hub before getting off in the seventeenth arrondissement, where the study-abroad group was staying. Everyone else had come in three days before, but he couldn’t miss the last week of football practice. They were the final days to impress Coach Young before he decided the starting line for next year.
But an opportunity to spend three weeks in Paris covered by his scholarship? He’d grabbed that with both hands. Never in his life had he thought he’d ever be able to go to France.
Never mind that he wouldn't be able to do any of the add-ons, the day trips, the real moneymakers for the trip organizers. No, he would not be going up in a hot-air balloon or taking a weekend trip to the Riviera or out to the wineries. A day flight to Vienna. He’d be just fine walking the streets of Paris, taking in the sights. The online guide said he could feed himself for ten euros a day on a budget, which was what he was going to do. Pizza—they had that there, right?—French bread, cheese and ham. It was enough to be there.
Things like this didn’t happen to West Texas farm boys. Paris, when he was growing up, was a town in Hill Country, foreign because it was a ten-hour drive to the other side of Texas, way out there near the city folk.
There were only two ways out of West Texas: on the gridiron or in shackles, bound for Huntsville. Even the oil jobs were evaporating, moving on to other fields, offshore or up north, where West Texas boys froze as soon as they saw a flake of snow. Where he was from, kids sometimes waited years before they felt actual rain on their faces. It was hard and dry and bitter in West Texas, and most people quit, but his father was a rancher like his father before him. Their parcel of land was small, their herd modest, and they eked just enough out of the dust and the scrub to keep on living for the next year.
Boys like him grew up looking skyward, not to God, but to those Friday night lights, and the swarms of beetles and gnats and cicadas that swam in and out of the stadium lights at the high school. He’d looked up from the time he was as tall as his dad’s boots. When he was four, he played dirt ball with other kids, tying kitchen towels to their belt loops to mimic flag football. He was fast even then, they said, and big. A boulder rolling one way. In middle school he was ranked in the top ten players in the state. In high school, the top five.
He earned his athletic scholarship with every torn muscle, every bruised bone, every hairline fracture, every black eye, every concussion of his youth. He’d seen his dad proud of him a lot of days in his life, but he’d never seen him as proud as when they opened that letter from the university together at Mama’s grave. His old man had stared at Mama’s headstone for a long time, the brim of his hat angled down so Wes couldn’t see his eyes. But when he looked up again, there were tear tracks running down his leathery cheeks.
His DNA was in that dust, generations of Van de Hoeks who had worked the land with their sweat and blood and given their bones to the dirt. His dad had always told him, “You’re gonna have a better life than this, son. Keep you playin’, and you’ll be able to create your own future.”
The biggest city Wes had ever been in before was Austin, and that was for his pre–college athletics physical. He’d run five miles on a treadmill with an EKG hooked to his chest, breathed into what looked like an experiment from the space station, and stood patiently for X-rays of all his bones. He’d had to squat to fit in the machine’s viewfinder.
Simply being in Paris was enough. It was enough to fly overseas for the first time, get his first stamp in his passport. Enough to take the subway for the first time, navigate the transfer, muddle through with his high school and college French.
He hefted his suitcase up the six flights of wooden stairs to the top floor. The staircase was so narrow he could touch both walls with his elbows. Eventually he made it to the landing, what used to be the rafters in ye olde times, probably