Fire Sale (7 page)

The cold, foul water brought them up from the floor, sputtering and swearing. I seized Celine and April by their long braids and pulled hard. Celine started to throw another punch. I let go of the braids and grabbed Celine’s arm, bringing it up behind her back while pinning her right shoulder against me. I got my right arm under her chin and held her close while I gripped April’s hair again with my left. Celine cried out, but the sound was covered by the larger yells from Sancia’s babies and her sister, who were all screaming.

“Celine, April, I am going to let go of you, but if either of you makes a move I am going to knock you out. Got it?” I moved my forearm tighter under Celine’s chin to let her know how serious I was and tugged sharply on April’s braid.

The two stood mutely for a long moment, but finally both gave a sullen assent. I let them go and sent them over to the bench.

“Sancia, tell your sister to take your children into the hall. We’re going to talk as a team and I won’t have the three of them howling during our meeting. All of you girls, sit down. Now. Move it.”

They scuttled to the bench, frightened by my show of strength. I didn’t want to manage through fear. While they settled themselves I stood quietly, trying to get centered, to focus on them, not on my own frustrations. They watched me wide-eyed, for once completely silent.

Finally, I said, “You all know that if I report this fight to your principal, Theresa, Josie, Celine, and April will be suspended not just from the team but from school. All four were fighting, and”—I held up a hand as Celine started to protest that April jumped her—“I do not give a rat’s tail-bone about who started it. We’re not here to talk about blame, but about responsibility. Do any of you want to play basketball? Or do you want me to tell the school that I’m too busy to coach a bunch of girls who only want to fight?”

That started an uproar; they wanted to play; if Celine and April were going to fight, they shouldn’t be on the team. Someone else pointed out that if Celine and April were thrown out, they wouldn’t have much of a team.

“Then they just be selfish,” another girl shouted. “If all they care about is their head games, they should stay out of the gym.”

One of the girls who usually never spoke up suggested I punish the two for fighting, but not take them off the team. That idea brought a wide murmur of support.

“And what do you suggest by way of punishment?” I asked.

There was a lot of bickering and snickering over possible penalties, until Laetisha said the two should wash the floor. “We can’t play today until that floor get mopped up, anyway. They clean the floor today, then we have practice tomorrow.”

“What’s been going on here?”

I turned, as startled as my team to see an adult standing behind me. It was Natalie Gault, the assistant principal who couldn’t remember my name.

“Oh, Ms. Gault, these two—”

“Delia, did I ask you to report?” I cut off the tattletale. “The team has had a little friction, but we’ve sorted it out. They’re going home now, except for four who are staying to wash the floor. Which, although there is a mop and a bucket in the equipment room, and a janitor drawing a paycheck, seems to have been building up dirt since my graduation back in the Stone Age. April, Celine, Josie, and Theresa here are going to build team skills by cleaning off the grime. We’d like to use the gym tomorrow for a makeup practice.”

Ms. Gault measured me with the same look the principal’s staff used to give me when I was a student all those years back. I felt myself wilting as I used to back then; it was all I could do to keep my glib patter going to the end.

Gault waited long enough to let me know she knew I was covering up a serious problem—which the blood trickling down Celine’s leg and on April’s face testified to, anyway—but finally said she would sort things out with the boys’ coach: if we were going to clean the gym, we should have the right to use it first. She said she’d get the janitor to bring in additional mops and a new box of cleaning solution.

Building teamwork through scrubbing floors turned out to be a successful exercise: by the end of the afternoon, the four malefactors were united in their anger against me. It was after six when I finally let them go. Their uniforms were soaked and they were limp with fatigue, but the floor gleamed as it hadn’t since—well, a day twenty-seven years ago when my own teammates and I had scrubbed it. After a far worse episode than a mere gang fight. It wasn’t an episode in my life I liked to dwell on, and even now—even now I wouldn’t think about it.

I followed them into the locker room while they changed. Mold made little furry patches along the showers and the lockers, some of the toilet seats were missing, some of the toilets were filled with used napkins and other bloody detritus. Maybe I could get Ms. Gault to pressure the janitor into scrubbing this now that the team had cleaned the gym. I held my nose and called to Josie that I would wait for her in the equipment room.

