The dishwasher’s eyes are birdy; all night he’s been
clattering pots. Three times he’s darted out the kitchen door,
ducked behind the dumpster, darted back in. A line of sweat has
broken on his forehead. He’s dropped a carafe. His shoelace is
untied.
The sous chef is on to him. He’s a good guy, the
sous chef, a reader of Tolstoy, but damned if he’s going to stand
there steaming artichokes while some Mexican gets $9.50 an hour to
have himself a party in the parking lot. The sous chef has his
limits. He lowers the flame and steps over to the man, paring knife
in hand.
“What’s going on out there, amigo?”
The dishwasher turns, holding an oversized teal
plate in both hands. He blinks up into the sous chef’s thin face.
He’s a good dishwasher, this one. He speaks almost no English and
even his Spanish is choppy but he works like a burro. He stands five
foot two in his sneakers and his chin juts out too far and when you
talk to him he leans in and opens his eyes wide as if he’s trying to
see the words as they leave your lips. Here is someone who’s spoken
with goats, watched a horsefly bite his palm. He blinks again at the
sous chef.
“You got some buddies out here? You sneaking some
Christmas tequila?” The sous chef walks over to the door, opens it
onto the parking lot. The air is frozen and dry, touched with piñon
smoke. Darkness has settled over the edges of the buildings, crept
across the windows of the cars. Distant carolers sing stony,
Germanic lyrics.
The dishwasher glances at the door to the dining
room, then sets down the plate and walks past the sous chef, out to
the dumpster. Steam wisps off his forehead. The sous chef follows,
and together they peer around the dumpster, where a tiny woman sits
propped against the wall. She has the same jutting chin as the
dishwasher but her face is swollen and sweat-polished and her eyes
are soldered shut. She is wrapped in sweatshirts and jackets and
what looks to be a bedsheet, and under these her stomach mounds up
off the little frame of her body.
“Smokes!” says the sous chef. “You stay here, amigo.
I’m going to get Mr. Greene.”
The dishwasher shakes his head. “No Mr. Greene,” he
says. “I wash dishes.”
The sous chef shakes his paring knife at him. “Screw
the dishes. We’re gonna get her to a hospital. You hear me?”
The sous chef turns. The dishwasher’s wide eyes
follow him into the bright of the kitchen, then swing back down to
the woman. She lies very still beneath the bedsheet, her tiny face
furrowed with pain. The dishwasher leans toward her, his eyes like
moons, his mouth gaping open.
“Yselda?”
The woman does not move. The dishwasher glances back
at the door, then extends his hand toward her forehead. The instant
he touches her brow her eyes open blackly and a moan escapes her
throat. The dishwasher drops to a knee, wraps his arm around the
damp of her lower back, bends her limp arm around his neck and
lifts. He does not look back at the kitchen door as he walks her out
the parking lot and into the street, into a Christmas Eve chaos of
mittens and blue jeans, hatted men, bell-shaped women, children
batting each other with scarves. A spread of paper sack farolitos
spins orange halos in the dishwasher’s eyes as he and the woman push
into the knot of winter coats, the redtipped noses and overpuffed
jackets, the cackles and wafts of mint-chocolate breath. A caroling
line of white clad women, candles held just below their chins,
breaks on either side of them, their eyes gleaming red above the
flames. Someone shouts out Que Viva Santa Fe! and someone answers
Que Viva Your Pinche Madre! Teeth flash, tongues roll, a man who’s
had too much to drink stumbles off the curb and is caught by his
friends.
The woman groans. Her body goes tight and she stops.
The dishwasher holds her until it passes, and then drags her on past
the smoky luminaria huddles, the red and green blink of gallery
windows. A crag-faced man in a ski hat appears before them, offers a
steaming paper cup, seems to want to talk to them, but the
dishwasher and the woman clutch past, turn off on the first side
street.
It’s a narrow lane lined by thick adobe walls, quiet
and cold. At the bottom of the block rises a giant cottonwood, its
winter canopy blossoming into the night sky like an enormous
dandelion head. The dishwasher gapes at the tree for a moment, then
begins moving the woman toward it. The woman’s tiny feet walk and
drag and walk again. Her eyes are shut. Down the lane they stumble,
step by step, the darkness closing around them; behind them, the
walkers stream through the narrow gap between the adobe walls like
bright figures on a television screen. The sous chef is up there,
somewhere, and so is Mr. Greene. They’re asking if anyone has seen a
short man and a pregnant woman: they want to take them to the
hospital. They want to lift that woman into the backseat of Mr.
Greene’s car and put the dishwasher up in the front seat and drive
them through town at a fast but safe speed. The sous chef knows a
little Spanish; he wants to tell the dishwasher Tranquilo. Esta bien.
They want to carry her in through the emergency room doors and get
her onto a clean gurney and see the nurses wheel her off, the
doctors rolling up their sleeves. They want to buy the dishwasher a
coffee from the machine and when he shakes his head they want to
thrust it under his chin, insist he drink it. Tranquilo. They want
to sit there all Christmas Eve, if need be. They have their limits,
the sous chef and Mr. Greene. They want to sit there with the
dishwasher, in the fluorescence of the hospital room and stand up
when the doctor comes out to announce it’s a healthy boy, a healthy
girl. Nino! they want to tell the dishwasher. Nina!
The dishwasher and the woman have arrived at the
tree. He’s lowered her against the trunk, and is watching the breath
pile out of her mouth. It is cold here. The chill seeps through the
dishwasher’s sweatshirt and into the pores of his skin, wraps the
bones of his arms, his ribs. It settles on the surface of his eyes
and scrapes his ears. He tucks the bedsheet in tighter around the
woman, and then sits beside her. The back of his head comes to a
rest on the rough bark of the trunk. For a long moment he looks
straight ahead, and then he looks up. The branches of the cottonwood
tangle into the stars. The dishwasher closes his eyes. He has seen
them many times before.
