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.