There’s a locker room but no lockers at the stadium, so we had to carry our gear in bulky bags, and the strap was digging into my shoulder. Freeman and I were waiting at the corner to cross the street, on our way to catch the RER back into Paris after our loss to the Jets. It was dark and cold and had started to drizzle. We passed through the Cité des Cinq Mille and Freeman again removed the big ring he wore and put it in his jacket pocket. (Like anyone would want to steal that.)
At the RER station, we slipped our tickets into the turnstile, pushed our bags through ahead of us and passed inside. The electric board said the next train would arrive in two minutes, but it barreled into the station as we stepped onto the platform, and we got on. Freeman sat in an empty bank of seats. I sat across from him.
Freeman croaked his French more than he spoke it. “I am with regrets for what I did at the finish of the game,” he said.
We usually spoke English to each other, except when we were around French people, so I shifted back. “Forget it,” I told him.
But really, it had been bothering me since it happened. Part of me wanted to write it off as bitterness, as just a heat-of-the-moment thing, because of the loss. But it was like he didn’t recognize that most of our teammates were North African—“Arabs,” as he, like most French people, called them. My best friend on the team and his greatest advocate, Moose, was too.
I wasn’t so sure Freeman and I would become friends. It could be kind of hard to like him sometimes.
I said, “But Al-Qaida motherfuckers? Really? What’s up with that?”
He didn’t respond.
“Why just single out the Arabs? Because they’re kicking your butts in Iraq?”
“Ain’t nobody kicking our butts,” he shot back.
“It’s time you stopped believing Fox News.”
Freeman moved his bag from his lap to the empty seat beside him and stared into the dark outside the window. “Don’t mess with me about stuff like that,” he growled.
The train dipped from above ground into the bowels of the city. The sound of the wheels on the tracks was a metallic humming. I thought about the Jets. They were the number-one team, so by losing to them we’d put ourselves behind the eight ball after our very first game. We’d need to go undefeated from now on to end up at the top of the final rankings and have any hope of qualifying for the championship game.
Go undefeated the rest of the season? Right. With reliably unreliable Sidi, a spotty defense, a crappy backup QB leading the team for one entire half…
What Monsieur Lebrun had said on the sideline at the end of the game haunted me—about what Freeman and I were supposed to be doing for the team. If we lost again, would he send us home early?
At Gare du Nord station, the car filled up. Normally, this was where Freeman would transfer to catch the metro to take him home, but Juliette had asked him to dinner.
He spoke suddenly. “Can’t be but one of us on the field at once.”
“Huh?” Sometimes I couldn’t understand his English any better than his French.
“There can’t be but one of us, either you or me, playing at one time, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“We’ve got what it takes to beat the Jets, that goes without saying. We should run the table all season. But here we are.”
“Here we are,” I said.
“Well, how about this: what if you and me go both ways?”
I didn’t follow him.
“I played running back till my junior year,” he said. “I got mad skills. And you’ll train with the defense, so you can go in on D. That is, if you ain’t afraid to come up and hit a body.”
“Ha! I played safety two years in high school.”
“That way,” he went on, “the half when you can’t play QB anymore, you go in on defense...”
I finally got it. “And since we can’t be on the field together, you boost the offense.” It was smart—a great idea. And he didn’t even know our heads were on the chopping block. “I bet it’ll fly with the team too.”
“Get two full games out of us instead of just one and a half,” he said. “If we do that and avoid the M&Ms, we be clean as gasoline. Whoop Jets butt, Mousquetaires, all of them.”
“The M&Ms?”
“Mental mistakes,” he said.
I couldn’t help myself; I cracked up. “Right, of course, Mister Cheap Shot to the Chin, Fucking Al-Qaida Motherfucker!”
Even he had to smile at that. Then he got quiet.
“This is okay, you know,” he said.
“This losing?”
“Not the losing—of course not that,” he said. “But this.” He pointed toward the floor of the train. “Being here. Back home, Coach tells you when to pee and how to hold your willy. That’s all you ever know—what you’re told. Here, it’s like we got some say in it.”
He’d hit the nail on the head. It was what had made me leave home: so I’d have some say in what I did with my life.
We got off at Cité Universitaire. Across from the Parc Montsouris was a bakery. Freeman stopped. “I’ve got to bring something,” he said, dropping his bulky bag in the middle of the sidewalk for me to watch over. “Can’t show up to your cousin’s empty-handed. I’m suave like that.”
He pronounced it swah-VAY.
Through the window I watched him survey all the selections in the glass case. He came back out carrying a box.
“Fruit tart.” He frowned. “That mess is expensive!”
“The cost of being suave.” I pronounced it like him, but he didn’t laugh.