Out of Nowhere (2 page)

One corner of her mouth turned up. She was trying not to laugh at me.

“Ramadan is a holy month in which we fast during the day and eat in the evening,” she said. “In Nairobi, coaches form teams during Ramadan, and if you win, you earn money. Or dinner out,
at night.” She looked steadily into my eyes. “When you’re hungry, a meal at a restaurant is a good incentive for scoring.”

The way she easily used words like
incentive
made you wonder how she could be related to smiling Saeed.

“Well, thanks for explaining that,” I said. “I’m Tom Bouchard, by the way. Tell me your name again?”

She bent to scoop the little guy into her arms. “I know who you are,” she said quietly. She glanced quickly at Saeed, then turned on her heel and headed back across the field. Saeed hooked his thumbs in the straps of his pack, nodded once more at me, and followed them.

As I watched them go, I thought,
Wow. That girl does
not
like me
.

It’s weird when a total stranger already has her mind made up about you.

Here’s the fact, and I know I’m gonna sound like a jerk, but whatever: girls like me.

Girls like me, and I like girls. A lot.

So the full frontal drop-dead glare and the way-unfriendly attitude I got from Saeed’s sister were a first. And undeserved. Not only because I don’t usually get that sort of reaction from females, but because I had actually been
nice
to her brother. Unlike probably half the people in our city and most of the kids in school, who would’ve been thrilled to see them all get back on the buses they’d arrived in.

You gotta wonder who the genius was that came up with the plan to put a bunch of Africans in Maine, the coldest, whitest state in America.

Okay, maybe Alaska is colder. But not whiter. And it’s true that the Somalis who began showing up in Enniston by the hundreds started out someplace else. Warm places like Georgia and Southern California. Our town wasn’t ever anybody’s first bright idea. We’d gotten what’s called a “secondary migration” (my aunt
Maddie taught me that term), which is when refugees who have just barely made it out alive from some war zone are dumped in a city where there are plenty of cheap apartments, but as soon as they learn a few words of English, they realize their situation sucks. Like, the guy next door deals drugs and the schools are bad. So they move to a better place. Like Enniston. Which has pretty low crime, okay schools, and loads of cheap, empty apartments.

And empty mills. Big, abandoned textile factories that once hummed and spewed lint and gummed up the river and put a whole army of French-speaking immigrants from Canada, like my great-grandparents, to work. All dilapidated now, except for the ones converted to office space or restaurants serving brick-oven organic free-range something-or-other baked on a crust. I mean, I don’t eat that shit, but I have a few friends who landed jobs working in those places, so it’s all good.

Anyway, just around the time a bunch of Muslims took out the Twin Towers, a bunch of Somali Muslims started seriously secondary-migrating here. There had been a few of them in town for years, but this was different. Every day in school you saw more of them in the guidance office, these black kids who barely spoke English. They would wander, lost, through the halls, trying to figure out the whole concept of changing classes. The girls would wash their feet in the restroom sinks before lunch, which made them
real
popular with Cherisse’s crowd (not). One day I saw this Somali girl on all fours on the staircase landing. Everybody had to step around her, and I heard one guy say, “Dude, what is she doing?”

“Facing Mecca,” someone replied.

“Where’s Mecca?” somebody else asked.

“It’s out by the mall,” a third answered, which got a few laughs.

But not everyone was laughing. People were mad. Worried. Especially teachers. Who didn’t know what to do with hundreds of kids who just showed up and didn’t know English. Hell, a lot of them couldn’t even read and write their own language.

My mom and her sister, my aunt Maddie, are very big into the whole immigrant-ancestor thing. They’re always going on about our
mémère
Louise and
pépère
Claude, who came here from Quebec to work in the mills. So when the Somali families began showing up in big numbers and people started freaking out, Mom and Aunt Maddie said it was just the “new wave.” As in immigrants. Not Blondie, or the B-52s, or that other crap music they listened to when they were in high school.

My uncle Paul, their younger brother, got really pissed off when they said that.

