Away Running (20 page)

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.”

FREE

The technicians go in first. They wear tool belts and carry these big wrench-like things, and they have walkie-talkies. Summer-afternoon heat throbs off the compound, and one of the technicians takes off his jacket. The cop we know from before, Petit, goes to his car, gets behind the wheel and shuts the door. He just sits there.

It’s not long before he raises his walkie-talkie to his mouth and speaks into it. We all see him do this, and the crowd shifts again. He gets out of the car and goes to the first ambulance, but not pressed, not in a hurry, more like he’s lost in thought. The
EMT
s rush two gurneys into the compound entrance, and I’m thinking the dumbest thing I’ve ever thought. Seeing them gurneys, I’m thinking, What’s going
to happen with the game? Only four days left. If Moose is hurt, how will we replace him?

There’s a collective gasp, then one huge sigh when a few minutes later the
EMT
s roll the first gurney out. On it, a body bag, zipped closed, bottom to top.

Right behind is the second gurney: another body bag.

The
EMT
s wheel the gurneys to the ambulances and slide them into the back. They close the ambulance doors—a loud
clack!
—and get in front.

The whole night pulses with light, like a disco ball on a dance floor, but all the dancers are still. Matt’s face throbs blue then dark, blue then dark. Yaz, Khalil, stone still. I look back at Karim, the hoodie boys. Even the loudspeaker is silent.

The old man next to us moves first. He removes his prayer cap, his head collapsing forward onto his chest, his wrinkled hands wrenching and twisting the knit cloth.

A
grand frère
holds Khalil. Yaz says, as if to no one, “I have to tell Monsieur Oussekine.” He turns, his face dazed, arms limp at his sides, working his way through all these people. I follow Matt, who follows him.

None of us says anything on the walk to the Cinq Mille. Behind us, we can still hear the police loudspeaker. “
Dispersez-vous
.” I look back, and even more cops have arrived, all blue-lit, but none of the crowd is leaving.
No one is doing anything. Most folks just stand there, looking at the substation or at the cops or at the
CRS
guys behind their plastic shields.

In the foyer of Moose’s building, Yaz heads toward the stairs. Me and Matt follow. One flight. Two. Three. The dank smell of piss. French hip-hop filtering from somewhere down a hallway. When we get to their floor, the apartment door is open, Monsieur Oussekine in his
djellaba
already standing there. There’s puzzlement in his expression.

We all stop.

Over his shoulder, I can see the little girl who greeted us and the other little ones, crowding the window, trying to make out whatever can be made out below.

Yaz steps forward. “Papa Oussekine,” he says.

Then it shifts, Monsieur Oussekine’s face. Not the rest of him, just his face.

“My son!” he cries—it fills the whole hallway—and he collapses against the door.

Yaz catches him and carries him inside. “My son! My son!” And the kids behind, stunned to stillness, look blank-faced at their father as the door slowly swings closed.

Me and Matt stand there in the darkened hallway.

There’s a wailing from inside. Madame Oussekine.

We just stand there, me and Matt, the sound of commotion and “My son!” coming through the closed door.

Matt turns toward the stairwell, and we go.

He stops two floors below, heads toward an apartment and knocks.

“Sidi’s place?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, just knocks more urgently.

There’s no answer.

“They’ve got to be at the hospital,” I say.

“Do I go there? Or call?”

Bad idea. He and Aïda have been hanging some, and I know he’s worried about her, but Sidi’s people need to be alone together. I say it as gently as I know how.

“Naw, Matt. Not yet.”

He doesn’t agree or disagree.

We leave the building.

“Should we go by practice?” he says. “Let everyone know?”

“There’s no practice. They know.”

We head toward the
RER
. Are silent on the train.

Matt says toward the window, “With the cops earlier, I was embarrassed. To be standing there like that, handcuffed. You know?” He looks my way, then back. “Like, ashamed.”

“Wasn’t nothing else to do.”

“There’s always something you can do.”

“What?” I say. “What were we going to do? Bust the lot of them free?”

“I don’t know.” He looks me in my eye. “Maybe if we’d have run too, the cops would have come after us and not them.”

Maybe. And maybe it’d be us zipped up in them bags.

I turn my phone on, and the list of text and voice-mail messages fills my screen. Two texts are from Françoise. The first reads:
Please call. Let us know you are safe. F.
I don’t read the second.
Am fine
, I write in French shorthand.
Am not in Vllnve. Dont worry
.

At Gare du Nord, my transfer, I stay on the train. I mean, I don’t want to have to explain this stuff, any of it, to Georges and Françoise. Or to anyone else, for that matter. I just want to hang with Matt, who saw exactly what I did.

Matt doesn’t question my staying. We ride to Cité Universitaire.

FREE

I’m hoping Juliette won’t be at Matt’s place, but she is, and she’s a hot mess. She comes running at Matt as we walk in the door, looking like she’s been crying, and she scolds, “I called and texted! Why didn’t you call me back?”

Matt lets himself be hugged. After she lets him go, she hugs me.

