Fire Sale

6 Girls Will Be Girls

As nearly as I could figure it out, the fight Monday afternoon began over religion and spread to sex, although it might have been the other way around. When I reached the gym, Josie Dorrado and Sancia Valdéz, the center, were sitting on the bleachers with their Bibles. Sancia’s two babies were on the bench, along with a kid of ten or so-Sancia’s younger sister, who was babysitting today. April Czernin stood in front of them, bouncing a ball that some gym teacher had left on the floor. April was a Catholic, but Josie was her best friend; she usually hovered around while Josie did Bible study.

Celine Jackman came in a minute after me and cast a scornful look at her teammates. “You two be praying for a new baby in your families, or what?”

“At least we praying,” Sancia said. “All that Catholic mumbo jumbo ain’t going to save you none after you been hanging with the Pentas. The truth is in the Bible.” She thumped the book for emphasis.

Celine put her hands on her hips. “You think Catholic girls like me are too ignorant to know the Bible, because we go to mass, but you still hang out with April, and last I saw, she was in the same church as me, Saint Michael and All Angels.”

April bounced the ball hard and told Celine to shut up.

Celine went on unchecked. “It’s you good girls who read your Bibles every day, you the ones who know right from wrong, like you with your two babies. So me, I’m too damned to know stuff in the Bible, like do it say anything about adultery, for instance.”

“Ten Commandments,” Josie said. “And if you don’t know that, Celine, you are dumber than you’re trying to pretend.”

Celine swung her long auburn braid over her shoulder. “You learned that at Mount Ararat on Ninety-first, huh, Josie? You should take April with you some Sunday.”

I grabbed Celine by the shoulders and pointed her toward the locker room. “Drills start in four minutes. Hustle your heinie straight in there and change. Sancia, Josie, April, you start loosening your hamstrings, not your lips.”

I made sure Celine had left the gym floor before going into the equipment room to unlock the rest of the balls. When I started the warm-up a little later, I was shy only four players, a sign we were all getting to know each other: my first day, over half the team arrived late. But my rule was that you kept doing floor exercises for the number of minutes you’d missed, even when the rest of the team was running drills with balls. That brought most of the team in on time.

“Where’s that English lady, the one who’s writing us up?” Laetisha Vettel asked as the girls lay on the floor stretching their hamstrings.

“Ask April.” Celine snickered.

“Ask me,” I said at once, but April, who was bending over her left leg, had already sat up straight.

“Ask me what?” she demanded.

“Where the English lady be at,” Celine said. “Or you don’t know, ask your daddy.”

“Least I got a daddy to ask,” April fired back. “Ask your mama does she even know who your daddy is.”

I blew my whistle. “Only one question you two girls need to answer: how many push-ups will I be doing if I don’t shut up right now and start stretching.”

I spoke with enough menace in my tone to send the two back to pulling their toes toward their chins, left leg, hold eight, right leg, hold eight. I was tired, and not interested in thinking of empathic ways to reach the adolescent psyche. The ride from South Chicago to Morrell’s home in Evanston was about thirty miles, an hour on those rare days when the traffic gods were kind, ninety minutes when they more frequently weren’t. My own office and apartment lay somewhere near the middle. Keeping on top of my detective agency, running the dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor, doing a little caretaking for Coach McFarlane were all taking a toll on me.

I’d been handling everything okay until Marcena Love arrived; until then, Morrell’s place had been a haven where I could unwind at day’s end. Even though he was still weak, he was an alert and nurturing presence in my life. Now, though, I felt so jolted by Marcena’s presence there that going to see him had turned into the final tension of the day.

Morrell keeps open house in Chicago most of the time-in any given month, everyone from fellow journalists to refugees to artists passes through his spare room. Usually, I enjoy meeting his friends-I get a view of the larger world I don’t normally see-but last Friday I’d told him bluntly that I found Marcena Love hard to take.

“It’s only for another week or two,” he’d said. “I know you two rub each other the wrong way, but honestly, Vic, you shouldn’t worry about her. I’m in love with you. But Marcena and I have known each other twenty years, we’ve been in tight holes together, and when she’s in my city she stays with me.”

