Dolores Ramos George, the matriarch of the tribe, runs the store and the café and she knows everyone. She’s got a reputation for being a hard, mean woman, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s just a realist. She speaks her mind. I like her. She’s one of the people with whom I left word about the Noyer girls. When she heard the story, she just shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said. “Why didn’t they keep a watch? Some parents got no sense at all.”
“I know,” I said. “But I have to do what I can—for the sake of the other three kids.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I’ll tell people. It won’t do no good.”
But now it looked as though it had done some good. And in thanks, I had brought Dolores a basket of big navel oranges, a basket of lemons, and a basket of persimmons. If we found one or both of the Noyer girls as a result of her spreading the word, I would owe her a percentage of the reward—a kind of finder’s fee. But it seemed wise to make sure she came out ahead, no matter what.
“Beautiful, beautiful fruit,” she said, smiling as she looked at it and handled it. She was a stout, old-looking 53, but the smile took years off her. “Around here, if you don’t guard a fruit tree and shoot a couple of people to prove you mean it, they’ll tear off all the fruit, then cut down the tree for firewood. I won’t let my boys kill people to save trees and plants, but I really miss oranges and grapes and things.”
She called some of her young grandchildren to come and take the fruit into the house. I saw the way the kids were looking at everything, so I warned them not to eat the persimmons until they were soft to the touch. I cut one of the hard ones up and let each child have a taste of it so they would all know just how awful something so pretty could taste before it was ripe. Otherwise, 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.
Somewhere behind me, Dan was whimpering, “No, no, she’s still not here! Why did you say she was here? She’s not!” He sounded much younger than his 15 years.
And I heard Bankole talking to him, trying to calm him, but I stood frozen, staring at one of the boys—a young man, really. The young man stared back at me then looked away. Perhaps he had not recognized me. On the other hand, perhaps he was warning me. I was late taking the warning.
“Like that one, do you?” Cougar purred.
Shit.
“He’s one of my best. Young and strong. Take him instead of a girl.”
I made myself look at the girls. One of them did look like the description we had given out of Dan’s sisters: small, dark-haired, pretty, 12 and 13 years old. Nina had a scar just at the hairline where she had been burned when she was four and she and Paula and Dan had found some matches to play with. Some of her hair had caught fire. Paula had a mole—she called it a beauty mark—on the left side of her face near her nose. The girl that Cougar hoped we would buy did have a scar just at the hairline like Nina. She even resembled little Mercy Noyer quite a bit. Same heart-shaped face.
“Did she say she was Nina Noyer?” I asked Cougar.
He grinned. “Can’t talk,” he said. “Can’t write either. Best kind of female. She must have said something bad to somebody, though, back when she could talk. Because before I bought her, somebody cut her tongue off.”
I didn’t let myself react, but there was no way I could avoid thinking of our May back at Acorn. We still don’t know whose work this tongue cutting is, but we know that some Christian America types would be happy to silence all women. Jarret preached that woman was to be treasured, honored, and protected, but that for her own sake, she must be silent and obey the will of her husband, father, brother, or adult son since they understood the world as she did not. Was that it? The woman could be silent or she could be silenced? Or was it simpler than that—some pimp in the area just liked cutting out women’s tongues? I didn’t believe Cougar had done it. There was nothing about his body language that said he was lying or being evasive. That might just mean he was a very good liar,
but I didn’t think so. It seemed to me that he was telling the truth because he didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn who had cut the girl or why. I did. I couldn’t help it. How much more of this kind of mutilation would we be seeing?
The beautiful young man moved his feet in a restless, noisy way, dragging my attention back to him. Not that I was in any danger of forgetting him. And he was the one I had to buy now.
“How much for him?” I asked. It was too late to pretend I wasn’t interested. I had all I could do to just keep functioning—speaking sensible words in normal tones of voice, pretend that the impossible was not in the process of happening.
“Buying, are we?” asked Cougar, smirking.
I turned to face him. “I came here to buy,” I said. In fact, I would chance making an enemy of the Georges and kill Cougar if I had to. I would not leave my brother in this man’s hands. The thought that I had to leave any of these kids in his hands was sickening.