“Our ancestors came here to work. These people came here to collect welfare,” he fumed.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine how Aunt Maddie and Uncle Paul came from the same family. They’re
that
different. He’s a total working-class dude, never went to college and proud of it, while she’s got a couple of degrees in something and is always going to talks at the local college. Mom says when they were young, Maddie was the most beautiful girl at Chamberlain High School. Voted homecoming queen her senior year … then turned it down and boycotted homecoming, calling the whole queen thing sexist and saying that football embodied just about everything that was wrong with America.

My girlfriend, Cherisse, would give up a vital organ or sell her soul to Satan if she thought it’d earn her homecoming queen.

Anyway, I didn’t quite get Paul’s attitude about the Somalis. Maybe it had something to do with how he works hard and hates freeloaders. He’s always coming up with ways for me to earn some cash. Like the day after the soccer game against Maquoit. Paul had a potential two cords of sixteen-inch logs with my name and Donnie’s on them. He lives just outside town in this little house he mostly built himself, surrounded by trees, and last winter ice storms took out two big oaks on his property. He’d spent the summer chainsawing them into monster-sized chunks, and he wanted me and Donnie to split and stack them.

When I arrived at ten that morning and walked around to the back of his house, I could hear the mechanical drone and smell the diesel from the splitter he’d rented. He was wearing his red chamois work shirt and had already split a decent-sized pile of green wood into three-sided lengths. Paul is a beast. He’d probably been up for hours, impatient to get started.

“You boys have a late night?” he asked as I approached. Trace of a smile.

“More like an early morning,” I replied. He tossed me a pair of work gloves, then turned to the mound of thick logs a few paces away. He wrapped his arms around one of the biggest and heaved it onto the splitter. Then he grasped a lever and pulled. A hydraulic wedge slid smoothly toward the log, nudged up against it, then pressed into and through it. The chunk gave way with a loud crack and two fat halves thudded to the ground. Uncle Paul picked one up, replaced it on the splitter, and aimed the wedge again. This time the oak split into neat, three-sided pieces. He grabbed one in each hand and flung them onto the growing pile.

“Where’s Mr. Plourde?” he asked.

“He’s coming,” I said, trying to sound convinced. I had no idea whether Donnie would make an appearance. In fact, I pretty much doubted it. The last time I’d seen him—nine hours earlier, actually—he hadn’t looked like someone who’d be in any shape for manual labor in the morning.

Lila Boutin’s big brother had fixed us up with a case of Bud Light, and a bunch of us had headed out to the football field. Some of the girls brought blankets, and we were lying in the middle of the dark field, looking up at the black sky and knocking back a few cold ones. It was one of those September nights—no bugs, not cold yet, with a few random shooting stars that hadn’t burned themselves out in August—when you could fool yourself into thinking maybe Maine
isn’t
the most dead-end, godforsaken state in the union. That was my mood when Donnie jumped up from his blanket. He shook himself like a horse covered in flies.

“This is so lame!” he exclaimed. “What, are you people just gonna lie here?”

“Sounds good to me,” I replied. In the darkness, Cherisse’s hands were straying into some fairly interesting places, and I was thinking this was about as far from lame as I could imagine.

“I gotta
do
something,” Donnie said, more to himself than to any of us. I could see him move his feet restlessly. See his head tilt back as he finished off his beer.

“Don’t step on me, bro,” Jake Farwell said, followed by a female squeal and “Ouch!”

“What the hell, Donnie!” I heard Lila exclaim. “You just kicked Devon in the head!”

“Sorry,” Donnie mumbled, stepping away from the bodies and
blankets on the ground. “Whaddaya say, Tom-boy?” he added. “Wanna give me a ride?”

“Nope,” I managed before Cherisse covered my mouth with hers. Donnie breathed out impatiently.

“Gotta find my man Pepper. Who’s coming?” he said. Greg Pepper is this guy who sells weed and lives in probably the sketchiest part of the city. I started to tell Donnie to shut up and sit down and try to find the Big Dipper or Orion’s belt overhead, but that’s about when Cherisse found my belt, so I wasn’t saying a lot to Donnie. George Morin, who’s pretty much a stoner and also has a car, got up. “I’m with you, man,” he said, and Donnie slapped him five. Then the two of them walked off without another word to the rest of us.

“ ’Bout time,” I heard Lila mutter. “That guy is so hyper.”

“No hating on Plourde,” Jake said to her.

