The Warriors Page 4

  “This is the school computer room. It has all the latest equipment,” Darris said.

  “Right up to 1986,” John Kilgore added.

  It had been like that all during the tour. Each time Darris said something, John added a few words that either contradicted Darris or made an ironic comment about whatever he had said. But Jake could tell that the two of them were actually in complete agreement. They were friends the way people are friends when they live together, play together, and respect each other.

  Different as they were, John and Darris were alike in one way. They both had pulled the long end of their neckties out of their blazers and had draped them over their left shoulders. It wasn’t accidental. Whenever the long end of either boy’s tie started to slip down, he would flip it back into place. As they had walked the halls, peering into classes in session, Jake had noticed at least three other boys with their ties over their left shoulders.

  The three young men stood in front of a wide, double doorway. Darris put his hand on the handle of one of the doors without opening it. “Our gym,” he said.

  John smiled for the first time as he put his left hand on the other door handle. “Our gym,” he said, reaching up with his right hand to tap the long end of the tie draped over his shoulder.

  “We can go in here any time we have a free period, including study halls,” Darris said

  “Scorer’s right,” John added.

  Then the two of them, together, pushed the handles.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  HER DECISION

  MOLLY FORREST ADJUSTED her left earring as she watched Jake fill their plates from the cartons of Chinese take-out. Jake was surprised that his mother had said hardly anything. She arrived home with dinner half an hour ago—only an hour later than she’d originally said. Usually she was full of news about her day, about the work they’d done in her office on the battle with the government over the Indian Trust Funds. Today, though, she was so quiet it seemed as if something was wrong.

  Jake thought he should ask her if she was okay, but he couldn’t stop talking about his day. He’d never felt the need to talk so much. He had so much to say.

  “You should see it, Mom,” he said. “The whole inside wall of their gym is like this big mural of a college lacrosse game. And they’ve got the names of all the students who went on and played college lacrosse in this Roll of Honor next to it.”

  “How are your teachers?” his mother asked.

  “Great. I mean, the first thing you see when you go into the school is this display case with what they call a history of lacrosse in it. Although it pretty much leaves out Indians. But it’s like the whole school worships lacrosse.”

  Jake took a deep breath. “They’ve got this tradition in the school that these two guys who were showing me around, John and Darris, they were telling me about. Like whenever they have a game, the lacrosse players carry their sticks around with them that whole day, wherever they go, into class and everything. And every lacrosse player who has ever scored a goal wears his school tie flopped back over his shoulder.”

  “You like the other students?”

  “They seem pretty cool, Mom,” Jake answered. “They were really nice to me—even after I told them I wouldn’t be able to play lacrosse.”

  Molly Forrest took a deep breath, tugged one more time at her earring, and then placed both of her hands palm-down on the table between them. She still hadn’t touched the moo goo gai pan Jake had spooned out onto her plate.

  “Your headmaster called me today,” she said.

  Jake’s heart thumped in his chest. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

  Jake’s mom shook her head. “No, Jake, but I found myself wondering if I’d done something wrong. You know, I never had a chance to visit Weltimore myself. I was just told that it was the best school around here. I didn’t know lacrosse was so important to them.”

  Jake held his breath. Was his mother going to tell him that he couldn’t go to Weltimore? Part of him hoped that she would, that she’d tell him it wasn’t going to work out for him like she’d thought—the part of him that hoped she’d say he had to go back home to his uncle and aunt and the nation school.

  She shook her head again. “And here I thought it was the people I knew who convinced Weltimore to let you in after the usual admission deadline. It seems, though, that your headmaster made some calls to the Nation School as soon as your name came up, just on the chance you might be “one of those Indian boys” who played lacrosse. When he found out how good you were, that tipped the balance.”

  Jake waited. A different part of him, a part that surprised him, actually wanted to go to Weltimore, to see what it was like there.

  Sure, at first he’d felt like he just wanted to run away from a place where they thought Indian lacrosse was primitive and his people were just dumb savages. But as the day had gone on and he’d seen how nice everyone was, how sincere they were, how much they cared about the game, he had found himself thinking differently. A small, stubborn voice in him had grown stronger and stronger. Maybe he could get them to learn more about lacrosse, the true stuff, about what the game really meant to his people. It was the same kind of voice that had kept his mother from giving up when she was the only Indian woman in her law school classes.

  Jake’s mother sighed. “Jake,” she said, “this has been a crazy day for me. Washington seems to get crazier every day, too. Everyone is so tense. First it was airplane crashes and anthrax. Then people were afraid of getting shot by snipers. I don’t know where to start. Do you think you can learn to like it here? Do you like this school? Do you think it could work out for you?”

  “Unh-hunh,” Jake said, hesitantly, unsure of where his mother’s thoughts were going.

  Molly Forrest reached over to lay her hand on her son’s arm. “Well, after talking with your headmaster, I realized I’d made a mistake. I made a mistake by asking you not to play lacrosse. So I’m releasing you from your promise. Jake, you can play lacrosse if you can keep up with your studies and do well in every class. Understand? Every class.”

  “Unh-hunh,” Jake said, an “unh-hunh” that let her know that he agreed, but also that he knew she still had said only part of what she wanted to say.

