Away Running (6 page)

The day I went up to the game in Villeneuve was a Sunday, and Sunday meals had been a big deal the two Sundays I’d been here, but that night seemed different. Special. Françoise set out the nice china and silverware they had used at the meal when I’d first arrived, and after salad, she served
coq au vin
. It’s just chicken, but stewed in this wine sauce, and I’d told her I loved it the first time she made it. She brought it from the kitchen with a fanfare like,
Ta-da!

Georges leaned forward in his chair as he served me. “It is really a pity that you are returning to America so soon.
Marie has holidays soon. We will meet her at Mont Blanc. The
Alpes françaises
!”

I asked, “How many years have you been to make to ski?”

I could always hear it when my French was slipping.

Georges continued in English. “Me, since I was this high.” He indicated his knee with the flat of his hand. “I am really quite expert. Marie too. As for Françoise…” He wobbled his hand on the air. “
Comme çi
,
comme ça.
She’s so-so…”

She slapped his arm.

“And you, dear boy,” Georges said, “do you ski?”

In San Antonio? Right.

“If you were not leaving, then you could accompany us!” He was all excited-like.

“Yes. That is kind to say,” I said.

“So, how was the game of
foot
you and your classmates went to see?” Françoise asked.

I knew she meant soccer. “Very interesting,” I told her. “But it was football.”

“Football?” she said and made a kicking motion.

“
Le football américain
,” I said and mimed a catching motion with my hands, though I expect she didn’t know what this signified.

“
Le football américain
?” Françoise said. “I didn’t know it was played here.”

“But of course it is, my love. Americans are good people too,
n’est-ce pas
, and like we French, they need sports to distract them from life’s more serious affairs.”

We went back and forth like that in French (well, me and Françoise anyway). See, I got French like a skunk got stink. Natural. That’s why Ms. Glassman, my teacher, took to me: ’cause I was the only jock in her class, and I be
cooking
with my French. For real. I hadn’t even considered trying to go on this trip when it was announced at the beginning of the school year. It was Ms. Glassman who called Mama and told her I should apply. She said there was an all-expenses scholarship I’d be a good candidate for—and I got it!

The two weeks here had flown by. Ms. Glassman led the group of us on daily excursions: the Louvre, Notre Dame, all what you’d expect. Interesting. Me, typically I’d bounce as soon as we were free. Not snobbish or nothing, it was just that none of the others in the group really appealed. They were three guys and eight girls. Most of them I knew by sight from the hallways at Heritage Park, our high school, and they’d be friendly enough. But they’d be all loud all the time, always wanting to stay just among us, never with the French, and they’d always be speaking English.

And all of them were white. I hadn’t thought it would matter before coming, but I felt like a fly in buttermilk
the whole time I was with them. They’d always speak
at
me, never
to
me. Whenever we were together, the white boys would break into some funky pseudo-ebonics, like I wouldn’t understand if they spoke proper. One or the other would toss out knuckles; he’d be like, “Whaddup, bruh!” or “How’s it hanging, cool,” all but calling me “my nigga.”

“
Bonjour
,” I’d say back. “
Ça va bien
,
merci
”—It’s going well, thanks—and offer my hand to shake like the French do. For real.

Back home, I talk like I talk, not ’cause I don’t know better but because I
do
. Mama corrects me, but with my boys, how I talk is who I am. These here on this trip weren’t my boys, and whoever they thought I was, I wasn’t. So I would throw my French at them and keep my distance and bounce from the group whenever I could.

I’d walk around. The Latin Quarter. The Bastille. Les Halles. Sometimes I’d stop in a café and have a Diabolo Menthe (mint syrup in
limonade
, which isn’t lemonade at all but more like a French version of 7-Up) or a Monaco (
limonade
but this time with a red syrup called grenadine). I’d watch folks, the passersby or those drinking wine at the bar and chatting with the barman, or the clusters of college students at the tables outdoors, even in winter, smoking cigarettes and talking and laughing.

Those would be my days. A great trip. Nothing like I would have expected and a diversion from all that was happening back home. That coming Wednesday, me and the rest were set to go back.

