Fire Sale

When practice finished, I took them all to Zambrano’s for pizza, even Betto and the baby, but I hustled them through the meal. It was already dark, and I wanted to get down to the underpass where Billy’s Miata had crashed before the streets were completely deserted. I dropped Julia and María Inés at home, with her brother and the baby, but didn’t take the time to see Rose, just sending up a message that Josie and Billy were still deeply hidden.

“I think they’re safe,” I said to Julia. “I think they’re safe because the Bysens are spending a lot of money looking for Billy; if anything bad had happened to him and Josie, they’d have found them by now. Your mom can call me on my cell phone if she wants to talk about it, but I want to look myself in one place I don’t think the detectives searched. Got that?”

“Yeah, okay…Do you think I can still play with the team?”

“You are definitely good enough to play with the team, but you’ve got to get yourself back in school before you can practice again. Can you do that between now and Monday?”

She nodded solemnly and got out of the car. It worried me that she left the baby carrier on the backseat for Betto to deal with, but I couldn’t add a parenting skills class to my current load; I just watched until he and the baby were safely up the walk and inside the house, then turned south, to the underpass where I’d found Billy’s Miata.

Carnifice might have searched this area for William, especially if my hunch was right that he was hot for whatever document Bron had used to threaten the company. Still, South Chicago was my briar patch. I refused to believe that Carnifice would think about it the way I did. The Bysen family was a job for them, not a complicated part of their roots.

The first part of the Skyway is built into an embankment that severs South Chicago -in fact, when it was built it put a lot of little shops and factories I’d grown up with out of business. But as it approaches the Indiana border, the highway rises up on stilts; homeless people build little shelters under them, but mostly commuters and locals use the road as a handy garbage bin. I pulled over to the verge, driving carefully-I didn’t want to puncture a tire down here-and left my lights on, pointing into the thicket of dead branches and discarded appliances.

The bracken showed fresh scarring from where the Miata had plowed into it. It had been three days now, and the area saw a lot of movement, people hiding in the undergrowth or sorting through the debris for salvage, but because of the cold the car tracks were still visible. I was no forensics expert, but it looked to me as though the car had been driven deliberately into the thicket, as if someone wanted to hide it-I couldn’t see any traces of swerving or other signs that the driver (was it Marcena? had it been Bron?) had lost control of the car.

I moved slowly, inspecting every inch of ground as I walked forward. When I got to the end of the broken branches, I got down on my knees-I’d put on old jeans after the basketball practice just for this search.

I was glad of my mittens, as I pushed the undergrowth aside and inspected the area for any trace of-anything. I found a small piece of the front fender, the paint still shiny, unlike the dull, rusted metal all around me. It didn’t mean anything, but I still stuck it into my parka pocket.

Overhead, the traffic was crawling. It was the height of the evening rush, and everyone was creeping out of town to their tidy suburban homes. They were also eating and drinking-which I knew because they tossed out their empty cans and wrappers, which floated down into the garbage underneath. I was almost hit by an empty beer bottle when I started to explore the area to the left of the car’s treadmarks.

I kept picking up stray pieces of paper, hoping that whatever document the Bysens were looking for might have fallen out of the car when it was being dismembered. I kept telling myself that this was futile, a sign of desperation, but I couldn’t stop. Most of what I saw were discarded advertisements, oriental rugs for five dollars, palm readings for ten, which I guess showed we need guarantees about the future more than we need our floors covered, but all kinds of stuff got tossed over the side of the Skyway-bills, letters, even bank statements.

I’d been at it for about an hour when I found the two books that had been in Billy’s trunk-Oscar Romero’s Violence of Love and the book that Aunt Jacqui said made her anorexic-Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I put them into my parka pocket. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but that seemed to be the net of what I was going to find. I looked disconsolately at the area I’d been searching. The daylight had gone completely, and my car headlights seemed to be getting dimmer as well. There was one last piece of paper near where I’d found the books. I tucked it into Rich Christians, and climbed back into my car on stiff legs.

I turned the car around to face north, but parked it while the engine warmed up again to look at my haul. I thumbed eagerly through Billy’s books, hoping that some mysterious document would drop out, his will, for instance, revised to leave all his holdings to the Mt. Ararat church, or a proclamation to By-Smart’s board of directors. Nothing emerged but Billy’s round schoolboy hand making notes in the margins of Archbishop Romero’s book. I squinted at his notes, but what I could make out in the dim light didn’t seem very promising.

The paper I’d found by the books looked like a child’s drawing. It was a crude sketch of a frog, done in Magic Marker, with a big black wart in the middle of its back, sitting on a dubious-looking log. I almost pitched it out the window, but the South Side was everyone’s dumping ground-I, at least, could put it out with my home papers for recycling.

The car was finally warm; I could take off my mittens, which were cumbersome for driving, and head north. I needed to stop at Mary A

It was seven-thirty. Overhead, the traffic was moving fast, but the streets around me were deserted again-anyone who crossed them to get home was long gone. My route took me near the corner where the Czernins lived, but I couldn’t see their bungalow. My heart ached for April, lying in bed with her bear, her daddy dead, her own heart doing something unknown and frightening inside her body.

My mother had died when I was only a year older, and it had been a terrible loss, one that still haunts me in difficult ways, but at least no one had killed Gabriella; she hadn’t died in a pit next to a foreign lover. And the father who stayed behind had adored her, and adored me-an easier journey than April was going to make, with her mother’s relentless anger scorching the house. I would have to talk to April’s teachers, see what could be done to get her academics up to a standard where she’d have a chance at college-if there were even a way she could afford college.

Sandra’s demand that I prove Bron had been on the job when he died was April’s only hope, either for her heart or her education, and I wasn’t optimistic. William had made it clear that the company would fight a comp claim to the bitterest possible limit. If I had Carnifice’s resources, maybe I could track down just where Bron had been at those odd times Grobian had quoted to me, ten-oh-something in Crown Point, Indiana, prove that he died on the job, but I didn’t even know where to look for his truck. For all I knew, it was in that pound over on 103rd Street, along with the Miata, or simply mingled with a lot of other By-Smart semis anywhere from South Chicago to South Carolina.

It made my head hurt, thinking about the number of things that needed to be done if I were going to figure anything out down here. And I still didn’t know where Billy and Josie could have gone. I’d wasted an hour in a landfill, and all I had to show for it was two religious books and a child’s drawing of a frog sitting on a-I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb.