Detente at the Flying Horse
Roy had a job changing tires and pumping gas two days a week after school at the Flying Horse service station on the corner of Peterson and Western. This was during the winter when he was sixteen. The three other weekday afternoons and also on Saturdays he worked at the Red Hot Ranch, a hot dog and hamburger joint. Roy had taken the gas station job in addition to his long-standing employment at the Ranch because his mother had had her hours reduced as a receptionist at Winnemac Hospital. His sister had just begun grammar school and they needed the money. Roy knew that his mother was considering getting married again—for what would be the fourth time—as a way to support them, a move he wanted desperately to avert or, at the least, delay. None of his mother’s marriages had been successful, as even she would admit, other than two of them having produced Roy and his little sister. They were her treasures, she assured them; their existence had made her otherwise unfortunate forays into matrimony worthwhile.
Domingo and Damaso Parlanchín, two Puerto Rican brothers, owned the Flying Horse. They were good mechanics, originally from San Juan, who had worked for other people for fifteen years and saved their money so that they could buy their own station. They were short, chubby, good-humored men in their forties, constantly chattering to each other in rapid Spanish. The Parlanchín brothers paid Roy a dollar an hour and fifty cents for each tire he changed, half of what it cost the customer. Damaso could patch a flat faster than Roy could get it off the car and back on again, and do it without missing a beat in the running conversation with his brother. Domingo was the better mechanic of the two, the more analytically adept. Damaso was superior at handling the customers, able to convince them they needed an oil change or an upgrade of their tires.
It was no fun changing tires in January in Chicago. The temperature often fell well below zero degrees Fahrenheit and icy winds off the lake scorched Roy’s perpetually scraped knuckles and cut fingers. Prying loose frozen lug nuts was Roy’s greatest difficulty until Domingo showed him how to use an acetylene torch to heat the bolts before attempting to turn them with a tire iron. “Cuidado con la lanzallamas,” Domingo told Roy.
One snowy afternoon about a quarter to four, just before dark, a black and white Buick Century ka-bumped into the station on its rims and stopped. All four tires were flat. Roy could see that they were studded with nails. Two burly men in dark blue overcoats and Homburg hats sat in the front seat. They did not get out, so Roy went over to the driver’s side window and nodded at him. The man rolled down the window. He was about forty-five years old, had a three-day beard and a four inch-long scar across the left side of his lips. The man in the passenger seat looked just like the driver, except for the scar.
“How fast fix?” asked the driver.
“It looks like you need four new tires, sir,” said Roy.
“Not possible fix?”
“I’ll ask my boss, but I doubt it. You’re riding on your rims. We’ll have to check if they’re bent.”
“Go ask boss.”
Roy trudged through the thick, wet snow to the garage, where Domingo and Damaso were working over a transmission on a 1956 Ford Apache pick-up.
“There’s a guy here who needs four tires replaced. Looks like he drove over a bed of nails.”
“Tell him he can to leave it,” said Damaso.
“And coming back at siete horas,” Domingo added.
The wind ripped into Roy’s face when he removed his muffler from around his mouth to convey this information to the driver of the Buick. Roy’s eyes stung; they watered as he waited for the man to respond.
“Cannot they fix now?”
“No,” said Roy, “we’re pretty backed up.”
The driver spoke to his companion in a language Roy could not readily identify. The wind whined and shrieked, making it difficult for Roy to hear anything else.
“We wait,” the driver told him. “Can fix sooner.”
Roy shook his head. “Maybe you’d better try another station. But you’ll damage your wheels.”
The man produced a fifty dollar bill and shoved it at Roy. He held it between two black leather-gloved fingers. “This extra. Okey dokey?” he said. “You give boss.”
Roy accepted the bill, marched back to the garage and handed it to Domingo.
“The guy says this is on top of the cost of replacing the tires, if we can do it now.”
“Tell him drive in muy despacio,” said Domingo.