Matt plops down on the couch, and I slide down the wall and sit on the floor.

“You’ll be more comfortable here.” Juliette brings in a chair from the kitchen. “Or sit on the sofa beside Mathieu.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

She sits next to Matt. “When I didn’t hear back, I almost called your parents.” She pauses, like for effect. “
Putain
, kiddo. Your mother would kill me.”

She lights a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table. Matt takes one too. Juliette doesn’t say anything, just hands him the lighter. She drags on the cigarette a long time and then starts in again.

“So what happened? Did you know those boys that attacked the police?”

“Attacked the police?” Matt says. “Nobody attacked the police.”

“It’s all over the news,” she says. “The radio and
TV
.”

“Nobody attacked the cops, Juliette.” Matt looks like he’s about to cry. “We were playing soccer before practice and…”

“You were with them?”

“Freeman and me both. A bunch of others. We were just…playing soccer. And they chased Moose and Mobylette and Sidi.”

“You were with those boys that vandalized and stole!”

“Nobody vandalized; nobody stole.”

“The police chief says so. On the
TV
, on the radio.”

“They’re lying, Jules,” he says. “I was
there
.”

Matt looks dazed, at a complete loss. I don’t know what I look like, and I don’t know what to say either.

Juliette gets up and paces between the kitchen and the window. She crosses her arms over her chest, the cig dangling from her lips, her mind clearly working.
“They’re spinning the story,” she says, “to cover for the cops? You guys have to stay away from Villeneuve for a while then. Who knows what might happen now.”

Matt is red-faced angry. “Don’t you get it, Jules? It was Moose.”

“I do, Mathieu, I get it.”

“Moose!” he screams.

She goes to Matt and pulls him into her arms. “I get it,” she says.

They sit like that for a while.

Finally she says, “So you have to do something then. Don’t let them make your friends out to be criminals.”

Matt and me spend the next several hours calling and texting folks while Juliette follows the media circus on the
TV
in her room and hollers updates to us. We call Coach Thierry, Le Barbu. I get Yaz’s number from our
DB
coach, Celestin, but Yaz’s phone just rings and rings. Matt talks to Monsieur Lebrun for a long time.

Juliette pokes her head out. “How about some sort of public protest,” she says, “to counter all the spin?”

“We’re on it,” I tell her.

Matt jumps in. “There’s going to be a silent march tomorrow from the electric substation to city hall.”

“Good,” she says. “The team’s putting it together?”

“Some
cité
elders,” says Matt.

“Even better!”

“Everybody knows,” Matt says. “Everybody is outraged. They want to fill the streets to let all of France know the truth of what happened.”

I look over at the clock—it’s 3:00
AM
. I’m exhausted. For real.

“Any news about Sidi?” I ask Matt. “Anything from Aïda?”

He shakes his head no and stares through the window into the dark outside.

I need to sleep. “I’m going to head home.”

I had talked to Françoise earlier, told her I was okay and that I was at Matt’s. When she asked about Villeneuve, I told her I was calling folks up there—which I was—but not a lot more.

Juliette kisses my cheek, and Matt walks me to the stairwell.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he tells me. “We’ll head up early.”

MATT

First thing I do when I wake up is flip open my phone. Twenty-two new messages.

Juliette and I kept talking after Free left, and she’s still asleep, curled up on the other end of the couch. I silence the ringer so the alerts don’t wake her. Most of the texts are from Villeneuve, the same one forwarded from different people, confirming the silent march this afternoon. The message reads that kids plan on skipping school, parents on leaving work, for Moose and Mobylette and Sidi. But there’s nothing from Aïda. I want news about Sidi, but I want to know how she’s doing too.

A text comes in from Free:
Gare du Nord station in 45?

I tap back:
30
.

I get there first and buy some Mars bars and potato chips at the newsstand on the far end of the platform.

“Check it out,” I hear Free say.

He has
Le Monde
, holding it out toward me as he walks up.

“Looks like it got hot last night,” he says, indicating the page the paper is open to. “They set some cars on fire, busted some windows out of a school.”

“Did you see the interior minister’s press conference?”

“I heard it. Why would he lie like that?”

“I wonder who’s going to chime in next. The president of the Republic?”

We shake hands finally, a proper greeting. Then Free looks down the tunnel for some sign of the train.

“There’s hardly nothing in the paper on Sidi,” he says. “Just that he’s in critical condition.”

“And you believe them?
Le Monde
can’t even get Moose’s and Mobylette’s ages right. Sidi could be dead for all we know.”

An incoming text alert on my phone. It’s my dad.

What happened to Moose?!?! YOU OK? Please answer my calls
.

I don’t know how he knows. The story isn’t even twenty-four hours old, and
Le Monde
didn’t mention Moose by name.

Juliette?

Then a text from her:
Your parents keep calling. PLEASE answer your phone
.

I didn’t even feel it vibrate, but there is a list of voice mails. One is from my mom. “Please tell me you’re not involved in any of this,” her voice scolds.