The map on Daniel Alvarez's phone promised a shortcut that would save forty minutes, and at nine o'clock on Christmas Eve it left his family twenty-two miles down a dead dirt road in the Arizona desert, with a dying minivan and no signal.
Gil Navarro saw their headlights from his porch. Hardly a soul drove the old Copper Wash road at night anymore. Few had driven it at all since 1987, when the state moved the highway twelve miles north and the gas station Gil's father built in 1952 went dark for good.
The headlights came closer, very slowly. Then they flickered, dimmed, and went out at the bottom of the wash, a quarter mile below his house.
Gil sat in his chair a moment longer. He was eighty. He had a bad hip and a cold beer and a Christmas Eve plan that involved falling asleep in front of the television.
Then he put on his jacket, got his big flashlight, and started down the hill.
The minivan sat in the sand with its hood up. A young man stood in front of the engine with his phone held over his head, turning in circles, looking for a signal. A young woman sat in the passenger seat with the door open. In the back seat, two small children slept under a blanket. On the dashboard was a plastic nativity scene, the kind that lights up.
"Buenas noches," Gil called, so he would not scare them. "You folks lost?"
The young man spun around. "Sir. Yes, sir. The map said this road went through to Globe."
"It used to," Gil said. "In 1975."
Their name was Alvarez. Daniel and Rosa, and the children were Mateo, six, and Sofía, three. They were driving from Tucson to Rosa's mother's house in Show Low for Christmas. Rosa's mother had been sick all fall, and this was maybe her last Christmas, and they had left late because Daniel's shift at the warehouse ran over.
The van had been running hot for twenty miles. Then a squeal, then a smell, then nothing.
Gil shone his flashlight under the hood. He did not have to look long.
"Serpentine belt's gone," he said. He pointed to the frayed black rubber hanging off the pulleys. "On this van, that belt runs your water pump and your alternator both. No belt, no cooling, no charging. Your battery's been running the whole car on its own for twenty miles. Now it's done too."
Daniel stared at the engine. "Can you fix it?"
"Not tonight," Gil said. "There's not a belt for this van within sixty miles, and every parts store in Arizona closed at five."
Rosa had come around the side of the van. She was holding Sofía now, asleep on her shoulder. She looked at Gil, and then up at the dark hill behind him, where one porch light burned.
"Is that your house?"
"It is."
"Is it warm?"
Gil looked at the two children. It was going to be twenty-eight degrees tonight in the wash. Deserts are like that in December.
"It's warm," he said.
The house was the old station building. Gil's father had built it in 1952, cinder block with a tin roof, two gas pumps out front and a service bay on the side. When the highway moved, his father had turned the office into a kitchen and the storeroom into a bedroom, and Gil had lived there ever since, alone since his wife passed in 2011.
The service bay was still there. Gil had never been able to empty it. Fifty years of a mechanic's life hung on its walls. Belts and hoses on nails. Coffee cans of bolts. A tire machine. A rack of hand tools black with old grease.
Mateo woke up when they carried him inside, looked around the bay with huge eyes, and whispered, "Are you Santa's mechanic?"
"Sometimes," Gil said.
He made hot chocolate on the stove in the kitchen, the old way, with milk and a block of Mexican chocolate and a cinnamon stick. Rosa sat on the couch with both children under a quilt. Daniel stood in the doorway to the bay, looking at the wall of belts.
"Any of those fit?" he asked.
"No," Gil said. "Those are for cars that went extinct when you were in diapers."
Rosa's phone had one bar of signal on the porch, if she stood on the railing. She called her mother at ten. Gil heard her voice through the window, cheerful and steady. We're fine, Mama. We'll be there in the morning. Don't wait up.
When she came back in, she sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands.
"She sounded so tired," she said.
Daniel sat down next to her. They did not say anything for a while.
Gil went out to the service bay and stood in the cold looking at the wall.
He knew every belt on it. He had hung most of them himself. V-belts for Chevys and Fords and Dodges, for tractors and pump engines and one 1961 Studebaker that had come through on its way to California and never left. None of them would fit a modern serpentine belt, with its wide flat back and six tiny ribs.
But a belt is a loop, Gil thought. And a loop is just a length of rubber that has to go around something.
He went back into the house and found his reading glasses.
"Daniel," he said. "Bring me your flashlight. And whatever tools you've got in the back of that van."
At midnight, they were under the hood of the minivan in the wash, Daniel holding the light and Gil leaning on the fender with his bad hip, measuring the path of the old belt with a piece of baling wire.
The plan was crazy. Gil knew it was crazy. A serpentine belt wove around six pulleys at once. But you did not have to run all of them. You only had to run two. The crankshaft and the water pump, to keep the engine cool. Charge the battery from his own truck's jumper cables. Bypass the rest.
A big, old V-belt off a 1978 Ford pickup might reach. If they rerouted it. If it held.
He had just slipped the old belt over the crankshaft pulley when Daniel said, very quietly, "Mr. Navarro."
Gil looked up.
Daniel was pointing his flashlight up the wash.
Water.
A thin, dark sheet of it was sliding down the sandy bottom of the wash toward them in the moonlight. Gil heard it before he saw it. A low, steady hiss. Somewhere up in the dark mountains to the east, where none of them could see it, it had rained.