FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE UNDER-20s
CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
APRIL 15
And now Free and I are stranded outside the locked construction site at Villeneuve, some of our teammates arrested and hauled off in a van, Moose and Sidi and Mobylette run off into the night, police cars speeding after them. It’s the day after Free and I went to Moose’s home, and what we’d fixed the night before with Monsieur Oussekine is all of a sudden completely undone. From that high to this low, just like that.
Four days before the championship!
And where are Moose and Sidi and Mobylette now? And how do Free and I fix it?
My throwing shoulder throbs—sharp and piercing, like something is ripped—from when the police officer yanked me to my feet by my handcuffed hands. Four days before the league championship!
Freeman is saying, “Of course, we won’t tell Monsieur Oussekine what just happened…” But he says it half uncertainly, like he’s thinking aloud, working his way through something. “Of course not.” He turns toward me. “But there’ll be Yaz at the cité. Or some other grands frères. We can tell them. They’ll know what to do.”
We start toward Moose’s building. It’s about a ten-minute walk. The road is eerie between lampposts, full of shadows and creepy quiet. And Free and I are quiet too. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but all I can see in my head is Monsieur Oussekine’s face, enraged. Or disappointed. Or first one and then the other. I told him about how great the Diables Rouges were for Moose and what Moose brought to the Diables, and he confided in us about his own father and about his fears for his son, and now…here we are.
Along one stretch of street, all the lights suddenly cut out. The entire neighborhood, in fact. All the lights in all the buildings all around. Pitch-black.
“Dang!” Free says.
Both Free and I freeze. Dogs bark. I can hear a kid crying in the distance. In windows, candles appear, flashlights; here and there, faces look out into the night.
Then, just as suddenly, the streetlights, all the lights, stutter back on.
“Dang,” he repeats. “This has been one hell of a day.”
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At Moose’s building we come upon a group of grands-frères. No Yaz, but one is Mobylette’s actual older brother, Khalil; I’ve seen him at games. They’re standing outside, all of them looking around, talking about the blackout.
“Bonsoir,” I say. “We’re friends of Amadou and Moussa, Moussa Oussekine.”
One recognizes us. “Les ’Ricains des Diables Rouges,” he says.
The others place us too. They greet us, shake our hands.
“What’s up?” another asks.
“Amadou and Moussa, and Sidi Bourghiba—we were with them. Over by the construction site,” I explain. “There were a lot of us.”
They listen intently, but I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
“The cops came, and they took a bunch of us away,” I say.
The grands frères all look grave.
Mobylette’s brother says, “And Madou?”
“Amadou and Moussa and Sidi,” I say, “they ran off.”
“Oh, shit,” Free says. He sees him first.
We all look in the direction he’s looking.
It’s Sidi, staggering toward us across the parking lot. His shirt, his pants, everything, all shredded. His skin, great big patches—gone. And it’s, like, smoke coming off him.
The grands frères, Free and me, we’re running to him.
Sidi falls to his knees, his face all blistered and wet, his eyes dark holes against the pink rawness.
Everybody is talking at once.
“What happened?”
“What happened, mon frère?”
And the smell.
“Moby…” Sidi is mumbling. “Moussa…”
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One of the grands frères stays with Sidi, telephoning for help, while the rest of us run through the dark streets over to the electrical substation, Freeman and me following Khalil and the others, and when we get there, four police cars surround the barbed-wire-topped walls, their blue lights pulsing in the night. The cops cluster in small groups near the compound entrance, a couple of the ones from earlier and others in uniform. There’s an EDF van too—Éléctricité de France, the French utilities company—but the technicians just stand there, holding their tools. The police, the EDF guys—nobody is even trying to go in.
The night air bites, but so much heat is coming from the humming substation that I break into a sweat. Skulls and crossbones cover the compound walls. Warning signs. Danger–High Voltage. Electricity—it’s stronger than you. One painted to look like a tagger wrote it: STOP! Don’t risk your life.
I don’t know what to do. I kind of want to yell out to Moose and Mobylette, to tell them to come out now, that it’s okay.
