"Huijia xiàn, Jim. Huijia gūxìang nĭde fuqin
—Go home, Jim. Go home to tend to your father."
David Koh was standing at the glass entrance door to the China Garden takeout restaurant and looking up and down North 5th East Street. Nothing was stirring. The snow—a daily event in southern Wyoming at this time of year—was starting and stopping in spurts, having a hard time deciding whether it would create a white Christmas this year. Nobody had come into the restaurant for an hour. There weren't any outstanding telephone orders. It was just him and Jimmy and they'd been the last ones to eat here, each tucking whatever Jimmy had most of while standing in anticipation of the telephone ringing, not exactly a festive meal. He'd called out to Jimmy in the kitchen over his shoulder.
It started to snow again, but it wasn't making a very serious effort at it, in keeping with being in the tired almost-almost town of Green River, Wyoming, a grease spot on Interstate 80 somewhere between "over there" and "back there." It was 7:45 p.m. on Christmas Eve and no one was stirring. His Mandarin was very basic. He was second generation in the States and his parents had been too eager to Americanize, but the restaurant's night cook, Jimmy Fong, was much more recently arrived, having come to take up his father's position in the China Garden kitchen when the old man's hands had been too crippled to continue. Jimmy's English wasn't that good. He hadn't had enough time out of the kitchen to work on it.
"
Wǒmen wù jĭnĭn shi wèi shiwŭfēn
—We don't close for another fifteen minutes," Jimmy called out from in back. He was the regimented one, which, like his father before him, made him a very good, reliable employee. He hadn't fully gathered that it was Christmas Eve and they were closing at 8:00 p.m. He usually was here until 10:00, and it usually was busy past that time.
"
Bù yīgè shi wèilài
—Nobody is coming," David called back. Jimmy would be sad about that. He had to work beyond closing time to feel he'd done his duty. David wasn't old school. He'd be happy they were closing early—if he had anyplace to go now. He couldn't go home. His parents would be whole hog for Christmas, it being an American tradition. That wouldn't include him this year, though. Jimmy wouldn't care about Christmas. He was a Buddhist. This was his first year in the States and he'd wound up in Nowhere, Wyoming, of all places. He was bewildered by it all.
It took until 8:30 for Jimmy to get the kitchen cleaned up and shut down and David to sweep out the front. David stood in the doorway, watching Jimmy walk toward the apartment he shared with his father. Jimmy had wrapped up the leftovers from the slow night. His father would eat well tonight. All Jimmy had in life in a country where he hadn't even mastered the language yet was his work and a father to take care of. David envied him, though, because the man was satisfied with that. David didn't even have a home to go to tonight. Bad timing on falling out with his parents during the Christmas season.
Before coming out of the restaurant and locking the door, he noticed that the guy across the street, at Gold's Gym—the other closer—was closing up too. David thought of the big, black guy who covered the evening shift at the gym as the other closer. The gym usually closed at 10:00 at night, just as the take-out did, and it often was David closing up here as the black guy, all muscle and about twice David's size, but built like Mr. Universe, was turning off the lights across the street. They'd been doing this for over a year now—watching each other close up their businesses at the end of the night—but they never come anywhere closer to meeting than saluting each other in the dark from across the street.
As he watched, the black guy pulled his athletic T over his head, presumably preparing to go back to the showers in the gym before closing down. David involuntarily sucked in air. The man's torso was magnificent—all chocolate, muscular sculpting, covered with a swirl of dark blue, almost primeval tattooing. David's mind flipped off into arousal and desire. He had to shake his head to come out of his reverie. This inflamed the dilemma he was in now—in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong family to have the feelings that he did.
The black guy saluted now and David returned it, and then the bodybuilder, looking really good in sweat pants and a bare chest, pulled back into the gym. With a sigh, David locked the door and stepped out onto the walk, looking both to the right and the left, not having any idea where to go on a night that he had time left to do something. Would guys like him be out cruising on Christmas Eve? Were there even many guys like him in this nowhere dot on the map? He hadn't hooked up since college; he hadn't met anyone in Green River to hook up with. It was sort of funny that this had come to a head with his family—and at Christmas time.
He'd gotten a room at the Mustang Motel over on East Flaming Gorge Way, the I-80 business route main drag through town, but there was no thrill in going there this early in the evening. The motel was clean, but sterile. He couldn't stay more than a couple of nights there. He'd have to find a room somewhere if he couldn't go back to his parents' house.
There didn't seem to be any other option than his room at the Mustang Motel, though, so David started walking toward East Flaming Gorge Way. The snow was still coming down in flakes, but it refused to cover the ground. This was unusual for this time of year in southern Wyoming. Usually there was a foot of snow or more on the ground for Christmas and the background of fluffy white stuff set the town's Christmas decorations off well and hid how tired the buildings themselves were. No such luck this year, which, when added to funk David's blowup with his parents, the owners of the China Garden restaurant, running it on the day shift, put him in a foul mood. It's as if he were waiting for something new to happen in his life to dispel the drudgery of this "going nowhere" town that was set so solidly against him and his nature.
As he approached the intersection with the main drag, he heard the choral music coming from a community center to his right, the opposite direction of the Mustang Motel to his left. It was Christmas Eve and he was all alone. He turned right. It was early yet. He'd listen to the music before going back to his room. Maybe it would make him forget his melancholy—at least for an hour.
What he didn't see was that Abeo Musa, the big, black Nigerian who ran Gold's Gym on the nightshift and who had been sizing up the Chinese guy, David Koh, from the Chinese takeout on the other side of the street from his gym had left the gym just after David closed up the restaurant and, after hesitating, had started to walk toward the main drag through the town. It hadn't been an inadvertent act when Musa had stripped off his T-shirt and flexed his muscles when he saw Koh across the street, watching him.
Musa followed some sixty feet away from the younger Asian man on the dark street, and when David turned right, toward the community center and the Christmas music, Musa turned in that direction too.
* * * *
The musical sound in the community center wasn't the greatest. There were some sweet voices in the choir but the total sound wasn't anything David would hear on a CD. But the atmosphere was warm and Christmassy and the musical selections were comforting—and, most important, mind numbing. David really didn't want to go home—with "home" now, at least temporarily, being a tired motel room that backed onto the most extensive rail switching yard between Rawlings, Wyoming, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The rail yards and the nearby Flaming Gorge attraction, which had lent its name to practically everything in town, were the only two reasons Green River still existed after the need for someplace to stop over to rest and resupply ended in the rush to California gold.
He found a seat, nodding to those already seated, the concert having begun, and becoming aware that, although people were polite about it, he was the only Asian-looking person in the room. There weren't even many blacks, Green River being pretty much an all-white town as a good many of the former small pioneer towns in the American West were. As far as he had been able to find, his and Jimmy Fong's were the only Chinese-origin families in town. The main reason China Garden was able to make it in this town of twelve-thousand residents was that it was the only Chinese food restaurant in the county. He was here now, though, and although he was getting looks, they were curious, not hostile, ones.
