Fire Sale (4 page)

He grinned salaciously. “I’ll see she gets a good ride, Tori, don’t you worry your uptight ass about that.”

Resisting an impulse to smack him, I started collecting balls from around the floor. I let him hang on to the one he was playing with, but I put the rest in the equipment room. If I didn’t lock them up at once they evaporated, as I’d learned to my cost: we’d lost two when friends and family were milling around the gym after my first practice. I’d scrounged four new ones from friends who belong to tony downtown gyms. Now I keep all ten balls in a padlocked bin, although I’ve had to share keys with the boys’ coach and the PE teachers.

While the girls finished changing, I sat at a tiny table in the equipment room to fill out attendance forms and progress reports for the benefit of the mythical permanent coach. After a moment, a shadow in the doorway made me look up. Josie Dorrado, April’s particular friend on the team, was hovering there, twisting her long braid around her fingers, shifting from one skinny leg to the other. A quiet, hardworking kid, she was another of my strong players. I smiled, hoping she wasn’t going to bring up a time-consuming problem: I couldn’t be late to my meeting with the By-Smart manager.

“Coach, uh, people say, uh, is it true you’re with the police?”

“I’m a detective, Josie, but I’m private. I work for myself, not the city. Do you need the police for some reason?” I seemed to have a version of this conversation with someone at every practice, even though I’d told the team when I started coaching what I did for a living.

She shook her head, eyes widening a bit in alarm at the idea that she herself might need a cop. “Ma, my ma, she told me to ask you.”

I pictured an abusive husband, restraining orders, a long evening in violence court, and tried not to sigh out loud. “What kind of problem is she having?”

“It’s something about her job. Only, her boss, he don’t want her talking to no one.”

“What—is he harassing her in some way?”

“Can’t you just go see her for a minute? Ma can explain it, I don’t really know what’s going on, only she told me to ask you, because she heard someone at the laundry say how you grew up down here and now you’re a cop.”

Romeo appeared behind Josie, twirling the ball on his fingertip à la the Harlem Globetrotters. “What does your ma need a cop for, Josie?” he asked.

Josie shook her head. “She don’t, Mr. Czernin, she just wants Coach to talk to her about some kind of problem she’s got with Mr. Zamar.”

“What kind of problem she have with Zamar that she wants a dick on his tail? Or is it the other way around?” He laughed heartily.

Josie looked at him in bewilderment. “You mean does she want him followed? I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. Please, Coach, it’ll only take a minute, and every day she keeps bugging me, have you talked to your coach yet? have you talked to your coach yet? so I gotta tell her I asked you.”

I looked at my watch. Ten to five. I had to be at the warehouse by five-fifteen, and visit Coach McFarlane before I went to Morrell’s. If I went to see Josie’s ma in between, it would be ten o’clock again before I made it home.

I looked at Josie’s anxious chocolate eyes. “Can it wait until Monday? I could come over after practice to talk to her.”

“Yeah, okay.” It was only the slight relaxation in her shoulders that told me she was relieved I’d agreed to do it.

4

Mountains of Things

I
threaded my way through the trucks in the yard at the warehouse, looking for the parking area. Eighteen-wheelers were backing up to loading bays, smaller trucks were driving up and down a ramp leading to a lower level, a couple of waste haulers were picking up Dumpsters and emptying them, and all around me men in hard hats and beer bellies were shouting at each other to watch where the hell they were going.

Trucks had dug deep grooves in the asphalt and my Mustang bounced unhappily through them, splashing my windows with mud. It had been raining off and on all day and the sky still seemed sullen. A century of dumping everything, from cyanide to cigarette wrappers, into South Chicago’s swampy ground had turned the landscape tired and drab. Against this leaden backdrop, the By-Smart warehouse looked ominous, a cavern housing some ravening beast.

The building itself was monstrous. A low-slung brick structure, perhaps originally red, turned grimy black with age, it filled two city blocks. The building and the yard lay behind high wire fencing, with a guard station and everything. When I turned off 103rd Street and pulled in, a man in some kind of uniform demanded to see my pass. I told him I had an appointment with Patrick Grobian; the man phoned into the cavern and confirmed that I was expected. Parking lay straight ahead, I couldn’t miss it.

Straight ahead meant something different to the guard than it did to me. After I’d jolted around two sides of the building, I finally came on the parking area. It looked like the lot to a run-down used-car dealer, with hundreds of beaters parked every which way among the ruts. I found a spot that I hoped was out of the way enough that no one would sideswipe my Mustang.

When I opened the door, I looked with dismay at the ground. The warehouse entrance lay several hundred yards away and I was going to have to pick my way through rain-filled potholes in my good shoes. I knelt on the driver’s seat and leaned over to paw through the papers and towels in back. Finally, I dug up a pair of flip-flops I’d used at the beach last summer and wiggled my stocking feet around the little toe bars. It made for a slow and embarrassing waddle across the yard to the entrance, but at least I reached it with only my stockings and trouser cuffs spackled in mud. I slipped on my pumps and stuck the muddy flip-flops into a plastic bag before shoving them into my briefcase.

