The cops are screaming, “
Par terre, par terre!
”—On the ground!—and “
Tout de suite! Allez
,
bougez-vous!
”—Right now! Go, move!
Me and Matt, we raise our hands, but Moose and Sidi and Mobylette, they break. So fast the cops don’t immediately react. They just kind of follow with their eyes, looking unsure what to do. I watch Moose and them running too, as surprised as the cops are.
“Don’t move, or we fire!” one says, pointing his Flash-Ball directly at my chest.
“
Halte!
” another screams after Moose and Sidi and Mobylette.
Two cops take off after them on foot. One of the cars peels off, its siren blowing, shrill and insistent.
A cop throws me to the ground, driving his shoe into the back of my neck.
“Easy, podner,” I say in English.
“
Arrêtes de bouger
,” he says—Stop moving.
“You’re crushing my neck!”
“
Ta gueule!
” the cop screams—Shut your trap.
Matt is on the ground now too.
The bottom chassis of the police car, the axle and tires, frames my view. An officer frisks me, empties my
pockets, then handcuffs me. I can hear dogs barking off in the distance.
“
Debout!
” the cops are all screaming at us. Get up! Now!
It ain’t as easy as it sounds, lying on our bellies like that, hands cuffed behind our backs. Matt says so, and the officer he says it to grabs his cuffed hands and wrenches him to his feet.
Matt’s scream sends a chill down my spine.
They line the nine of us up against a police van that has arrived. There are three more cars now too, blue lights flashing. We didn’t do anything wrong, but still I feel kind of guilty, standing there in the glare of their lights. I glance at Matt. He’s sweaty, all dirty from the ground.
“We know you broke into the construction site to steal,” one of the cops says calmly.
None of us says anything. The cops don’t either, not for a long time. They just stand there staring at us, their Flash-Balls still out.
“What did you vandalize?” one cop says finally. “If we have to go in and figure it out ourselves, it’s going to be much worse for you.”
Another long silence.
“Some of you don’t have papers. How can we know you even have the right to be in France?”
A cop off to the side scrutinizes me and Matt, our passports in his hand, then walks over to the cop in charge, the one who has been speaking. He points from our passports to us. The head cop indicates for him to pull us out of the line. The cop grabs each of us by an arm and pushes us ahead of him toward the top guy, who says, “You shouldn’t be running around with a bunch of hoodlums.”
The cop who separated me and Matt from the rest stares at us—hard—while the other flips through our passports. Then it occurs to me: Can they deport us for this? Will we have to miss our last game? And what’ll Mama say?
The cops start shepherding the other guys into the back of the police van. Some have their
ID
cards, some don’t—it doesn’t matter.
“Check my papers,” Adar is saying. “They’re fine.”
“We didn’t do anything,” says Jean-Marc. “We were just taking a shortcut to practice.”
“
Vos gueules
!” the head cop says—Shut up! “You broke into a locked construction site to vandalize and steal. You’re going to jail.”
A cop comes toward me and Matt, but the head guy waves him off and then goes to one of the cars, where he sits behind the wheel, one foot out on the ground, leaving me and Matt standing there while the other cops push our friends—our teammates!—into the back of the van.
“Should be us going in too, right alongside them,” I say as the van pulls off.
Matt says, “You’re right, Free, but I can’t help it—I feel kind of relieved.” He looks me in my eye, then quickly looks down at his feet.
I look away too.
The head cop talks into the radio in the car, one foot jackhammering up and down as he stares over at us. He looks disappointed, like he knows us and entrusted us with some simple task—feeding the dog or taking out the trash—and we didn’t do it.
The cop who pulled us out of the line joins him in the car, the only car left. I hear the radio, staticky and distant but clear: “…three fugitives are in flight at the cemetery. Four officers in pursuit…”
“That’s Moose and Sidi and Mobylette,” I whisper to Matt.
Matt stays stiff, steady, staring at his feet. “We weren’t doing anything!” he suddenly yells toward the car. “We were just trying to get to practice on time!”
The head cop gets out and storms over. “
Arrêtes ton cinéma
. You think this is a game?”