After the
coq au vin
(I had seconds!), me and Georges and Françoise moved to the living room for dessert—a strawberry tart that looked awesome, the glazed fruit in spiral rows on top of a yellow cream filling. Françoise brought in a tray with a stack of small dishes on it—and also Champagne glasses. She sat on the settee beside me and began slicing the tart, but Georges left the room, and when he came back, he was carrying a bottle of Moët and a saber, and I was like,
A saber?

He stayed standing, all formal and serious, so that it didn’t fit. “In France, we toast important occasions with Champagne,” he said in French. “Today is special for us, for we have welcomed into our home a person who has touched us most deeply.”

And I remember thinking, Is he talking about me?

Françoise was standing beside him then, all smiles, and he went on. “We have only known you, Freeman, these few weeks, and we know that in many ways it must be a difficult time for you, to be away from your home. But during this time you have become a son to us. We hope we have been family for you too.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“
Merci
,” I said. “
Merci
.” And I meant it.

Georges, still all formal, took that saber and, holding the Champagne at the base, ran the saber in one fluid swoop along the bottle from bottom to top. There was a
clink!
and the head—cork, surrounding glass and all—just popped right off, straight up, and hit the ceiling. Foaming liquid bubbled out, and I couldn’t help myself. I blurted, “Oh
, merde!
”

FREE

I didn’t hardly sleep that night, partly because of the Champagne, but it was more than that. A dream woke me up at, like, two, and I never got back to sleep after. I still remember it. There was a huge stadium, and no light but that from the moon. The whole scene, it was more
Lord of the Rings
than Super Bowl. The stands were packed with trolls and muscled-up dwarves, humans too, but all gnarly and greasy-haired, the whole lot of them in leather tunics and waving giant swords and battle axes and such, standing and roaring at each other, one army on one side and folks from the other army opposite, some invisible dividing line keeping them apart. Who knew what was at stake? I didn’t. All I knew was that I was in a mass of folks I didn’t know, hating them others over there.

I can’t remember how this came to be, but a small group of us—five or six—were sneaking through the passageways under the stands, by where the concessions and restrooms should be, concrete corridors and pipes overhead dripping water and hissing steam, because we realized—suddenly—that we were on the wrong side, that ours was the one opposite us. And besides, the whole thing seemed kind of ridiculous—all the beefing and posing that none of us could make sense of. Working our way to the proper side, we decided to just find the exit instead, to get on out and away from all the madness.

But then someone from the stands spotted us. He pointed, and raging folks started streaming down the exit ramps toward us. We broke away, running as fast as we could down the long concrete corridors. They overran one or two of us right off, but I got out into the open, onto an empty parking lot, headed for the gates. They were fast, but I was faster. But then there were some in front of me too, coming suddenly out of nowhere. I thought I could deke them—I hoped I could—and then everything went black.

I remember thinking that was the end of the dream, that I was awake. But when my eyes snapped open, I wasn’t in Marie’s room, where I’d been sleeping, but back in the stadium, in the middle ground between all those folks raging and roaring at each other, and now they were all—both sides—roaring at me. I couldn’t move;
maybe I was trussed up or something. I couldn’t even turn my head from side to side. I just stared straight ahead. Then somehow my view of the scene panned back, and I could see it from above. From there I could see that my head was chopped off and on a stick, dripping blood and dangling ragged strands of neck meat! And I was screaming…

There wasn’t any more sleeping after that. But it wasn’t just the nightmare that kept me up. It was my thoughts churning. I just lay there in the dark, looking around the room—at the chest of drawers that stood against one wall, at the sink in the opposite corner—and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about home and why I had left.

I had found out about getting the France scholarship the same week I signed the letter of intent to play at Iowa State: at the end of November, right before Thanksgiving. The recruiter came to our house in San Antonio with my coach, Coach Calley. It was the recruiter’s third time over, and he told me and Mama about the academic programs at the university and about my good prospects of starting early, and he laid the papers out on the coffee table and set a fancy pen over top of them. He gave me a maroon Cyclones cap once I’d signed.

