“How rotten of her. You’re fifteen, smart and savvy enough for boys to be spending the night in your own bedroom, or to be sleeping together-where-on Coach McFarlane’s pullout bed? You’re going to have to go home sooner or later. Let’s make it sooner.”
“But, Coach, it’s quiet here. There’s no baby. I don’t have my sister taking my stuff, or the boys sleeping under the dining room table. There’s no roaches in the kitchen-it’s so peaceful here. I don’t want to go back!” Her dark eyes blazed with passion, and a kind of longing. “And Coach McFarlane likes having me here, she said so. She makes me work on my studies, and I help look after her, I do stuff like I did for my grandma when she was sick, I don’t mind it.”
“That’s a separate matter,” I said, calming down-I’d been in that apartment on Escanaba too many times not to respond to her yearning for quiet. “Let’s sit down and figure out what to do about Billy’s problems.”
I pulled the chairs out from under Mary Ann’s old enamel table. Billy’s chin was still sticking out pugnaciously, but the fact that he sat down at my command meant he was ready to answer my questions.
“Billy, I just came from April’s house. While I was there, Freddy Pacheco broke in. He tore the place apart. At first, I thought he was looking for the drawing he’d made for Bron-” I pulled out the paper, now very worn, with a tear along one crease.
“You have that?” Billy cried out. “How did you get it?”
“It was near where your car was wrecked Monday night. What do you know about it?”
“My car was wrecked? How did it happen? Where was it?”
I eyed him narrowly. “At 100th and Ewing. Who was driving it? Marcena?”
“No, because they’d put her-” He clapped a hand over his mouth.
In the silence that followed, I could hear the kitchen clock ticking and a drip from the bathroom sink. I thought irrelevantly that I’d have to remember to tighten the faucet before I left.
“Who put her where, Billy?”
He didn’t speak, and I remembered Rose Dorrado, earlier tonight, telling Julia not to make telling the truth like a trip to the dentist. “All this decay will have to come out, Billy, before I can fix it and make it whole again. Start with your car. You gave it to Bron, right?”
He nodded. “I told Bron he could use it until I needed it again. I even wrote a slip out for him to carry, in case a cop or-or someone accused him of stealing it. But I wanted to go to the warehouse first and get my books, and a few things I’d left in the locker. I didn’t want to work for Grobian anymore, because he had insulted Josie, and he had insulted me by spying on her. That was before I saw he-well, anyway, I told Bron I’d give him the car when I finished all that.”
“You went to see Pat Grobian Sunday afternoon after church? He was at work, then?”
“No, but he lives down in Olympia Fields. I drove down after I talked to you. Pat was still in his underwear, watching football on TV, can you believe that? And he had the nerve to call Josie a-well, a name, I won’t repeat it. We had a fight, an argument, I mean; I don’t hit people. I was already worrying about stuff, and I told him I’d have to take some time off.”
“The stuff you were worrying about-you’d seen it in a fax from Nicaragua? That’s what your aunt Jacqui says.”
“She told you about it? When?” His eyes were wide with disbelief.
“I was out at your grandmother’s house last night. Jacqui didn’t say much, just that you’d misinterpreted something about the Matagalpa plant, but she-”
“She said that?” Billy was almost shouting in anger. “She told that lie right in front of my grandmother? Do you know anything about what’s going on down here?”
“Very little,” I said meekly. “I know Pastor Andrés glued shut Fly the Flag to harass Frank Zamar over using sweatshop labor, but that Zamar went ahead and used it anyway. I know that Freddy-”
“You don’t know about Matagalpa,” Billy cut me off. “I found out-I saw this one fax to Aunt Jacqui, actually, it was the day you came to the warehouse to ask about money for the basketball program. They make jeans for By-Smart in Matagalpa, see, our house brand, Red River, and Aunt Jacqui, she wanted to see how fast they could set up to mass-produce sheets and linens and, you know, all that line. So I saw all the wage and hour figures and it was shocking, and I talked to her about it. She spends, like, two or three thousand dollars on every outfit she wears, I know because Uncle Gary keeps yelling about it.
“When I saw that Nicaragua fax, I did the arithmetic. The workers at the Red River plant work forty-four hundred hours a year, and they get not even eight hundred dollars, a year, I mean. So they’d have to work fourteen thousand hours to pay for one of her dresses, only, of course, they couldn’t because they have to feed their children. I told her this, why can’t she pay them something decent?, and she laughed, that way she has, and said their needs were simpler than hers. Simpler! Because she’s depriving them!”
His face was red and he was panting. I could picture the scene, Billy flushed as he was now with righteous rage, Aunt Jacqui smiling maliciously as she always did when one of the Bysens was upset.
“So that’s why you wanted to stay away from your family?”
“Sort of.” He stirred the sugary sludge in his cup round and round. “I talked to them all, Grandpa, Grandma. Of course, Father is hopeless, but Grandpa, he just treated me like I was retarded, they all think I’m retarded, he said it would make sense to me when I knew the business better. So when Pastor Andrés went out to our headquarters, that day you were there, to lead the service, he tried to preach about it, and, well, you saw what happened then!”
Josie put a hand on his, with a sidelong look at me to see if I would try to stop her touching him. He patted her absently, but he was brooding over his family.
“You threatened to call the shareholders. What was that about?”
“Oh, that.” He hunched an impatient shoulder. “That’s so old now. I told my-my father, and Uncle Roger, I’d support a union bid in Nicaragua, that I’d go to the shareholders and tell them I was going to send money to the guys who the Red River manager is locking out in Matagalpa so they could afford to take their case to the World Court. Of course, that has Father and all my uncles freaked. I didn’t really plan on hurting the family, not then, but now, oh, Jesus, now-!”
He broke off, real anguish in his face and voice, and dropped his head in his hands. This time, it was I who leaned over and patted him consolingly.
“What happened? Something about Zamar?”
“Everything was about Zamar.” His hands muffled his voice. “They-Aunt Jacqui and Grobian, I mean-were threatening Zamar, see, threatening to destroy his plant, that was the business with the rats, because he was saying he’d have to break the contract. Pat, Pat Grobian, he and Father said no one could break a By-Smart contract. If Frank Zamar did, then everyone would think they could walk away if they didn’t like the terms. Everyone wants to do business with us because we’re so big, and then we make people agree to prices they can’t afford…”
He stopped.
“So?” I prodded.
“I’ve gotten pretty good at Spanish,” he said, looking up briefly. “I studied it in high school, but because of the warehouse, and worshiping at Mt. Ararat, I understand it really well. So this fax came in from the Matagalpa manager, in Spanish. He was sending Pat the name of one of the local jefes, chiefs, you know, who get bad jobs for illegals and pocket half their pay, and, you know-”
I nodded.
“So the guy in Matagalpa, he was saying they should send Frank Zamar to this one guy, this local jefe here in South Chicago, and he’d see Frank got a stream of Central American illegals desperate for work. And Pat Grobian kind of told Frank, do it or else.”