6
According to the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, a Down syndrome reincarnation is meant to be a reward, in the form of a short, restful, and relatively stress-free lifetime, for good karma accrued during a meritorious previous incarnation. DSers, or at least well cared for DSers, tend to have loving, caring natures and sunny dispositions, and for the most part spend less time worrying about matters beyond their control than the more able-minded general public-not a bad description of an enlightened being, according to the Tibetans.
From that point of view, Missy Childs, sheltered, pampered, and privately tutored, must have been a veritable saint in her previous lifetime. Saintliness, however, is not exactly a survival skill in the Berkeley flats, and enlightened or not, as a mentally disabled white female, Missy could be said to have been on borrowed time, statistically, from the moment she stepped through Ganny’s front door.
The boys had probably seen her coming a block away. There were three of them, hanging out in front of a mom-and-pop liquor store, decked out in Blood summer wear in honor of the unseasonably warm weather: backward Raiders caps, oversize black polo shirts, baggy-saggy black Ben Davis cutoffs, high black socks, red- trimmed Airs; they also wore red bandannas tucked discreetly into their back pockets-any more obvious gang styling might have gotten them picked up by the Berkeley cops on a loitering-with-intent-to-associate rap.
The two twelve-year-old baby gangstas were cutting school; the thirteen-year-old had already been expelled. They were bored, they were broke, and Missy must have looked like a godsend, waddling up the street in her pigeon-toed gait, with her pink plastic purse over one arm and a birdcage dangling from the other. Simultaneously, as if at some undiscernible signal, the three boys hopped off the low concrete retaining wall next to the sidewalk outside the mom-and-pop (the entrance to which was not only barred, but protected by a pair of concrete pylons to prevent drive-through break-ins) and fell into step behind Missy. “Hey, you a retard?”
“Sticks and stones,” said Missy, without turning around. She was dog-tired already, her feet hurt, she had sweated through her T-shirt, and the cage weighed a ton (she knew by now that it had been a mistake to bring it along-all the water had already sloshed out of the little dish clipped to the bars, and Tweety herself was clinging desperately to her little trapeze as it swung to and fro), but Missy’s instinct told her to keep walking. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
“Hoo hoo ha ha.” The oldest boy mocked her speech. “And what you doin’ wearin’ ’Didas ’round here?” Only Crips and Crip satellites wore Adidas.
The maneuver, when it came, was so slickly executed that to an observer-and fortunately for Missy, there had been an observer-it looked like one of those nature documentaries where a pack of wolves cut off a lame caribou from the herd. As they passed a boarded-up vacant lot, one of the boys darted around to get in front of Missy, slowing his pace to block her way, while the second closed up behind her and the boy to her left eased her to the right, through a gap in the board fence.
And before Missy could even call out, one boy was behind her with one hand pinning both wrists against the small of her back and the other hand across her mouth, the second boy had her purse, and the third had begun twirling the birdcage over his head, preparing to launch it across the weed-strewn lot like an Olympic hammer thrower.
Afterward, she would remember everything about that moment: the heat, the distant traffic, the weeds, the broken glass, the sunbaked earth of the vacant lot, the whirling cage, the crows on the telephone line, the buzzing blue sky, the sweat running down her face, the boy’s tense little body pressing up against her from behind, the salt taste of his hot little hand covering her mouth-it all seemed terribly real and so terribly important that she almost forgot to be afraid.
“Stall it out right there, youngbloods.” A man’s voice, from the other side of the fence.
“Oh, shit, it’s Obie,” whispered the boy holding Missy. The boy holding her purse quickly shifted it behind his back, while the boy swinging Tweety’s cage over his head lurched comically around the lot trying to arrest its momentum as the biggest, second-handsomest black man Missy had ever seen squeezed himself sideways through the gap in the fence.
“Let her go, Jerome.” He was wearing a black sweat suit, his gray hair was cut short and curly like Dennis Richmond’s, and his skin was a deep chocolate brown.
“Yeah, lemme go, you brat,” said Missy, when the hand came off her mouth; her arms were still pinned behind her.
“Naw, Obie, naw, we-”
“Answer up, blood.” The way the man said it-patiently, without raising his voice-reminded Missy of Simon: the quieter he said something, the quicker you’d better mind.
And sure enough, the boy released her. Missy tugged angrily at the neck of her T-shirt, which was all rucked up and twisted around. “Gimme.”
The boys started laughing as she reached for the cage; the man silenced them with a glare. “You heard the lady.”
“I heard
A moment later the cage was on the ground and the soles of the boy’s Airs were dangling a foot above the weeds and the dirt and the broken glass.
“Work the mind before you work the mouth, baby g.” The old lion gave the cub an admonitory shake, then set him down gently.
“We was just-”
“I know what you was just. You a got-damn disgrace to the race, all a you.” He handed the cage to Missy. “You okay, honey?”
Dazed by all the sudden twists and turns her day had been taking, Missy managed a nod. She didn’t feel very okay, though. She couldn’t catch her breath and her heart was beating fast and fluttery in her chest, like Tweety’s heart.
“Okay, you run along, then,” said the man. “I’ll watch your back.”
Missy wasn’t sure why he’d want to watch her back, but she didn’t wait around to ask. She ducked through the hole in the fence and started walking. She walked and walked and walked, and by the time she realized that the nasty little boys had taken her purse-the purse containing not just her twenty-dollar bill and her lucky penny from Cannery Row that Dorie had given her, the one with the otter stamped on it, but also the card she was supposed to show strangers if she was ever lost, the card with her address and her phone number, neither of which she had ever quite managed to commit to memory-she had no idea how to make it back to the vacant lot.
Or to Ganny’s, for that matter. Missy had no idea how long she wandered with that heavy cage before she found herself passing a familiar-looking fence overgrown with purple morning glories. Two, three hours? Missy wasn’t real good with time-but then, she’d never had to be. There’d always been someone to tell her when it was time to do something, or stop doing it. All she knew was that she was tired and sunburned and hungry and thirsty and her feet hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside that house again and be all alone with Ganny.
She did make it as far as the kitchen, where she leaned over the sink and tilted her head and drank water directly out of the faucet until her tummy felt as if it were going to burst. But when she turned the water off, she heard, or thought she could hear, the flies buzzing in the bedroom, and decided it would be better to take Tweety, who’d been lying motionless on the paper in the bottom of the cage ever since the vacant lot, and go back outside to wait for Simon in the garden. She’d fallen asleep in the shade of the fence, under the sunflowers, and awakened to find Simon kneeling over her, crying with joy.
“I knew you’d come,” she’d whispered through her cracked lips.
And now, she was home again, with sunlight pouring in like gold through the tall windows of the living room. From her nifty new hospital bed she could see most all of Berkeley and, beyond it, the dark, sparkling waters of the bay; that city of white towers gleaming in the distance was San Francisco. It looked like a toy city from way up here; it looked like a whole toy world.
As for the new day nurse, Missy could take her or leave her. She was pretty and she had a funny name-Missy liked that about her-but she was mean about food. When Missy wanted an after-lunch snack, Nurse Apple said
