***
Sometimes I wondered why the band of slick, entrepreneur brothers who owned all three of the TacoTown franchises in the city bothered to keep the restaurants open during January. That month, our shifts were long, uneventful, and dark. Since there were hardly any customers, the evenings were full of tedious make-work projects like cleaning the insides of fluorescent light fixtures. I stood beside Darren while he pulled down the large sheets of translucent plastic that covered the lights above the counter, waiting to carry them back to Bert who would spray away the dust and grime and dead bugs.
“I can’t believe you don’t need to use a chair to reach those,” I remarked.
Darren smiled up into the ceiling. “Is that a compliment?”
“I don’t know.” I was on my guard now. “It’s disbelief, incredulity, awe – whatever.”
“Cool. I’ll take it.”
The wind lashed into the restaurant through the front doors. We hadn’t served a customer in nearly an hour so we both turned to look. The snowy hulk of a large, clumsy creature slumped over the threshold and slid down onto the tile floor in a heap as the doors closed behind it. I knew it must have been human. But at first sight, it reminded me of something else. It made me think of a walrus.
“Wayne!” the snowy walrus yelled up from the floor. “Darren – triplets! Where are you guys?”
Darren cursed. “It’s Tom.”
I squinted at the mound of chilly humanity lolling on the floor. “No,” I said. “That can’t be right.”
Wayne appeared behind the counter with us. “Tom?” he called back.
“There you are,” the walrus was looking more and more like it was Tom yelled back at us. It was even rolling up into a sitting position on the floor.
Bert was standing beside us now too, holding a clean plastic lighting tile. “Who is that guy?” he asked.
“The proverbial disgruntled former employee,” was Darren’s explanation.
I started to move away from them, toward Tom. “Is he hurt?” I asked. “Tom –”
But Darren caught my wrist, holding me back. “No, he’s not exactly hurt,” he assured me.
“Whatever he is,” Bert said, “I don’t think he could get any drunker.”
As soon as I heard the words, I knew Bert was right. And it made me feel sick. I was about to knowingly meet a drunk person for the first time in my life and it happened to be someone I cared about. I shook off Darren’s hold anyway.
“Well, we still can’t just leave him lying there like that,” I said.
But I didn’t step any closer to Tom. My desire to help him myself had been eclipsed by a funny little fear. This person on the floor wasn’t the Tom I knew. Until the effects of the liquor wore off, he was someone else – if only very slightly. And I wasn’t sure I could trust him.
Tom had pushed himself up the wall by now and was standing again, leaning heavily against a large, orange garbage bin. “Oh good. There’s Crystal,” he hooted. “Crystal, you are so pretty – even if you do look like –“ His voice became garbled as he started to slide down the wall again.
Wayne sighed. “Come on, guys,” he said to the other boys. “You two stay here,” he said to Crystal and me.
“Having a bad night, Tom?” I heard Wayne begin.
Tom surveyed the three boys as they stood over him. “You.” He waved at Bert who stood there with his confident cowboy posture, looking down on Tom as if he was some kind of sick livestock. “You’re the new me," Tom told him. “The blond, buff, better me.”
Bert laughed. “Whatever you say, buddy.”
“Hey Darren – did you get that little Mormon chick for yourself yet?” Tom slurred. “I see her, hiding over there. She won’t come close enough to let me check if she’s still wearing that halo under her TacoTown hat. Come on over, little Mormon. Being drunk’s not contagious, you know. You don’t hafta worry about me –“
“That’s enough, Tom,” Wayne interrupted.
Tom tried to straighten his stance against the wall. “I don’t take orders from you anymore,” he said to Wayne. “And I’m not leaving.”
“That’s fine. No one asked you to leave,” Wayne reminded him.
But Tom would not be diverted from the drama he’d been rehearsing in his head all night. It was still real to him even if the rest of us weren’t playing along. “I said I’m not leaving. You’re gonna hafta call the cops and get me thrown out of here.”
Tom managed to hook his arm over the back of a chair and hefted himself onto the seat, landing with noisy groans both from the wood and from himself. He pounded his foot against the floor. “Come on out here, Crystal. Sit with me. Warm me up –“
“That’s enough, Tom,” Wayne warned again.