“I hope you can afford him,” Cougar said. “Like I told you, he’s one of my best.”
I haven’t had to do much haggling in my life, but something occurred to me as Cougar and I began. “He looks like one of your oldest,” I said. My brother Marcus would be almost 20 now. How old did one of Cougar’s child-slaves have to be before he was too old?
“He’s 17!” Cougar lied.
I laughed and told a lie of my own. “Maybe five or six years ago he was 17. Good god, man, I’m not blind! He’s great-looking, but he’s no kid.” It amazed me that I could lie and laugh and behave as though nothing unusual were happening when my long-dead brother stood alive and well just a few meters away.
To my further amazement, we haggled for over an hour. It seemed to me to be the right thing to do. Cougar was in no hurry, and I took my cue from him. He even seemed to be enjoying himself some of the time. Everyone else sat around on the ground, waiting, and looking bored or confused and angry. My people were the confused, angry ones. Dan in particular looked first disbelieving, then disgusted, then furious. But he followed the example of the two men. He kept quiet. He sat staring at the ground, his face expressionless. Travis watched me, then looked from me to Bankole, trying to figure out what was going on. But he wouldn’t ask in front of Cougar. Bankole maintained a perfect poker face. Later, the three of them would have a lot to say to me. But not now.
And Cougar did want to get rid of Marcus. Maybe it was Marcus’s age, maybe something else, but I couldn’t miss that veiled eagerness of his. What he said just didn’t jibe with his body language. I think being a sharer makes me extra sensitive to body language. Most of the time, this is a disadvantage. It forces me to feel things that I don’t want to feel. Psychotics and competent actors can cause me a lot of trouble. This time, though, my sensitivity was a help.
I bought my brother. No shooting, no fighting, not even much cussing. In the end, Cougar smirked, took his hard currency, and released Marcus from the slave collar. He had offered me the collar and a control unit too—at added cost. Of course I didn’t want it. Filthy things.
“Nice doin’ business with you,” Cougar said.
No. It hadn’t been nice at all. “I still want the Noyer girls,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ll keep my eyes open. That young one over there is a real good fit to the description you gave.”
I turned to Dan. “Is she…anything like your sisters?”
The girl and Dan stared at one another, and it hit me again that I was going to have to walk away and leave these children to their pimp. I avoided looking at the girl.
“Yeah, she looks a little like Nina,” Dan mumbled. “But what good is that? She’s not Nina. What good is anything?”
“Can you tell him anything more that would help him recognize either of your sisters if he sees them?” I asked.
“I don’t want him to recognize them.” Dan turned to stare at Cougar. “I don’t want him to touch them. I’d kill him! I swear I would!”
Bankole took him to the truck, and Travis, in spite of his confusion, followed with Marcus. I went back into George’s and took care of Dolores. She hadn’t found Dan’s sister, but she had done me a favor that I would never have imagined anyone could do. She had more than earned her fee.
As for Dan I couldn’t really blame him for his attitude. But we couldn’t afford a fight now. I was too close to my own edge. Leaving the rest of the kids, especially the little ones, was horrible. I had been willing to fight for Marcus if I had to, but I might have gotten him and others killed. I would have gotten someone killed. I don’t know how to stop people like Cougar, but I don’t think killing off their victims, their human property, is the best way.
Inside the truck, I hugged my brother. He was as unresponsive as a stick at first, but after a moment he held me away from him and stared at me for at least a full minute. He didn’t say anything. He just shook his head. Then he hugged me. After a while, he put his hand to his throat. He felt all around his neck where the damned collar had been. Then he just kind of curled up on himself. He lay on his side in fetal position, and I sat beside him. He flinched when I touched him, so I just sat there.
And I told the others. “He’s my brother,” I said. “I…for five years, I believed…that he was dead.” And then I couldn’t say anything more. I just sat with him. I don’t know what the others did apart from keeping watch and driving us home. If they talked, I didn’t hear them. I didn’t care what they did.
In all, Bankole told me, my brother had three active venereal infections. Also, his upper back and shoulders, his left arm, and the outside of his left leg were covered with an ugly network of old burn scars. No wonder Cougar had wanted to get rid of him. He probably thought he’d 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.”