Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

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.