DIABLES ROUGES (1–1) V. OURS (0–2)
FEBRUARY 28
Me and Matt, Moose, pushing his ten-speed, and Aïda, our flag-team captain, were walking from the stadium to the RER after practice. They were chatting and laughing and whatnot, Matt and Moose horsing around, exchanging clownish looks and faux-sexy glances. Aïda, in her headscarf, smiled at their silliness. Me, I kept to myself.
It had been a month or so since I’d decided to stay. I was having fun and all—living in France, who wouldn’t be?—but I wasn’t feeling right either. Not easy, like Matt seemed to be. Homesick maybe. I’d Skype Mama every week, and she’d tell me how she was doing (“Fine”) and how Tookie and Tina were doing (“Fine”), and she’d ask how it was with me (“Fine,” I’d say). So we were all fine, you know. Still and all, as often as not I just felt off, uneasy.
Me and Matt and them passed by the city cemetery and the humming electrical substation that powered Villeneuve—ten-foot concrete walls topped with barbed wire, skull-and-crossbones and Danger–High Voltage signs all over. There was what they called an “industrial park” nearby. It wasn’t much of a park: fenced-in construction sites and giant cinder-block warehouses, most of them vacant. A ways off was a congested highway.
“The A1,” Matt once explained to me. “The Autoroute du Nord. It leads to Brussels.”
“How do you know these things?” I asked.
“How don’t you know them?” he said back.
We had the Ours (French for “bears”) coming up on Saturday, a game we should win. The Saturday before, we had stomped the Mousquetaires, 42–0. Mobylette killed. Matt kept calling sweeps and Mobylette would turn the corner and blow by the DBs like they were standing still, his legs just a-churning. The boy could scoot! But it was Matt who won the day, calling the right play at the right time, getting everybody involved and keeping everybody focused even as the game got out of hand. Other teams had foreign players too, but Matt was on.
Me, not so much. Coach Le Barbu had me at safety, and I played it as a sort of monster-back—part linebacker, squeezing the line of scrimmage when I saw a run coming, and part defensive back, dropping into coverage. I’d been effective, you know. I’d made lots of tackles. But I hadn’t shined, really. Not like Matt. I hadn’t gotten a single interception, very few big hits. It rattled my confidence for real, yo. And I hadn’t played a down on offense. No need for me to.
We wove our way through the Cinq Mille projects. In the concrete courtyard between high-rises, some older guys—gray-haired, a mix of Arab and black—were playing the metal ball game you see old French guys play in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Pétanque, it’s called. That was what I was staring at when I noticed this group of dudes a little ways off: five of the hoodie boys that hung out by the big oak tree at our games. Three Arabs and two Brothers. Chelou, Moose called them—suspect, shady. One Brother was passing a plastic baggie to another, accepting some bills from him.
One of the Arabs was hawking on me. “Qu’est-ce tu mates, toi…” blah, blah, blah, he hollered my way. I hardly understood a word of his slang, but I got the message still and all: he had seen me eyeing his crew, so he was calling me out.
He moved on me, hard, so I pulled up. Didn’t say nothing, but I freed my hands from my pockets. He was spitting his slang, his crew pushing up behind.
The old guys stiffened up, like they knew what was about to go down, but they kept playing. Except one, who scooted off into one of the buildings. I felt Matt and Moose behind me.
Moose stepped forward. “Cool, mec, cool.” His hand was out toward the hoodie boy. “Y a pas de problème, là. On va à la gare, c’est tout.”
There’s no problem, Moose was telling him. We’re headed to the train station, that’s all.
The other hoodie boys stood stone-cold behind their boy, who was all face-to-face with me but silent now, one hand in his hoodie pocket. I had four inches on this fool, and I saw his hand reaching, but I knew my hands were quicker, whatever it was he had in his pocket. It just depended what his crew did when it popped off, and if Matt and Moose could hold their own.
See, I know gangster. Northside Rollers, East Terrace Mafia, Latin Kingz—we got all that in my ’hood back home. These boys here wasn’t gangster. All Frenchified and whatnot, they were just playing make-believe.
“Karim, on va à la gare, c’est quoi le problem?” Moose was mediating, his hand outstretched.
Aïda too. “Cool, Karim. Cool.”
She put her hand on hoodie boy’s arm, and he snapped it free. “Qu’est-ce que t’as, toi!” he hissed at her—Butt out! What’s the matter with you!—and Matt stepped forward. But hoodie boy was steady all up in my face.
One of his crew started to do the dope-smoker giggle. “Hee-hee. C’est les footballeurs ’Ricains des Diables Rouges.”
The old men, they’d disappeared. Little kids started to gather around, and two others of his crew had started to giggle too.
But not hoodie boy. Karim, Moose and Aïda had called him.
“Dégages.” Karim spat and gave this little nod, like he was dismissing us or some such, letting us pass, and I just steady stood there ’cause I hadn’t asked his permission in the first place.
Matt grabbed my arm, him and Moose and Aïda moving on, and Matt said in English, “Come on, Free.”
Him speaking English caused the other hoodie boys to burst into giggles again, but Karim kept staring at me.
I was steady staring him down too, my eyes like, Nigga, I got your name now. Karim. I got you.
Around the corner, in the parking lot of the next set of high-rises, the little kids buzzed around us, asking if we played for the American football team and would we give them autographs. And now here Moose was, preaching at me in his heavy-accented English: “You just do not understand, mec. In a place like this, everything must always be normal.” He said normal in French—nor-MALL. “How you say? Commonplace. You must act as though everything is commonplace. Some boys are selling drugs, c’est normal. A fight begins. Normal. It is ordinary, nothing that you react to.”
But I was like, Tsst, nigga, please. “Some fool calls you out, you got to stand tall. Got to. Otherwise he come calling every day.”
Moose swatted at the buzzing kids. “Allez, allez! Dégagez!”
Dégager. The same word Karim had thrown at us, in about the same tone of voice, too.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Moose said to me, “but you must understand also these guys are often with weapons, and they are looking for trouble. It is better to ignore them and just pass on.”
“I was ignoring them. Dude bumped up on me.”
We’d rounded onto the main street, just up the way from the train station, and as usual there were police vans on each side of the road. Matt called the ones in the white vans the CRS—the riot police. Wasn’t no riot going on, so I was like, Whatever. But Moose said, “Not this again…” He slowed his pace and put some attitude in his step.
And sure enough, a group of five of them rolled up on us. They wore dark blue jumpsuits and army boots; each had a helmet latched onto his belt and carried a metal baton. One held out a hand toward Moose, another toward me.
“Vos papiers.”
“Américain,” I said, but he shot back, “Allez, tes papiers,” all dismissive.
Moose already had his ID card out. He dropped his bag to the ground, opened it and stepped back. Another cop started going through it. The one on me tapped my bag with his free hand; I dropped it too. Matt opened his equipment bag, but they ignored him. Aïda shoved her hands in her pockets, all attitudinal now, like Moose.
The first cop pretended to inspect our papers, but it was all for show. He was just buying time while his boys rifled through Moose’s and my bags. They dropped stuff on the ground, turned clothes inside out. One got a kick out of my helmet, turning it over and over in his hands. It was clear there wasn’t nothing for them to find, but they kept on all the same, searching pockets, taking things out and leaving everything all over the sidewalk.
One, off to the side, said to Matt, “T’es Américain aussi? What are you doing here?” This cop had a single bar on his shoulder patch—a lieutenant or some such—and acted like he was the ranking officer. His name badge read Petit.
“I’m Canadian,” Matt corrected him. “Québecois.”
“From Montreal?” Lieutenant Petit asked.
Matt nodded.
“Great music town!” Petit said, and he looked all excited. “I spent a month there last summer during the jazz festival, visiting my older brother.” He started imitating this Quebec accent like Matt has: “Aw-stee, j’vais passer prendre une bière toute à l’ahr, Kriss da Caw-leese…”
“Is he a policeman too?” Matt said.
The lieutenant stopped mugging. “Pardon?”
“Your brother,” Matt said.
“He’s a lawyer.”
“Well then, he would tell you that cops in Canada aren’t allowed to stop people on the street for no reason.”
The lieutenant smiled. “Touché,” he said. “Although we are not in Canada here.”
He signaled the others to wrap things up. The one who had our ID papers handed them back, and they all turned and moseyed off, lazy-like, toward their van. No “Sorry,” no “Good day.” They didn’t even replace our stuff in our bags.
“Alors, on se revoit à mon retour dans quelques minutes?” Moose said to them—So, the same drill again in a few minutes then, on my way back?
“Vas-y, petit gars,” one of them snarled. “Dégages.”
That same word. Beat it, it meant, but harsher like, Fuck off.
Moose turned on Matt. “Making new friends?”
Matt ignored him.
Aïda said, “The way the police treat us Beurs, this utter lack of respect, tells us all we need to know about where we stand in France.”
“Beurs?” I asked. I didn’t know the word.
“Slang for North Africans,” said Matt.
I was supposed to be sympathizing, but all I could manage was, “So I can expect more of this crap every time I’m with you?”
“In Villeneuve, probably yes,” Moose said. “Our illustrious minister of the interior, in the newspapers, he called us project residents…racailles?”
“Scum,” Aïda translated, to make sure I’d understood.
“Yes, this. And he vowed to, uh…how you say… nettoyer au Kärcher?”
“It’s like what the industrial cleaner does,” Aïda said, “with a pressure hose.”
Moose said, “You see, after a little child died from a stray bullet, the interior minister vowed to clean out the scum from our neighborhoods. He was referring to the jeunes de la cité…”
“The youths from the projects,” said Aïda.
“The riot police have been here ever since. More than a year now. To them, Karim and me, we are the same.”
We arrived at the station. Matt just stood there, like he was waiting for Moose to say something more or for Aïda to go on expressing outrage, but I just passed on through the turnstile.
“For real,” I said, “I’m glad to be leaving this shithole.”