The Man With No Time

The light revealed the park as brown and dirty. Bums slumbered beneath newspaper blankets at its edge, too smart to risk being caught farther inside. The dead grass was littered with bottles and crumpled paper.

An asphalt path led from the Alvarado entrance into the park. Horace began counting at the first step, and the path led us down a short hill, through a copse of bushes, and to a gate. Eleanor had Pansy by the arm.

“Two hundred,” Horace said. He looked left at some tall oleanders.

Horace had short legs. I ran a couple of yards forward, to the edge of the oleanders, and stopped. No one else moved.

Then I said, “Pansy. Horace.” I wasn't sure I trusted my voice.

They all came up behind me and stopped. Eleanor drew in her breath, and it caught and broke, and Pansy let out a small flat high sound like the whistle from a steam kettle and ran past me to the swing where Julia sat, her left wrist tied to the rope of the swing by a bright pink gift ribbon.

Eleanor's reaction was the Chinese one.

“He kept the boy,” she said.

7

The Lord's Servant

The room was full of babies, and they all had numbers written on their wrists. Some of them wore colored ribbons around their throats, trailing enormous floppy bows over their shoulders. Those babies were not crying. The other babies had lengths of string around their necks, dirty pieces of string tied in rotting knots, and they were crying desperately. A very thin, stooped woman in a conical straw rice-paddy hat like the ones we used to see on the newsreels from Vietnam moved from one crying baby to another, spooning something white and thick into their mouths. As they sat up and sucked at the spoon the strings around their throats blossomed into bows, and when the bows became big enough they pulled the babies over onto their sides. Now the other babies were beginning to cry, their colored ribbons dwindling into dirty string, but the thin woman ignored them and shuffled in her rope sandals to the wall.

There was a big round orange button on the wall. I hadn't seen it before. The thin woman pushed it, and the wall slid upward to reveal a broad, steep chute. She pointed to a handle below the chute and gestured for me to pull it. When I did, dozens of new babies cascaded down the chute and into the room. The old woman raised her head to look at me, and beneath the conical straw hat I saw she had a black eye.

“Simeon,” Eleanor said.

I rolled over and came face-to-face with a cerise bear, one of the twins' menagerie. “What time is it?” I asked. The couch was too short for me, and my legs were stiff from having slept with them drawn up.

“Eleven. I've fixed some juk.”

“Any word?” My feet hit the floor sooner than I expected them to, jarring me all the way to my teeth.

“Shhh,” Eleanor said reprovingly. “Pansy and Julia are asleep.”

I eyed the couch, a world-class collection of lumps. “How do you sleep here?”

“You managed,” she said, smiling at me.

“But you're delicate,” I said. “The slightest wrinkle in the sheet-”

She pulled my nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Oh, bananas. I sleep like a horse and you know it. Come and eat something.”

I got up. The floor only heaved twice beneath me. Horace was sitting at the dining-room table eating juk, rice gruel, from a bowl. He'd combed his remaining hair with water, making him look like a farmhand visiting the big city.

“Morning again,” I said. “How long has it been?”

“A little more than five hours.”

“Let's figure he was somewhere close by when we got Julia,” I said, sitting. My back cracked. “He'd just called, so we know he was near MacArthur Park at five-thirty. What's he doing now?”

“Who knows?” Horace said. In spite of the slicked-down hair, he looked much better, five years younger than he had when we left for the park. He'd gotten one child back, and his faith in Uncle Lo had been vindicated, after a fashion. “He'll call when he's ready.”

“Maybe the question is, where is he now?” Horace gave me an interested glance, and it suddenly struck me that I hadn't seen him alone with Pansy since the kids disappeared. He'd always been with Eleanor and me, consigning Pansy to other rooms. “Maybe he needs this time to get from here to somewhere else.” I looked around. “Speaking of where, where's your mother?”

“Pansy packed her off,” Eleanor said, coming into the room with a bowl in her hands. “Mom was driving her wild. Tears, accusations, nattering.” She put down the bowl, sat next to me, and pushed her fingers through my hair, combing it back. “About four yesterday afternoon she told Mom to get out of here and go home.”

I dropped the spoon into my juk. “Your mother's house,” I said.

“Sure, her house,” Horace said crankily. “Where else-”

“That's where he's going,” I said.

Eleanor sat up. “Whatever it was he wanted, he didn't find it here.” She looked at me, but she was thinking about something else. “Should we call her?” she asked Horace.

“Why?” Horace said. “He doesn't know where she lives.”

“Actually,” I said after thinking about it for a moment, “he probably does.”

“How would he?” That was Horace.

“How'd he know about the twins?” Eleanor asked him rhetorically.

“I know who told him about the twins,” I said. “Who told him everything except ancient history, in fact.”

“Who?” Eleanor had a hand on my arm.

I pointed across the room at the cross on the wall. She followed with her eyes and then gave a small gasp.

“Mrs. Summerson?”

Even in his distracted state that caught Horace's ear. “Mrs. Summerson?” he asked.

The phone rang, breaking through the silence like a dentist's drill.

“No games this time,” I said. “Just answer it.”

Horace went to the phone, blew a deep breath out through tight lips, and picked it up. “Hello?”

Eleanor's fingers tightened on my arm.

“Hello, Lo,” Horace said. He looked over at Eleanor and their eyes held. Horace nodded twice and rattled off something in Chinese. I caught “Ah-Ma,” or mother, several times, and Horace shifted his gaze to me and lifted his eyebrows. “Okay, okay,” Horace said and then listened. “Yeah, okay. Yes. Bye-bye.” He pushed down the buttons on top of the telephone and said, a little grudgingly, “Good, Simeon.”

“Mom's,” Eleanor said.

“He wants the place empty by noon. He wants it to stay empty until five this evening. He wants all Mom's stuff put out in plain sight.”

“Not just another pretty face,” Eleanor said, making circles with her fingertips on the back of my hand. She hadn't done that in years.

“Can you reach them?” I asked to mask my confusion.

“They're home right now,” Horace said, starting to push buttons.

“How do you know?”

“Uncle Lo says both cars are there.” He finished dialing and waited.

“Uncle Lo's very careful,” Eleanor said. “It's a good thing he doesn't really mean to harm us.”

“I don't know about you,” I said, hanging on to her fingers, “but I'd gladly throw him out of the helicopter for what he's done already.”

Horace started talking. He encountered some resistance, raised his voice, remembered that Pansy was asleep and lowered it again, and began to gesture with his right hand. He rolled his eyes and looked at Eleanor.