Fire Sale

10 Unions? Not a Prayer!

“Heavenly Father, Your power fills us with awe, and yet You condescend to love us. Your love pours down on us constantly and as its proof, You sent us Your darling Son as a precious gift to bring us close to You.” Pastor Andrés’s public voice was deep and rumbly; with the mike overamplifying him, and the faint Hispanic accent, he was hard to understand. At first I strained to follow him, but now my attention wandered.

When Andrés first came into the meeting room with Billy the Kid, I’d been startled enough to wake up for a moment: the pastor was the man I’d bumped into yesterday morning at Fly the Flag-the one who wondered if I were drunk at nine in the morning. His church, Mt. Ararat Church of Holiness in Zion, was where Rose Dorrado and her children worshiped. I knew the ministers at these fundamentalist churches wielded tremendous authority in the lives of their congregations; maybe Rose had confided her fears about sabotage to Andrés. And maybe, in turn, Andrés had persuaded the plant owner to explain why he wouldn’t bring in the cops to investigate the sabotage.

It wasn’t possible to squeeze past all the people between me and the front of the room to talk to him before the service; I’d intercept him on his way out at the end. If the service ever did end. Every now and then, what seemed to be an approaching climax jerked me briefly awake, but the pastor’s deep voice and accent were a perfect lullaby, and I would drift off again.

“With Your Son, You show us the way and the truth and the light, with Him at our head we will move through all life’s obstacles to that glorious place where we will know no obstacles, no grief, where You will wipe away all our tears.”

Nearby, other heads were nodding, or eyes shifting to wristwatches, the way we used surreptitiously to peek at each other’s test papers in high school, all the time imagining no one could tell our eyes weren’t glued to our own desktops.

In the front row, Aunt Jacqui had her hands folded piously in prayer, but I caught a glimpse of her thumbs moving on some handheld device. Today, she was wearing a severe black dress that didn’t quite match the evangelical mood of the meeting, despite its color: it was cinched tightly to show off her slim waist, and the buttons down the front ended around her thighs, allowing me to see that the design on her panty hose went all the way up her legs.

Next to me Marcena was sleeping in earnest, her breath coming in quiet little puffs, but her head bobbed forward as if she were nodding in prayer-no doubt a skill she’d learned at her fancy girls’ school in England.

When we’d left Morrell’s condo at six-thirty, her face was gray and drawn; she’d slumped in the passenger seat, groaning. “I can’t believe I’m going to chapel at dawn after three hours’ sleep. This is like being back at Queen Margaret’s, trying to make the headmistress believe I hadn’t crept into hall after hours. Wake me when we’re ten minutes from By-Smart so I can put on my face.”

I knew how little sleep she’d had, because I knew what time she’d gotten in last night: three-fifteen. And I knew that because Mitch had a

“They’re your dogs,” Morrell said.

“She’s your friend.”

“Yeah, but she isn’t barking.”

“Only in the sense of barking mad, and, anyway, she provoked them,” I grumbled, but it was still me who stumbled down the hall to quiet them.

Marcena was in the kitchen, drinking another beer, and letting Mitch play tug-of-war with her gloves. Peppy was on the perimeter, dancing and snarling because she wasn’t included in the game. Marcena apologized for waking the house.

“Stop playing with Mitch so I can get them to lie down and shut up,” I snapped. “What kind of meeting went on this late?” I took the gloves away from Mitch, and forced both dogs to lie down and stay.

“Oh, we were inspecting community sites,” Marcena said, wiggling her eyebrows. “What time do we need to set out? It really takes almost an hour? If I’m not up by six, knock on the door, will you?”

“If I remember.” I shuffled back to bed, where Morrell was already sound asleep again. I rolled over, hard, against him, but he only grunted and put an arm around me without waking up.

I assumed from Marcena’s suggestive grin that site inspections meant she’d been out with Romeo Czernin in his big truck, having sex at the CID landfill golf course, or maybe the high school parking lot. What point was there in acting so cute about it? Because he was married, or because he was a blue-collar guy? It was as though she thought I was a prude whom this kind of teasing would both offend and titillate. Maybe because I’d told her the kids were talking about their affair, or whatever it should be called.

“Let it go,” I whispered to myself in the dark. “Relax and let it go.” After a while I managed to doze off again.

Morrell was still asleep when I got up at five-thirty to give the dogs a short run. When we got back from our dash to the lake, I opened the door to the spare room so Mitch and Peppy could wake Marcena while I showered. I put on the one business outfit I’d left at Morrell’s. It was a perfectly nice suit in an umber wool, but when Marcena appeared in a red-checked swing jacket I did look like a prude next to her.

There’s no easy way to get from Morrell’s place by the lake to the vast sprawl beyond O’Hare where By-Smart had its headquarters. My own eyes sandy with fatigue, I threaded my way along the side streets, which were already full, even at this hour. I had the radio on, keeping awake to Scarlatti and Copeland, mixed in with ads and dire warnings about traffic mishaps. Marcena slept through it all, through the radio, through the woman in the Explorer who almost creamed us as she pulled out of her driveway without looking, the man in the Beemer who ran the red light at Golf Road, and then gave me the finger for honking.

She even slept, or skillfully feigned sleep, when Rose Dorrado called me back around a quarter to seven.

“Rose! I owe you an apology. I’m sorry I suggested you could be involved in sabotaging the plant; that was wrong of me.”

“I don’t mind, you don’t need to mind.” She was mumbling, hard to hear over the traffic sounds. “I think-I think I worry for nothing about what is happening-a few accidents and I am imagining the worst.”

I was so startled I let my attention slip from the road. A loud honking from the car to my left brought me back in a hurry.

I pulled over to the curb. “What do you mean? Glue doesn’t fall accidentally into locks, and a sackful of rats doesn’t just drop into a ventilation system.”

“I can’t explain how these things happen, but I can’t worry about them no more, so thanks for your trouble, but you need to leave the factory alone.”

That sounded like a rehearsed script if ever I heard one, but she hung up before I could press her further. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to be late out here; I’d have to worry about Rose and Fly the Flag later.

I gave Marcena’s shoulder a tap. She groaned again, but sat up and began putting herself together, putting on makeup, including mascara, and fishing her trademark red silk scarf out of her bag to knot under her collar. By the time we turned onto By-Smart Corporate Way, she looked as elegant as ever. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Maybe mascara would further enhance the red in my eyes.

By-Smart’s headquarters had been designed along the utilitarian lines of one of their own megastores and appeared as big, a huge box that overwhelmed a minute park around it. Like so many corporate parks, this one looked tawdry. The prairie had been stripped from the rolling hills, covered with concrete, and then a tiny bit of grass Scotch-taped in as an afterthought. By-Smart’s landscaper also included a little pond as a reminder of the wetlands that used to lie out here. Beyond the wedge of brown grass, the parking lot seemed to stretch for miles, its gray surface fading into the bleak fall sky.