took a few days for things to cool off with Juliette. But I’ll confess: at first I didn’t think they would at all. I thought she’d still see me as the bratty, egotistical kid she used to babysit, and I would have to live out in Villeneuve with Yazid.
And my mom and dad…well, let’s just say it took a bit more than a few days, and I had to make some big concessions—mostly about Orford—to get them to sign the permission forms and not fly over to drag me back to Montreal.
The first two weeks I commuted up to Villeneuve, and I had some pretty good practices. It felt great to be suited up and zipping passes! The level of play was really uneven though—more so than I’d imagined. Guys like Moose and Sidi—Aïda’s brother, the one Moose got into trouble protecting—stood out, not for their skill but for pure athleticism. Others looked the part in pads, even if they were a little clumsy. Jorge was bigger than my center back home. But a lot of it was kind of comical. I could see why US Football magazine had ranked the team so low.
Still, the guys were super pumped that I was there and excited for our home opener in two weeks, against a team called the Jets from another Parisian suburb. All the guys really hated the Jets. I didn’t know what the Jets were like, but I hoped we could get by on enthusiasm and guts.
The senior team’s season opened that Sunday, the week before our opener—a “friendly” game, as they called them here, against a team from a lower division. It was at home in Villeneuve, so all of us went, the Under-20s, the bantams, the flag team, including Aïda and Yasmina. We all wore our home jerseys, like the senior side. I had to pay off Sidi to get to wear 15 for the season; it was my number back home, but he typically wore it for the Diables. It only cost me bottomless Cokes at the café beside the RER station while we played foosball after practice one night—pretty cheap in the big scheme of things.
The senior team was sixty deep, some with good size; in uniformed rows, stretching before kickoff, they looked good. The three leading warm-up—the QB from the cover of US Football, a lineman and what looked to be a linebacker—were obviously North American. You could tell by the way they carried themselves, the easy swagger—though whether they were from the United States or Canada, I couldn’t say. The visitors, the Sphinx, were a pretty ragtag bunch by comparison. Some had white helmets with white face masks; others, white helmets with black face masks. A few wore black on black. During their warm-up, they weren’t sharp at all. If they had an American on their side, he was disguising it pretty well.
Music blared over the loudspeakers—French hip-hop. I couldn’t really make out most of the words. Something like “J’suis trop ghetto pour cette France…D’où vient le malaise…Trop de différence de rue case nègre à Paris seize…” The stands were filling up. I noticed this kid six or seven rows up from us, sitting by himself, away from everybody else. He was black but clearly not from here. In fact, he was pretty obviously American, certainly an athlete, probably a football player. He looked wiry but was broad-shouldered, and his neck was too thick for a French player. Safeties back home were built like him (though by the way he carried himself—kind of guarded, uneasy, hands deep in his pockets and hunched into himself in his letterman’s jacket—I’d have said he was from the States, not Canada).
I pointed him out to Moose. “From one of the other teams?” I asked. “A scout or something?”
“A spy?” Moose said. He leaned into Sidi, on the bench below us, and whispered something in his ear. Sidi looked up at the kid and shrugged. Moose turned back to me. “Let’s go see.”
The American turned toward us as we approached.
“You’re from the States?” I said.
He gave a slight nod but kept his focus on the field.
I sat down beside him all the same. Moose sat on the other side. “Mathieu Dumas,” I told him and offered my hand. “My friends call me Matt.”
“Freeman B…,” he said. It sounded like Bay-HAN-zin, or something like that.
“Moussa Oussekine,” Moose said, and he threw out his hand for a soul-brother shake. All the Diables shook that way; it surprised me at first too, and this black guy, Freeman, was looking kind of suspiciously at Moose for doing it.
The senior Diables kicked off—a good kick, high and deep. Their coverage team tagged the returner, and the American was like, “Oh, dang!”
“Fabrice, there,” Moose said in English, “is the most hard hitter on the senior side.”