High doors opened onto a consumer nightmare. Shelves stacked with every imaginable product stretched as far as I could see. Directly in front of me dangled brooms, hundreds of them, push brooms, straw brooms, brooms with plastic handles, with wood handles, brooms that swiveled. Next to them were thousands of shovels, ready for every Chicagoan who wanted to clear their walks in the winter ahead. On my right cartons labeled “ice-melt” were stacked halfway to a ceiling that yawned thirty feet overhead.

I started forward, and backed up again as a forklift truck rattled toward me at high speed, its front-loader high with cartons of ice-melt. It stopped on the far side of the shovels; a woman in overalls and a bright red vest began slitting the boxes before they were even off the loader. She pulled smaller boxes of ice-melt out and added them to the mound already there.

Another forklift pulled up in front of me. A man in an identical red vest started loading brooms onto it, checking them against a computer printout.

When I stepped forward again, trying to decide on a route through the shelves, a guard moved to intercept me. A large black woman wearing a vest with safety reflectors, she also had a hard hat labeled “Be Smart, By-Smart,” and a belt that seemed to hold everything the complete law officer needed—including a stun gun. Above the racket of the conveyor belts and the trucks, she demanded my business.

Once again, I explained who I was and why I was there. The guard took a cell phone from her belt to call for approval. When she had it, she gave me a badge and directions to Patrick Grobian’s office: down Aisle 116S, left at 267W, all the way to the end, where I’d find all of the company offices, toilets, canteen, and so on.

It was then that I saw big red numbers that labeled the entrance to each row. These were so large that I’d missed them at first. I’d also missed a series of conveyor belts high above the aisles; they had chutes that lowered stacks of goods to various loading depots. Signs proclaiming “No Smoking Anywhere, Anytime” were plastered prominently on the walls and shelves, along with exhortations to “Make the Workplace a Safe Place.”

We were facing Aisle 122S, so I turned left at the shovels and walked down six aisles, passing a mountain of microwaves, followed by a forest of artificial Christmas trees. When I reached Aisle 116, I moved into Christmas decorations: avalanches of bells, lights, napkins, plastic angels, orange-faced Madonnas holding ice-white baby Jesuses.

Between the mountains of things stretching endlessly away, the conveyor belts ratcheting overhead, and the forklifts rolling around me, I began to feel dizzy. There were people in this warehouse, but they seemed to exist only as extensions of the machines. I clutched a shelf to steady myself. I couldn’t show up at Patrick Grobian’s office looking woozy: I wanted his support for Bertha Palmer’s basketball team. I needed to be upbeat and professional.

Three weeks ago, when I met the assistant principal who oversaw Bertha Palmer’s after-school programs, I knew I was going to have to find Mary Ann’s replacement myself if I didn’t want to stick around the high school for the rest of my life. Natalie Gault was in her early forties, short, stocky, and very aware of her authority. She was swamped in a flood of paperwork. Girls’ basketball ranked in her consciousness somewhere below upgrading the coffeemaker in the faculty lounge.

“I’m only filling in for Mary Ann until the end of the year,” I warned her when she thanked me for taking over at short notice. “I won’t have time to come down here once the playing season starts in January. I can keep the girls conditioned until then, but I’m not a trained coach, and that’s what they need.”

“All they really need is for a grown-up to show interest in them, Ms. Sharaski.” She flashed a bright meaningless smile at me. “No one expects them to win games.”

“Warshawski. And the girls expect to win games—they’re not playing to show what good sports they are. Which they’re not. Three or four of them could be top-notch players with the right coaching—they deserve more than the short time and mediocre skills I can give them. What is the school doing to find someone?”

“Praying for a miracle with Mary Ann McFarlane’s health,” she said. “I know you went to school down here, but back then the school could rent an instrument for any child who wanted to play one. We haven’t offered music in this school for eighteen years, except for the Band Club, which one of the reading teachers runs. We can’t afford an art program, so we tell kids to go to a free downtown program—two hours and two buses away. We don’t have an official basketball team—we have a basketball club. We can’t afford a coach—we need a volunteer, and we don’t have a teacher who has the time, let alone the skills, to take it on. I suppose if we could find a corporate sponsor we could hire an after-school coach.”

“Who’s down here who could put that kind of money into the basketball program?”

“Some small companies in the neighborhood, places like Fly the Flag, sometimes put up money for uniforms or instruments in the band. But the economy’s so bad right now that they aren’t doing anything for us this year.”

“Who’s big down here now that the mills are closed? I know there’s the Ford Assembly Plant.”

She shook her head. “That’s all the way down on 130th, and we’re too far away and too small for them, even though some of the parents work down there.”

Her phone rang at that point. Someone from the city health department was coming by tomorrow to look for rodent droppings—what should they do about the kitchen? A teacher stopped by to complain about the shortage of social studies texts, and another wanted eight students moved out of his room to a different section.

By the time Ms. Gault got back to me, she couldn’t remember whether I was Sharaski or Varnishky, let alone whether the school would help find a coach. I ground my teeth, but when I got back to my own office that afternoon I did a search on companies within a two-mile radius of the school. I’d found three that were big enough to afford serious community service; the first two hadn’t even let me make an appointment.

