Timothy Hallinan: The Man With No Time

Horace, often the cynosure of his mother's wrath at his inability to hold down more than two jobs at the same time, let out a sigh that fluttered his napkin, and Pansy put her hand gently over his. Horace retracted his hand, leaving Pansy looking down at empty tablecloth. I wondered, and not for the first time, whether something was going wrong between them.

“What's your mom say about Uncle Lo?” I asked. “She must be thrilled.”

“Well, she's coming. Sometime today.”

“Today?” Pansy said, knocking over, and catching, a glass of water.

“What time?” Horace demanded, alert at last.

“Three.” Eleanor lifted a hand. “Horace, I told you on the phone last night-”

“Who remembers last night?” Horace snapped.

“The pictures,” Pansy said. She licked her upper lip and then wiped it with a pale forefinger.

“Blinking baby Jesus,” Horace said. He stood up. “We gotta get home.”

“I'm not hungry anyway,” I said truthfully. “What pictures?”

Pansy, frantically hanging cameras around her neck, said, “Just pictures.”

“We haven't paid,” Eleanor pointed out. She seemed privately amused at something.

I got up and dropped thirty dollars onto the table. “Take that off last night,” I said to Horace, “and let's go.”

“What's your hurry?” Eleanor asked.

“I want to see those pictures,” I said.

“It's Pansy's rogues' gallery,” Eleanor said as Horace, thirty feet in front of us, passed a truck on a blind curve. There was an indignant raspberry from the horn of an oncoming car, and a bright red Ultra-Nondescript hurtled past us, hugging the curb. The driver was facing backward and screaming out the window.

“Remember when you could tell cars apart?” I asked. “Sweet little Pansy? A rogues' gallery? Who are the rogues?”

“Everybody,” Eleanor said. “Pansy's been wicked with her camera. But it's mostly Mom.”

“Ah,” I said, closing my eyes as I passed the truck. When I opened them, we were still alive. “Ergo, the rush.”

“Pansy's always been the perfect Chinese daughter-in-law,” Eleanor explained cheerily. “ 'Yes, Mother, no, Mother. Of course you can cut the children's hair, Mother. Why should I have anything to say about how my children look?' And all the while, she had the cameras dangling all over the house. And good for her.”

This was surprising. Eleanor had escaped her mother's massive gravitational field approximately ten minutes after she entered college, but she'd always seemed to expect filial piety from Horace and Pansy. After all, it was traditionally the responsibility of the eldest son to take care of the parents. And Horace had come through. Until Mrs. Chan had moved to Las Vegas, only eighteen months earlier, she'd exercised absolute dominion over the small apartment in which all the Chans except Eleanor lived, and which Mrs. Chan owned. It had always seemed to me the most claustrophobic possible living arrangement; there was literally no room for disagreement. Not that Mrs. Chan, then between husbands and lacking a sinkhole for her supernatural energy, would have tolerated disagreement even if they'd all been rattling around in the Taj Mahal.

“So what's wrong between Horace and Pansy?”

I could feel Eleanor's glance. “Who says anything's wrong?”

“Eleanor,” I said, “either I'm a member of the family or I'm not. They're not the same. Something's wrong.”

“I don't know,” Eleanor said unconvincingly.

Well, I thought I knew-I could smell Ning's perfume coming out of my pores.

“I can understand if he's frustrated,” Eleanor said, capitulating. “Mom is the boss, and Pansy knows it, which is pretty hard on his ego. And Pansy's pregnancy was, well, difficult, you know? They couldn't make love for months and months.”

“They can now,” I offered, and then I thought about it. “Can't they?”

“Pansy says they don't.” People, even private people like Pansy, volunteered things to Eleanor. “I was there one night with the kids, and Horace hadn't been home for hours. She was setting the table for dinner, way too late to expect Horace to eat anything, and all of a sudden she fell to the floor and started to cry. She missed a chair on the way down. So I sat next to her, and the next thing I knew, she opened up. Yikes, of all the things I didn't want to know. She thinks he's got a girlfriend.”

“I doubt that,” I said, joining the Brotherhood of Guilty Males as we coasted up the driveway of Mrs. Chan's apartment building. Horace and Pansy were climbing out of their car, Horace shouting at Pansy in Cantonese until she silenced him with something sharper in tone and further north in dialect. Over the squabble I could hear Bravo barking a manic welcome, but the barking sounded muffled. Pansy threw some phrase that was all elbows and edges over her shoulder as she climbed the steep exterior stairway leading to the back door of the apartment. Then, turning face forward again, she stopped climbing, so suddenly that Horace, running on momentum and alcohol fumes, stumbled into her back. Pansy had to throw out a hand and grasp the banister to keep from toppling back on him, but the gesture was nothing but muscle. She was completely focused on the landing at the top of the stairs.

The rickety wooden child-restraining gate that Horace had installed to keep Julia and Eadweard from the first, and potentially last, fall of their lives was hanging open. Pansy snapped something that was clearly a question, and Bravo suddenly loosed a volley of barking that was more frantic and deep-chested than simple welcome.

The gate was always kept closed. It was the last thing Pansy checked every night and the first thing she rechecked in the morning. She took the stairs two at a time, cameras banging against her body and each other, and bolted through the open back door. Horace trudged resignedly up behind her, and Eleanor pushed past me, her face grim and tight, a mask of muscle.

Then Pansy screamed. It was a virtuoso, three-octave shrill. A diva's scream, breaking at the top of the scale and shivering its way down again. Eleanor and I got through the door just in time to see Pansy, hands pressed against her cheeks, fill her lungs all the way to her knees and start a new one.

Horace had reached her by then, hoisting her like a sack of rice and carrying her backward. Following, I saw the kitchen.

It had been trashed: utensils spilled glittering onto the floor, flour dumped everywhere, the first snowfall after the bomb. Bravo thundered away somewhere near.

The hallway took me past the kitchen and into the combination dining and living room. The table lay on its top, legs sticking up into the air as stiff as a dead cow's. Upholstered chairs had been slit open and eviscerated. The rugs had been pulled aside. Pictures, including some from Pansy's rogues' gallery, had been torn from the walls and trampled. The family shrine had been bent and smashed, and a hole had been kicked in the wall below the mantel on which it stood.

Horace deposited Pansy on a sofa that looked like it had vomited its intestines and headed off toward the bedrooms, and I followed, leaving Eleanor to try to take Pansy in hand. Horace was already in the twins' room by the time I hit the hallway behind him. I could see that one of the beds was lying on its side.

“Shit,” he said, and the door to the hall closet buckled outward and then snapped back, held by a childproof external bolt five feet from the floor. I slid the bolt, and Bravo rocketed out between my legs, hitting me so hard that the door slammed shut again. I was turning away to join Horace, who was shouting something to Pansy from the twins' room, when I saw the piece of paper tacked to the door.

It said: Theyre okay, dont do nothing.