“We were just crossing the site. We didn’t do anything.”
“And you think that’s what this is about?” he tells Matt. “Take a look around you,
mon petit gars
. This isn’t Canada. This is France’s gutter. Half the population lives
off drug dealing and petty theft. And the hatred, the anti-police and anti-white hatred…”
He stops, but not because of me, because I’m black and he’s just showed his ass. It’s as though he sees me like Matt, as white. The cop stands there staring straight at us.
Matt doesn’t drop his eyes. “We play for the American football team,” he says, calm now, like he can reason with the guy. “All of us do. The municipality sponsors the team.”
“And?” the head cop says. “You think that means something?”
The radio crackles: “…heading toward the electrical substation. We need backup…”
The cop heads to the car. “If those boys aren’t in the system,” he says, “well, then, they have nothing to worry about. They’ll be back in their beds later tonight.”
He makes a gesture to the other officer, who comes over.
“My boss seems to think you’re okay,” the cop says, unlocking Matt first. “Me, I know better. Americans or not, you boys were into something.” He looks me, then Matt, in the eye. “But he thinks we should let you go, and it’s his call.” He walks back toward the police car. “Get out of here. This is no place for tourists.”
He gets in, and the car pulls away.
“Dang,” I say, rubbing my wrists where the handcuffs dug in.
Matt kneads his shoulder.
“Dang,” I say again. “What do we do now?”
We just stand there in the empty lot beside the construction site.
“I don’t know, Free,” he says. “Go to practice?”
“What about Moose and Sidi and Mobylette?”
We stand there.
“Let’s go to Moose’s building,” I say.
“And do what? We can’t tell his father!”
“Of course not,” I say, “but if Moose gets away, that’s where he’ll head. Or to the clubhouse.”
“And if he and Sidi and Mobylette don’t get away?” He’s still kneading his shoulder.
“If they don’t get away?” I say. “Dang.”
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
JANUARY 10
I remember the day I decided to come to Paris. Decided? I’m not sure that’s the right word for it, exactly. It started on a January afternoon like any other. I’d popped over to my school to see if class lists had been posted for the coming semester (my last!), hoping I’d run into friends (I didn’t). I was walking down Sainte-Catherine toward my mom’s condo. It was snowy and cold, the wind cutting—a typical Montreal winter.
Jean-Michel opened the door as I approached. “Congratu-freakin-lations!” he said. He wore a full-length dark wool coat against the cold, and one of those funny hats doormen always wear. “I saw your name in
Le Journal de Montréal
. Laval University, huh?”
I knew an article was coming out, announcing the university’s football recruits, but I didn’t know it would be that day.
My dad always said it was unseemly to boast.
Act like you’ve been there before
, he’d say. So I said, “Yep,” trying to keep cool, but I found it impossible not to smile. “I’ll be joining the number-one team in the country.”
“I’m a McGill fan myself,” Jean-Michel said, stepping into the lobby behind me. “And hockey more than football, frankly.”
“No way! Hockey is just body checks and brawling. Football is ballet by comparison.”
He pushed the call button for the lift and handed me our mail. The doors slid open, I walked into the glass elevator and entered our five-digit code, and the doors slid shut. My dad would tell me I was lucky to be living at the Crystal Towers, but I found the place so tacky, everything gilded and gaudy and shiny new, that I was embarrassed to invite friends over. My mom had moved us there after she and my dad split up, pretending she’d chosen it with me in mind, to be closer to my school. Right.
The lift shot up the outside wall of the building. Snow wafted down over the already white city. The giant Christmas tree across the street beside Air France’s Canadian headquarters was still up. Two blocks away,
I could see the Bell Centre, home of the Montreal Canadiens.
I was looking forward to seeing the newspaper article, but I felt uneasy too. I mean, would I even see any playing time at Laval? The coach had told me they were bringing in three other quarterbacks, and I knew that one, this kid from Plattsburgh, New York, was supposed to be a stud. I’d googled him. The article called him “Laval’s #1 prospect,” and his stats were studly, that was for sure.
