Parable of the Talents

'Then the cops came and drove us into the street Behind them came demolition crews to push down the houses, blow up the buildings, and destroy everything we had been forced to leave behind. People were dragged or driven into the street without all kinds of things—spare clothing, money, pictures, personal papers     Some people who couldn't speak English were even driven out without relatives who had managed to hide or who were too sick or disabled to run. The cops dragged some of these out and put them in trucks. They didn't find them all. I sent them to get seven that I knew of, and they brought them out

'But everything was chaos. People kept trying to run back to get their things, and the cops kept stopping them—or try­ing to. Some of the cops were in armored personnel carriers. The ones on foot had full body armor, masks, shields, auto­matic rifles, gas, whips, clubs, you name it, but still, some people tried to stop them, or at least to hurt them. The peo­ple threw rocks, bottles, even precious cans of food.

'Then someone fired three shots, and one of the cops went down. I don't know whether he was wounded or he tripped, but there were the shots, and he fell. And that was that. Everything went to hell.

'The cops started shooting. People ran, screamed, shot back if they had guns. I got separated from the Durans. I started looking for them even before the shooting stopped. No one shot me this time, but I didn't find the Durans. I never found them. I tried for days. I looked at as many dead bodies as I could before they were collected. I did every­thing I could think of, but they were gone. After a while, I knew they must be dead, and I was alone again.'

Marcus sat still, staring into space. 'I loved them,' he said, his voice soft and filled with pain. 'And I loved being Marcos Duran—the little preacher. People trusted me, respected me.... It was a good life. Most of them were good people—just poor. They deserved so much better than they got.' He shook his head.

'I didn't know what to do,' he continued after a moment. 'I hung around the Valley Street area for two more weeks, saw all the buildings go down and the rubble carried away. I stole food where I could, avoided the cops, and kept look­ing for the Durans. I'd said they were dead, and on some level, I believed they were, but I couldn't stop looking.

'But there was nothing. No one.' He hesitated. 'No, that's not quite right. Some people from my poor, half-assed church came back to see what was left. I met three families of them. They all asked me to stay with them. They had rel­atives squatting in other hovels, overcrowded like you wouldn't believe, but they figured they could take in one more. I had nothing, but they wanted me. I should have gone with them. I probably would have set up another church out­side of town, gotten married, and raised a family—Dad all over again. I would have been okay. Poor, but okay. Poor doesn't matter as much if you can make a place for yourself and be respected. I know that now, but I didn't then.

'I was 18. 1 figured it was time for me to be a man, get out on my own. I figured there was nothing for me in south­ern California. It was a place where you could only be poor unless you were born rich or you were a really successful crook. I thought that meant I had to go north. There was al­ways a river of people walking north on the freeway. I thought they must know something. I talked to people about Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon ... I never intended to stay in California.'

'Neither did I,' I said.

'You walked up?'

'I did. So did Bankole, Harry, Zahra  A lot of us did.'

'Nobody bothered you?'

'A lot of people bothered us. Harry, Zahra, and I survived because we stuck together and one of us always kept watch. We started out with my one gun. We gathered more people and more guns along the way. I lost count of the number of times we were nearly killed. One of us was killed. There may be an easy way to get here, but we didn't find it.'

'Neither did I. But why did you come here? I mean, why didn't you keep going to Oregon or someplace?'

'Bankole owns this land,' I said. 'By the time we got near here, well, he and I wanted to stay together, but I also wanted... I wanted to keep the rest of the group together. I was building a community—a group of families and single people who were still human.'

'You walk the roads for a while, and you wonder if any­one is still human.'

'Yeah.'

'The people you brought here—they built this place?'

I nodded. 'There was nothing here when we got here but the ashes of a house, the bones of Bankole's relatives, some untended crops and trees, and a well. There were only 13 of us then. There are 66 of us now—67 with you.'