On a dark side street around the corner from the old movie theatre, where a romantic comedy had been playing for a month, Marianne’s car was parked: a station wagon with the insignia of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the driver’s side door. Marianne fished the key out of the pocket of her leather jacket and stabbed at the lock.

“This car isn’t yours, is it?” Doc asked.

“A friend at the BIA lets me borrow it sometimes,” she explained. “We Indians stick together. Doc, you wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette lighter? I can’t see a thing.” The sharp nose of her key kept slipping, scraping the paint on the door.

Doc shivered from the cold and from the damage she was doing to the station wagon. He was tempted to leave. Helen was waiting for him at home. He had promised to help her prepare for a holiday feast with her cousins who were flying down from Wisconsin in the morning. Right now she might be changing the linen in the guest room or baking a pumpkin pie or placing fresh flowers in the icon niches of their rented adobe house on Alameda Street. He imagined her sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, untangling an electrical cord studded with colored bulbs. He was on the verge of wishing Marianne a merry Christmas, turning on his heels and heading off into the night when the door clicked open.

“We’re home free,” she said.

Marianne settled into the driver’s seat. She started the engine and pulled out, her seat belt unbuckled. Unruly black hair dangled over the side of her face so that he couldn’t see her eyes. There was tension in her knuckles as she clutched the steering wheel. Doc knew she was too drunk to drive, but so was he. The fact that this vehicle did not belong to her made him nervous, yet it also gave him a thrill, as if the two of them were fugitives.

“You sure it’s alright for me to come with you?” he asked. “Are outsiders allowed on the reservation at night?”

“No,” she said. “But you’re my guest. It’ll be an education.” Her voice was hoarse from drinking and from breathing the smoke-filled air of Don Diego’s Tavern.

“You got a woman?” she asked him.

“In a way,” he said.

“Either you do or you don’t.”

“I’m not married.”

“Let me see your hand,” she demanded. “The left one.”

When she glanced at his ringless fingers, Doc noticed the puffiness beneath her eyes. They were the eyes of a disillusioned woman in her late thirties, maybe forty. In Don Diego’s she had seemed younger, so full of life that when she cajoled him into buying her drinks, he had gladly obliged. She was an antidote to the Christmas Eve shift in the hospital’s emergency room where he had treated, among others, a malnourished girl with pneumonia, a motorcyclist with severe lacerations and a frail old man who had suffered his third heart attack.

“No wedding band.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t prove a thing.”

Doc just smiled and shook his head.

They drove through a rundown neighborhood of adobe homes that seemed to be sinking into the earth. There were no sidewalks, and the station wagon kept veering to the right, rumbling over the edges of frozen front yards.

“I was married,” she said.

“Divorced?”

She snorted. “I wish.” Suddenly realizing that only her parking lights were on, she switched to headlights just in time to avoid an emaciated cat scampering across the road. “No, I don’t wish that, either.”

“What happened?”

“You’re a doctor,” she said. “You know the life expectancy of an Indian male.”

“Heart disease? Cancer?”

“Yeah, the Caucasian cancer,” she said.

His mind swimming in the froth of five beers — three more than he usually drank at Don Diego’s before going home — Doc rested his forehead against the window. He recognized the outskirts of Santa Fe. A series of box cars loomed in the darkness like buttes seen from a distance. The railroad tracks extended from the desert almost to the center of town where Helen was waiting for him. Tomorrow her cousins would arrive to exchange gifts, bestow compliments on Helen’s cooking, and treat her and Doc like a married couple as if wishing for it could make it so.

“Tell me what happened to him.”

“Billy was a tribal leader, the finest craftsman on the res,” she said. “Out of kindness he hired a poor old widow to sit outside the Palace of the Governors and sell the jewelry he made. Every Saturday he went into town to see how sales were going and to bring the widow something to eat. The last time he went, about a year ago, a couple of rednecks were getting hot under the collar with her. A pair of Texans, I think. Well, Billy, he confronted them. The Texans accused the woman of trying to cheat them. Billy had a short fuse. He got riled up. They argued. One of the Texans pulled a knife.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do it.” Marianne reached for the dashboard and adjusted a knob. “This heater is worthless.”