“That was not particularly friendly,” the American said in French, “for a ‘friendly’ game.” His French was a little stiff, and he had a heavy accent. Still, you had to like the effort.
“The French are odd that way,” I told him. “They call pre-season games ‘friendlies,’ as though guys in plastic armor ramming into each other could ever be warm and fuzzy.”
“You are not French?” he said, using the formal vous for me instead of tu.
“Canadian. From Montreal,” I responded in English.
“But you”—vous again—“reside here?”
“For the season. I play on the junior team. I’m going to coach a bit too.”
He looked surprised. “Junior like JV?” he asked in English.
“The Under-20 division. One of fifteen or so clubs, across two divisions. It’s club teams here,” I explained, “not affiliated with schools like back home, so no varsity and JV.”
“They pay you to do it? To coach and play?”
“Insurance, an allowance for my cousin who boards me and for my meals and subway fare.”
“Nice gig,” he said.
On the field, the senior Diables had the ball and were driving toward the end zone. They were methodical—a dive that gained four yards, a sweep that went for eight.
Freeman turned to Moose. “You too?” He kept to English.
“No, I am French.”
“French? Right,” he said a little snarkily. “But what I’m asking is, they pay you to play?”
“Ha! This is only for the foreign ‘talent.’” He reached across Freeman and nudged me. “To keep this one from getting too sick for home and running back to his maman.” Then he put his fists to his eyes and made a wah-wah crying gesture.
I shoved him, and he slapped at my hand, but Freeman leaned out from between us, a little peeved, and we stopped. “So is it the regular season over here right now then?” he asked.
“The French have to do everything their own way,” I said, for Moose’s benefit more than to answer Freeman’s question. “They play January to April here.”
“Hear tell y’all Canadians ain’t so different, doing things your own way.” I hardly understood his English. “Three downs instead of four, twenty-yard end zones, playoffs in October…”
“And not just with football,” I said. “Here, they call hot dogs ott doe-gue.” I pronounced it like Inspector Clouseau would. “In Quebec, we call them chiens chauds.”
Literally hot and dog.
“Like a little Dachshund puppy in a bun,” he said, “steam rising all up off him.”
And he and I laughed.
Moose didn’t. He looked like he couldn’t follow what we were saying. He said, “I will be honest, my teammates and I”—he pointed to our guys, who were all looking up at us—“we thought that maybe you were a spy from the Jets.”
“A spy? Ha! Before yesterday I didn’t even know y’all played here.”
“Do you play?” Moose asked him.
“Yeah. Back home.”
“I could tell,” I said, in French to make sure Moose could stay in the conversation. Freeman wore a gaudy ring—a school ring, I’d thought at first, but maybe it was a championship ring. “Where’s home?” I asked him.
“San Antonio.” He said it kind of boastfully.
“They say Texas high-school football is the best.”
He gave me a long look, as if to say he couldn’t believe I would actually question this. “Sho nuff,” he said finally.
The cocky bastard.
Then Moose said in English, “Maybe you would desire to play for the Diables Rouges?”
Freeman didn’t respond; he just stared back at Moose, face blank, clearly surprised. And I remember thinking, Sure, why not? Like me.
If he was for real, that is.
Moose said, “What age do you have?”
“Seventeen.”
“Parfait,” Moose said.
Freeman looked Moose up and down, as if he wasn’t taking him seriously.
“Why not?” I said. “Under-20 teams can field two foreign players. We only have me.”
“I start college at the end of January,” Freeman said.
“Postpone until the fall,” I told him. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Moose looked more and more excited by the prospect of it.
“Playing football in Paris,” I said. “How many opportunities like this do you think you’ll get? I mean, if you think you could make the team, that is.”
“I’d own this league!” Freeman said.
I got up, and Moose followed. We started back down the bleachers.
“We practice here tomorrow at six,” I told Freeman. “Come by. Let’s see what you’ve got.”