Parable of the Sower (22 page)

“You should have come to us back in the neighborhood,” I said. “We would have set up lessons for you.”

“Richard wouldn’t let me. He said I already knew enough to suit him.”

I groaned. “I’ll teach you. We can start tomorrow morning if you want.”

“Okay.” She gave me an odd smile and began ordering her bag and her few possessions, bundled in my scavenged pillowcase. She lay down in her bag and turned on her side to look at me. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” she said. “Preacher’s kid, all over the place, teaching, telling everybody what to do, sticking your damn nose in everything. But you ain’t bad.”

I went from surprise into amusement of my own. “Neither are you,” I said.

“You didn’t like me either?” Her turn to be surprised.

“You were the best looking woman in the neighborhood. No, I wasn’t crazy about you. And remember a couple of years ago when you tried your hardest to make me throw up while I was learning to clean and skin rabbits?”

“Why’d you want to learn that, anyway?” she asked. “Blood, guts, worms… I just figured, There she goes again, sticking her nose where it don’t belong. Well, let her have it!’”

“I wanted to know that I could do that—handle a dead animal, skin it, butcher it, treat its hide to make leather. I wanted to know how to do it, and that I could do it without getting sick.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought someday I might have to. And we might out here. Same reason I put together an emergency pack and kept it where I could grab it.”

“I wondered about that—about you having all that stuff from home, I mean. At first I thought maybe you got it all when you went back. But no, you were ready for all the trouble. You saw it coming.”

“No.” I shook my head, remembering. “No one could have been ready for that. But… I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.”

She turned again and lay on her back, staring upward at the stars. “I should have seen some of that stuff,” she said. “But I didn’t. Those big walls. And everybody had a gun. There were guards every night. I thought… I thought we were so strong.”

I put my notebook and pen down, sat on my sleepsack, and put my own pillowcased bundle behind me. Mine was lumpy and uncomfortable to lean on. I wanted it uncomfortable. I was tired. Everything ached. Given a little comfort, I would fall asleep.

The sun was down now, and our fire had gone out except for a few glowing coals. I drew the gun and held it in my lap. If I needed it at all, I would need it fast. We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes.

I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the tops of hills. I saw groups and individuals. Twice I saw dogs, distant, but alarming. I heard a lot of gunfire—individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire. That last and the dogs worried me, scared me. A pistol would be no protection against a machine gun or automatic rifle. And dogs might not know enough to be afraid of guns. Would a pack keep coming if I shot two or three of its members? I sat in a cold sweat, longing for walls—or at least for another magazine or two for the gun.

It was nearly midnight when I woke Harry, gave him the gun and the watch, and made him as uncomfortable as I could by warning him about the dogs, the gunfire, and the many people who wandered around at night. He did look awake and alert enough when I lay down.

I fell asleep at once. Aching and exhausted, I found the hard ground as welcoming as my bed at home.

A shout awoke me. Then I heard gunfire—several single shots, thunderous and nearby. Harry?

Something fell across me before I could get out of my sleep-sack—something big and heavy. It knocked the breath out of me. I struggled to get it off me, knowing that it was a human body, dead or unconscious. As I pushed at it and felt its heavy beard stubble and long hair, I realized it was a man, and not Harry. Some stranger.

I heard scrambling and thrashing near me. There were grunts and sounds of blows. A fight. I could see them in the darkness—two figures struggling on the ground. The one on the bottom was Harry.

He was fighting someone over the gun, and he was losing. The muzzle was being forced toward him.

That couldn’t happen. We couldn’t lose the gun or Harry. I took a small granite boulder from our fire pit, set my teeth, and brought it down with all my strength on the back of the intruder’s head. And I brought myself down.

It wasn’t the worst pain I had ever shared, but it came close. I was worthless after delivering that one blow. I think I was unconscious for a while.

Then Zahra appeared from somewhere, feeling me, trying to see me. She wouldn’t find a wound, of course.

