Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“We're leaving,” I said to Horace, trying and failing to stand up. “Pansy's waiting for you.” Pansy was Horace's wife and the mother of their twins, and as far as I was concerned an immediate candidate for sainthood.

“Pansy,” Uncle Lo said dismissively, standing above us again. “Who cares?”

He'd sounded a lot fonder of Pansy at Horace's house, and now his tone caught Horace's attention. Horace looked up at him, wide-eyed.

“I do,” I said. This time I managed to get to my feet, and I was relieved to see Horace stand up, too.

“Gotta hit the toilet,” Horace said, edging out of the booth.

“Good luck,” Lek said cheerfully, and we all watched Horace weave his way toward the plumbing, as though he were part of the floor show.

Uncle Lo sat down next to me, closer than I would have liked. He smelled like the old clothes at the bottom of the hamper.

“The check,” I said, leaning away.

Lek pouted politely and then floated in the direction of the bar. The electric piano gurgled out the opening chords of Elvis's “Blue Christmas.”

“You detective boy,” Uncle Lo said, surprising me. When I'd been told the family hero was in town, I hadn't known he'd been told what I did for a living.

“Yeah,” I said, worrying about Pansy and the twins. “Detective boy.”

“Hah,” Uncle Lo said, as though I'd admitted personally eating most of the members of the Donner Party. “Some Chinese not like detective.”

“And some detectives don't like some Chinese,” I said, draining my newly full glass without thinking about it.

Uncle Lo put his hand on my arm and squeezed. I lowered my head-which seemed to take a lot of time-to check it out. His index finger was scraped raw, its nail split vertically to the quick. It must have hurt him to squeeze my arm, but nothing showed in his face. “What you think about me?”

“I think you've got a terrific black eye. And I think Horace should be home with his wife.”

Uncle Lo sank his fingers more deeply into my arm, and I watched the skin beneath the nail go white, except for the livid line of red beneath the split. It had to hurt like hell Then he smiled a cheese-yellow crescent that defied the pain and stood. He didn't wobble this time. “We go home then.”

“Swell,” Horace said, materializing next to the table. He'd splashed his pants, leaving a pattern that suggested an archipelago of uninhabited islands adrift in a khaki sea. “The urinal moved,” he said.

The girls laughed again, dutifully this time, and Horace settled the tab, added a big tip, and led us out through the door in an imprecise conga line. Horace and I had lost the ability to identify either of our feet as right or left, but Uncle Lo walked with the kind of precision that would have qualified him to lead the Long March. Once we were squeezed into the front seat of Horace's little Honda-the backseat was taken up with the twins' stuff-Uncle Lo leaned against my shoulder and went promptly to sleep.

“I gather the dog tried to bite you,” I said conversationally, but he'd departed the conversation zone.

Horace was far too drunk for L.A. on a Saturday night, but the luck that had deserted him in the men's room rejoined us in the car. He swerved away from oncoming headlights once or twice and said "Wheeee" too often to reassure the faint of heart, but eventually we pulled up behind the apartment house that he and Pansy and the twins rented from his and Eleanor's mother. Pansy stood silhouetted in the light from the door as Uncle Lo revived against my shoulder and gave the world a survivor's squint.

“So,” I said as Uncle Lo and I climbed carefully out of the car beneath Pansy's sober gaze. “Who'd you call in the bar?”

“Always detective,” Lo said. He held up the wrist bearing the watch he'd kept checking. “I look my watch, and all wrong. So I call Time.”

I started toward my car before the question struck me: “Why didn't you ask one of us what time it was?”

“Detective boy,” he said dismissively, “Good night.”

I thought about it all the way home.

As much as I loved Eleanor Chan, my hangover was making it difficult to like her.

“He saved my life,” Eleanor said, grabbing my arm with surprisingly strong fingers.

“This seems to be a family trait,” I said, pushing her hand aside. Then I hung onto her wrist. The room had developed an alarming tilt.

We hadn't been seated yet. Horace, Pansy, the two kids, and Uncle Lo were late meeting us, and the competition for tables at the Empress Pavilion was too fierce to allow us to do anything but mill around hopelessly, clutching our paper numbers and praying that the rest of the group showed up before our number was called. The entire Chinese population of Los Angeles proper, which is to say all but the more recent Mandarin-speaking arrivals who had laid claim to Monterey Park, showed up at the Empress Pavilion for dim sum on Sundays. Every single one of them was talking. For all the myth of the inscrutable Orient, the Chinese are the most demonstrative people on earth.

“Well, he did" Eleanor said, raising her voice over the din. Like many Chinese, she seemed perfectly at ease packed shoulder to thigh with strangers. "He carried me, literally carried me, more than two hundred miles across China on his shoulders with my pregnant mother following behind dressed as a peasant. When we hit the water he tied my hands around his neck and swam toward Hong Kong with my mother paddling along behind.”

We hadn't actually talked about this in detail before. “Lo did that?”

She turned away, scanning the crowd for latecomers. “The harbor was full of police boats. He bought them off, somehow. Three or four times we saw the spotlights skipping over the water. Once a light stopped just above our heads and someone yelled something in Cantonese. I thought we were dead.”

“What did he yell?” I just can't help asking questions.

“Who knows? I was just a little kid. But whatever it was, and whatever Uncle Lo called back, the boat turned around without picking us up and moved away from us, and Uncle Lo told us to follow the boat, and half an hour later another boat picked us up and we were in Hong Kong.”

“He must be very resourceful,” I said.

She gave me Full Glare. “You make it sound like an accusation. If he hadn't been resourceful, I'd still be in China.”

“I'm grateful,” I said, meaning it. My headache approached tumor magnitude. “But there's still something wrong with him. Whose brother is he? Your mother's or your father's?”

“Neither,” she said. She looked at my big doleful white man's face, mistook my grimace of pain for a pang of conscience, and lifted herself up to kiss my cheek. She'd always been forgiving, and I'd often taken advantage of it. “Uncle is a term of respect. For years, I thanked Uncle Lo in my prayers every night for what he did for my family. If he hadn't, there wouldn't have been any family.”

Now we were on familiar ground. Eleanor's family had been landowners, a fatal mistake when the Chinese government made one of its Great Leaps forward. Her father, a university professor, had spent eighteen hours kneeling on broken glass and reciting his sins to illiterate Red Guards. Then he'd been sent to prison in Manchuria, and when the prison officials realized he was going to die, they released him so they wouldn't have to bother with the body. Somehow he got himself home and impregnated his wife with Horace as a final gesture toward life. That finished, he'd turned his face to the wall and let life go. That was in 1959. Eleanor was two.

Like many men of his class, he'd been an intellectual, which made him doubly guilty. He'd written a long scholarly treatise about Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, the novel that Eleanor and I loved best in the world. It had brought us together at UCLA, me in Literature, she on loan from Oriental Studies. Both of us had been transfixed by the tale that set forth the problems of Bao-Yu, the pampered and neurotically sensitive rich boy, and his two beautiful female cousins, the ethereal Dai-Yu and the earthy Bao-Chai-a vanishing Gone with the Wind way of life painted unexpectedly on a Chinese canvas like the frilly blue tragedy of the Willow Pattern.