Once they had driven some distance from town, pinpoints of light appeared on the desert, then vanished behind dark crescents of land that during the day were scrub-covered hills. From time to time they passed a well-lit truck stop or a homestead beside the road. Otherwise all was black. Doc felt like a Spanish explorer driven by capricious winds and ocean currents beyond the mapped world to a place where no girlfriend, no relatives and no mangled patients awaited him. He sat back to enjoy the fluttering bronchial hum of the engine and the whisper of the tires, intoxicated with the knowledge that no one on earth but this woman beside him knew where he was at this moment.

“You’ve got to meet my son, Glenn,” Marianne said. “My nieces will be there too. They’re terrific kids.”

This was the first Doc had heard of this. “Where are we going, exactly?”

“My brother’s place on the res,” she said. “Our family is very tight.”

The next thing he knew, Marianne was shaking him. He woke up freezing and suffering from a headache. He dimly recalled a dream of plummeting into a glacial crevasse. “Where are we?”

“Argentina,” she said. “Where do you think we are?”

Doc wiped frost from the window with the sleeve of his jacket. They had pulled up in front of an adobe house on an unpaved lane just off a public square. Dozens of brown paper bags glowing with soft candlelight had transformed the pueblo into the kind of village Doc could imagine in ancient Galilee.

“This is where Jerry lives. My brother.” After disengaging herself from the driver's seat, Marianne stumbled like an awkward bear between the luminarias lining a footpath through a garden of yuccas smothered in frost. Apparently she had made an effort to hold herself together during the trip and now felt free to let go.

“I've got a snooootful,” she cried. Doc caught up to her in front of the door and took her arm to steady her. “Hey, Doc, what part of the anatomy is a `snoot'?”

“Take it easy,” he said. “You haven't had a drink in over an hour.”

“I'm a late bloomer.”

She clutched the back of his neck and let her knees buckle. Somehow he managed to set her on her feet just as her brother opened the door. Jerry had thick frowning lips and the same sad eyes as his sister. After Marianne’s sputtered introduction, he ushered them in and invited Doc to sit next to him at the dining room table where Glenn was already devouring a bowl of red chili. Marianne’s son barely nodded at him. He was a young man of about twenty, with eyes the color of coffee beans and cascading black hair that any woman would have envied. Doc felt an urge to touch it, as though it was the fur of a well-groomed cat.

A bony middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair came out of the kitchen and served chili to the men.

“Louisa, my wife,” Jerry said.

Louisa sneered and returned to the kitchen.

Jerry leaned toward Doc. “Menopause,” he said. “She's been surly for months.”

Marianne’s brother turned his attention to the chili, a watery concoction of chick peas, hot peppers and gristly beef. Doc pretended to do the same but kept an eye on Marianne, who had collapsed in an armchair by the fireplace. Her nieces, a pair of beautiful teenagers with the perfect skin of Polynesian maidens, were sprawled on the carpet at her feet, chatting about school and people they knew. In the fireplace, smoke from a small blaze carried the sweet aroma of pinon. The interior of the house was neat and ordinary. Foolishly Doc had expected hand-woven rugs and silver and turquoise ornaments, like a gift shop or a museum.

Jerry finished his chili and dabbed his lips with a napkin. “Doctor,” he said, “you look to me like a Polack Jew.”

Doc seldom thought about his religion. For him it was a matter of upbringing rather than belief. He viewed himself as an agnostic, his convictions so mild that they verged on apathy. “How did you know?”

Jerry smiled, showing thick gray teeth. “I was in New York City once, years ago. Crazy place. I rode the subway, learned a few things, and then I came home. Are you a specialist?”

“Emergency medicine. I work at St. Joseph’s.”

“Me, I prefer oncology,” Jerry said. “You know, most tumors are really symptoms of spiritual crises. No Indian ever died of cancer before the white man arrived.”

As if on cue, Glenn, who was sitting directly across the table from Doc, took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. “Have one,” he said, sliding the pouch and rolling papers across the table with his fingertips. It was a gesture of insistence, of challenge.

“So, Doctor, how long have you known my sister?” Jerry asked.

“Not long.”

“She’s …” Jerry’s eyes traveled to the chair into which Marianne had melted like cheese. “… a fine woman.”

With Glenn’s hostile gaze upon him, Doc needed several minutes to roll an adequate cigarette. He felt that this was a test, an initiation. In his entire life he had taken perhaps a dozen drags of smoke. Luckily the tobacco was as smooth as cream, and he didn’t cough once as he puffed.