I sat up, fending her off, and saw that Harry was there, too.

“Are they dead?” I asked.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Are you all right?”

I got up, swaying from the residual shock of the blow. I felt sick and dizzy, and my head hurt. A few days before, Harry had made me feel that way and we’d both recovered. Did that mean the man I’d hit would recover?

I checked him. He was still alive, unconscious, not feeling any pain now. What I was feeling was my own reaction to the blow I’d struck.

“The other one’s dead,” Harry said. “This one… Well, you caved in the back of his head. I don’t know why he’s still alive.”

“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh hell.” And then to Harry, “Give me the gun.”

“Why?” he asked.

My fingers had found the blood and broken skull, soft and pulpy at the back of the stranger’s head. Harry was right. He should have been dead.

“Give me the gun,” I repeated, and held out a bloody hand for it. “Unless you want to do this yourself.”

“You can’t shoot him. You can’t just…”

“I hope you’d find the courage to shoot me if I were like that, and out here with no medical care to be had. We shoot him, or leave him here alive. How long do you think it will take him to die?”

“Maybe he won’t die.”

I went to my pack, struggling to navigate without throwing up. I pulled it away from the dead man, groped within it, and found my knife. It was a good knife, sharp and strong. I flicked it open and cut the unconscious man’s throat with it.

Not until the flow of blood stopped did I feel safe. The man’s heart had pumped his life away into the ground. He could not regain consciousness and involve me in his agony.

But, of course, I was far from safe. Perhaps the last two people from my old life were about to leave me. I had shocked and horrified them. I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.

“Strip the bodies,” I said. “Take what they have, then we’ll put them into the scrub oaks down the hill where we gathered wood.”

I searched the man I had killed, found a small amount of money in his pants pocket and a larger amount in his right sock. Matches, a packet of almonds, a packet of dried meat, and a packet of small, round, purple pills. I found no knife, no weapon of any kind. So this was not one of the pair that sized us up earlier in the night. I hadn’t thought so. Neither of them had been long-haired. Both of these were.

I put the pills back in the pocket I had taken them from. Everything else, I kept. The money would help sustain us. The food might or might not be edible. I would decide that when I could see it clearly.

I looked to see what the others were doing, and was relieved to find them stripping the other body. Harry turned it over, then kept watch as Zahra went through the clothing, shoes, socks, and hair. She was even more thorough than I had been. With no hint of squeamishness, she hauled off the man’s clothing and examined its greasy pockets, seams, and hems. I got the feeling she had done this before.

“Money, food, and a knife,” she whispered at last.

“The other one didn’t have a knife,” I said, crouching beside them. “Harry, what—?”

“He had one,” Harry whispered. “He pulled it when I yelled for them to stop. It’s probably on the ground somewhere. Let’s put these two down in the oaks.”

“You and I can do it,” I said. “Give Zahra the gun. She can guard us.”

I was glad to see him hand her the gun without protest. He had not made a move to hand it to me when I asked, but that had been different.

We took the bodies down to the scrub oaks and rolled them into cover. Then we kicked dirt over all the blood that we could see and the urine that one of the men had released.

That wasn’t enough. By mutual consent, we moved camp. This meant nothing more than gathering our bundles and sleepsacks and carrying them over the next low ridge and out of sight of where we had been.

If you camped on a hill between any two of the many low, riblike ridges, you could have, almost, the privacy of a big, open-topped, three-walled room. You were vulnerable from hill or ridge tops, but if you camped on the ridges, you would be noticed by far more people. We chose a spot between two ridges, settled, and sat silent for some time. I felt set-apart. I knew I had to speak, and I was afraid that nothing I could say would help. They might leave me. In disgust, in distrust, in fear, they might decide that they couldn’t travel with me any longer. Best to try to get ahead of them.

“I’m going to tell you about myself,” I said. “I don’t know whether it will help you to understand me, but I have to tell you. You have a right to know.”

