FREE

Me and Matt met at Les Halles the next afternoon. He was sitting on the lip of the Fontaine des Innocents as I walked up.

“You sure this is a good idea?” I asked.

“It can’t hurt.”

“If Monsieur Lebrun and Yaz didn’t get anywhere, what can you and me accomplish?”

“You underestimate my charm and powers of persuasion.”

We had our big bags with our gear so we could go straight to practice after, but I was dressed fly, in black slacks and a white shirt.

Matt busted on me. “Did you get a side job as a waiter?”

“Oh snap,” I said, and I gave him the hand.

He pointed to a florist’s shop. “For Moose’s mom.”

A little old lady sold us the Délice du Printemps, which meant “spring delight.” It was a bouquet of yellow tea roses, white lilies, pink gerberas and blue lisianthus. (She had to explain this to us; I don’t know yellow tea roses from Guns N’ Roses.) On the train, we sat silent, me holding the bouquet. I didn’t tell Matt this, but I hadn’t ever been in a Muslim’s home before. Ever. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was kind of nervous behind it, especially as we were trekking up there to tell a grown man how to raise his son.

It was seven floors up, and the elevator was broken. The cement stairwell reeked of piss. With our huge bags, me and Matt were in a sweat and working for breath by the time we reached their door. In the hallway outside was a line of shoes and sandals. Matt slipped out of his, and when I didn’t, he nudged me. When my shoes were off, he rang the bell.

A little girl, ten, maybe eleven years old, in a long embroidered shirt and a blue-and-yellow headscarf, opened the door. She yelled back into the apartment, “Moussa, les américains des Diables!” Then back to us, beaming: “Salut, les champions.”

An older lady appeared—Madame Oussekine?—in a high-necked robe that reached the floor and a dark headscarf. “Please, please.” She waved us in. Then, kind of scolding: “You should have called to let us know you were coming.”

I extended the flowers.

“How lovely! Let me find a vase.”

Their living room was long and narrow, with green walls. The ceiling was kind of low, the room kind of tight, with stuff everywhere. There was an oak cabinet with glass doors, filled with old books, colored candles and framed pictures. One was a black-and-white—super old—of a man in an army uniform.

Moose came out from the back, not looking too pleased. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“Saving your ass,” Matt whispered back.

Before Moose could say anything more, a man appeared at the end of the hallway, tall and lean, in a long white robe and skullcap. Monsieur Oussekine was straight up a replica of Moose, fast-forward forty years, and with a full beard.

“Welcome to my home,” he said in a booming voice. It seemed to echo over every other noise in the apartment. But he didn’t smile. Kind of the opposite: his face was as quiet as a closed door.

Moose was sort of…submissive in front of his pops. Not like nothing I’d ever seen of him. “Father, meet Mathieu Dumas. His family hosted me in Montreal last summer.”

Monsieur Oussekine’s face loosened some at that, but not much.

“And this is Freeman Behanzin. He comes from Texas.”

He took me in with a glance and waved for us to sit down. Matt and me sat side by side on this old leather sofa, and he took the large chair beside the window. Moose stayed off in the corner, near the hallway. The air was stuffy with the smell of food frying in the kitchen.

“Let me guess,” Monsieur Oussekine said. “You’re here to try to convince me to let my son stay on the team.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir,” Matt said, and then he started in, and it sounded kind of rehearsed. “Like all fathers, I’m sure you know what the—”

Monsieur Oussekine cut him off. “How old are you, son?”

“Eighteen, sir. Well, almost.”

“And you propose to lecture me on what’s best for my children?”

Matt stared at his shoes.

The girl who’d opened the door carried in this fancy sculpted tray with a copper teapot on it like the one in Aladdin. It saved our asses. Monsieur Oussekine took his focus off us and turned it onto the tray. There were these fresh but ridiculously small glasses in a bunch, and he served us mint tea by holding the pot up high, lowering it to the lip of a glass and then moving on to the next one, splashing tea all over the table. I didn’t know if we were supposed to raise the cups in a toast or throw them back like movie cowboys do a shot of whiskey. Matt sipped at his, his eyes still fixed on his feet, so I followed his lead—or tried to. The glass was scalding. I put it back down and blew air on my burning fingertips. And we just sat there, looking at one another.

I said, “Moose—I mean, Moussa. He told us you work as an urban technician. For the city of Paris. That must be interesting?”

“Interesting? No. But essential. I’m what the municipality calls a technicien responsable de la propreté urbaine.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

“I’m a garbage collector.”

There was a long silence. Then Monsieur Oussekine broke it with this high-pitched, songlike laugh. It didn’t match his voice.

“But Father studied to be a mechanical engineer,” Moose jumped in, kind of defensive, “when he still lived in Algiers.”

“Yes, yes, that’s true,” his father said. “In the gas and oil industry. That hasn’t meant much here though, and it was a long time ago.”

I didn’t realize I was staring at a framed medal, over in the oak cabinet beside the picture of the soldier, but Monsieur Oussekine went and got it and laid it on the coffee table. It was a bronze cross with a red-and-white ribbon. “This catches your eye?” he said. “It was the ticket my father, Moussa’s grandfather, paid so that we could come here.”

“Pardon, Monsieur?” Matt said, looking as baffled as I felt.

“During the war of independence, in our home, in Algeria, my father”—Monsieur Oussekine pointed to the man in the picture—“was a Harki.”

A Harki? But I didn’t have to ask because he just went on and explained.

