Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,42

cheated me, palmed a defective off on me. Someone might once have done the same to him. Marcus was so good-looking that Cougar might have been persuaded to buy him in a rush without stripping him to look him over. But Marcus had suffered terrible burns sometime in the past, and Bankole said he had been shot, too.

When Bankole had finished examining him, he gave him something to help him sleep. That seemed best. Marcus had not objected to being examined. I assured him before I left them together that Bankole was a doctor and my husband as well. He didn’t say anything. I asked him what he wanted to eat. He shrugged and whispered, “Nothing. I’m okay.”

“He’s far from okay,” Bankole told me later. But because Marcus wasn’t in serious physical pain, we could keep him with us. We gave him a space behind screens—room dividers—in our kitchen. It was warm there, and we had set up a bed, a dresser, a pitcher and basin, and a lamp. Like every other household in the community, we sometimes had to take people in—strangers who were visiting, new people joining us, or neighbors within the community who weren’t getting along with others in their own households.

I worried that Marcus, in his present state of mind, might get up in the night and run away. How long must he have dreamed of running away from Cougar and his friends? Now, waking up in a strange place, and not quite remembering how he had gotten there… Just to be sure even after he had taken his sleeping pill, I went out and told our night watch—Beth Faircloth and Lucio Figueroa—to be careful. I told them Marcus might awake confused, and try to run away, and that they should be careful about shooting at a lone figure trying to get away from Acorn. Under normal circumstances such a figure would be thought a thief, and might be shot. We’d had great trouble with thieves during our first year, and we learned that if we were to survive, we couldn’t afford to have much sympathy for them.

But Marcus must not be shot.

“You told me Zahra Balter saw your stepmother and your brothers shot down back in Robledo,” Bankole said to me as we lay in bed together. “Well, he’s been beaten, shot, and burned. I can’t imagine how he survived. Someone must have taken care of him, and it wouldn’t have been your friend Cougar.”

“No, it wouldn’t have been Cougar,” I agreed. “I want to know what happened. I hope he’ll tell us. How was he with you when I left you two alone together?”

“Silent. Responsive and unembarrassed, but not speaking one unnecessary word.”

“You’re sure you can cure his infections?”

“They shouldn’t be a problem. Let alone, any one of them would have killed him sooner or later. But with treatment, he should be all right—physically, anyway.”

“He was 14 when I saw him last. He liked playing soccer and reading about the past and about foreign places. He was always taking things apart and sometimes getting them back together again, and he had a huge crush on Robin Balter, Harry’s youngest sister. I don’t know anything about him now. I don’t know who he is.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to find out. I’ve told him he’s going to be an uncle, by the way.”

“Reaction?”

“None at all. At the moment, I don’t think that even he knows who he is. He seems willing enough to be looked after; but I get the feeling he doesn’t much care what happens to him. I think… I hope that that will change. You may be his best medicine.”

“He was my favorite brother—and always the best-looking person in the family. He’s still one of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes,” Bankole said. “In spite of his scars, he’s a good-looking boy. I wonder whether his looks have saved him or destroyed him. Or both.”

It seems that things can never go well for long.

Dan Noyer has run away. He slipped past the watch and out of Acorn at least in part because of the instructions I gave to the night watch. Beth Faircloth says she saw someone—a man or boy, she thought.

“I thought the figure was too tall to be Marcus,” she said when she phoned me. “But I wasn’t sure—so I didn’t shoot.” The running figure had been dressed in dark clothing with something dark over the head and face.

Not until I had verified that Marcus was still there did I