I’m too old to have the kind of fight where you give your lover an ultimatum and break up, but I was glad we’d postponed any decision on living together.

Marcena had stayed away on Saturday night, but returned the day after, sleek as a well-fed tabby, exuberant about her twenty-four hours with Romeo Czernin. She’d arrived at Morrell’s just as I was putting a bowl of pasta on the table, burbling about what she’d seen and learned on the South Side. When she exclaimed how super it was to drive such an enormous truck, Morrell asked how it compared with the time she managed to get a tank through Vukovar to Cerska in Bosnia.

“Oh, my God, what a time we had that night, didn’t we?” she laughed, turning to me. “It would have been right up your alley, Vic. We stayed long past our welcome and our driver had disappeared. We thought it might be our last night on Earth until we found one of Milosevic’s tanks, abandoned but still running-fortunately, since I don’t know how you turn one of those things on-and I somehow managed to drive the bloody thing all the way to the border.”

I smiled back at her-it was indeed the kind of thing I’d have done, with her enthusiasm, too. I felt that twinge of envy, country mouse with city mouse. My home adventures weren’t tame, exactly, but nothing I’d done compared to driving a tank through a war zone.

Morrell gave an almost invisible sigh of relief at seeing Marcena and me in tune for a change. “So how did the semi compare with the tank?”

“Oh, an eighteen-wheeler wasn’t nearly as exciting-no one was shooting at us-although Bron tells me it has happened. But it’s tricky to drive; he wouldn’t let me take it out of the parking lot, and, after I’d almost demolished some kind of hut, I had to agree he was right.”

Bron. That was his real name; I hadn’t been able to come up with it. I asked if the Czernins had put her up for the night; I was wondering how April Czernin’s hero worship of the English journalist would survive if she knew her father were sleeping with Marcena.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said airily.

“You spend the night in the semi’s cab?” I asked. “These modern trucks sometimes almost have little apartments built into them.”

She flashed a provocative smile. “As you guessed, Vic, as you guessed.”

“You think you have a story there?” Morrell interposed quickly.

“My God, yes.” She ran her fingers through her thick hair, exclaiming that Bron was the key to an authentic American experience. “I mean, everything comes together, not exactly through him, but around him, anyway: the squalor, the heartache of these girls imagining that their basketball may get them out of the neighborhood, the school itself, and then Bron Czernin’s story-truck driver trying to support a family on those wages. His wife works, too; she’s a clerk of some kind at By-Smart. My next step is his firm, By-Smart, I mean, the firm he drives for. One knows about them in a vague way, of course: they’ve been making European retailers shake in their boots since they launched their transatlantic offensive three years ago. But I didn’t realize the head office was right here in Chicago, or at least in one of the suburbs. Rolling-something. Fields, I think.”

“ Rolling Meadows,” I said.

“That’s right. Bron tells me old Mr. Bysen is incredibly pious, and that at headquarters the day starts with a prayer service. Can you imagine? It’s utterly Victorian. I’m dying to see it, so I’m trying to organize an interview up there.”

“Maybe I should come with you.” I explained my efforts to enlist the company as a sponsor for the team. “Billy the Kid might get us in to meet his grampa.”

She flashed her enthusiastic smile at me. “Oh, Vic, super if you can manage it.”

We’d ended the evening still in relative harmony, which was a mercy, but I still didn’t sleep well. I slipped out of Morrell’s place early this morning, while he was still asleep, so I could drive to my own home and give the dogs a long run before my day started: today would take me down to coach again at Bertha Palmer, and I had promised Josie Dorrado to talk to her mother after practice.

The dogs and I ran all the way down to Oak Street and back, about seven miles. All of us needed the workout, and I thought I was feeling a lot better until Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor, told me I was looking seedy.

“Thought with Morrell coming home, you’d perk up, doll, but you’re looking worse than ever. Don’t go tearing off to your office now without eating a proper breakfast.”

I assured him I was fine, truly fine, now that Morrell was home and mending well, that my current overload was temporary until I found a real coach for the girls at Bertha Palmer.

“And whatcha doing about that, doll? You got anyone lined up?”

