The Sandwich Maker

short fiction

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

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The cop wanted more onions on her sandwich.

I worked the graveyard shift at the deli. We were always open, even on Christmas, though we did get paid time-and-a-half for working holidays. And I bet you're wondering who buys sandwiches on Thanksgiving.

Nurses. Firefighters. Insomniacs. The homeless. The lonely. The mentally ill. And cops. I made sandwiches for all of them. But I'd never had a customer who wanted that many onions.

"Are you sure you want all this?” I asked the cop. A full onion. Ten thick slices. Sandwich pollution. I was crying from the fumes.

"I think I have to charge you extra,” I said.

We graveyard sandwich-makers invented our own procedures and policies. We worked in a small deli. Not a franchise. The owner rarely showed up during the day and never at night. We liked to joke that he was a Russian mobster just laundering money. Our graveyard shift manager rarely left the back office. He spent most of his shift sleeping on a pile of cardboard boxes. He made five dollars more an hour than I did. That would've been $200 more a week. $800 a month. After taxes, something like $600. I could've used that extra money but I wasn't jealous of the manager. And none of us resented him. He wasn't lazy. He was exhausted. His feet were always sore. His back ached. He was divorced and worked two jobs to help support his kids. Do you remember they used to call it moonlighting when you worked two jobs? A poetic name for a difficult life. But nobody calls it moonlighting anymore because everybody works two or three jobs now. Two or three gigs.

"More onions," the cop said. "I want my sandwich to insult me."

She laughed. I laughed. I'd made at least fifty sandwiches for her over the previous two or three years. She'd become something like my house guest and I was something like her personal chef. If she came on a night when I wasn't working, she'd just microwave a burrito. I always looked forward to seeing her. Maybe I was in love with her. It's hard to know. It's hard for me to admit it. I was a Native American boy, a Navajo born and raised in Seattle. I'd never visited my tribe's reservation. My paternal grandparents had belonged to Navajo clans but my father gave that up when he moved to the city. Blood-wise, I was half-Navajo. Culture-wise, I was something less. It's like I was a can of generic cola on the bottom shelf while the full Navajos were Coke and Pepsi right there in your eyeline. But I was still an Indian who wasn't supposed to love white authority figures. Certainly not the ones in uniform. And never white cops. Other Indians would've teased me and said she was just another treaty-breaker. But things change. For Indians, it's all about the change. There's so many white people roaming around that we Indians are bound to fall in love with somebody's whiteness.

So I guess I maybe loved that white cop because of her whiteness and not despite it. And she'd never before wanted that many onions on her sandwich. Impulsive. Impulsive. Who can ever explain the impulsive?

A few months earlier, she'd walked in with a black eye.

"Somebody resist arrest?" I asked her.

"Soccer ball," she said.

Soccer-playing cop. I always assumed she was a lesbian. I knew I was stereotyping her. But stereotypes wouldn't exist if they didn't contain a significant amount of truth.

That white cop probably could've beaten me up. I kinda liked the thought.

"Is this enough?" I asked her as I added more onions. The bread couldn't contain them. It was a sandwich so unruly that it had become a salad.

"Give me all the onions in the world," she said.

"Are you sure sure?” I asked.

I thought about how awful that her breath was going to be. I still wanted to kiss her. I thought about her getting into the face of some smart-ass juvenile offender. I imagined her saying, "This is what prison smells like all the time."

I still wanted to kiss her.

"You're always reading," she'd said to me one night. As I worked, I usually had a novel propped open by the cash register.

"I drive past," she said. "And if you ain't making sandwiches then you're reading. Why you always reading?"

"Every book takes me closer," I said.

"Closer to where?" she asked.

"Closer to not being here,” I said.

She nodded. She worked graveyard shift, too. She probably wanted to solve crimes in the sunlight.

I plated her onion sandwich. There was ham, too, and tomatoes and mayo. I scooped potato chips on top. Added a pickle. Poured her a Diet Coke. She took her meal to a corner table and quickly ate it. As I cleaned our work area for the fifth time that night, I surreptitiously watched her onion extravaganza.

After she finished eating, she gave me the thumbs-up, and said, "Perfect." Then she left the deli and drove away in her squad car.

My co-workers, Black Mike and White Mike, gave me shit.

"You gotta ask her out," White Mike said. "You look like a shelter dog when she comes in. Pick me, pick me, pick me."

"Indian boy loves white cop," Black Mike said. "Romeo and Julie-fucking-ette."

A week later, that cop showed up to say goodbye. She was out of uniform. She'd gotten a job in her hometown, Republic, a little village set down in the Eastern Washington pine forests an hour from the Canadian border.

"I'm gonna be deputy sheriff," she said.

"Who's the sheriff?" I asked.

"My Dad," she said. She smiled. Her voice broke. Her eyes watered. She was so happy. So proud.

"Good luck," I said.

"Thanks," she said. "Well, I gotta go. Gotta say goodbye to some others."

"Other night people," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "Night people."

We stared at each other. I thought I saw romance in her eyes. But I wasn't sure. I didn't want to declare my love and be rebuffed.

"Okay," she said. "If you ever get to Republic, look me up."

After she left, the Mikes gave me even more shit.

"You idiot," White Mike said. "She wanted to give you a going-away present in the backseat of the cop car,"

"She's a lesbian," I said. "She plays on the other team."

"I think she might play more than one sport," he said.

But I was really thinking, and didn't want to say, that on the long list of potential lovers, a graveyard shift sandwich maker is somewhere near the bottom.

Black Mike said, "Damn. Indian boy chooses tragedy. Again."

Twenty years later, I still think about that cop. The deli burned down long ago. An apartment building occupies that whole block now. A middling Italian restaurant sits on the corner where the deli used to be.

I ended up writing book reviews and movie coverage for the local independent weekly. I did that for five years and barely made enough money. But now I’m a paralegal who writes for the firm’s lawyers. I make more money than I ever have. That’s a good thing. I've been married for eight years to a white woman. She's an accountant. We send our kid to public school but we've been wondering if we can move our money around and pay for private school. Who knew that first grade can cost $12,000 a year?

Our kid is only half as Navajo as me. We marry our peers so it's almost guaranteed that he'll marry a white woman and have kids only half as Navajo as him. Eventually, two, three, and four generations down the road, all my descendants will be white people who think they're Navajo.

That's how it goes for almost all of us Indians. There's not enough of us.

I love my wife. Her blue eyes flew like twin comets into my orbit and I instinctively knew that someone like her only comes around once every 75 years. I ain't going nowhere. But, sometimes, when I can't sleep, I'll grab my phone, open the GPS app, and plot travel routes to that cop’s little town on the Canadian border. She’s probably sheriff by now. But I'll never go on that journey. Life is better when you keep a loose hold on the impossible things.