Читать книгу The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes - Anthony Sadler, Anthony Sadler - Страница 18

IF THE NEW SCHOOL WAS BECOMING a nightmare for Spencer, there was at least one silver lining. A black kid who came on a minority scholarship, brought in to pump up an anemic athletic program, because you could barely mount a team with only fifteen kids per class, unless you brought in a ringer.

Anthony Sadler would be the starting point guard on the basketball team as a freshman and the starting wide receiver on the (flag) football team, but he was the kind of kid who didn’t hide his frustration on the field. He cussed, he yelled at teammates, he found himself frequenting the principal’s office, which by then was a daily way station for Spencer and Alek. If the two boys from Woodknoll Way didn’t have much in common with the new kid from Rancho Cordova, they were at least familiar with frequent delinquency. That, they had in common. They went home at night to different parts of the city, but during the day they spent most of their time in the same office.

And there was something else about Anthony that made it seem like destiny that he would be brought into their friendship: his last name. Sadler, which came just before Skarlatos, which came just before Stone, all of which meant that every time the students had to line up in alphabetical order, Spencer was next to both of them. Their friendship was fortified by alphabetical happenstance.

It could not have been a worse coincidence for the school administration: the three most mischievous kids always assembled together.

For Spencer, it was exciting to have another outsider around. It was like a vestige of a bygone era, the glory days of public school. Spencer and Alek had been forced to hang out with a bunch of kids who’d fully bought into this system and knew nothing else. In Anthony, there was finally another normal person. And he knew cool stuff. He knew how to dress, what kind of sneakers to wear. How to sag your pants, how to wear your T-shirt two sizes too big. The boys from Woodknoll Way were still going to school in camouflage because they thought that was cool. From Anthony they learned that it (emphatically) was not. And Anthony cussed all the time. That’s what you did in public school, he told Spencer, did you forget? He did it in sports; he did it for no reason. He said he was trying to scale back, but it was like unlearning a language, and that was refreshing as well; Spencer and Alek cussed too, and whenever an f-bomb slipped out their classmates looked like they’d been slapped in the face. With Anthony, Spencer could talk about normal stuff, in his normal way. It was a bond forged in four-letter words.

Soon, the three of them feeding off one another, they started getting called to the principal’s office together. “You said what?! This is a Christian school!”

Spencer watched Anthony work on it though. Spencer was amazed; Anthony had an uncanny ability to adapt to his surroundings. He seemed keenly aware of his environment and always knew exactly how to fit in, while Spencer didn’t care and Alek didn’t seem to either.

So Anthony, once he understood that cussing didn’t fly here—and that people snitched—got his temper in check. He prided himself on always, always knowing how to act; it just took him some extra time at the school to find out what wouldn’t go over. He started reining it in. Spencer watched Anthony become the prodigal son. The adults there, like adults everywhere, started to adore him. Adults always adored him. Or they found him quiet and polite, which Spencer was wise to. That was an act. That’s what Anthony wanted them to think, but Spencer knew that in reality, Anthony was like him.

When Spencer brought him home to meet his mom, Joyce found Anthony sweet but quiet; she couldn’t get a read on him. When she woke up to an angry call from a neighbor whose house had been covered in toilet paper by two boys who, in the halo from the street lamp, looked to be a chubby pasty white kid and a tall skinny black kid, Joyce was mortified. Not only had her son shamed himself to the neighbors, but what would she tell Mr. Sadler?

Spencer and Alek had been the only two people for years who didn’t buy into the system, but Anthony had that same independent streak Spencer and Alek had, the same eye for mischief. It wasn’t just that the school days had been so monotonous for so long; the school had its tentacles in other parts of their life. Aside from paintball and airsoft gun battles, Spencer and Alek hadn’t really had lives outside of the school. Now they did.

If Anthony provided a breath of fresh air—a kid who wasn’t a drone like all the others seemed to be, a freethinker like Spencer and Alek, a kid with style, and a window into culture Spencer and Alek had no other exposure too—he was obviously just as bowled over by them. The first time he went over to Spencer’s house and saw all the guns—toy guns, airsoft guns, paintball guns, an actual shotgun in Spencer’s bedroom—his jaw dropped.

“Your parents let you have this?”

Spencer shrugged. “You’ve never seen one of these?”

“Nah, not a for-real one.”

“You’ve never been hunting?”

“No, I mean … black people don’t really hunt. It’s not like a thing we do in our leisure time.”

Anthony had never seen anything like it. Spencer began to understand that in this way too Anthony’s life had been a little different from his, that Anthony’s family had real exposure to tragic gangland violence. Anthony’s father was a delivery driver who became a pastor, a pastor who became a fixture in the community. He was the kind of man who counted the mayor and chief of police as personal friends, along with whatever celebrities Sacramento could claim, because whatever your politics were and whatever your religion was, you respected a man who went out to talk to gang members and put his body in front of violence. Pastor Sadler tried to build relationships with the people at the fringes of society, connecting his own flock with the dope peddlers and gangbangers. He tried to pull the police into it, build up relationships between police and those inclined to violence in depressed parts of the city, so that the two groups wouldn’t only see each other when people started shooting, and so that people shooting might be avoided in the first place. Even before he was ordained, Anthony’s dad had seen guns ruin far too many lives far too close to him to let his children have them as toys.

In this he mostly succeeded, keeping his children from having any exposure to guns, even while they lived in a community riddled with them. It was only when Anthony went from a public school in a rough neighborhood to the small private school in a safe one that he finally was exposed to guns.

At Spencer’s house, Anthony was out of Pastor Sadler’s reach, and he was blown away. He saved up $30 immediately to get his own airsoft gun, upgraded to an MP5, then an airsoft shotgun, and he got lost in the epic battles Alek and Spencer staged in front of their houses and down in the woods behind Schweitzer. Whole Saturdays disappeared while the three of them charged through the woods, then left and charged up Woodknoll Way toward an awaiting army. They recreated epic battles from the movies. At school the only class the three of them found at all interesting—the one subject they couldn’t even pretend not to care about—was history, because their teacher talked all the time about the world wars, and then the boys went out after class and on weekends to relive the great heroic battles: the landings at Normandy, the bombardment at Khe Sanh.

It helped that their history teacher seemed the most … well, normal. He was animated, and he fueled the boys’ interest in wars and the sporadic acts of heroism throughout history. They studied FDR; the idea of a person like that, leading a country through its greatest challenge while he himself was in physical pain, it was energizing. The teacher went into more depth about the wars than any other teacher had: World War II, Vietnam, and especially this one man, FDR, who’d handled a frenetic world and despite it had done the right things at the right times to defuse dangerous situations at critical moments. In class the boys held on to every word.

They’d watch movies, Saving Private Ryan, Letters from Iwo Jima, the fascists in the movies feeling a little familiar, Black Hawk Down, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and by the time the credits rolled, they’d swung onto their elbows and were talking over each other, “What I’d do when I got to the beach is hide behind the boat until they were reloading.” History wasn’t boring, not if you pulled open the curtains just enough so you could imagine yourself on stage. Playing the part of an infantryman charging the shoreline or a pilot buzzing the treetops to skirt enemy radar. They dreamed up scenarios in which they defeated a threat against all odds and saved the day; it got their pulses beating, and then they went out and shot each other with pellets, imagining what would happen if one day, it was one of them in the line of fire.