CHAPTER 6

He had been pleased and touched by the clean clothes next to his bedroll when he woke in the morning. A simple act of kindness. Rarely had he seen that in his life. The fact that there were bags to clean clothes was news to him too. Go figure. It was a piece of information he stored away for future use…well if there was a future. Right now, it was looking grim.

They had woken to howling winds and a shaking tent. One of those black, dust storms with the deadly sharp particles had engulfed them. To go outside was a death-sentence, where one would either choke on the dust or be shredded by the razor-sharp objects, which were akin to diamonds. Their tent was designed to withstand the storm and could actually be pressurized in the event of an unbreathable atmosphere.

Maureen was like a trapped animal in the tent. Even when she was sitting still, she gave the illusion of a pacing tiger. He got it. She was worried about her family. His attempts to distract her fell flat and it was also a struggle for him to simple stay awake. The fever had left him, but had also drained him. The aspirin was taking the edge off his pain but, not that he'd admit it, it was beating up his stomach. He had pounced on the package of applesauce she had offered him at lunch time, but had turned down the curried vegan dish. As he slurped down the applesauce it amazed him at what ended up in MREs.

The storm showed no signs of abating and during the late afternoon, Maureen suddenly decided to start grilling her new bunkmate.

"Maybe you should tell me a little more about yourself since you will be residing with my family," she started out as if she were interviewing a perspective tenant.

Don, who was half-asleep, pushed himself more upright, yawned, but didn't stretch for that would have hurt, then looked at her expectantly. "Don West. Open book. What do you want to know?"

"Where were you born?"

"Earth."

"Specifically?"

"South, or maybe North America," he replied with a touch of uncertainty.

She gave him an exasperated look as if he was being deliberately obtuse. "How could you not know where you were born."

"I was kind of young then."

"But you have a birth record."

"True, I do. Hard to get anywhere in life without one," he said reasonably.

"And what does it say," she asked slowly giving each word a tick of annoyance.

"It says, Buenos Aires, Argentina."

She could tell by the tone of his voice there was still more to this tale. She was beginning to think this conversation was a bad idea. She had hidden copies, of portions, of the Resolute's data banks on her computer. Maybe she'd just search them for data about him instead to see who she'd invited to live with them on the Jupiter. Still, she had nothing better to do right now, so she persevered onward.

"But…" she prompted.

Giving an indifferent shrug he said, "But, since I made it up myself, it's probably not accurate."

"Your birth record is illegal? Even orphans have certs."

"True. If you are an orphan whose parents gave you up for adoption." Bobbing his head a little he added, "Mine, they did it differently. One day when I was around five, they put me on a train and told me I was going to visit my grandfather, but there wasn't enough money for us all to go. So, they snuck me on a train and sat me next to an older couple. Told me if anyone asked, they were my grandparents. For the next twelve hours I rode on that train, next to those people who I didn't even know. Then it stops, and everyone gets off including me. My parents told me I would recognize by grandfather by the red fedora he would be wearing. For days, I hung out in the train station looking for an old man in a red hat. Know what? Surprise! He never showed up."

"You were abandoned in a train station at five years old?"

His shrug said so?

"And how exactly does a five-year-old survive on their own?" she demanded.

"Not very well. I was picked up by the cops and turned over to child services."

"So, you did grow up in an orphanage."

"No. Not really. I spent some time in group homes. A few private ones too. A lot on the streets."

"School?"

He reached for the glass of water to wet his throat. "Mostly online. And the school of hard knocks. Watch one, do one, steal one. Hey," he said when she narrowed her eyes at him. "Joking. But there are a lot of people out there that will teach you their trade, off the books, as long as they can profit from you. And once you got it, you leave."

"How much of that is true?" she asked, skeptically.

"Enough to confirm in your mind that I'm nothing like you or your family. And how about you? Brothers? Sisters? Child protégée I suppose."

"I was an only child, raised on a farm."

"With like cows and chickens and ole McDonald?"

She gave him a wry look. "It was not a children's nursery rhyme. We grew mostly through the use of hydroponics. Self-contained ecosphere from the top to the bottom. Clean. Renewable. Sustainable. My parents were bio-farmers, well-known in the field and the pioneers of many protocols."

