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He stepped back and examined his paunch, supporting it with his hands like an expectant mother showing off her bump, an image that made him quickly release his grip and wipe his hands instinctively on his pants, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He’d always had a paunch. He was just one of those guys. From the time he came out of the womb, he’d looked like his diet consisted entirely of pizza and beer, which wasn’t true. Willie actually ate pretty well for a single man. The problem was that he led what Arno, his assistant, described as a “classic indolent lifestyle,” which Willie took to mean that he didn’t run around in Spandex like a moron. Willie tried to picture himself in Spandex, and decided that he’d already had too much to drink if that was the kind of thing he was imagining alone in a men’s room on his birthday night.
He had changed out of his bib overalls for the occasion, which had been traumatic in itself. Willie was a guy born for overalls. They were loose fitting, which was important for a man of his age and girth. They gave him useful pockets in which to keep things, and a place to store his hands when he wasn’t using them without looking like a slob. Out of overalls, everything felt too tight, and he had too much stuff and too few holes in which to keep it. Tonight, he bulged in places where a man shouldn’t bulge.
Willie was wearing black Sta-Prest trousers, a white shirt veering toward yellow due to age, and a gray jacket that he liked to think of as a classic of tailoring but was, in fact, just old. He was also sporting the new tie that Arno had handed to him that morning with the words, “Happy birthday, boss. You go
The thing about it was, Willie didn’t feel sixty. He’d lived through a lot-Vietnam, a painful divorce, some heart trouble a couple of years back-and it had certainly aged him on the outside (those lines, and his few remaining gray hairs, were hard earned), but inside he felt like he always had, or at least the way he had since he was in his mid-to late twenties. That was when he had been at his peak. He’d survived two years in the Marines, and had returned home to a woman who’d loved him enough to become his wife. Okay, so maybe she hadn’t exactly been Lassie in the faithful companion stakes, but that came later. For a time, they had seemed pretty happy. He’d borrowed some money from his father-in-law, started renting premises in Queens, over by Kissena Park, and applied the mechanical skills that he had honed in the military to maintaining and repairing automobiles. It turned out that he was even better at it than he had thought, and there was always enough business to keep him occupied, so that after a few years he had hired a small Scandinavian guy with bristly hair and the attitude of a junkyard dog to help him out. Thirty years later, Arno was still with him, and still had the attitude of a junkyard dog, albeit one whose gums hurt and who could no longer scamper after female dogs with the same vigor that he once had shown.
Vietnam: Willie hadn’t come back scarred from his time in Nam, either physically or psychologically, or not so that he could tell. He’d landed in March 1965, part of the Third Marine Division assigned to create enclaves surrounding vital airstrips. Willie ended up in Chu Lai, sixty miles south of Da Nang, where the Seabees constructed a four-thousand-foot aluminum runway in twenty-three days amid cactus and shifting sands. It was still one of the finest feats of engineering under pressure that Willie had ever witnessed.
He had just turned nineteen when he signed up for service. He didn’t even wait for the draft to find him. His old man, who had come here in the twenties and had served in the military himself during World War II, told him that he owed something to his country, and Willie didn’t question his judgment. By the time he came home his father’s friends were breaking heads down on Wall Street and over at Washington Square Park, teaching the long-hairs a little something about patriotism. Willie neither condoned it nor objected to it. He’d done his time, but he could understand why other kids might not want to follow in his footsteps. It was a matter for their conscience, not his. Some of his buddies had served, too, and they had all returned home more or less intact. One of them had lost an arm to a grenade hidden in a loaf of bread, but he could have lost a lot more. Another came back minus his left foot. He’d stepped on a bear trap, and the jaws had snapped shut above his ankle. The fu
Both of those guys were gone now. They’d died young. Willie had attended their funerals. They were gone, but he was still here.
Sixty years, thirty-four of them in the same business, most in the same building. Only once had the security of his postservice existence been threatened. That was during the divorce, when his wife had sought half of all that he owned, and he was faced with the possibility of being forced to sell his beloved auto shop in order to meet her demands. While he might have been kept busy with a steady stream of repairs, there wasn’t a whole lot of money in the bank and much of Queens hadn’t been like it was now. Then there was no gentrification, no single men and women driving expensive automobiles that they didn’t know how to service for themselves. People drove their cars until the wheels came off, and then came to Willie looking for a way to get another three, six, nine months out of them, just until things improved, until there was a little cash to spare. There were cops being shot on the streets, and turf wars, and protection money to be handed over, even if it was paid in kind by carrying out repairs for free, or by not asking questions when someone required a quick spray job on a car that was so hot it ticked. Elmhurst and Jackson Heights became Little Colombia, and Queens was the main entry point for cocaine shipments into the United States, the money laundered through check-cashing businesses and travel agencies. Colombians were dying every day in Willie’s neighborhood. He had even known a couple of them, including Pedro Méndez, who campaigned for the antidrug president Cesar Trujillo and took three in the head, chest, and back for his troubles. Willie had serviced Pedro’s car the week before his death. It was a different city then, almost unrecognizable from the one that existed today.
But then Queens had always been different. It wasn’t like Brooklyn, or the Bronx. It was disparate. It sprawled. People didn’t write affectionate books about it. It didn’t have a Pete Hamill to mythologize it. “Someplace in Queens”: if Willie had a buck for every time he’d heard someone use that phrase, he’d be a wealthy man. For those who lived outside the borough, everywhere within it was just “someplace in Queens.” To them, Queens was like the ocean: big and unknowable, and if you dropped something into it, it got lost and it stayed lost.