Louisa emerged from the kitchen and announced that it was time to go to church to see the Christmas dance. The girls roused Marianne from her torpor. Glenn lit another cigarette and folded his tobacco pouch.

“Any more chili left?” Marianne said. The question was addressed to Louisa, who merely grunted while clearing bowls from the table.

“There’s no time,” Jerry said. “After church you can eat.”

“I’m starving.”

“Fat bitch,” Louisa muttered. “She comes into my house … .”

“My brother’s house,” Marianne shouted. “Our house.” She turned a finger on herself. “You suck my family’s tits like a calf.”

Alertly the girls looked on, standing aside like referees. Sitting at the table in the dining area, Jerry and his nephew remained impassive.

Louisa stomped off to the kitchen and returned with a bread knife clutched in her fist. Unsteadily Doc rose from his seat, but once on his feet he lost the will to act. Suddenly space seemed flattened, a projection on a screen. The blaze in the fireplace was a room-temperature illusion. The nieces stood by like bit players awaiting direction. The blade in Louisa’s hand was a harmless prop. Doc looked at Jerry, who motioned for him to sit. Gratefully Doc obeyed.

“Go ahead,” Marianne shouted, posing theatrically with her arms outstretched, drawing attention to her breasts. “My beautiful husband is gone. Put me out of my misery.”

Louisa raised the knife, but her daughters intervened. One grabbed her mother around the waist from behind; the other stepped in front of Marianne like a bodyguard. The conflict, which had the air of a ritual, abruptly ended.

Glenn got up and blew smoke in Doc’s face, then tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. Doc blinked and staggered as he rose. Marianne was having trouble getting into her jacket, so he held it up behind her as she inserted her arms. “That skinny piece of shit,” she said.

“What’s going on?” Doc asked her.

“Billy left us money, enough to keep Glenn and me comfortable.” Marianne’s bloodshot eyes glared at her sister-in-law. “Louisa is jealous, the greedy bitch. She’d like me to give her half my inheritance for a bowl of slimy chili. Look at her.” Stiff and prim, Louisa was in the foyer nagging her daughters about their appearance, fussing with their coats and hair. “She carries herself like a martyr, but she’d crucify me if she could. I don’t know how my brother lives with that woman.”

With the exception of Marianne, the entire family gathered in the hallway and left without a word.

“Aren’t we going?” Doc asked.

Marianne wriggled out of her jacket. “Absolutely not.”

For a while they sat by the fireplace. Embers tumbled from the logs, and damp bark snapped. Smoke from Glenn’s cigarettes roiled around a table lamp and crept along the ceiling.

“The air smells like shit in this house,” Marianne said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside the cold descended on them with the impact of a waterfall. Doc glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight. By this time Helen would have finished trimming the tree, topping it off with the hand-painted angel she had inherited from her grandmother.

“I wouldn’t mind going in to see the dance,” Doc said.

They were sitting in front of the church. He could feel the chill of the stone step through his pants, conducted like an electrical charge all the way up his back. Luminarias lined the square like lights on an airport runway. A bonfire was blazing on the outskirts of the plaza, stoked by a group of raucous young men. The shouts of the youths and the smell of burning wood saturated the air.

“It’s not the same without Billy,” Marianne said. “You should have seen him, such a graceful man for his size. Here they come, right on time.”

A column of ghostly figures emerged from a dark side street and entered the square: dour men dressed in leather and feathers. They made there way slowly toward the church like a funeral procession, their soft-soled shoes making noises like whisk brooms on the frozen ground. Passing Doc and Marianne without so much as a glance, they climbed the steps, their pace deliberate and stately. Their movements were so rhythmic, so precise, that Doc imagined the sound of drumbeats. When the church doors swung open to let the dancers in, he thought he heard bells, a ringing like wind chimes. The doors shut behind the last of them, enclosing the warmth of bodies within.

“Believe me,” Marianne said, “you’re not missing much. Right now the dancers are approaching the altar. They’ll stop in front of the big green crucifix …”

“Green?”

“Yes.”

“Why is the crucifix green?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The painters must have had that color left over from another job. Anyway, the dancers will form a circle and start pacing. Clockwise, counterclockwise. It’s boring.”

“Will there be a mass?” Doc asked. “Something religious?”

“Why should there be? We won.”

“What do you mean, you won?”