"Eggheads on a farm. Imagine that. Bet you didn't hurt for money either," he said perceptively. "Private schools, tutors, camps. The works."

"We were comfortable."

"An isolated? Did Mommy and Daddy make sure life was squeaky clean? And yet, you became a rocket scientist, you have a daughter who is not an original Robinson and you didn't marry an egghead, but a Marine. I'd hazard a guess you were a good-girl gone bad when you left the farm. Later you repent to become the upright citizen you are today…though I think some of the bad girl still lurks within."

She glanced over at him with annoyance for his ability to peg her rather well.

Sensing her discomfort, Don backed off. "Seems like we both have some demons in our past that still need exorcising."

She gave him a half-smile at his peace-offering attempt. "Judy told me you wanted to be paid to show Victor where the fuel was located."

"It's not exactly a secret. Anymore. Nor the fact I won't be getting paid now."

She gave him one of those Robinson looks that made you want to go to church and confess. But he'd been getting those looks his whole life. This one little lady wasn't going to change his way of survival.

"It's who I am. What I am. The only thing Don West ever got in life was… nothing. If I don't look out for myself, no one else will. You know what trust has gotten me? Doing the right thing? Broken, battered and bruised." He folded his arms across his chest and stared downward. "I might be stupid, but not stupid enough to do the same thing over and over. That's insane."

"It's the definition of insanity," she corrected. "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."

"Yeah, well, whatever."

"Was it the right thing? What you did for Judy?" she asked curious to know how he had seen the situation without Judy's rose-colored glasses. "You essentially gave up the money at that point. To help her."

Carefully, he scrubbed a hand over his face in frustration. "I dunna know. Your daughter, she can be persuasive. Seems to know how to push my buttons."

A half-smile blossomed on Judy's face. "She can, be persuasive. Like her father. She has a strong sense of what is right and wrong, at least to her. And she has the ability to drag others into her visions. Again, like her late father." She leaned back and stared with unfocused eyes at the undulating tent ceiling. "I met Ty in one of my liberal arts classes. 'Protesting. A Lost Art Form.'"

"Odd choice for a sheltered farm girl," he noted, as he raised his head to glance over at her.

"It was the only one that fit in my schedule."

"So, sheltered farm girl gets swept off her feet by activist. A love child is born. But the activist Daddy can't be held down so he takes off after the next whale to be saved."

She gave him a small, but not unkind head shake. "I was swept off my feet, but so was he. We loved each other. Not a passing fancy. My parents approved of him and we were married, in my home town where Judy was conceived."

"But…"

"Life, Don, as you well know… it doesn't always go as expected. During the first year of my doctoral program, there was an accident on my parents' farm. They both died."

"I'm sorry," he muttered softly.

"And so was I. Family is everything to me. If it weren't for Ty and Judy, I don't know how I would have made it through that period. But I had to hold it together, for my family. A few years later, Ty died of a rare illness. I always thought that was one of the reason's Judy went into medicine. A strange attempt to bring back a father she really never knew. I focused on Judy and my studies. One day I met a handsome marine and one thing led to another. John and I got married, he adopted Judy, we had two children of our own…"

"…and lived happily ever after," Don interjected. "But we all know that fairytale didn't exactly come true."

She paused for a moment lost in thought. "No, but I hope we're not at the end yet. John and I had a rough go, but we are reconnecting, on a new level."

"Mrs. Robinson, your husband loves you and your children more than life. A fact, he told me in a motivational speech that ended along the lines if I let any harm come to you, I'm a dead man."

"That sounds like John," she said rather dreamily, which caused Don to snort.

"You are definitely a rocket scientist with your head in the clouds. Life ain't wishes, rainbows and unicorns."

"Unicorns once existed, sort of. A species of goat that had one horn. Extinct now."

Don burst out laughing. "Is that supposed to be comforting? Make me feel better somehow?"

She joined him in his laughter. "I don't know. It just popped into my mind."

The laughter brought on a small coughing fit for Don, which in turn made every muscle in his body ache. He doubled over and groaned. She brought him over a glass of water and helped support him while he drank it. Her hand rested on the back of his good shoulder as her eyes wandered down his back again. He'd put his pants on, but elected to remain topless in deference to the stuffy environment. She saw the faint scars on his back again, the ones she had noted when she had first fixed him up.

