Biding Time
by Elaine Orr
Published by Elaine L. Orr
Biding Time
Copyright 2011 by Elaine L. Orr
More books, novellas, and short stories by Elaine Orr
Tess and All Kinds (short story)
Secrets of the Gap (mystery with a touch of romance)
Searching for Secrets: Author's Preferred Edition (mystery with a touch of romance)
Appraisal for Murder (first of the Jolie Gentil cozy mystery series)
Rekindling Motives (continuing the Jolie Gentil series
www.elaineorr.com
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS THE WATCH that started it all. Uncle Rudy won it. There were extra buttons, so I pushed one. Two little lights flashed. "Moscow - 10 p.m." I nearly dropped it.
"What are you doing, giving me a Russian watch?"
Uncle Rudy laughed. He hardly ever did. Said it hurt his gums in front, where there were gaps instead of teeth. "It's got lots of cities. Push it again."
"Paris. 7 p.m."
"Why do I need a watch that tells time in these places?" I asked, kidding him.
"You don't know. You might just get there," he replied. He was serious.
I don't remember what I said then. I did laugh with him as we tried to figure out how to get the time for D.C. "Set that for Shaw time," he said, referring to our neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C. Uncle Rudy left to put on what he called his guard-dog outfit. He had a night watch job at the animal hospital. I sat and looked at the watch. Paris. New York. Moscow. Bangkok. I couldn't remember where Bangkok was.
Mama told me it was near Vietnam. She said it in the strained tone she always used to talk about the country where her brother, my namesake, was killed. Franklin Myers. Dead at age twenty-two. "Why do you want to know that," she asked. "Somebody trying to sell you some stuff from there?"
"No, mama." 'Stuff' was her word for anything you shouldn't have. It used to mean junk food. Lately, she watched to see if my 'stuff' might include drugs.
I showed her the watch. "Uncle Rudy gave it to me."
"Where did he get that? Did it come out of a box?" Her way of asking if I thought it was hot.
"He said he won it in the loser's lottery at Leon's Liquors."
Mama laughed. Not her usual half-angry laugh about something Uncle Rudy did. "Loser's lottery! That's the right name for any old thing Uncle Rudy won. Heh. Heh." She stopped laughing when she looked at me.
"I know you don't like me talking that way about Uncle Rudy, baby..."
"I'm not your baby!"
"No, you're not. It's just, you didn't....
"....know Uncle Frank," I finished for her.
Slowly, she walked to the kitchen. "Uncle Rudy, he tries. He's been real good to you."
Even the name of the watch, which I noticed for the first time, seemed to call to me. "The Independent Traveler." I pushed the buttons again. Bangkok. 12:25 p.m. Near Vietnam. That didn't tell me much. I decided to do the unthinkable; go to the library without being forced to. If we had Internet at home, I could have looked it up that way, but we didn't.
The smell greeted me at the door. I thought of it as 'smart people's smell.' I took a deep breath. Maybe it would sink in.
The librarian watched me, and I remembered that when my fifth grade class had visited, Eric and I had put gum over the water fountain drain. I walked into the main room. As if I knew where to look for what I wanted. This was stupid. I turned back to the door, and she was behind me. Smiling. I looked behind me. No one there.
"Do you need some help?" she asked.
I pulled the watch out of my pocket. "I want to know where these places are." She turned the watch over in her hand, and I fought an urge to grab it back.
She pushed the buttons and smiled again. "Come this way."
I followed her through the door marked Reference. The first time I'd been in there was in third grade. Eric's brother Jefferson, a first-class ball player, had wanted to look up something about Karim's NBA playoff record. Eric and I squirmed and punched each other so much the librarian, a different one, had asked us to be quiet twice. Jefferson was furious.
"You'll need to look closely at this globe," she said. I pretended to understand what she meant.
"Over here is Washington, D.C.," she continued. "If you were to fly to all these cities, you'd probably go first to New York." Her finger traced that route. "Then across the Atlantic to Paris." She looked at me to see if I had any questions. I didn't take my eyes off the map.
"Then you'd fly across Europe toward Moscow. So, that's maybe ten or fifteen hours more. Then, from Moscow to Bangkok, I guess at least another twelve hours. Maybe more."
She looked at me again. I held out my hand and she dropped the watch into it. "Anything else?" she asked.
"No, ma'am." I turned and walked a few steps, and stopped. "Thanks." And I got out of there faster than I leave school the day summer vacation starts.
Hands in my jacket pockets, the right one grasping the watch, I walked home. What difference did it make? I'd never get anywhere. Uncle Frank had tried. Mama was real bitter when she talked about him joining the Army to "see the world."
She was especially bitter that he was killed in what she called a "white man's war." ("Lotsa yellow folks there, too, you know, their country," Uncle Rudy would say. It ticked her off.) It was an odd thing for Mama to say. She wasn't down on white people too much.
When I learned more about the whole Vietnam thing, I was surprised that she wasn't angry that his body was never found. "MIA" I knew the initials long before I knew their meaning. Missing in Action and 102nd airborne. His name and company were engraved on a plaque at St. Francis High School. Uncle Rudy took me in one day to show me. That's about all I knew.
When I asked her why his body was never found, she'd almost snorted the answer at me. "Black folks are used to disappearing in wars."
"Why, do we blend in with the dirt?" Ever the smart alek, I egged her on.
She ignored me. "You need to remember how many families got broken up by slavery, and during the Civil War. 'Finders' they had, went around looking for folks. You paid them some to look, more if they found somebody. Usually they didn't. Yessir. Not even anybody really lookin' for your Uncle Frank and the others. I know he's gone to the Lord. I don't need a letter tellin' me some Army doctor found his teeth somewhere." He was the only one of her two brothers and three sisters who had good teeth.
The few times I'd shown interest in other places, she'd remind me of Uncle Frank. "Hardly anything you need you can't get here in D.C. Don't go breakin' my heart like Frank broke my mama's." She was into guilt.