Away Running (15 page)
“Hungry for experience,” said Matt, looking all proud at his wit. He added in French, “And I’m
Québecois
, by the way.”
Me and Matt did that a lot—switching from French to English, back and forth, like they were both just one language. It was funny how speaking French so much had gotten me speaking English better too—understanding things about grammar I’d never thought on before, using more varied vocabulary. Mama would get a kick out of that.
We sat on a city bench to eat our crepes, and Matt, suddenly all serious, said, “Do you think I should apologize to Moose and Sidi?”
“For what?”
He looked off up the street. “For bad-mouthing them.”
“Sidi had you by the neck!”
“But I treated them like white people always treat them.”
I wanted to say,
But Matt, you
are
white
…
I didn’t. It would have been mean. And it didn’t feel quite right either. I just focused my attention on my crepe.
“Okay, maybe not Sidi,” Matt said. “He was acting like an ass. But Moose is my friend.”
He wasn’t your friend that night, I thought, but I didn’t say that either.
“I said something stupid, okay?” Matt said. “Still, that doesn’t explain what’s going on with the team.”
“Sure it does,” I said between bites. “They’re acting all Three Musketeers. ‘One for all, and all for one.’ You mess with one of them, all of them get mad behind it.”
“No, it feels like something else. Like the guys are afraid all of a sudden.”
“Afraid? Of what? We’re killing folks.”
“My dad always tells his players that being a middle-of-the-pack team is easy,” Matt said. “Being on top, that’s a totally different pressure.”
He finished his crepe, wadded the paper and leaned back, all stretched out on the bench.
“Fear of failure,” he said. “It’s like they’re paralyzed by the idea of coming up short against the Caïmans. Like, if they don’t show up to practice, if they act like they don’t care and don’t give it one hundred percent, then they don’t have to step up. If we lose, they can pretend it was because they weren’t really invested in winning in the first place.”
“Fear of failure?” I said. “Or of success maybe.”
I wadded up my empty crepe wrappers and wiped my greasy lips.
“My sophomore year, we were playing John Jay High,” I said. “The Mustangs—huge rivals. It was our homecoming, and they were ranked at the top of our district, number two in Texas 5-A, had a couple of All-Staters on defense. I was
on
though. I was playing running back, and in our first offensive series we drove the length of the field on two of my runs, a thirty- and a fifty-yarder. We had the ball first and goal on the seven, and Coach Calley called an inside dive to me. I popped through a quick hole, past the linebacker. Number 56. He grunted,
Shit!
as I blew by. Nobody left but the free safety, and I juked him, cut hard against the flow.”
Suddenly I heard my own voice, the words spilling out.
“He punched the ball loose. Like he wasn’t even going for the tackle.”
I heard my voice, and my words surprised me, because they sounded like a confession.
“They recovered.”
Matt said, “It’s funny how the bad memories are the ones that stick with you.”
“The weird thing was that he knew. The free safety, I mean.”
Matt looked like he didn’t quite follow.
“Our stadium manager called me into their locker room after the game, after they’d showered and left. All over—on the floors, under benches and taped to
lockers—was my head shot from the program, taped to note cards with my tendencies written on the back.
An outside runner; quick; a fumbler; carries the ball with only one hand, even on the goal line
.
“I wasn’t number 17, just a helmet and pads playing running back. I had a face. They knew my face.”
“That’s cool. Or, at least, flattering,” Matt said. “Did you win?”
“Nope. I didn’t have another run longer than five yards after that first drive.”
“Why not?”
“Who knows,” I said. “Fear of failure.”
“Or of success?”
“Maybe. Coach Calley moved me to corner the next game; he said my future was playing on defense. I guess that’s why he’s the coach and I ain’t nothing but a player. He sees things I don’t really see.
“So where to?” I asked, rising—and changing the subject.
“Why, the Museum of Peace, of course.”
The ticket to the museum was
really
expensive—80 Euros, like, $125, the student rate!—more than I’d budgeted for the entire week. At least it included a minibus tour of the beaches. And the museum was worth it, way impressive. They showed these films about D-day—nothing you didn’t already know from school and all the movies, but it was something else to see for real. And there were tons of photos and memorabilia, the uniforms of all the units and stuff, their weapons—straight-up relics.