7

Close Quarters

J
osie lived with her mother—and her older sister and her sister’s baby, and her two young brothers—in an old building on Escanaba. As we drove over, Josie implored me not to tell her mother she’d been punished. “Ma, she thinks I should go to college and all, and if she knows I been in trouble over basketball maybe she’ll say I can’t play no more.”

“Do you want to go to college, Josie?”

I pulled up behind a late-model pickup parked outside her building. Four speakers stood in the bed, with the volume cranked so high that the truck itself was vibrating. I had to lean over to hear Josie’s response.

“I guess I want to go. Like, I don’t want to spend my life working as hard as Ma does, and if I go to college maybe I can be a teacher or coach or something.” She picked at a loose cuticle, staring at her knees, then burst out, “I don’t know what college is, what it’s like, I mean. Like, would they be all stuck up, not liking me because I’m Latina, you know, and growing up down here. I met some rich kids at church, and it’s, like, their families don’t want them to know me, on account of where I live. So I’m worrying college would be like that.”

I remembered the church exchange program that Billy the Kid had mentioned. His choir had been singing with Josie’s Pentecostal church choir. I could well imagine families as rich as the Bysens not wanting their children getting too friendly with girls from South Chicago.

“I grew up down here, Josie,” I said. “My mother was a poor immigrant, but I still went to college up at the University of Chicago. Of course, there were morons there who thought they were better than me because they grew up with a lot of money and I didn’t. But most of the people I met, students and professors, all they cared about was what I was like as a person. If you want to go to college, though, you’re going to have to work hard on your studies as well as your basketball. You know that, right?”

She hunched a shoulder and nodded, but the confidence was over; she undid her seat belt and got out of the car. As I followed her up the walk to the front door, I saw five youths lounging around the truck, smoking reefer. One of them was the guy who sat morosely in the bleachers with his and Sancia’s children during practice. The other four I hadn’t seen before, but Josie clearly knew them. They called out to her, something taunting that I couldn’t hear over the booming speakers.

Josie yelled back, “You better hope Pastor Andrés don’t come round—he totally fix that truck for you like he did before.”

The youths shouted something else at her. When it looked as though she was going to stay to fight, I pushed her up the front walk. The noise followed us up the stairs to the second floor; even though the Dorrados lived in the back of the building, I could still feel the bass rocketing inside my stomach as Josie unlocked her front door.

The door led directly into a living room. A girl was sitting on the couch, dressed only in a baby-doll T-shirt and underpants. She was watching television with a ferocious intensity, her hand moving from an open chip bag in her lap to her mouth. An infant lay next to her on the plastic-coated cushion, staring vacantly at the ceiling. The only decorations in the room were a large, plain cross on one wall and a picture of Jesus blessing some children.

“Julia! Coach is here to see Ma. Put some clothes on,” Josie cried. “What you thinking, sitting around naked in the middle of the afternoon?”

When her sister didn’t move, Josie walked over and yanked the potato chip bag from her lap. “Get up. Get out of this dreamworld and into the daylight. Is Ma home?”

Julia hunched over, so that her face was only a yard from the screen, where a woman in red was leaving a hospital room; a man accosted her. The conversation, in Spanish, had something to do with the woman in the room behind them.

Josie stood between the set and her sister. “You can see
Mujer
again tomorrow, and the day after and the day after that. Now, go put on your clothes. Is Ma home?”

Julia got sullenly to her feet. “She’s in the kitchen. Mixing María Inés’s formula. Take María Inés out with you while I put on my jeans.”

“I gotta meet April. We have a science project together, so don’t expect me to stay home looking after your own baby,” Josie warned, scooping up the infant. “Sorry, Coach,” she added over her shoulder to me. “Julia lives inside that telenovela. She even named the baby for one of the people in it.”

I followed her through a doorway into a room that doubled as a dining and bedroom: bed linens were folded neatly at one end of an old wood table; plates and silver were stacked at the other. Two air mattresses lay under the table; next to them, a box held Power Rangers and other action toys that must have belonged to Josie’s brothers.

Julia shoved her way past Josie into a small room on our left. Twin beds were neatly made. The linens were startling, bright replicas of the Stars-and-Stripes. I hadn’t realized patriotism was so important to the Dorrados.

A rope slung above the two twin beds was festooned with baby clothes. On the wall above one bed, I glimpsed a poster for the University of Illinois women’s basketball team: Josie’s side of the room. Like most of the girls on the team, the U. of I. women were her heroines, because that’s where Coach McFarlane had gone to school. Despite the clutter in the cramped quarters, everything was neatly organized.

We passed on to the kitchen, a room just big enough for one person to stand in easily. Even back here, the thud from the giant speakers outside still carried faintly.

Josie’s mother was warming a bottle in a pan of hot water. When Josie explained who I was, her mother wiped her hands on her baggy black pants and apologized repeatedly for not being in the living room to greet me. She was short, with bright red hair, so unlike her tall, skinny daughters that I blinked at her rudely.

When I shook hands and called her “Ms. Dorrado,” she said, “No, no, my name is Rose. Josie, she didn’t say you was coming over today,” she explained.

Josie ignored the implied criticism and handed the baby to her mother. “I ain’t staying around to babysit. April and me, we had to stay late at practice, and now we need to work on our science project.”

“Science project?” Rose Dorrado repeated. “You know I don’t want you doing anything like cutting up frogs.”

“No, Ma, we ain’t doing nothing like that. It’s on public health, like, how do you keep from catching the flu in school. We have to set up the study, uh, pamters.” She cast a cautious look at me.

“Parameters,” I corrected.

“Yeah, we’re gonna do that.”

“You get back here by nine o’clock,” her mother warned. “You don’t and you know I’m sending your brother to look for you.”

“But, Ma, we’re late starting on account of Coach kept us late,” Josie protested.

“Then you work that much harder,” her mother said firmly. “And what about your supper? You can’t ask Mrs. Czernin to feed you.”

“April brought an extra pizza home with her Thursday, when Mr. Czernin took us out with the lady reporter. She said she saved that for her and me to eat tonight.” She didn’t wait for further reaction but bolted back through the apartment. We heard an extra jolt on top of the bass as Josie slammed the door.

“Who is this lady reporter?” her mother asked, testing some formula on her wrist. “Josie said something about her on Thursday, but I didn’t follow it.”

I explained who Marcena Love was, and what she was doing with the team.

“Josie’s a good girl, she helps me a lot, like with little María Inés, she should have a treat now and then,” her mother sighed. “She doing okay with the basketball team? You think maybe basketball can get her a scholarship for college? She needs an education. I won’t have her end up like her sister…” her voice trailed away, and she patted the baby reassuringly, as if trying to say she wasn’t blaming it for her worries.

“Josie works hard and she looks good on the court,” I said, not adding that the odds of making a college team from a program like Bertha Palmer’s were pretty abysmal. “She said you want to talk to me about a problem of some kind?”

“Please, let me give you something to drink; then we can talk more easily.”

Given a choice of instant coffee or orange Kool-Aid I started to refuse anything, but remembered in the nick of time the important hospitality rituals in South Chicago. Romeo Czernin was right: I had been away from the ’hood too long if I was going to turn up my nose at instant coffee. Not that my mother ever served it—she’d do without other things before giving up her Italian coffee, bought at a market on Taylor Street—but instant was certainly a staple on Houston Street when I was growing up.

Baby propped on her shoulder, Rose Dorrado poured some of the water she’d been boiling to heat the bottle into two plastic mugs. I carried those into the living room, where Julia, in jeans, had reestablished herself in front of her telenovela. Josie’s two young brothers had come home, too, and were fighting their sister over the channel she was tuned to, but their mother told them if they wanted to watch soccer they had to mind the baby. The boys quickly fled back down to the street.