“We won, in the end,” she said. “Jesus hangs from the cross and watches us dance on his grave. At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Those men in there have forgotten. Billy never did. His dance was a victory dance.”

Doc said what he thought she wanted to hear. “He must have been a remarkable person.”

“No kidding,” she said. “His death really knocked the wind out of me, and I still haven’t gotten it back.”

“Give it time.”

“I’m just like Billy’s saleswoman now — a damn widow. I hate that word.”

“It’s just a word, Marianne.”

“Makes me feel like a mummy wrapped in sheets,” she said. “I wish you’d brought your medical bag. I could go for a sedative.”

For an instant, Doc felt an urge to kiss her. To kiss someone. He could almost feel his beard stop growing as his body froze, losing sensation, losing humanity. He imagined himself sleeping with Helen, covered from feet to shoulders with a thick paisley quilt to protect them from the Christmas cold. He watched the young men feed the bonfire, red sparks rising like rescue flares, until the heavy doors creaked open and the church crowd poured around them, out into the square. Doc helped Marianne to her feet.

“There’s my brother.”

Jerry and his family were greeted by jocular neighbors. When Marianne pushed her way toward them, they turned their backs and orbited their friends, barring her from the conversation.

“Glenn!”

She caught sight of her son, but couldn’t reach him through the crowd. The plaza was crawling with young people, hollering, kissing, cajoling one another. Even the youngest of children were still awake. The luminarias never seemed to burn out, and the bonfire threw a golden light on every face. Doc managed to get to her by slicing through a cluster of elderly women. He could feel their disapproving stares, like a midday summer sun on his neck. He experienced flashes of heat and paralyzing moments of cold. His intoxication had worn off, and he yearned for another drink.

“I want my son,” said Marianne.

Arm in arm, the two of them moved through the crowd. Doc wasn’t looking for Glenn. He searched for other Caucasian faces, and found none. “Forget it,” he said. “We’ve lost him.”

It was hard to keep Marianne steady in all the jostling, so he separated her from the celebration and tugged her all the way from the square to Jerry's house. “Shouldn’t we get going?” he said.

“Going where?"

“Back to Santa Fe.”

“What for? Don Diego's will be closed by the time we get there.”

Doc knew Helen would have called the hospital hours ago — every hospital — and his colleagues' homes as well. Though she would have tried to stifle the worry in her voice, it would have pulsed like a beacon through mist. He believed he could find that light if he tried.

“Let’s drive back to town — or at least go inside.” Doc’s nose was running, his eyes tearing. He swayed to keep warm, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

Marianne drew near and embraced him, her face turned aside, pressed against his collarbone. “Brrrrr,” she said. “Brrrrr.”

Doc knew she was faking it. She didn’t mind the weather.

The setting of Doc’s dream was Santa Fe Plaza. He witnessed a cockfight in which two angry-eyed roosters pecked at one another while feathers rained down from the sky. On the arcade outside the Palace of the Governors, a woman twice the size of Marianne showed him a silver and turquoise necklace. She hung it on a stunted fir tree, then vanished into smoke. Suddenly smoke was everywhere, engulfing the arcade, the cocks and the Indian men who were egging them on.

Awakening on the couch in Jerry’s living room, he was surprised to see Marianne moving about in her leather jacket with the air of someone preparing to leave. Her nieces were sleeping back-to-back on the rug near the fireplace. Marianne covered them with a blanket. Glenn had dozed off at the dining table, his forehead on his arm, an ashtray of bitter-smelling cigarette butts by his elbow. His mother slid the ashtray toward the center of the table, then stroked his gleaming black hair. At the head of the table, Jerry was sitting upright with his eyes shut. He didn’t appear to be breathing.

“Is he all right?” Doc asked.

“That’s the way he sleeps sometimes,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake. I want to show you something.”

As Doc rose from the couch, his head thumped with pain. “You wouldn’t happen to have some aspirin?”

“You’re the doctor. You should carry what you need wherever you go.”

Outside the morning was cool and clammy. Marianne led him beyond the square, beyond the last of the flaking dwellings on an unpaved road. The pueblo was perched on a mesa. They hiked to the very edge overlooking a sagebrush basin. The colors of sunrise streaked the overcast sky. Below them a spotted horse was fidgeting in a corral. Marianne sat down on a sandstone ledge.

“That colt belonged to Billy,” she said. “It’s Glenn’s now.”

“You own this property?” Doc made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the expanse of desert below.