After the man had done this, following Damaso’s signals to pull up into the other bay and onto the lift, Damaso told the men to get out of the car.
“We stay in,” said the driver.
“No es posible raise car with you inside. Insurance no good if you fall.”
The driver held out another fifty. Damaso took it. He nodded to Domingo, who activated the lift.
“Lock doors!” Damaso shouted up at the men. “And no move!”
Roy pumped gas for several customers while the Parlanchín brothers worked on the Buick. The sky had gone dark and snow kept falling. Before the Buick pulled out of the station on four new Bridgestones, it stopped next to Roy. The driver rolled down his window.
“Yes, sir?” said Roy. “Is everything okay?”
“All okey dokey,” replied the driver. “You young boy, work hard bad weather. How much Spanish men pay you?”
“Buck an hour and two bits a flat.”
“Slave wage,” said the man. “Now 1962. Take.”
The driver extended toward Roy his black gloved left hand between two fingers of which protruded another fifty-dollar bill. Roy took the money and stuffed it into one of the snap pockets of his brown leather jacket.
“Thank you,” he said. “Where are you guys from?”
“You know Iron Curtain?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“We are from behind.”
After the Buick had gone, Roy went into the garage.
“Strange hombres, si?” said Domingo.
“The driver gave me a tip,” Roy told him. “I don’t know why, though.”
“He give us a hundred extra,” said Damaso.
“The Buick had diplomatic license plates,” Roy said. “They’re Russians, I think.”
“Must be they are trying to be more friendly,” Domingo suggested, “since they been forced to take missiles out of Cuba.”
When Roy was eleven, he remembered, his mother had had a boyfriend from Havana, a conga drummer named Raul Repilado. She had met him in Coral Gables, Florida, when she and her third husband, Sid Wade, the father of Roy’s sister, were vacationing at the Biltmore. Raul Repilado’s band, the Orquesta Furioso, was appearing at the hotel. Raul had come to Chicago a couple of times to see Roy’s mother, the last time during the winter. Before leaving, the conguero declared that he would never come back to such a terribly cold place, even for a beautiful woman. Roy couldn’t wait to tell his mother that he’d made an extra fifty bucks that day.
Shattered
Roy was walking to his after school job at the Red Hot Ranch when a girl about his age, whom he did not know, came up to him and said, “Isn’t it terrible? I just want to scream.”
Roy looked at her face. The girl was crying but she was still pretty. She had blonde hair and gray eyes. At closer inspection, Roy realized that the girl was older than he’d first thought; she was about eighteen or nineteen.
“Isn’t what terrible?” he asked.
“You didn’t hear?”
“I don’t know,” said Roy. “Hear what?”
“The president’s been shot. He’s dead.”
Fresh tears shot out of the girl’s eyes and poured down her cheeks.
“Can you hold me?” she asked him. “I need to be held, just for a few seconds.”
Even though he was two or three years younger than the girl, Roy was at least
two inches taller. He put his arms around her. She sank her head into his chest and continued sobbing.
“I’m shattered,” she said. “I never imagined anything so terrible could happen.”
“Do they know who shot him?”
The girl moved her head side to side without taking it off of Roy’s chest.
“A woman shouted it from the window of a bus.”
“Maybe the woman was crazy,” Roy said. “Maybe it didn’t happen at all.”
“No, it happened. I’ve been walking for blocks and blocks and other people said it, too.”
The girl remained in Roy’s embrace for about a minute before she pulled away and wiped her face with the end of her scarf. It was a windy, cold day; the sky was overcast. Roy could feel snow in the air.
“Thank you,” the girl said. Her gray eyes were bloodshot. “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Later that night, after Roy had gotten home from work and watched the news on television, he thought about what the girl had said, that the assassination of the president was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, even though she was not the person who had been murdered.
When things go wrong, Roy decided, people are shocked by the discovery of their own lack of control over events. Perhaps now the girl would understand just how fragile the appearance of order in the world really was. All Roy wanted to think about was how pretty she was and how good it felt to hold her.
A Day’s Worth of Beauty
The most beautiful girl I ever saw was Princessa Paris, when she was seventeen and a half years old. I was almost seventeen when I met her. An older guy I knew from the neighborhood, Gus Argo, introduced me to Princessa—actually, she introduced herself, but Gus got me there—because he had a crush on her older sister, Turquoise, who was twenty-two. This was February of 1963, in Chicago. The street and sidewalks were coated with ice, a crust of hard, two day-old snow covered the lawns. Princessa attended a different high school than I did, but I had heard of the Paris sisters; their beauty was legendary on the Northwest side of the city.
Argo picked me up while I was walking home from the Red Hot Ranch, a diner I worked at four days a week, three afternoons after school and Saturdays. It was about eight o’clock when Gus spotted me hiking on Western Avenue. He was twenty-one and had worked at Allied Radio on Western for three years, ever since he’d graduated from high school. Argo had been a pretty good left-handed pitcher, I’d played ball with and against him a few times; he was a tough kid, and he had once backed me up in a fight. A gray and black Dodge Lancer pulled over to the curb and honked. I saw that the driver was Gus Argo, and I got in.
“Hey, Roy, where you headed?”
“Thanks, Gus, it’s freezing. To my house, I guess. I just got off work.”
“Yeah, me, too, but I got to make a delivery first, drop off a hi-fi. Want to ride over with me? Won’t take long.”
“Sure.”
“Your old lady got dinner waitin’?”
“No, she’s out.”
“Okay, maybe we’ll get a burger and coffee at Buffalo’s. I just got paid, so it’s on me.”
“Sounds good.”
“Ever hear of the Paris sisters?”
“Yeah, everybody has. You know them?”
“I’m makin’ the delivery to their house. I been tryin’ to get up the nerve to ask Turquoise Paris to go out with me for two years.”
“Are they really so good looking?”
“I’d give anything to spend one day with Turquoise, to have one day’s worth of her beauty.”
“What about the other one?”
“Princessa? She’s almost eighteen, four years younger than Turquoise. I only saw her once, at the Granada on a Saturday. She’s a knockout, too.”
Gus cranked up the blower in the Dodge. The sky was clear black but the temperature was almost zero. The radiator in my room didn’t work very well; I knew I would have to sleep with a couple of sweaters on to stay warm. Argo parked in front of the Paris house and got out.
“Come in with me,” he said. “You can carry one of the boxes.”
Princessa opened the front door. She was almost my height, slender and small-breasted. Her lustrous chestnut hair hung practically to her waist. Once I was inside, in the light, I took a good look at her face. She reminded me of Hedy Lamarr in Algiers, wearing an expression that warned a man: If you don’t take care of me, someone else certainly will. Princessa’s complexion was porcelain smooth; I’d never before seen skin that looked so clean.
“You can just leave the boxes on the floor in the living room,” she told us. “My father will set it up when he gets home.”
“Who’s there, Cessa?”
Gus Argo and I looked up in the direction from which the voice asking this question had come. Gene Tierney stood at the top of the staircase. Or maybe it was Helen of Troy.
“The delivery boys,” Princessa answered. “They brought the new hi-fi.”
“Tell them to just leave the boxes in the living room. Daddy will set it up later.”
“I just did.”
The apparition on the staircase disappeared; she wasn’t coming down.
“Thanks, guys,” said Princessa. “I’d give you a tip but I don’t have any money. I can ask Turquoise if she does.”
“No,” Gus said, “it’s okay.”
He glanced at the top of the stairs once more, then walked out of the house.
“My name is Roy,” I said to Princessa.
“Hi, Roy.” she said, and held her right hand out to me. “I’m Cessa.”
I took her hand. It felt like a very small, freshly killed and skinned animal.
“Your hand is warm,” I said, holding it.
“My body temperature is always slightly above normal. The doctor says people’s temperatures vary.”