“My father fought for France against the insurgents who would eventually take over Algeria. Harki is what these native troops were called.” He refilled Matt’s glass, with the same up-and-down stroke. “He died in combat.”

“The French government,” Moose said, his voice rising, “after getting beaten, refused to even admit that a war had been fought. They called it a ‘police action,’ as though my grandfather had died for nothing.”

“No, no, my son,” Monsieur Oussekine said. “French citizenship—that’s what he got in exchange.” He turned to Matt and me. “His sacrifice was our ticket to France.”

“Full French citizenship?” Moose said, half under his breath.

“My angry son isn’t all wrong,” said Monsieur Oussekine. “When you look at the life we have here…”

He rose and went to the long window. “This place.” He pointed to the surrounding high-rises. “They name the buildings after artists: Balzac, Ravel, Debussy—our own building, Renoir. But even doctors won’t come for emergency calls. Tell me, how can you raise a boy correctly in a place like this?”

He wasn’t calling us out, but it was like he was saying, I know why you came around, but step off. Step up out my business.

But still Matt jumped in. “That’s why the Diables Rouges are so important,” he said.

Monsieur Oussekine waved him off, then locked his hands behind his back. “School is important, not things that distract from school.”

“But we need other outlets,” Matt insisted. “Kids like Moussa, they need an outlet. Especially in a place like this. That’s what the Diables Rouges provide.”

But me, I was thinking about Villeneuve and about what Monsieur Oussekine had said. “My father,” I said, “he grew up in Chicago.”

I stopped myself, trying to figure out how to explain it so they’d understand.

“The West Side, where my father grew up, it’s very much like this. Not so different. There were…” I couldn’t find the word for gangs, so I just said it in English: “Il y avait des gangs.”

Matt translated: “Des bandes rivales.”

“Il y avait des bandes rivales,” I said, then continued, “My father used to tell me that there were gangs and drugs all over, and lots of trouble with the police. Lots of racism, you see.”

Monsieur Oussekine stared at me. Moose too.

“He and my mother had me, but they weren’t married. You see? They were very young, like Moussa and Mathieu and me, and they had a child, and the one thing that saved him.”

I paused. Saved him?

“The thing he told me saved him and his new family was the military. Kind of like your father.”

“It was his ticket,” Monsieur Oussekine said.

“Yes. But he wanted better for me than he had.”

I couldn’t find the word for stationed, so I said it otherwise. “Because of the air force, we resided in San Antonio…”

“In Texas,” Matt said.

“We resided in San Antonio, and there were gangs and drugs too, a lot of trouble, and my father was often gone, on duty overseas, and my mother now had my little brother and sister too. My father insisted I play football.”

“As an outlet,” Matt said, but I said, “No, not as an outlet. For the structure. For the discipline. Because he thought it would help me make better decisions.”

Matt jumped in again, and I was glad he did that time, because Monsieur Oussekine was steady staring at me and I didn’t know what more to say.

“Maybe sometimes Moussa has made bad decisions. Who doesn’t? But the leadership he’s learned from the Diables Rouges, the loyalty…He looked out for Sidi, even though he knew it could get him into trouble. Like you yourself look out for Moussa.”

Monsieur Oussekine was still staring at me. Not angry like he might have been for me calling him out about his business, but firm all the same. “Your father sounds like a wise man,” he said. “He must be very proud.”

Proud?

“My father.” I pointed to the medal. “He was killed last fall in Iraq.” The words just came out. “My father, like your father.”

I looked at Monsieur Oussekine, and it was like he heard me saying something I wasn’t saying out loud. The thing I didn’t know how to say.

“You’re afraid he was a sort of Harki?” Monsieur Oussekine said. “That he was used by the military and thrown away?”

I didn’t know what to say.

He came to the couch, sat beside me. “Your father, my father,” he said, “they weren’t lackeys. This medal isn’t something to be ashamed of, something to hide away in a shoe box in the closet.”

He removed it from its case, put it in my hand.

“Touch it.”

I ran my fingertip along the cold grain of the metal.

He said, “This coin and ribbon, it’s my father, in all his strength. It’s the physical embodiment of him, of a man who had the courage to live his convictions.”

I returned it, looking away. Not embarrassed. Just…I don’t know.

“And Moussa too,” I heard Matt say. “He has the courage to live his convictions too.”

Matt leaned forward in his seat, and Monsieur Oussekine was listening to him, but his arm was draped over my shoulders. And me, I just looked away.

Matt said, “Moussa is why I’m here, Monsieur Oussekine, in Villeneuve. He had the vision to see what an experience this would be for me. And the courage to look out for me, for Freeman and me, in this place. I, we, his friends, we come to you today because we want to do for Moussa the same that he always does for us.”

Monsieur Oussekine didn’t respond. He just sat there, his arm draped over my shoulders.

» » » »

A little bit later, we were in the hallway outside their apartment, me and Matt and Moose. Moose was excited, hugging us and all.

“Putain, les mecs. Merci,” he said. “Merci.”

Matt was all smiles too. “I didn’t think we could pull it off.”

“The things you said!” Moose said to me, but then he stopped, put a hand on my shoulder. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know why I had told them just then. But it felt public finally, Pops’s death. Like everybody knew.

It didn’t feel wrong though. Doesn’t still. Pops’s death is part of who I am. I will carry his memory like a medal and ribbon, a ticket to being my best me.

“Your father,” I told Moose. “He’s great.”