"Out," Gil said. "Out of the wash. Now."
Daniel grabbed the flashlight and the toolbox. Gil grabbed the hood of the van and pulled it down hard, and then grabbed Daniel's arm and turned him toward the bank.
"Walk," Gil said. "Don't run. You'll fall."
The water was only an inch deep when it reached the van's tires. By the time they climbed the bank, it was six inches. By the time they reached the top and turned around, it was a foot deep and brown and moving fast, swirling around the minivan's wheels.
"The van," Daniel said. His voice cracked.
"The van's a van," Gil said. "Your kids are in my kitchen."
They stood on the bank in the moonlight and watched. Gil had lived on this wash for eighty years. He had seen it run a hundred times, always from rain somewhere they could not see. This was a small one. The water came up to the bottom of the van's doors and stayed there, a brown, hissing river, and then, after twenty minutes, it began to drop.
By one-thirty, it was gone. Only wet sand and the smell of creosote bushes, sharp and clean, the way the desert always smells after rain.
The van was still there. Mud to the bumpers. But still there.
"It's a sign," Daniel said shakily.
"It's a flash flood," Gil said. "Same thing, out here."
They went back to work at two.
Gil checked the engine first. The water had not gotten above the wheels into the electrical. Lucky. He did not believe much in luck, but he would take it on Christmas.
Then he finished what he had started. The old Ford V-belt went around the crankshaft pulley and the water pump pulley and nowhere else, tight as a fiddle string after he shimmed the water pump bracket with two washers from a coffee can. It looked wrong. It looked like a farm truck had married a minivan.
"That'll get your engine cool," Gil said. "It won't charge your battery. So we're going to do that before you go, from my truck. A full charge will run you two hours, if you keep the radio off and the heater low."
"Show Low is two hours and ten minutes," Daniel said.
"Then you'd better drive fast," Gil said. "And turn the heater all the way off for the last ten."
At five-thirty in the morning, with the sky going pink over the mountains, Gil drove his old pickup down the hill and parked it nose to nose with the minivan. They ran the jumper cables. The van's dashboard lights flickered and came on.
Daniel turned the key. The engine caught.
The belt held.
Gil stood beside the van with his hand on the fender, listening to the engine run. He could hear the belt. A slight slapping sound on every turn, the sound of a part doing a job it was never meant to do. It would not last forever. It would last until Show Low.
Rosa came down the hill carrying Sofía, with Mateo holding her hand. She had folded the quilt and left it on the couch. She had washed the hot chocolate cups.
"Mr. Navarro," she said. "We have to pay you."
"No."
"Please."
"Ma'am, it's Christmas," Gil said. "And that belt's fifty years old. I'd have charged you three dollars for it in 1976."
Mateo stood in front of him in his pajamas and his winter coat and looked up.
"Are you really Santa's mechanic?" he asked.
Gil thought about it.
"Sometimes," he said again. "Not usually."
Mateo seemed to accept this. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic figure from the nativity scene on the dashboard. It was one of the three wise men, the one carrying a little gold box.
"You can have the one with the present," Mateo said.
Gil took it. He held it in his palm for a long time.
Daniel shook his hand before he got in the van, and held on a moment.
"My dad was a mechanic," he said. "In Nogales. He died when I was twelve. He used to fix things like that. With whatever was in the truck."
Gil did not know what to say to that, so he said the true thing. "Then you already know how," he said. "You just haven't had to yet."
Daniel laughed and wiped his eyes and climbed in behind the wheel.
They called from Show Low at seven-forty. Rosa's voice was crying and laughing at once. They had made it with four minutes of battery left. Her mother had been waiting at the window in her robe since six. A neighbor, a mechanic, would put on a real belt the day after Christmas.
"He looked at your belt," Rosa said. "He wants to know who did it. He says he's never seen anything like it."
"Tell him it was Santa's mechanic," Gil said.
That night, after the sun went down, Gil sat on his porch with a cold beer and looked down at the old dirt road in the moonlight, still damp from the flood.
The little plastic wise man stood on the porch railing beside him, holding his gold box.
Out in the dark, the old Copper Wash road ran on toward a highway that had not been there since 1987. Gil left the porch light burning anyway, the way his father always had, in case another family's map was wrong tonight.