“It feels good. Mine is cold. I wasn’t wearing any gloves.”
She withdrew her hand.
“Could I come back to see you sometime?” I asked.
Princessa smiled. Hedy Lamarr vanished. Princessa had one slightly crooked upper front tooth the sight of which made me want to kiss her. I smiled back, memorizing her face.
“It was nice to meet you,” I said, and turned to go.
“Roy?”
I turned around. Hedy was back.
“You can call me, if you like. My last name is Paris. I have my own phone, the number’s in the book.”
I went out with Princessa a couple of times. She talked about her boyfriend, who was already in college; and about Turquoise, who, Cessa told me, was a party girl.
“What’s a party girl?” I asked.
“She gets fifty dollars when she goes to the powder room, sometimes more. My parents don’t know.”
I didn’t ask any more questions about Turquoise, but I did repeat what Princessa told me to Gus Argo.
“Fifty bucks for the powder room? You’re shittin’ me,” he said.
“Does that mean she’s a prostitute?” I asked him.
“I don’t think so,” said Argo. “More like she goes out with visiting firemen who want a good lookin’ date.”
“Visiting firemen?”
“Yeah, guys from out of town. Salesmen, conventioneers.”
Many years later, I read Apuleius’s version of the myth of Psyche and Amor. Venus, Amor’s mother, was so jealous of her son’s love for Psyche that she attempted to seduce Amor in an effort to convince him to destroy his lover, which he would not do. Venus even imprisoned Amor and ordered Psyche to go to the underworld and bring up a casket filled with a day’s worth of beauty. Eventually, Jupiter, Amor’s father, came to his son’s rescue and persuaded Venus to lay off the poor girl.
I remembered Gus Argo telling me he would have done anything to have had one day’s worth of Turquoise Paris�
�s beauty. My guess is that he never got it, and I doubt that he knew the story of Psyche and Amor. Gus just didn’t seem to me like the kind of guy who’d spring for the powder room.
The Peterson Fire
It was snowing the night the Peterson house burned down. Bud Peterson was seventeen then, two years older than me. Bud got out alive because his room was on the ground floor in the rear of the house. His two sisters and their parents slept upstairs, above the living room, which was where the fire started. An ember jumped from the fireplace and ignited the carpet. Bud’s parents and his ten- and twelve-year-old sisters could not get down the staircase. When they tried to go back up, they were trapped and burned alive. There was nothing Bud Peterson could have done to save any of them. He was lucky, a fireman said, to have survived by crawling out his bedroom window.
I didn’t see the house until the next afternoon. Snow flurries mixed with the ashes. Most of the structure was gone, only part of the first floor remained, and the chimney. I was surprised to see Bud Peterson standing in the street with his pals, staring at the ruins. Bud was a tall, thin boy, with almost colorless hair. He wore a Navy pea coat but no hat. Black ash was swirling around and some of it had fallen on his head. Nobody was saying much. There were about twenty of us, kids from the neighborhood, standing on the sidewalk or in the street, looking at what was left of the Peterson house.
I had walked over by myself after school to see it. Big Frank had told me about the fire in Cap’s that morning when we were buying Bismarcks. Frank’s brother, Otto, was a fireman. Frank said Otto had awakened him at five thirty and asked if Frank knew Bud Peterson. Frank told him he did and Otto said, “His house burned down last night. Everybody but him is dead.”
I heard somebody laugh. A couple of Bud’s friends were whispering to each other and trying not to laugh but one of them couldn’t help himself. I looked at Peterson but he didn’t seem to mind. I remembered that he was a little goofy, maybe not too bright, but a good guy. He always seemed like one of those kids who just went along with the gang, who never really stood out. A bigger kid I didn’t know came up to Bud and patted him on the left shoulder, then said something I couldn’t hear. Peterson smiled a little and nodded his head. Snow started to come down harder. I put up the hood of my coat. We all just kept looking at the burned down house.
The Roy Stories Page 16