By-Smart had both the discount megastore at Ninety-fifth and Commercial, and their Midwest distribution center at 103rd and Crandon. The store told me they didn’t make any community service decisions, that I needed to see Patrick Grobian, the Chicagoland south district manager, whose office was in the warehouse. A kid in Grobian’s office who answered the phone said they’d never done anything like this before, but I could come in and explain what I wanted. Which is why I was hiking through mountains of things on my way to Grobian’s office.

For some reason, when I was growing up in South Chicago I’d never heard of the By-Smart company. Of course, thirty years ago they had only begun the most phenomenal part of their staggering growth. According to my research, their sales last year had been $183 billion, a number I could hardly comprehend: that many zeroes made my head swim.

I guess when I was a kid, their warehouse had already been here at 103rd and Crandon, but nobody I knew worked here—my dad was a cop, and my uncles worked at the grain elevators or steel mills. Looking around me now, it was hard to believe I hadn’t known about this place.

Of course, you’d have to be a Trappist monk not to know about the company today—their TV commercials are ubiquitous, showing their happy, nurturing sales staff in their red “Be Smart, By-Smart” smocks. All over America, they’ve become the only retail outlet for a lot of small towns.

Old Mr. Bysen had grown up on the South Side, over in Pullman; I knew that from Mary Ann’s telling me he’d gone to Bertha Palmer High. His standard bio didn’t talk about that, instead dwelling on his heroics as a World War II gunner. When he got back from the war, he’d taken over his father’s little convenience store at Ninety-fifth and Exchange. From that tiny seed had sprouted a worldwide empire of discount superstores—to use the overheated imagery of one business writer. Of the sixteen girls I was coaching at Bertha Palmer, four had mothers who worked at the super-store, and now I knew April Czernin’s father drove for them, too.

The South Side had been Bysen’s base and then became his hub, I’d learned from
Forbes
; he’d bought this warehouse from Ferenzi Tool and Die when they went bankrupt in 1973 and kept it as his Midwest distribution center even after he moved his headquarters out to Rolling Meadows.

William Bysen, known inevitably as Buffalo Bill, was eighty-three now, but he still came into work every day, still controlled everything from the wattage of the lightbulbs in the employee toilets to By-Smart’s contracts with major suppliers. His four sons were all active in management, his wife, May Irene, was a pillar of the community, active in charity and in her church. In fact, May Irene and Buffalo Bill were both evangelical Christians; every day at corporate headquarters began with a prayer session, twice a week a minister came in to preach, and the company supported a number of overseas missions.

Several of the girls on my team were also evangelical Christians. I was hoping the company might see this as a faith-based opportunity to serve South Chicago.

By the time I got to Aisle 267W, I was just praying that I’d never have to shop again in my life. The aisle emptied into a drafty corridor that ran the length of the building. At the far end I could see the silhouettes of smokers huddled in a wide doorway, desperate enough to brave the chill and rain.

A series of open doors dotted the corridor. I poked my head into the nearest, which turned out to be a canteen, its walls banked with vending machines. A dozen or so people were slumped at the scarred deal tables. Some were eating machine stew or cookies, but a number were asleep, their red smocks trailing on the grimy floor.

I backed out and started looking into the rooms lining the corridor. The first was a print room, with two large Lex-marks dumping out stacks of inventory. A fax machine in the corner was doing its part in the paperless society. As I stood mesmerized by the flow of paper, a parade of forklifts pulled up to collect output. When they trundled off, I blinked and followed them back into the corridor.

The next two doors opened onto tiny offices, where people were doing such energetic things with computers and binders of paper that they didn’t even look at me when I asked for Grobian, just shook their heads and kept typing. I noticed little video cameras mounted in the ceilings: maybe their paychecks were docked if the cameras caught them looking up from their work when they weren’t on break.

Five guys were waiting in the hall outside a closed door a little farther down the hall. Some were drinking out of cardboard canteen cups. Despite the pervasive cameras and the big sign ordering “No Smoking Anywhere, Anytime,” two were smoking surreptitiously, cupping the cigarettes in their curled fingers, tapping the ash into empty cups. They had the worn jeans and work boots of tired men who worked hard for not very much money. Most had on old bomber or warm-up jackets, whose decals advertised everything from Harley-Davidson to New Mary’s Wake-Up Lounge.

Grobian’s nameplate was on the door in front of them. I stopped and raised an eyebrow. “The great man at home?”

The Harley jacket laughed. “Great man? That’s about right, sis. Too great to sign our slips and get us on our way.”

“Because he thinks he’s on his way to Rolling Meadows.” One of the smokers coughed and spat into his cup.

New Mary’s Wake-Up Lounge grinned unpleasantly. “Maybe he is. Isn’t the bedsheet queen—what the fuck was that for, man?” Another smoker had kicked him in the shin and jerked his head in my direction.

“It’s okay, I’m not the gabby type, and I don’t work for the company, anyway,” I said. “I have an appointment with the big guy, and ordinarily I would just butt in on him, but since I’m here to ask a favor I’ll wait in line like a good kindergartner.”