I bought some postcards from the gift shop. Mama and I had taken to writing each other, paper and pencil, after that first letter. I’d been sending three, sometimes four, a week. I wrote at night, before going to bed, and I would tell her about what I’d done that day, places Matt and me
had visited, things I’d learned about Paris or France or the world. Hers were scribbles on scrap paper mostly, sometimes hardly more than
I’m fine
and
Have fun
. I mean, she’s got so much to do, and Tookie and Tina to worry after too. Tookie would usually write a few words at the bottom in those big block letters you first learn, and Tina sent crayon drawings she’d made for me.
I would carry Mama’s letters with me, unopened, in my jacket pocket until the next one arrived, sometimes days and days on end. Because once I’d read it, it was like the letter was suddenly just ink on a page, you know, and I would lose sight of them, of Mama and Tookie and Tina. The weight of it in my pocket, the anticipation of the still-unseen words, made Mama and them seem real and right here with me. Like the next line in a conversation that never ended.
The minibus that carried us out to the beaches was packed with tourists, most of them older couples with cameras hanging around their necks, most not American. Me and Matt squeezed onto a narrow bench near the back. The bus went to Sword Beach first. We got out and looked down over the bluff. The wind was crisp, and I put my letter jacket back on. The brochure talked about all the troops that had landed there, Canadians and Brits at Sword, Juno and Gold, Americans farther on.
It shook me, the spare stretches of sand and the rocky bluffs, and the conical black roofs on the white stone houses in the distant villages. It was picture-postcard pretty, but the emptiness was loud. You didn’t need movie special effects, the
Saving Private Ryan
and
Band of Brothers
pillbox bunkers and tracer bullets and bursting spits of dirt. The quiet and space said it all.
We wandered around Omaha Beach, into the bunkers and machine-gun nests. As a kid, I would have been imagining myself a soldier, maybe even playing war. Dodging behind walls and charging through doorways, tossing grenades into machine-gun nests. But me and Matt just drifted from spot to spot, kind of reverential.
Up the way, past the giant Battle Monument, was the American Cemetery. It was just rows and columns, rows and columns, of white crosses, sometimes a Star of David. I’d seen it a hundred times before in pictures, but you just don’t know. You just don’t know what it’s like. All those crosses and stars.
James W. Smiley, Pvt
116
Inf
29
Div, Omaha, Nebraska, b. March
17
,
1926
–d. June
6
,
1944
.
Draper A. Conway, Pvt
16
Inf
1
Div, Lynn, Massachusetts, b. October
27
,
1922
–d. June
6
,
1944
.
Arthur L. Rose, Sgt
505
Inf
32
Abn Div, Fairfield, Connecticut, b. January
4
,
1925
–d. June
6
,
1944
.
The brochure read:
They died defending freedom and democracy
.
Matt said, “Coaches always talk about blitzes and lobbing bombs and taking no prisoners.” He moved from one grave to the next. “But this…what your father does… now that’s for real.”
I broke away from him then, wandered off by myself. Because…well…I just did. And a few rows on, there was a crucifix and the guy’s birthdate was the same as my pops. No lie. September 7. And no lie, his first name was the same. John.
Jack, my Mama called him.
No lie.
Suddenly Matt was there beside me, and he was like, “Hey, you all right? Free?”
“My old man, he’s dead, you know.” My voice, the words spilling out of me, was like a confession. “In Iraq. They blew him up. An
IED
. He was riding in a Humvee, him and his team, going to train some new guys or some such. And he wasn’t even a combat soldier, just a jet-engine mechanic. I mean, he was a
mechanic
, man.”
There was an old couple a few rows over, necklace cameras and all, and they were just staring.
“We had a game the Friday after the casualty-notification officer came to tell us. A big game, to make the playoffs. Ain’t none bigger.”
I tried to look at Matt as I said it, but I couldn’t.
“I played the fucking game, man.”
I got my hands free of my pockets and wiped my face, the snot that was at my nose.
“Mama ain’t been to church in I don’t know how long, Pops sure as shit didn’t go, but she’s steady going now, with my Grandma Jessie and Auntie Constance in New Orleans. Like that makes one bit of difference, you know? And…”
I didn’t know what more to say.
We’d buried a casket, just a metal box with an American flag draped over it, whatever remained inside too far gone for viewing. Taps and a twenty-one-gun salute. Mama behind a black veil, Tookie’s face in her shoulder and Tina on her lap. Tookie couldn’t stop crying. A colonel in dress blues gave me the triangle of folded flag.
Remembering the funeral now, on that beach in France, I wiped the water off my face, then twisted my class ring free. I laid it at the base of John Wilson Smith’s white crucifix, and I took a knee. I crossed my heart with a finger like you see people do in Notre Dame. I didn’t really say a prayer, because I didn’t know what more there was to say. I just knelt there.
When I opened my eyes, Matt was kneeling beside me. He rose when I rose, then followed me to the minibus. We sat at the rear and waited for the tour guide to lead all the old couples back and for the bus to return us to Caen.
On the ride there, the bus twisting along the beach-side roads, Matt said, “You did good, leaving your ring there.” He hunched his neck into his collar. “It’s just so tacky and gaudy…”
And I busted up. He was laughing too.
It was pretty late when we finally got back to the museum. The sun had dropped, and the temperature with it. Buses ran on a reduced service on weekends, so we had to wait forty-some minutes for the one to take us to the highway. Once out there, Matt leaned toward the road, thumb out. Soon he was actually in it, on a knee, his hands together, like a plea. The cars just zipped by.
Being a Saturday evening, traffic was thin, almost nothing, and it felt like hours passed before anyone stopped. They dropped us twenty kilometers up the road. Each lift was trifling like that, just a bunch of short ones, and with each one the time got later and the traffic thinner. Some cars taunted us by riding their horns—
beeeep!
—
as they passed. Eventually, almost no cars came by at all, just semis. We tried to wave some down, like we had an emergency or something. Nobody stopped.
I glanced at my cell. It was one in the morning.
“We’re not getting back tonight,” Matt said. “I’m a moron! Hitchhiking to Normandy on our free day. I thought it would be easy.”
But I was like, “Bullshit. Even if we have to walk, we’re back tonight.”
We hadn’t eaten since the crepes at lunch. I was starving, so I knew Matt must be too, but we had the Caïmans the next day—we
had
to get back that night! I took off at a clip.
The highway crossed a small country road, and a sign on it said that some town called Gaillon was three kilometers away. Symbols showed there were hotels and restaurants and a chateau. “Let’s head there,” I told him. “We’ll take the train.”
We got to Gaillon by one thirty. It was really just a big village, all asleep, everything closed, no lights but that of the streetlights. Road signs showed that the train station was in the next village over, Aubevoye, two more kilometers away, so we kept walking.
The station was tiny, closed but not locked. A few bums slept on or under benches, using wadded newspaper as pillows and unfolded ones as sheets. The departure board
above the ticket window said the next eastbound for Paris wasn’t until six forty.
“
Merde!
” Matt said.
“Buck up, laddie,” I told him, but he didn’t laugh.
“What do we do?” he said.
The bums smelled, the whole place smelled, and we were tired and hungry and needing to get home. I did the only thing I knew to do: I started going through the trashcans. I handed him some wrinkled-up newspaper and kept some for myself.
“Five-star accommodations,” I said.
I left a text instead of calling Georges and Françoise, saying I was staying the night at Matt’s place and for them not to worry. Matt did the same with Juliette. We stretched out on the cold concrete floor, away from the others and near the ticket window. I rolled onto my side, curled up in a ball and laid my head on my arm, like that would help make it more comfortable.
» » » »
The six-forty train came through on time. The ticket window was still closed, so we bought tickets from the conductor when he passed. Matt was a wreck—a total wreck!—dark circles under his eyes and his hair all over the place. “Don’t say anything to Moose,” he said.
Duh
.