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Seventeen

Ding's desire to jump somebody backfired. The jumpers became the jumpees, and Ding and his homeboys got their asses kicked by the Pele Patrol, South Pacific gangbangers who were two-thirds as tough and twice as big as the Southeast Asian boys. Of course, if the whole gang had come, it would have been no contest, but the homeboys had decided to cruise with just the part of the gang that had been on Ding's fire escape that afternoon. Le's older brother and his friends hadn't come, or any of the newer recruits. These days, well, at least before word of this battle got out, everybody on the southwest side wanted to be a Guerilla. Even the assholes who called them the Monkeys either to dis them or because they didn't know enough about English to know that a Guerilla wasn't the same thing as a gorilla.

Anyhow, the Peles had made monkeys out of the Guerillas, and the homeboys from the International District were looking for a way to save face when they saw the dopey-looking dude talking to the cat.

"Hey man, there's the victory feast!" Le hollered.

"Gross," said Hai, who was born in the States.

"You too sensitive, Hai?" Minh teased him. "Come on, let's get that cat. I'll show you how we ate in the camps, brother. You want to be a Guerilla, you gotta eat like one."

"Hey, man, there's cats at home," Hai said.

"I like the looks of that one," Ding answered, just to show them who was the leader.

The cat did not like his looks, however, nor the looks of the fifteen other homeboys out to kill its ass and jump its scrawny little master. It laid its ears back, as cats do, fluffed its fur up, as cats do, hissed, as cats do, and then yelled, as no cat in Ding's experience ever had done, "This cat is running before she gets wokked!"

Not only a talking cat, but one who told bad jokes under fire. A valuable cat, then.

The cat bounded away, closely followed by the kid, whom Ding had begun to recognize as the one from whom the gang had taken money earlier in the day. Ding and the Guerillas pounded after them, leaping and hollering and waving their guns, knives and baseball bats.

Then all at once a car pulled up beside them. Linh opened fire, the idiot, thinking the car was full of Peles pressing their luck.

The car screeched to a halt as bullets smacked into it, and the tires sputtered and hissed themselves flat.

Over all the other noises, a woman shrieked and shrieked, and right then, Ding knew they were in for it. The Peles didn't come lookin' for action with women in the car. These were civilians.

He hollered to the gang to beat it out of there but before he could turn and run, the driver climbed out of the car. He had seen her before, though only once, the night before he and his family had received the news that they were to come to the United States.Just for a moment he saw her as she had been then, kind and beautiful, merciful and good. "Kwan Yin," he said, making a little bow over his steepled hands, but then she seemed to grow and sprout arms and legs and the belt around her waist was made of skulls.

"Is this how you use your good fortune?" the goddess of mercy in her wrathful aspect demanded. "How you use your gifts? You, who could enlighten and enliven the whole world, you choose instead to gather around you only a few other stupid children and you all behave like savages, terrorizing innocent strangers and animals?"

"Kwan Yin, you don't understand," Ding said.

"I understand that I chose you and your family to escape from that hole for a reason, and it wasn't this. I'd also like to know what you intend to do about my auto."

"Does it have a CD player?" one of the boys asked opportunistically.

"Shut up," Ding commanded. "Kwan Yin, I tried to make good use of my gifts but nobody would let me. The Americans call us names and act as if we were all their enemies. They hate us if we do well and if we don't, they shame us. My parents work at menial jobs and are given no respect. No matter how I excel, I can do nothing with my talents. Better if you had left me there in the refugee camp. At least there we all understood each other."

"Don't tempt me," Kwan Yin said, but there were fewer skulls spouting blood dripping from her girdle now and her color was less wrathful purple and more of a frustrated pink. "I chose to help you and your family to come to this country not because of your musical talent, but because even in adversity, you retained your kindness and humanity. Now that you have more, you've forgotten those qualities. You have dishonored yourself and your parents." Her words sounded eerily like those his mother had spoken earlier in the day.

"A 'gook' has no honor except what he can beat out of others for himself," Ding argued bitterly.

"I'm sorry that you hold such an opinion. I granted the wish of a decent boy who risked his own safety to feed and protect an old woman from bullies. Here you are the bully, picking on a poor boy less fortunate than you, since he has no parents and no home, and threatening to kill his only friend, a harmless cat, when you already have so much to eat you must constantly run around like a fool to keep from getting fat. Now I think you would have mugged the old lady in the camp for her rags."

"Not so!" Ding said. "In the camps we were equal. Here people have everything and they hate you if you don't have the same things but won't let you get any for yourself . . ."