The humming of the electric compound is a loud, metallic whirring. And the crowd keeps growing, people running over from the high-rises. There are thirty or forty of us now. Mostly men, some quite old. I recognize two of the pétanque players from the cement courtyard outside the Cinq Mille. I hear “Mais allez-y! Entrez!” from over by the cemetery, and see Karim standing on its squat rock wall, yelling for someone to go in. Other hoodie boys are gathering around him.
A static voice from a police loudspeaker responds, so sudden that I jump: “Par ordre du préfet de la Seine-Saint-Denis: Dispersez-vous.”—By order of the chief constable of La Seine-Saint-Denis, you must disperse.
I lean toward Free but still have to shout to be heard over the whirring. “They say we have to disperse, but I mean, should we? At what point does this huge press of people start hindering the police from going in?”
Free looks back at me, his eyes saying, I don’t know.
Yaz has joined us and holds Khalil back from trying to jump the wall. The grand frère who had stayed behind with Sidi pushes his way through to us. He shouts to Yaz over the racket of the rest. “The ambulance arrived—they’ve taken le jeune to Hôpital Saint-Antoine.”
“And?” Yaz shouts back.
The grand drops his eyes.
Sidi looked so bad. And the smell! Like a summertime barbecue, the grease that drips from the ribs onto the coals.
“Moussa!” I scream, and Free joins in. “Moose, Mobylette! Come out, it’s okay!”
Now we all have to hold Khalil from rushing the wall.
From the rest of the crowd: “Allez-y!” and “Entrez!”
“Par ordre du préfet,” the loudspeaker booms, “dispersez-vous.”
Another police car pulls up, lights whirling, followed by a CRS van. They inch forward, pumping their sirens, but no one moves out of the way. We only clear a passage after two ambulances arrive, and then we open up an avenue.
An old man next to us, in a Muslim prayer cap, is close enough to the police to hear what they say. He says to another old man, “Did you hear that? The cop said that if the boys went in there, he wouldn’t pay much for what’s left of their hides.”
The other old man says, “But why if? The cops know good and well the boys are in there. The cops are the ones who chased them in!”
The CRS people start piling out of their van. They wear helmets and carry big plastic shields, and it riles up the crowd even more. It riles me up too, because we’re here checking on our friends, and the cops are just standing there, doing nothing but threatening us.
“Moose! Mobylette!” I scream.
“Par ordre du préfet: dispersez-vous.”
Some CRS guys spread out among the EDF guys; others take positions over by the cemetery, where Karim and the hoodie boys are. Karim doesn’t back down. He screams and points his finger in the face of a helmeted CRS officer.
My phone starts pinging with texts from teammates. Free’s too.
Where are you guys?
What’s going on?
One from Adar: Cops just let J-M and me go. 4 or 5 cop cars sped off. Are Moose/Sidi/Moby with you?
I see Free turn off his phone, and I do too. What would I say?
That’s when I spot him. Lieutenant Petit, the cop who stopped us outside the RER station after practice a few months ago, whose brother lives in Montreal. He’s in civilian clothes, but even though he’s out of uniform, I recognize his crab-apple cheeks and red hair. He’s speaking with the old man in the prayer cap.
“S’il vous plaît, Monsieur,” he says, “you have to understand, we’re doing all we can right now.” His voice is gentle, pleading almost.
“But the EDF,” the old man says, “they just stand there!”
“They can’t breach the facility yet,” the lieutenant says.
“But why?” I jump in, like I have some clout because he and I have bantered before and I’ve got the upper hand, as if my being clever and white and from Montreal will spur him to action. “What are you waiting for?”
I can see he recognizes me too. He remains calm.
“Because it’s totally unsafe,” he explains. “There are twenty-thousand-volt transformers inside those walls. We can’t do anything until the central service shuts the station down.” He looks directly at me. “None of you is doing those boys any good crowding around, threatening the technicians.”
And as if on cue, the loud whirring slows, like jet engines turning off. The transformers power down.
The crowd stills too. Shifts. The loudspeaker continues—“Dispersez-vous”—but the rest is silence. The dark night enrobes the high-rises, their windows lit up. Paris proper, someplace in the unseeable distance.
The old man next to us voices what we’re all feeling.
“There,” he says to Lieutenant Petit. “Now go.”