“I’ve put out a few feelers,” I said defensively. Besides meeting with Patrick Grobian at By-Smart, I had talked to the women I play Saturday pickup games with and to someone I know who runs a volunteer program for girls at the park district. So far, I’d come up empty, but if Billy the Kid could pry some bucks loose from Grampa one of my contacts might become more enthusiastic.

I fled the apartment before Mr. Contreras got himself revved into a high enough gear to keep me for another hour, promising over my shoulder that I’d eat breakfast, really. After all, my family motto is never skip a meal. Right underneath the Warshawski coat of arms-a knife and fork crossed over a dinner plate.

Privately, I was affronted at being told I looked bad. When I got into my car, I studied my face in the rearview mirror. Seedy, indeed: I was merely interestingly haggard, my lack of sleep making my cheekbones jut out like an anorexic runway model’s. In lieu of eight hours in bed, all I needed was a good concealer and some foundation, although not when I was going to spend two hours with sixteen teenagers on a basketball court.

“Morrell thinks I’m beautiful,” I grumbled out loud, even if Marcena Love is there in front of him right now, suave and perfectly groomed, probably had her makeup on just so when she commandeered the tank and headed for the border. I snapped my seat belt in hard enough to pinch my thumb, and made a rough U-turn into traffic. When I get my turn to hijack a tank, I’ll put on fresh lipstick, too.

I stopped at a diner for scrambled eggs, stopped at a coffee bar for a double espresso, and reached my office by ten. I concentrated on SEC filings and checked arrest records around the country for a man one of my clients was looking to hire. For the first time in a week, I actually managed to stay focused on my real work, completing three projects and even sending out the invoices.

I ruined my better mood by trying to phone Morrell while I waited at a light on Eighty-seventh Street and only reaching his answering machine. He had probably gone to the botanic gardens in Glencoe with Marcena; they’d talked about it last night. I had no problem with that whatsoever. It was great that he was feeling well enough to be up and about. But the idea added to the ferocity with which I stomped on Celine and April at the start of practice.

The team kept quiet for about five minutes, barring the usual jostling and the mutterings that they couldn’t do it, the exercises were too hard, Coach McFarlane never made them do this.

Celine, who seemed primed for mischief today, broke the silence by asking if I knew Romeo and Juliet. She was standing on her left leg and pulled her right leg straight over her head by the heel. She had extraordinary flexibility; even when she was driving me to the brink of pounding her, she could transfix me by the fluid beauty of her movements.

“You mean, the civil war that makes two star-crossed lovers take their life?” I said cautiously, wondering where this was going. “Not by heart.”

Celine momentarily lost her balance. “Huh?”

“Shakespeare. It’s how he describes Romeo and Juliet.”

“Yeah, it’s like a play, Celine,” Laetisha Vettel said. “If you ever came to English class, you’d a heard about it. Shakespeare, he lived like a thousand years ago, and wrote Romeo and Juliet up in a play before there was a movie. Before they even knew how to make movies.”

Josie Dorrado repeated the line. “‘Star-crossed lovers.’ That means even the stars in heaven wouldn’t help them.”

To my astonishment, April kicked her warningly in the leg. Josie blushed and started touching her toes with a ferocious energy.

“That what ‘star-crossed lovers’ means?” Theresa Díaz said. “That’s me and Cleon, on account of my mama won’t let me see him after supper, even for a study break.”

“That’s because he in the Pentas,” Laetisha said. “Your mama is smarter than you, you listen to her. Get clear of the Pentas yourself, girl, you want to live to your next birthday.”

Celine pulled her left leg up, her long braid swaying. “You and Cleon should do like April’s daddy. I hear everyone do like Coach did on Thursday, call him Romeo. Romeo the Roamer, he got the English lady in his-”

April jumped her before she finished the sentence, but Celine had been ready for it-she swung her left leg like a weight, knocking April to the floor. Josie jumped in on April’s side, and Theresa Díaz hustled in to help Celine.

I grabbed Laetisha and Sancia as they were about to pitch in and marched them to the bench. “You sit there, you stay there.”

I ran to the equipment room and picked up a janitor’s bucket. It was full of nasty water, which suited me just fine: I rolled it out to the gym and poured it over the girls.

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.