  “In a way,” Jake’s mom continued, “it was good that Dr. Marshall called when he did.” Her voice turned more serious.

  Whatever it is, Jake thought, here it comes.

  “Jake, I’ve also realized that this just isn’t working out the way I thought it would, with my crazy schedule. You’ve been left alone here far too much. And you shouldn’t have to come home to an empty house all the time. As nice as this condo is for me, it hasn’t been much fun for you, has it?”

  Jake didn’t answer, but his mom nodded.

  “Just as I thought. Today they told me that I was going to be doing even more on this case. I’m going to be making a bigger salary, but I also have to do more travel and even be away on weekends. Well, as soon as I heard that, I knew I had to make a big decision.”

  I’m going home, Jake thought, trying not to smile. He could already see the welcoming look on Uncle Irwin’s face, could even smell Aunt Alice’s cooking.

  “So,” Jake’s mom said, patting his arm, “I worked it out over the phone with Dr. Marshall. They have the space in their dorm for you. You’re going to be a boarding student at Weltimore.”

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  DRILLS

  “SCOOP THE BALL, MR. KURESHI,” Coach Scott growled. “This isn’t golf.”

  Muhammad Kuyreshi, a Pakistani boy who was one of Jake’s two new roommates, took another quick running step and managed to thrust the head of his lacrosse stick under the elusive ball. He cradled it uncertainly, and then threw it. It bounced weakly over the ground, then rolled toward the next player in the opposite line, about twenty yards away.

  As Muhammad turned and ran back to the end of their line, he gave a quick thumbs-up to Jake, who nodded to him. Before lights-out
last night, Jake had showed Muhammad the right technique for scooping. He had played field hockey back home, but never lacrosse.

  Sweat ran down Jake’s face, but he didn’t wipe it away. He was next in line and had to concentrate. The players had been on the field doing defensive drills for at least half an hour. Shuttle run. Foot fire. Fast break. Triangle slide. Defensive clearing. Jake was in the familiar place his mind and body went to during practices and games. Nothing else existed except this moment. He was aware only of the stick in his hand, the ball, the other players, the field, and the commands of his coach.

  The ball rocketed toward him, fired hard by John Kilgore’s long arms, across the hard surface of the field. Jake gathered it in the webbing of his stick, cradled up, spun, and rolled back across. This stick wasn’t like his old one, still back at the res. But he’d gotten used to this plastic stick, and it moved in his hands as if it were part of him. Of course, Jake wasn’t aware of how he looked on the field, but the other players were. His moves were as smooth and flowing as a bird’s wing cutting through the air.

  An hour later, the practice over, Jake sat on a bench in the boys’ locker room. He was alone, and everything that had not intruded on his mind while he was on the field came flooding back. He had already taken his shower and dressed. He had to get to dinner soon, but here he sat, trying to understand how he felt.

  A month had passed since his arrival at Weltimore, and he’d been a boarding student for three weeks. His two roommates, Muhammad Kureshi and Kofi Anloga, were good guys. He’d never spent time with anyone from another country before, and it was kind of cool. It was interesting to hear about their homes and their families in Pakistan and Ghana. Somehow, as far away as their homes were, Jake felt as if his own home was even further. Crazy. He knew it was only an eight-hour bus ride to the reservation.

  “Hey,” a voice said. “Earth to Jake.”

  Jake looked up. Darris Tavares stood there, his earphones on. Electronic equipment wasn’t allowed in class, but after 5:00 P.M., everyone broke out his stuff. The sound was cranked so loud Jake could hear Pearl Jam streaming out. Darris liked the old stuff. He turned down the volume on his player, which was half the size and ten times as expensive as the old Walkman Jake was holding. Jake had noticed that everything personal that the kids at this school owned, whether it was a sweater or a picture frame, was top-of-the-line, stuff Jake had only seen in mall windows or on TV ads.

  “Coming to dinner?” Darris asked him. “Come on.”

  Jake stood up and looked over Darris’s shoulder. John Kilgore was standing in the doorway, waiting for both of them. That was how it was around here. The guys were always trying to make him feel at home, letting him know he was included. Even when they had short-sheeted his bed the first night in the dorm and put shaving cream into his sneakers, Jake knew it was something every kid had to go through, like a ritual. Everybody had laughed about it, and he had smiled along with them. Everything they did made him feel included.

  After he’d started practicing with the team, they’d been even more friendly. They taught him to accept the privileges given to the lacrosse kids—like wearing his tie over his shoulder or being allowed to go into the gym whenever he had a free period, so he could use the weight machines or just shoot baskets. He was as much a part of this special group at Weltimore as any of the others. So why did Jake feel even more like a stranger?

  Maybe it was because he felt it was just part of the drill. Maybe they were doing it because they were supposed to do it. Or was it just because he was a new player on a team, someone who would make them more likely to be winners because he was part of the team? He often wondered if they would even talk to him if he didn’t play lacrosse.

  “Ready?” Darris asked.

  In the doorway, John waved at him. “Let’s go.”

  “Unh-hunh,” Jake said. He stood up and followed them.