“Why the frig not?” Devon snapped, sitting up. She had her hand on her just-kicked head. “The guy’s crazy. He’s always drunk or stoned, or trying to get drunk or stoned.”

“That’s funny, coming from someone who’s out here drinking beer,” Jake replied.

Devon shrugged. “I don’t know why you guys defend him,” she said. “He’s a loser.”

There isn’t a whole lot that can distract me from the charms of Miss Cherisse Ouellette, but even the wounded Devon wasn’t allowed to run Donnie down in my presence. I shifted Cherisse off my chest and raised myself up on one elbow.

“Hey, Devon, can I ask you something? What’s your problem with the word ‘fuck’? We all know you won’t
do
it, but can you not even
say
it?” Burst of laughter, even from the girls.

“Hmm. ‘Frig.’ Aren’t those the first four letters in Devon’s other favorite word?” Jake said. I knew where he was going right off, but there was a pause as the rest of them scrolled through their mental spell-checks. Lila got it first.

“Oh my God, that’s
so
mean, Jake!” She leaned over to slap Jake but hit Cherisse instead.

“Ouch! Thanks a lot, Lila,” Cherisse said, but you could tell she wasn’t really hurt. She whispered quietly to me, “What favorite word?”

I pressed my lips against her ear.

“Frigid,” I breathed.

She gasped, then tried to stifle her giggles in the front of my shirt.

Meanwhile, Devon got up. She yanked her blanket from the pile and searched for her shoes.

“I have just one thing to say to you people,” she said. “Fuck. You.”

Jake whooped, then applauded.

“And
you
two,” she hissed, turning to me and Cherisse. “Why don’t you
fucking
get a room?” She marched off, trailing her blanket.

“Hey. That was
two
things,” I called after her. Everyone laughed. Poor Devon.

Not too long after that the beer was gone, Cherisse was making noises about clearing out, and we heard hollering from the parking lot. We didn’t know whether it was cops or kids, so we grabbed our stuff and ran behind the bleachers. From there we could see the lot.

It was Donnie. He was standing straight up through Morin’s sunroof, whooping like a madman as the car spun donuts. When
it turned sharply, Donnie’s whole body swung and it looked like he was going to be flung up and onto the pavement. Somehow he held on, and after a victory lap that left the smell of singed rubber, the two of them peeled out and disappeared into the night.

“Guess he found Pepper,” Jake said, and we all cracked up.

A few monster chunks into it, Uncle Paul and I had a rhythm. He would heave; I’d manage the wedge; he’d position for the second bite; we’d both toss the splits. Neither of us spoke, which was fine by me. I was enjoying the thought-free zone of splitter hum and repetitive motion. Paul can be good like that. He’s happy to work alongside you without pulling conversation out of your head.

Not that morning, however. He’d been at the soccer game.

“I see your coach is starting some of those Somalis,” he said. The wedge slid forward. I waited for the crack before speaking.

“Yup,” I said. We grabbed the splits. Tossed.

“How’s that goin’?” he continued.

“Fine.”

Better than fine
, I managed to not say, as it probably would have pissed him off. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him what my role had been in getting Saeed out on the field.

That day when Saeed wore the Manchester United shirt, I’d told him that if he played soccer, he should come to a meeting with Coach after school. I don’t really know how I communicated that to him, because I’m sure as hell no Mike Turcotte when it comes to African charades (that’s what we call Turcotte’s attempts at talking to these kids), or how he managed to understand, but he showed up. And brought three other Somali guys with him.

After Coach Gerardi gave his talk and dismissed everyone, he signaled me over. Saeed was standing with him, holding a sheaf of papers: permission slips, medical forms. All the things you need to fill out if you want to play sports in high school.

“Tom, this young man says you invited him to the meeting today?”

I nodded. I wondered if I was in trouble. Coach doesn’t really talk; he growls.

“Well, he’s going to need some help filling out these forms,” he said. “Think you can do that?”

I’m captain of the soccer team. Did I really have a choice?

“Uh … sure,” I told him. “But doesn’t guidance have translators who help with that?”

“They’re gone for the weekend,” Coach said. “He needs these by Monday.” He turned on his heel and walked off, leaving me standing there, stupidly, with Saeed.