Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

Simon’s shame quickly transmuted itself into anger. Dorie was awakened by a series of open-handed slaps. Hog-tied, all she could do was tuck her chin tight into her chest and wait it out. It didn’t hurt much, anyway-or at any rate, it didn’t hurt any worse than the pain from the broken nose, cramped limbs, and parched lips that it had supplanted.

The mild beating also helped take her mind off the mask-that seemed important. And afterward he was gentle. He loosened her bonds, rolled her onto her back, and retied her wrists in front of her. Her legs were left free; it wasn’t until he slipped his hands between her knees and urged them open that she realized he hadn’t left her ankles untied as a mercy.

But her captor apparently changed his mind about molesting her sexually when he caught the scent of urine.

“I think somebody needs a bath,” he said, patiently but firmly. It was the first time he’d spoken in her presence.

Simon Childs, thought Dorie. Our founder. Of course, of course: the fox starts a support group for the geese. Which makes me the biggest goose of all.

Though her eyes were closed again, she sensed that he had moved away; then she heard water running. Not a gentle plashing, but loud and violent, the sound of water falling from a height into a big, empty, metal tub. It made her want to pee again, but she decided to save it up this time. Having a name to put to the monster, and even more important, a face to put behind the mask, had sent Dorie back into survivor mode: she had remembered the anti-rape measures she and her girlfriends used to recommend to each other. Act crazy. Laugh, don’t cry. Howl, gibber. If you can pee, pee; if you can shit, shit your pants; and if you can’t do either, stick your finger down your throat and puke all over him. Anything to kill desire, buy time, stay alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope-isn’t that what everybody always said?

Then Dorie remembered something else, a parable her father once told her when she hadn’t sold a painting in a year and was thinking about giving up and taking a straight job. It was about a man sentenced to death who promised the king that if his life was spared, within a year he would teach the king’s favorite horse to talk. His friends told him he was crazy, that he’d set himself an impossible task. But a year is a long time, he told them. A lot of things can happen in a year. The king could die. The horse could die. Or maybe-who knows? — maybe the horse will actually learn to talk.

Stranger things have happened, thought Dorie. Miracles have happened-you just have to stay alive long enough to be there when they do.

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.”