I sipped the thin, bitter coffee while Rose fretted out loud about the future of her boys without a father; her brother tried to help out, playing with them on Sundays, but he had his own family to look after, too.

I looked at my watch and tried to push Rose Dorrado to the point. The story, when it came out, wasn’t the tale of personal violence I’d been imagining. Rose worked for Fly the Flag, a little company on Eighty-eighth Street that made banners and flags.

“You know, your church, your school, they want a big banner for parades or to hang in the gym, that’s what we do. And we iron them if you need that done. Like, you keep it rolled up all year and you want it for your graduation march, only our shop has the machines big enough to press one of those banners. I been there nine years. I started even before my husband left me with all these children, and now I’m like a supervisor, although, of course, I still sew, too.”

I nodded politely and congratulated her, but she brushed that aside and went on with her tale. Although Fly the Flag made American flags, those had just been a sideline to their main business until September 11. They’d always produced the outsize flags that schools and other institutions liked to spread across an upper balcony or wall, but before September 11 such enormous flags had had a limited market.

“After the Trade Center went down, there was a very big demand for them, you understand, everyone wanted a flag for their business, even some rich apartment buildings wanted to hang them from the roofs, and suddenly we had a lot of orders, almost too much, we couldn’t even keep up with it. Everything we do is by hand, you know, for this kind of banner, but for the flags we use machines, and so we even had to buy a second machine.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “South Chicago needs more business success stories.”

“We do need these businesses. I need this job: I got four children to feed, plus now Julia’s baby. If this business don’t stay in business, I don’t know what I can do.”

And now she came to the crux of the matter. Since the summer, work had fallen off. Fly the Flag was still running two shifts, but Mr. Zamar had laid off eleven people. Josie’s mom had a lot of seniority but she was afraid for the future.

“It sounds very worrying,” I agreed, “but I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”

She laughed nervously. “Probably it’s all my imagination. I worry too much because of having so many children to feed. I make good money at the plant, thirteen dollars an hour. If they close, if they go to Nicaragua or China, like some people think, or if Mr. Zamar—if some accident happens to the building—where else can I work? Only at By-Smart, and there you start at seven dollars. Who can feed six people on seven dollars an hour? And the rent. And we’re still paying for María Inés, for her birth, I mean. The hospital, they charge so much interest, and then she needs her shots, all the children, they all need shoes…” Her voice trailed off into a sigh.

All during Rose Dorrado’s rambling remarks, Julia continued to watch the television as if her whole life depended on it, but the tension in her thin shoulders showed she was acutely aware of her mother’s words. I drank my coffee down to the last undissolved crystal: I couldn’t waste anything here.

“So what’s happening at the plant?” I tried to bring her back to her problem.

“Probably it’s nothing,” she said. “Maybe it’s nothing; Josie kept saying not to bother you with it.”

When I pressed her harder, though, she finally blurted out that last month, when she arrived at work—and she always got there early, always anxious that she be thought a good employee—if there were going to be more layoffs she couldn’t let anyone say she had a bad attitude—anyway, she arrived to find she couldn’t get her key in the lock. Someone had filled the keyholes with Krazy Glue, and they lost a whole day’s work while they waited for a locksmith to come and drill them out. Then another time she opened the factory and found it full of a really bad smell, which turned out to be dead rats in the heating ducts.

“Because I’m there early I got all the windows open, and we could still do some work, it wasn’t too bad, but you can imagine! We were lucky the weather was not so bad—in November, you know, it could be a blizzard, or rain or something.”

“What does Mr. Zamar say?”

She bent over the baby. “Nothing. He tells me accidents happen at plants all the time.”

“Where was he when the locks were glued shut?”

“What do you mean?” Rose asked.

“I mean, wasn’t it surprising that you discovered they were glued shut? Why wasn’t he there?”

“He don’t come in early because he stays late, until seven or eight at night, so he don’t come in usually till eight-thirty in the morning, sometimes even nine.”

“So he could have glued the doors shut himself when he left the night before,” I said bluntly.

She looked up startled. “Why would he do that?”

“To force the plant out of business in a way that let him collect the insurance.”