Lightly, she traced a finger down one of the scars, causing him to shudder and jerk away from her.

"I'm sorry," she said as she removed her hands from his back, got up and moved over to her mat. "I was just curious. About them."

Don sat angled away from her so she couldn't see his face. However, she could tell by the trembling of his torso, she'd hit upon something very sensitive and personal to him.

"It's none of my business," she offered up as a graceful way out for him.

"I…" Don stopped and cleared his throat. "There faded. I'm dark-skinned. Most people never see them."

"I bet most people don't repair a four-inch gash on your back while you're in your underwear either," she said trying to lighten the atmosphere.

"True. It is not a situation I find myself in…often. And the few people who have patched me up, well they aren't the type that care about things like old scars."

"Do they wear eye patches and live in dark hovels?" she jested. "These people who patch you up?"

"A few. And they break your legs for non-payment," he answered, chuckling. Then his voice dropped an octave and he was very serious once more. "The story of how I grew up, it's mostly true. My parents ditched me. No clue why or what I did to them, to deserve being abandoned. I spent some time in a group home, then I was placed with a foster family. Maybe I was seven?"

Don drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, ignoring the pain and pressure the position was putting on his thigh and shoulder wounds. "They were a spare the rod, spoil the child kind of couple. Trust me, they never spared the rod, only it was a whip."

Damn it, she had opened a box that he had kept well-hidden for most of his life. No one, not even his few lovers, had ever noticed his scars since he was an adult. The memories he had long ago locked away washed over him, flooding his soul with their poison. He'd been whipped for everything. Finishing his food (glutton). Not finishing his food (wasteful). Mud on his shoes (slovenly). Not getting an A (laziness). They had him convinced he could do no right and he came to believe he deserved to be whipped because he was that bad. He was told not to speak of his shame to anyone at school or the foster care system. He was told he should be grateful they were willing to take on the Herculean task of teaching him the right way to live. And he had come to believe it at the impressionable age of seven. He tried to walk the path of righteousness, but he couldn't seem to follow it and he was never sure what really was on it. Sometimes a few days would pass, or even a week or two free from correction. But then he'd stumble, or there would be a new rule he didn't know about, and his step-father would bring the whip out. Crying simply brought on lectures on being a man and a few more strokes. The same with pleading or trying to explain. In time, he learned to stifle his cries, stand there and except it corrections.

Had it not been for the freak moment when his shirt hitched up and a teacher at school saw the tail end of one of the marks, who knows how things would have ended up. Him dead, probably. But the abuse did come to light and he was removed from that house and placed back in group care, where there were no secrets and he became the brunt of everyone's jokes. After a few miserable years, he learned about living in the streets from a new kid who arrived. The kid had no intention of being stuck in a group home and when he escaped one night, Don went with him. The kid showed him the basics of living on the street and Don adapted easily. It had been a pleasant few years, relatively speaking, until the kid started running with a gang, and was killed in a shoot-out with a rival gang. He'd lit out on his own after that, staying away from the gangs and their violence.

Before his mind could wander down the path of remembrance any further, Don slammed the door shut. This stroll down memory lane wasn't doing anyone any good. Somehow, twenty-years later, those memories still could derail him.

"Please," he said capturing her eyes.

"I won't say anything to anyone. But Don. Judy, she's a doctor. If you ever get hurt and she has to treat you, she's going to see and ask."

She already has treated me and saw too much, Don thought to himself.

"Well," he said with false bravado, "I'll just have to make sure I stay healthy and out of sickbay. Problem solved." Don glanced at her commlink resting on a cargo box. "Wow. Would you look at the time. That late. Time for bed. Sounds like the storm is letting up. We need to be up bright and early in the morning." Lying down on his side, face to the tent wall, back to her, he pulled the blanket over his body like a protective cocoon, even though the tent was stuffy.

That gesture said it all to her. A small portion of her soul wondered if she was being too harsh when judging him. Yes, he did look after himself first, but he looked out for those around him too. Like Debbie the chicken. She pondered if you dug through all the layers that Don had built around himself, what the true man under it all was really like.