The elevator opened onto our penthouse, and I headed toward the kitchen, where I dropped the mail onto the quartz countertop. The newspaper wasn’t there, but the answering machine blinked red. “You. Have. Three. New. Messages,” the android voice said.
The first was from that morning, from Jean-Michel. “Matt, we’ve received a special delivery for you. From France.” It was the large beige envelope I’d just dropped onto the counter. It felt like a magazine, and by the return address—
Club Villeneuvien de Football Américain
—I recognized that it was from Moose, whom I’d met the summer before.
The second message was from my girlfriend, Céline. “What’s going on? I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell all day. You ignoring my calls? Caaaall me.” Later, I thought. I just didn’t have the energy for her right then.
The third message was the one that got to me. It was for my mom, but it was from the dean of Orford University, and it was about me. “
Bonjour
, Madame Tremblay,” the machine said. “This is Pierre Cartier. I wanted to let you know I’ve followed up personally on your son’s case. Mathieu should receive the official letter in the next few days; I’ve posted it Express Mail. I’ll see you at our next board meeting.”
I replayed the message twice before it sank in. My mom had been pulling strings again in her push for me to attend Orford. And my mom got what she wanted. She’d wanted to be a journalist, and she became the editor of one of Canada’s most popular women’s magazines. She’d wanted to leave my dad, and here we were in our tacky penthouse. Now Mom wanted me to go to Orford, which had no football team, not even a bad one, but was the top business program in the country; she wanted me to major in business administration like my brother Marc and sister Manon had, and to get an
MBA
or a law degree after.
Marc is a corporate lawyer who works in Shanghai for China National Petroleum. Manon makes tons of dough as a stockbroker in Toronto. Making money, that’s what
they
wanted. Me, I wanted to play football.
“You’re home early,” Claude said, scaring the hell out of me.
“Don’t sneak up on me,” I told him.
His laugh was more like a cackle. “Just passing through,” he said, heading toward the elevator. He had the folded newspaper under his arm. “Your mother asked me to pick up the invitations for the fundraiser tonight. She also told me to tell you there’s lasagna in the fridge.”
I didn’t know if my mom had met Claude before or after the divorce, but I did know he was spending more and more time at the penthouse. Fine, just as long as he quit acting all buddy-buddy with me. And as long as he didn’t try to play dad.
He waved goodnight and got in the lift. I flipped through the rest of the mail, thinking, There’d better not be anything addressed to Claude…
I had one more letter, this one from the Northern Bank of Canada. I took it and the manila envelope from Moose to my room and sat on my bed. (A king, of course. It was so huge I’d had to leave my
NFL
-team-helmet sheets at the old house, with Dad.)
Moose (his real name is Moussa Oussekine) had sent the most recent issue of
US Football Magazine
, a French version of
Sports Illustrated
that reported exclusively on American-style football. On the cover was a great shot of the Diables Rouges quarterback. The
QB
stood tall in the pocket, arm cocked, ready to dart a pass, as defenders in black and gold swarmed around. The Diables unis looked
like vintage Arizona Cardinals gear but with a trident on the helmets instead of the bird. There was a huge crowd in the stands.
Moose was the captain of the Junior Diables Rouges, the Under-20s side. I’d met him during two-a-days the summer before, when he came with a group of other French players to take part in my team’s preseason training camp. The French guys stayed with host families. My dad is our head coach, and Moose stayed at my old house with him the entire two weeks. I’d go over after practices, and Moose and I would watch game film in my dad’s office and play
Madden NFL
for hours.
Flipping through the pages of the magazine, I stumbled on a Post-it note on the opening page of the Under-20s season preview. Moose had scribbled:
Oueche, Matt! Yo, the season kicks off in a few weeks. You need to get your ass to France and throw some long bombs for us
.
I laughed. Moose had been harping at me about going there to play for the Diables since the day I met him, but, of course, I’d never taken it seriously.
The French played their season in the winter and spring. The article described the twenty-five Under-20s teams across the country, focusing mostly on the seven in the Premier Division. Of those seven,
US Football
ranked the Diables Rouges sixth. They’d finish first with me as quarterback, I thought. Not boasting, just saying.