And in low whispers, I told them about my mother—my biological mother—and about my sharing.

When I finished, there was another long silence. Then Zahra spoke, and I was so startled by the sound of her soft voice that I jumped.

“So when you hit that guy,” she said, “it was like you hitting yourself.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t get the damage. Just the pain.”

“But, I mean it felt like you hit yourself?”

I nodded. “Close enough. When I was little, I used to bleed along with people if I hurt them or even if I saw them hurt. I haven’t done that for a few years.”

“But if they’re unconscious or dead, you don’t feel anything.”

“That’s right.”

“So that’s why you killed that guy?”

“I killed him because he was a threat to us. To me in a special way, but to you, too. What could we have done about him? Abandon him to the flies, the ants, and the dogs? You might have been willing to do that, but would Harry? Could we stay with him? For how long? To what purpose? Or would we dare to hunt up a cop and try to report seeing a guy hurt without involving ourselves. Cops are not trusting people. I think they would want to check us out, hang on to us for a while, maybe charge us with attacking the guy and killing his friend.” I turned to look at Harry who had not said a word. “What would you have done?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice hard with disapproval. “I only know I wouldn’t have done what you did.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you to do it,” I said. “I didn’t ask you. But, Harry, I would do it again. I might have to do it again. That’s why I’m telling you this.” I glanced at Zahra. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I knew I should, but talking about it is…hard. Very hard. I’ve never told anyone before. Now…” I took a deep breath. “Now everything’s up to you.”

“What do you mean?” Harry demanded.

I looked at him, wishing I could see his expression well enough to know whether this was a real question. I didn’t think it was. I decided to ignore him.

“So what do you think?” I asked, looking at Zahra.

Neither of them said anything for a minute. Then Zahra began to speak, began to say such terrible things in that soft voice of hers. After a moment, I wasn’t sure she was talking to us.

“My mama took drugs, too,” she said. “Shit, where I was born, everybody’s mama took drugs—and whored to pay for them. And had babies all the time, and threw them away like trash when they died. Most of the babies did die from the drugs or accidents or not having enough to eat or being left alone so much…or from being sick. They were always getting sick. Some of them were born sick. They had sores all over or big things on their eyes—tumors, you know—or no legs or fits or can’t breathe right… All kinds of things. And some of the ones who lived were dumb as dirt. Can’t think, can’t learn, just sit around nine, ten years old, peeing in their pants, rocking back and forth, and dripping spit down their chins. There’s a lot of them.”

She took my hand and held it. “You ain’t got nothing wrong with you, Lauren—nothing worth worrying about. That Paracetco shit was baby milk.”

How was it that I had not gotten to know this woman back in the neighborhood? I hugged her. She seemed surprised, then hugged back.

We both looked at Harry.

He sat still, near us, but far from us—from me. “What would you do,” he asked, “if that guy only had a broken arm or leg?”

I groaned, thinking about pain. I already knew more than I wanted to about how broken bones feel. “I think I’d let him go,” I said, “and I’m sure I would be sorry for it. It would be a long time before I stopped looking over my shoulder.”

“You wouldn’t kill him to escape the pain?”

“I never killed anyone back in the neighborhood to escape pain.”

“But a stranger…”

“I’ve said what I would do.”

“What if I broke my arm?”

“Then I might not be much good to you. I would be having trouble with my arm, too, after all. But we’d have two good arms between us.” I sighed. “We grew up together, Harry. You know me. You know what kind of person I am. I might fail you, but if I could help myself, I wouldn’t betray you.”

“I thought I knew you.”

I took his hands, looked at their big, pale, blunt fingers. They had a lot of strength in them, I knew, but I had never seen him use it to bully anyone. He was worth some trouble, Harry was.

“No one is who we think they are,” I said. “That’s what we get for not being telepathic. But you’ve trusted me so far—and I’ve trusted you. I’ve just put my life in your hands. What are you going to do?”