Chapter 2: Chapter 2
“It says here that you had a 4.0 average at Stanford, majoring in classics. You lettered in baseball and football and speak several languages, including—”
Here Smalley stumbled.
“Bahasa,” Quinn said.
“What is that?”
“It’s the official language of Indonesia. I grew up there.”
“Your family is with one of them big corporations, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, well. Looks like I got myself a regular Renaissance man here.”
Don’t, Quinn thought, the color rising in his burnished cheeks. Don’t.
“I prefer to think of myself as a man of many interests,” he said. Here he paused before adding, “Coach.”
He was trying, really he was. But Christ, you didn’t have to be a classics major—indeed you didn’t have to know Homer from Homer Simpson—to see what was going on. But if you were and you did, Smalley was Agamemnon, the boss from Hell, and he himself was Achilles, not the type to knuckle under to a bad boss. What for? It was the same old, same old—starting out as eager to please as a newborn pup, only to be dropped from atenth-story window, your brains dashed against the pavement by someone’s capricious detachment or out-and-out hostility. It was Jakarta 2.0 and he couldn’t go back there—wouldn’t go back there—not when he had put that Pandora’s Box so carefully on a shelf.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Smalley was saying. “Well, then, understand this, boy”—-and here his broad, gap-tooth grin turned icy—”you ain’t ever going to be starting quarterback of the New York Templars.”
Quinn met that grin with one of his own. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
He kept that smile tightly in place as he emerged from Smalley’s office, but it was no use. His stomach plunged as his heart rose. His mind raced, a jumble of emotions led by those well-traveled twins, rage and fear.
I am who I say I am, he thought. But he knew that wasn’t true, not entirely; knew the Smalleys of the world still had the power to hurt him, because he let them—which made whatever indignity he suffered that much worse.
Alone in the shower room, he turned on the faucet and, leaning against the cool tile, pounded it with his left fist. As he let out an animal cry, the water caressed the creamy dunes of his muscular back like a warm Jakarta rain.2
Jakarta, twelve years earlier
Running: It had been his earliest memory. Running from someone. Running toward something yet unknown. Running past the smiling Nemin, with the curved, blue laundry basket always at one graceful hip and her youngest trailing close by the other; past Sumarti, polishing, always polishing the black SUV with the company plates; past Gde, who clipped the hardy, nubby grasses and had the equally unenviable task each morning of gathering the fragrant frangipani blossoms that carpeted the lawn overnight as if by magic, their pink-tinged petals seemingly touched by a fairy’s kiss.
Like all budding athletes, he had his rituals to observe before bounding out the door to the city beyond and freedom. The New York Yankees cap—symbol of a team and a city he had never seen but that loomed large in his dreams—tilted slightly to the left, just so. The yellow-green shirt—a salute to one of Jakarta’s greatest baseball teams—worn loose over the long, skinny navy denim shorts, matched by the yellow-green socks and navy sneakers, also just so. But most important of all, the moment of tribute to the blue, white and yellow painting of his mother and her two equally fair-haired sisters, his aunts, who lived in America and whom distance had made all the more intriguing.
His family called it The Three Gracesthough the figures were less antique than Victorian, grouped as they were after those in John Singer Sargent’s The Wyndham Sisters. Quinnie knew nothing of Sargent and the Sisters,and his knowledge of the ancient Greeks did not extend beyond his mythology class. But something compelled him to touch the thickly applied, swirling paints just above the red signature of the artist, John Kalen, in the lower right-hand corner—furtively, of course, lest his mother’s wrath pour down on him.
Then and only then could he singsong “Good day, Gde,” making a rhyming game of his name as he scooped up a frangipani blossom and, inhaling its sweet scent, skip past the heavy metal gate, past the guards and the baying Dobermans, laughing, always laughing.
“Good day, young master,” Gde would say. “You be in big trouble.”
And in truth, he would be, but Quinnie didn’t care. He had escaped a Yankee Doodle oasis of tennis courts, swimming pools, barking dogs, barbed-wire fences, and barbecues to another world, the real one where marble mansions, sleek hotels and onion-domed mosques collided with the tin shanties that lined brackish canals. There were no sidewalks save for the raised lanes along which lumbered battered buses, fat and red, so he dodged the ubiquitous Blue Bird taxis and the mopeds and motorcycles on which modern young women in too-short skirts clung to the waists of their boyfriends. Years later, whenever reporters asked how he became a running quarterback, he would flash on his twelve-year-old self darting through traffic as if it were an obstacle course and grin at the memory.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone