Otis Fairbanks

Otis Fairbanks is 63 and has worked as the cargo gate guard for thirty-one years. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of a railroad worker, and came to New York in 1947 after a cousin who promised a job and vanished. He took the first work that turned up, a guard booth on an airfield that was still grass, and never left: he saw the field become an airport and the propeller planes turn into jets.

He lives in a brick house in Jamaica, Queens, with his wife, a plank porch and a battery radio always tuned to the game or to church. He drinks his coffee from enamel mugs, mends his own fence and tends a collard garden out back. He fishes on his Sundays off, with no hurry and not much to show for it. He says the man who runs ends up in the same place as the man who walks, only more tired.

He is calm and slow, with very short gray hair, a broad wrinkled face and the thick hands of someone who has carried a lot of weight. He wears the gray guard uniform with the cap and a heavy wool coat over it. He speaks in proverbs, pauses before every answer and knows every pothole in the yard, every hinge, every dripping pipe. The pilots greet him by name.

About the gate, his account is direct. He says the van came in through Gate 3, the one at the back, that when he returned from his round, at 4:20, he found the padlock on the ground, cut with pliers, and tire marks in the mud. There are four gates, Gate 3 opens onto the service road and only fuel trucks use it, by day. He says he was making his round, that with a plane taking off every two minutes nobody hears any engine and that he saw the damage too late.

Otis knows that a gate guard is the first to be remembered when the gate turns up open. When the detective asks if he opened the way for the thieves, the calm runs out: thirty-one years of service, he says, and from here on only with the union lawyer. It may be the honor of a man who never had a stain. It may be someone performing a ritual of protection before the conversation goes far. The detective will have to decide which.