Fire Sale

In the audience, everyone had woken up and was sitting straighter in the uncomfortable chairs. A buzz went through the room, like wind through prairie grasses. Marcena, who’d jerked awake at the commotion, nudged me and demanded to know what was going on.

I shrugged in incomprehension, watching the man who’d retrieved Bysen’s stick: he was having an angry conversation with Billy the Kid. Pastor Andrés stood with his arms crossed, looking nervous but belligerent. Billy, scarlet-faced, said something that made the older man fling his arms up in exasperation. He turned his back on Billy and told the rest of us that the service had been going on longer than usual.

“We all have meetings and other important projects to attend to, so let’s end by bowing our heads for a minute, and asking God’s blessing on us as we try to face the many challenges we encounter. As Pastor Andrés reminds us, we are all only stewards of God’s great gifts, we all carry heavy burdens, we all can use divine help on every step of our journey. Let us pray.”

I bowed my head dutifully with the rest of the room, but glanced at Aunt Jacqui from under my eyelashes. Her head was lowered, her hands were still, but she was smiling in a secretive, gloating way. Because she wanted Billy to be on the hot seat with his grandfather? Or because she enjoyed turmoil for its own sake?

We sat silently for about twenty seconds, until the gray-haired man a

“Who was that?” I asked the woman on my left, who was checking her cell phone as she got up to leave.

“Mr. Bysen.” She was so astonished I didn’t know that she sat back down.

“Not him. The man who finished the service just now, the one arguing with Billy the-with young Billy Bysen.”

“Oh-that’s young Mr. William. Billy’s father. I guess he wasn’t too pleased with the minister Billy brought up from the South Side. I see you’re a visitor-are you one of our suppliers?”

I smiled and shook my head. “Just an acquaintance of young Billy from South Chicago. He invited me here today. Why was Mr. Bysen so upset by Pastor Andrés’s remarks?”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Are you a journalist?”

“Nope. I coach basketball at a high school on the South Side.”

Marcena was leaning across me to listen in on the conversation, her nifty little fountain-pen recorder in her hand; at the journalism question, she gave a wolfish smile and said, “I’m just a visitor from England, so the whole thing was confusing to me. And I had trouble understanding the pastor’s accent.”

The woman nodded condescendingly. “You probably don’t get too many undocumented Mexicans in England, but we see a lot of them here. Anyone could have told young Billy that his grandfather wouldn’t enjoy hearing that kind of message, even if the pastor had delivered it in plain English.”

“Is he Mexican?” I asked. “I wasn’t sure from the accent.”

Marcena kicked my shin, meaning, they’re giving us information, don’t get their backs up.

Our informant gave a meaningless laugh. “ Mexico, El Salvador, it’s all the same thing; they all come to this country thinking they have a right to a free lunch.”

A man in front of us turned around. “Oh, Buffalo Bill will get that nonsense out of Billy’s system fast enough. It’s why he sent the Kid down to South Chicago.”

“But what nonsense?” Marcena looked and sounded hopelessly ignorant; she was almost batting her eyelashes. What a pro.

“Didn’t you hear him talking about workers and the fruits of their labors?” the man said. “Sounded a lot like union organizing, and we won’t stand for that at By-Smart. Billy knows that as well as the rest of us.”

I looked to the front of the room, where Andrés was still talking to Billy. With his short, square body, he did look more like a construction worker than a minister. I suppose he could have been a union organizer: a lot of the little churches on the South Side can’t support a pastor, and the staff have to work regular jobs during the week.

But would Billy have really tried to bring an organizer into Buffalo Bill’s prayer service? The impression I’d gotten last Thursday had been that Billy loved his grandfather, that he thought only the best of him.

Billy clearly also was attached to Andrés; as the room cleared, he’d stayed next to Andrés, and his posture suggested embarrassment and apology. As I watched, the pastor put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and the two of them made their way out.

I suddenly remembered my own mission with Andrés. Calling out that I’d be back in a minute, I threaded my way through the chairs and sprinted after them, but by the time I got to the far exit they had disappeared into the maze. I ran down the hall, checking different turns, but I’d lost them.

When I got back to the meeting room, a couple of janitors were folding up the chairs, stacking them on pallets along the wall. When they’d finished with that, they opened a door and began pulling out exercise mats. A woman in leotard and tights carried in a large boom box; Aunt Jacqui, who’d disappeared when I was trying to find Andrés, came back into the room in her own exercise gear and began doing stretches that emphasized the smooth curve of her buttocks.

The man who’d told us By-Smart wouldn’t allow unions followed my amazed gaze, his own resting on Jacqui’s rear end as she bent to the floor. “Aerobics meet here next. If you and your friend want to work out, you’d be welcome to stay.”

“So By-Smart does it all,” Marcena laughed. “Prayers, push-ups, whatever employees need. How about physical sustenance? Can I get breakfast? I’m famished.”

The man put his hand in the small of her back. “Come to the cafeteria with me. We all get a little hungry on church mornings.”

As we followed our guide back through the maze, we could hear the boom box begin an insistent beat.

11 Home on the Range

“But, Grandpa, I wasn’t trying-”

“In front of the entire workforce. I never thought you would have so little respect. Your sister, yes, but you, William, you I thought appreciated what I’ve spent my life building up here. I won’t have it torn down by some welfare cheat who doesn’t have the backbone to support himself and his family, so he needs to steal from me and mine.”

“Grandpa, he’s not a welfare-”

“I understand how it happened: like everyone else in the world, he saw how good-natured you are and took advantage of it. If that’s what goes on at that church, that Mount Ararat, it should change its name to Mount Error-rat, and you, my boy, should stay as far away from them as possible.”

“But, Grandpa, it really isn’t like that. It’s about the community-”

I was in the antechamber to Bysen’s office, the room where the secretaries guarded the great man’s gate. One of the i

The big desk in the middle of the room was empty and I was heading toward the sound of battle when someone called to me from the corner. It was a thin, colorless woman at a small metal desk, doing things on a computer, demanding my name and business in the pinched nasal of the city’s old South Side. When I said that Billy had arranged a meeting for me with his grandfather, she flicked a nervous glance from the i

“I don’t see you in the book, miss, for having an appointment with Mr. Bysen.”

“Billy probably thought he could take me directly to his grandfather after the service.” I smiled easily: I’m not threatening, I’m a team player.

“Just a second.” She answered the phone again, putting her hand over the mouthpiece to speak to me. “You’ll have to talk to Mildred; I can’t authorize you to see Mr. Bysen without her say-so. You can sit down; she’ll be back in a minute.”