“Why are you still standing here?” Tom bawled at him. “Go call the cops. Call them right now.”
“Settle down, buddy,” Bert interjected. “No one wants to call the cops.”
“And no one wants to throw you back outside either,” Wayne added. “Look at you. You’re too drunk to be out in the cold. You’re probably half frozen to death already and you don’t even know it.”
I hadn’t thought of that. We all knew alcohol made people more likely to be injured by the cold – something about changes in blood flow. It’s the kind of scary story visiting policemen used to regale us with in our junior high school classes. It looked like Tom must have forgotten their warnings. The hair on the back of my neck began to rise. Maybe Darren was wrong about Tom not being hurt.
“Look, he’s been wandering around out there without any gloves,” Bert observed. “You’d better let us take a good look at your hands, buddy.”
“Why?” Tom tried to sound defiant as he said it. But his curiosity was irresistible and he held his hands out and looked at them himself. His flesh was nearly white and both his hands looked like parts of them had been sculpted out of wax. Tom swore. “Wayne,” he croaked. “Wayne, what did I do? Crystal, I wrecked my hands.”
That was when Crystal and I broke out into the dining room and ran to where Tom sat. I gasped at the sight of his poor hands. Bert was reaching for them. “No!” I yelled. “Don’t touch them. Help him to the back instead,” I said. “Crystal, go fill the sink with warm water – warm, not hot.”
She ran into the kitchen while Bert and Wayne carefully raised Tom to his feet.
“Darren, go call an ambulance,” I said. He trotted off into the office. I turned and tried to smile at Tom. “Come with us, Tom. It looks like you’ve got some frostbite on your hands.”
“I can’t go with you,” Tom protested. “I don’t work here anymore. I’m not allowed behind the counter.” Despite his protests, he didn’t resist Wayne and Bert as they each took hold of one of his elbows and led him toward the sound of the running water.
“Tom,” I said loudly as we reached the sink, “this is going to hurt at first but you really need to warm up your hands, right away. Understand?”
He looked scared. “But – they don’t even feel that cold to me,” he stammered, his voice starting to sound teary.
“Come on, Tom. Do what she says,” Crystal told him as she cranked the taps closed.
Bert and Wayne stood on either side of him and plunged both Tom’s hands into the sink, soaking the cuffs of his sleeves. The howl Tom loosed as the water washed over his frostbitten flesh was like nothing I’d ever heard a person make before. Bert looked on calmly but grimly, with a face not unlike the one he probably wore in the springtime when he and his father branded calves. Wayne kept his head down and stayed uncharacteristically speechless.
Tom looked up from the sink as he ran out of breath for any more screaming. “Where is she?” he rasped. “The little Mormon chick – why do you people listen to her?”
Wayne was shushing him as Darren came back from the telephone. “Okay, they’re coming.” He glanced at where Tom stood panting into the
sink. “What did you guys do to him? Even the operator could hear him yelling.”
“It was just a little first aid,” I answered. “I think he frostbit his hands pretty badly. Poor Tom. Now he thinks I’m the devil.”
“The water’s cooling off,” Wayne reported. “Should we add a little more to warm it up?”
“I guess so,” I said even though I never wanted to hear that sound Tom made ever again. Where was the ambulance?
Tom was trying to pull his hands out of the sink. “They’re fine now. They’re fine – I swear. I’ll just put them in my pockets,” he was pleading.
We all yelled “no” in unison. “If you rub anything against them you might rub your skin right off. Frostbite’s a lot like a burn that way,” I explained.
Finally, we heard the sound of metal clinking in the dining room. Darren clipped out to meet the paramedics and bring them to Tom. I heard one on them talking into his radio while another lightly wrapped Tom’s hands in a special bandage as he sat on a stretcher:
“Seventeen-year-old male; intoxicated; mildly hypothermic; frostbite to left and right hands. Civilians administered appropriate first aid on scene...”
Tom lay back in the stretcher and let his head roll to one side as the paramedics wheeled him away. He said one last thing to us before he disappeared through the doorway.
“Crystal – Crystal, I think I’m gonna puke.”