  Jake actually looked forward to most of his classes. He had discovered that if he really concentrated on what was being taught, he could forget everything else in his life for those few moments—until the bell sounded to move them on to the next room. It was nothing like the Nation School. He didn’t have his best buddy Rick Jamieson passing him notes or Frank Tarbell making signs at him from the other side of the room, reminding him they were riding their bikes up around Frogtown that afternoon, fun things that kept him from focusing on his schoolwork.

  The teachers at Weltimore weren’t really that much better; he just paid better attention here. By concentrating on his school subjects, Jake didn’t leave himself any room to think about how much he missed his aunt and uncle and his friends back home.

  When he was in class, Jake didn’t have to think about being part of a new team. He didn’t have time to wonder why he sometimes felt so uncomfortable about being one of “Coach Scott’s Boys.” In class, all he had to do was be a math student or a science student or an English student. As a result, he was doing better than he had ever done before, getting a low A in everything. In his biology class, Jake was paired up as lab partner with Skippy Fairbanks, the smartest of the “Smart Kids.”

  History, though, was a little different. Coach Scott was the history master. Sometimes Coach Scott ran the class like any other class, and Jake could make his mental escape, safe in the middle of facts and dates, names and places. But whenever Coach Scott brought lacrosse into the history lesson, Jake didn’t feel more at home. Instead, it always made him feel uneasy.

  “War is like being out on the playing field,” Coach Scott would growl. “In both cases, winning is not the most important thing.” Then he would pause and look around the room.

  Jake was careful always to have his gaze down, looking at his desk, focusing on the end of his pen as he took notes when Coach Scott did that. In those long pauses, Coach Scott would stare at one boy after another, as if daring one of them to speak up and challenge what he was saying. No one ever did. Then, like a player raising his hands after scoring a goal, he’d make his point.

  “No, winning is not the most important thing. It’s the ONLY thing!”

  History was the only class that made Jake think about home. It was the only class that made him remember, regardless of how hard everyone had tried to make him fit in, that he was different.

  Although everyone at Weltimore wore the same school uniform, it somehow made the differences between them even more obvious. It wasn’t the clothes the other boys wore—it was the way they wore them, things like a Scorer draping his necktie over his shoulder. Jake kept forgetting to do that. More than once, one of the kids on his team had come up to him in the hall and reached out, almost as automatically as giving a high-five, to lift Jake’s tie up for him and put it back over his shoulder.

  People’s faces were more distinct because of the uniform, too. Faces like Muhammad’s or Kofi’s or Jake’s stood out, clearly different from the others’. Sometimes Jake could see in the faces of the Third Generation students, the “Three-Gens,” those whose fathers and grandfathers had gone to Weltimore, a look that told him what they were thinking.

  Uncle Irwin had always told Jake that he should never think that making a lot of money was the goal of life. Jake knew that the Three-Gen boys had been told just the opposite. Sometimes, when Jake saw them looking at him, he was sure they were thinking about how much more they had than this poor Indian kid.

  In the locker room, for example, the Three-Gens sometimes talked about what kind of cars their fathers were going to buy for them when they turned sixteen. None of them was going to get a Ford or a Chevy. Jake could only shake his head when he heard the names “Porsche” or “Benz.” It was just that way for those kids— part of their family history.

  Jake remembered a point the coach had made once about history. “Studying history,” Coach Scott had said, “is just like getting a chance to play the same team twice in the season. What you learn the first time around will help you avoid the mistakes of the past.” Jake had a feeling that most of the other k
ids just wanted to keep repeating the same rich history. They wanted to do what their fathers had done, to have what their parents had.

  But then again, so did he. But what he wanted was way different, especially the way he looked at history itself.

  Jake remembered Grampa Sky saying just that. “We don’t see the same history the white people see. Our history is not dead facts in a book. Our history is alive and still going on. It’s in our songs and stories and in the roots of every tree.”

  Still, Jake forced himself to pay attention to what Coach Scott said. If a student was caught daydreaming, the coach made him go stand at attention at the front of the room. Muhammad Kureshi was already in front of the chalkboard, his back stiff as a ramrod.

  “Tomorrow,” Coach Scott boomed, “we’re going to take a little detour into an event in 1763, a little story I know you’ll enjoy.”

  The bell rang, but Jake didn’t move. Neither did anyone else. The class knew Coach Scott’s drill.

  Coach Scott looked around the room, smiled, and then bellowed, “Dis-missed!”

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  ANOTHER DAY

  JAKE LOOKED OUT THE DORM WINDOW. The sun was just starting to show itself above the trees. He held up the glass of water in his hands, waiting for the first light of dawn to pass through it.

  “Elder Brother,” Jake whispered, “I thank you for giving us another day.”

  Then Jake drank the water. He did this every morning. No one else was awake yet, so no one was around to ask him what he was doing. Grampa Sky had taught him this was a good thing to do. It would remind Jake to be thankful every day for the many blessings, great and small, that most people take for granted.

  “When the light of the Old One, the Great Sun, touches water,” Grampa Sky had told him, “that water becomes a medicine. Drink it and it will keep you strong, grandson.”