Fire Sale

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 pi

“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

Josie 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.”