Mama closed the door behind them after they left, and no sooner had the latch clicked than she started jumping up and down and clapping her hands. Tookie and Tina came out from the back, and they were pogoing too.
I’m not even sure they knew exactly what it was they were carrying on about. Me, I couldn’t help myself—I pumped my fist in the air.

“I’ma be a college baller!” I said.

“I’m
going
to be a college baller,” Mama corrected me, but she was steady pogoing in place.

“We’ve got to call your father,” she said, and she went over to the
PC
on the card table in the corner. Mama sat in the chair and Skyped him while me and Tookie and Tina scrunched around her, squatting beside her so as we’d all fit in front of the webcam.

Pops’ face filled up the screen, the collar of his camo fatigues framing the bottom border. He was in Iraq, his third deployment, this time at Joint Base Balad, outside Baghdad; he worked on jet engines. It had to have been, like, three thirty in the morning over there, but a couple of soldiers were playing Ping-Pong over his shoulder.

Pops looked like he knew what was coming. His mouth moved before the words could catch up. “So how’d it go?”

“Just great,” Mama said, and she started to explain about the full ride and about the engineering program being nationally ranked, but Pops cut her off. “Let the boy tell it, Verna!” Even all grainy in the webcam, and in the weak lighting of the Quonset hut, his face was lit up. The corners of his mustache seemed pushed up onto his temples, so broad was his smile.

“Coach Horton, the recruiter, said they’re graduating three corners and a safety,” I told him. “Ain’t nothing but two sophomore corners and a redshirt freshman on the whole squad.”

“There
aren’t
but two sophomores,” Mama corrected me.

I knew how to say it proper, but saying it like that for Pops seemed right. See, football was always me and Pops’s thing. I’d been balling since I was “knee-high to a pup,” as he’d say, and before the war Pops would come to every game. He’d grade my play.
Good stick on third down
, or, all stern-like,
You’re slacking on kick coverage
. That kind of thing. Pops would be scrutinizing every detail.

He hadn’t really seen me play since I’d grown into my chest and college recruiters had started coming around, so I wanted to catch him up as best I could.

He said, “So you’ve got a good chance to play your first year?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. Tookie had gone back to his room, to play Game Boy or some such, but Tina’s tiny hand was steady holding mine, and she was smiling Mama’s smile. “Especially if I enroll in January and go through spring ball.”

“You got the credits?”

“Sure enough.
And
a three-point-six
GPA
.”

Mama said, “My Freeman’s going to get to go to university!” Then she added, “What a week. First the award to take the trip to France, now this.”

I pulled the brim of the Cyclones cap even lower over my face, told Pops about the scholarship, not bragging, just saying.

He moved in closer to the camera, his face blocking out the Ping-Pong game, like he could reach on through, put his hand on my shoulder. “Son,” he said, “you’ll make the Cyclones a better team and get to go to college, something your mama and me, your aunts and uncles, never got a chance to do. Boy, you are going places.”

» » » »

My school group had the day free, what with us having just two days left, and I decided to walk to the places around the city I had liked best. The loud-honking and lively Champs-Élysées first. Then over by Montparnasse: gray stone walk-ups and lots of bookshops and cafés everywhere. After that I took the metro to Montmartre, to the Sacré-Cœur, the white stone church that looks like those pictures of the Taj Mahal.

It was cool out but not cold; I was fine in just my Huskies letter jacket. I sat on a green wooden bench in the park at the base of the long staircases that led up to the church. The parks here aren’t parks the way I know them. They’re mostly gravel-covered paths, and the grass is off-limits. Guards in two-toned blue unis with blue box-hats
blow whistles at you if you step out onto the green. Still and all, these ladies—young moms and African nannies and Swedish au pairs—brought their kids. The kids were overdressed—in coats and scarves and knit hats—for a winter that seemed like it wouldn’t ever come. They freed themselves and ran and made a ruckus like Tookie and Tina would if they were here. The ladies, pushing the empty strollers, followed behind, picking up the cast-off clothes.