“An Indian never really owns anything.”

The agitated horse pranced along the perimeter of the corral, seeking a break in the fence.

“Me and Louisa, we’ve got … issues.” Marianne said this as if responding to a question. “That’s what white people call them, right?”

“What do Indians call them?”

“Life on the reservation.”

Standing on the lip of the mesa with his arms crossed, Doc felt like a captain at the helm of his ship: a ship in the doldrums, going nowhere. Little by little the sky brightened, though the sun remained hidden behind stratus clouds. The scent of snow was in the air. He imagined Helen on the phone with the police, at wits end, perhaps in tears, while her unsuspecting cousins made their way from the airport in a rented car.

“You know how my people came here?” Marianne said. “We're from the Far East. Centuries ago we were just another bunch of chinks. When the continents touched, we walked across the Bering land bridge. The rest is history.”

“You told me that already, in Don Diego’s.”

“I don't remember. I must have been drunk. Anyway, I can guarantee this: if nature ever rebuilds that bridge, we’ll all pack up and go back to Asia.” She leaned forward, hands on knees. “Doc, are you really a Jew?”

“Technically,” he said. “But I practice medicine, not religion.”

“Your ancestors go way back, like ours.”

Pogroms, exile, diaspora. Doc related what little he knew, all of it sketchy and relatively recent. Births and deaths, locations and dates. Krakow, 1892. Newark, 1956.

“You’d never make it as an Indian,” Marianne said. “You can’t even tell a story.”

As they drove to Santa Fe, snow began to fall. The tiny moist flakes dissolved the instant they landed on the windshield.

“Does your lady friend know where you’ve been?” Marianne squinted at the highway, an overweight broad-faced woman whom Doc was seeing in full daylight for the first time.

“I didn’t expect to be out all night.”

“You’re in big trouble.”

The landscape was a turbulent ocean of hills supporting a flotsam of cholla cacti, clumps of grass and weeds. Through the snowfall Doc thought he spotted the red-brick ruins of the ancient pueblo in the distance — the precursor to the modern village — but it was probably a butte or a mirage. He imagined the anxious young woman waiting for him, her greatest desire to have him near, to embrace him in the warmth of her holiday.

“What if you really could go back to Asia,” he said, “but you had to go alone?”

Marianne thought it over. “The trip might be interesting, but once I got to China or Mongolia or wherever, what the hell would I do? Without Glenn, my brother, my nieces. Even Louisa. You should understand that.”

“How do you mean?”

“Didn’t Moses take his whole tribe out of mothballs and lead them kicking and screaming to the Promised Land?” she said. “He brought the Jews with him, every single one.”

“That’s a myth, Marianne.”

“Where do you think myths come from?” They had reached the junction of Cerrillos Road where gas stations, billboards and shoe-box-shaped motels implied that they were close to town. “But I’d never leave,” she said. “I’d miss Billy. His spirit is in this air. On the reservation. In church. Over by the corral.”

“Do you sense his presence now?”

She smiled, just barely. “Not with you sitting where he should be.”

When they arrived at the heart of town, Marianne pulled over and stopped outside a pottery shop. This was as far as she would go. A twenty-minute walk would bring him home.

“Would you take it as an insult if I wished you a merry Christmas?” she said.

“I don't believe in Christ, but I don’t mind Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, then. I'll catch you at Don Diego's.”

Doc climbed out of the station wagon. The passenger door was still wide open. “He must have been crazy about you.”

“How do you know?”

Doc leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

As he watched her drive off, his body tensed up from the cold. To warm himself he fantasized that his all-night absence would have no consequences. He imagined Helen putting the finishing touches on the lush fir tree — silver tinsel and candy canes — while the turkey browned in the oven. Their home, overflowing with cheer and tranquility, would be prepared to receive their guests. He would answer the doorbell and greet her cousins jovially. Later, presiding at the dinner table, he would carve generous portions for everyone. It gave him great pleasure to think of himself as a gracious host.

As the station wagon receded down Cerrillos Road, the falling snow couldn't seem to decide whether or not to accumulate. Traffic was light on Christmas morning, but the pavement was slippery, and Marianne was speeding. “Slow down,” he said. By now she was far away. “Drive safe.”

Alan Elyshevitz (PA)  is the author of two chapbooks of poetry. His work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Mid-America Poetry Review, The Cream City Review, and elsewhere.