Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,39
they would have ruined several pieces of fruit as they tried to find a tasty, ripe persimmon. Just yesterday, I caught the Dovetree kids doing that back at Acorn. Dolores just watched and smiled. Anyone who was nice to her grandkids could be her friend for life—as long as they didn’t cross the rest of her family.
“Come on,” she said to me. “The shit pile that you want to talk with is stinkin’ up the café. Is this the boy?” She looked up at Dan, seeming to notice him for the first time. “Your sister?” she asked him.
Dan nodded, solemn and silent.
“I hope she’s the right girl,” she said. Then she glanced at me, looked me up and down. She smiled again. “So you’re finally starting a family. It’s about time! I was 16 when I had my first.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’m only two months along, and not showing at all yet. But she would notice, somehow. No matter how distracted and grandmotherly she can seem when she wants to, she doesn’t miss much.
We left Natividad in the housetruck, on watch. There are some very efficient thieves hanging around Georgetown. Trucks need guarding. Travis and Bankole went into the café with Dan and me, but Dan and the two men took a table together off to one side to back me up in case anything unexpected happened between the slaver and me. People didn’t start trouble inside George’s Café if they were sensible, but you never knew when you were dealing with fools.
Dolores directed us to a tall, lean, ugly man dressed completely in black, and working hard to look contemptuous of the world in general and George’s Café in particular. He wore a kind of permanent sneer.
He sat alone as we had agreed, so I went over to him alone and introduced myself. I didn’t like his dry, papery voice or his tan, almost yellow eyes. He used them to try to stare me down. Even his smell repelled me. He wore some aftershave or cologne that gave him a heavy, nasty, sweet scent. Honest sweat would have been less offensive. He was bald, clean-shaved, beak-nosed, and so neutral-colored that he could have been a pale-skinned Black man, a Latino, or a dark-skinned White. He wore, aside from his black pants and shirt, an impressive pair of black leather boots—no expense spared—and a wide heavy leather belt decorated with what I first thought were jewels. It took me a moment to realize that this was a control belt—the kind of thing you use when you’re moving around a lot and controlling several people through slave collars. I had never seen one before, but I’d heard descriptions of them.
Hateful bastard.
“Cougar,” he said.
Crock of shit, I thought. But I said, “Olamina.”
“The girl’s outside with some friends of mine.”
“Let’s go see her.”
We walked out of the café together, followed by my friends and his. Two guys sitting at the table off to his right got up when he did. It was all a ridiculous dance.
Outside, near the big, mutilated, dead stump of a redwood tree, several kids waited, guarded by two more men. The kids, to my surprise, looked like kids. They were not made up to look older or, for that matter, younger. The boys—one looked no older than 10—wore clean jeans and short-sleeved shirts. Three of the girls wore skirts and blouses, and three wore shorts and T-shirts. All the jeans were a little too tight, and the skirts were a little too short, but none were really worse than things free kids of the same ages wore.
The slaves were clean and they looked alert and wary. None of them looked sick or beaten, but they all kept an eye on Cougar. They looked at him as he emerged from the café, then looked away so that they could watch him without seeming to. They weren’t really good at this yet, so I couldn’t help noticing. I looked around at Dan, who had followed us out with Bankole and Travis. Dan looked at the slave kids, stopped for a second as his gaze swept over the older girls, then shook his head.
“None of them are her,” he said. “She’s not here!”
“Hold on,” Cougar said. He tapped his belt and four more kids came around the great trunk of the tree—two boys and two girls. These were a little older—mid-to-late teens. They were beautiful kids—the most beautiful I had ever seen. I found myself staring at one of them.