"Ah!" she said. "I had no idea people were so evil. I suppose the group that sponsored your family did not really share, though they paid for your passage and for your home and clothing until you could get started."

"Well, sure, but they only did it to feel superior . . ."

"You seem very sure of that. Was that your only motive for being helpful?"

He dropped his head and stared at the splashes of slushy rain as they fell on the sidewalk.

"Ding, in granting you the chance to come to America, which you wished with all your heart, I did not guarantee that the struggles you had in the camps would be your last on earth. Life is struggle, you know that. Just because you're no longer in a Buddhist country, but in a country with more material goods, that fact is not changed. People struggle here too, and the course you have embarked on makes that struggle harder, not just for them, but for you. It is definitely making it harder for your parents, who endured much so that you might grow up away from the war they knew."

Ding spat, "They love the war. It is all they talk about. I will never be as good as they because I did not grow up in the war."

"Do you think that they loved the war so much or did they love Vietnam? And perhaps it is all they talk about because it is all they knew. Perhaps you will never be as good as they are, but if so, it is because you bring war with you in your heart. You have in you many gifts—for music and for people, to influence them for good or ill. Go. Contemplate your path. It is said that the road to honor is a rough one, but believe me, son, the road you have chosen thus far is no bed of roses either. It's just easier because your anger whips you forward toward worse disaster than even you have experienced. The calamities that befell your parents before were collective ones that fell upon you through fate. The calamity you invoke now upon you and your parents and your friends here is entirely one of your own making. Make something else."

"How?" he asked defiantly, expecting that there could be no answer.

"Make reparations to those you have harmed, give honor where it is due, and do not be deterred when obstacles place themselves in your path. Wait, and seek to look through and around them. They are there for a reason and have something to teach you. You can start the reparations by finding a phone booth and calling me a tow truck."

 

* * *

 

There was a godmother from EireWith curly long silvery hairHer name was FelicityShe caused serendipityWhich you may have thought came from thin air

 

"My God, Felicity, what did you say to him? Where did you get that outfit you were wearing out there? I thought you didn't do magic if you didn't have to!" Rose talked fast, the push of adrenaline powering her tongue even while she shook with the aftermath of shock.

"I simply gave him a good talking-to and sent him home with his friends to do something useful. Young scoundrels."

"But—but you changed into someone different."

"Not really. I simply assumed the guise of Kwan Yin, as I did when I visited the refugee camps. Fairy tales in other lands not only don't have blonde heroines, they don't have fairies either, nor godmothers, but they do have motherly goddesses, and it all adds up to the same thing."

"You mean you do this all over the world?"

"Of course. Badly off as Seattle may seem to you, there are other places where things are much worse. Still, misery is misery, starvation is starvation, and thwarted talent and unused gifts are always a terrible waste. And speaking of terrible wastes, when the tow truck comes, do you belong to an auto club?"

"Not any kind that services this sort of car," Rose said, climbing out, now that she was sure the bullets had stopped flying, and rounding the corner of the building to see to Dico.

He was lying in a ball on the ground. The cat, who naturally was now pretending nothing had happened worthy of her notice, took turns washing her own fur and Dico's hands, which were still covering his face.

As soon as Felicity followed Rose over to Dico and the cat, however, Puss trotted toward Felicity to yowl plaintively for handouts and attention.

"Dico, are you okay?"

"Have they gone away?" he asked every bit as plaintively as Puss.

"Yeah. My friend scared them off. You're not hit, are you?"

"No, but d-don't c-come too close, Rose. I—I wet my jeans."

"It's a good thing I didn't have another cup of coffee at Felicity's, or I would have too. It's perfectly excusable to wet your pants when somebody's shooting at you, Dico. We'll find another pair for you someplace."

"Oh, I got some in my locker up by the ferry terminal," he said. "Who were those guys, Rose? Did you scare them away?"

"Not me. Felicity did. She knew the leader from before, and I think he owed her a favor."While that was sinking in, Felicity was having a major petting session with Puss. "You can have all the crab and lobster you want, prretty Puss, prrrecious Puss" (the rolling R's were accompanied by long strokes from nose to tail of the cat's rather ruffled fur) "if you can make this toad tell us what he did with a certain young woman."

"Everybody knows what toads do with young women, Feliciteee," Puss said to Felicity. "They put the make on them. They're worse than tomcats, who at least pretty much stick to their own species."

"I'll be damned, it does talk!" Rose exclaimed, though she didn't see the cat's mouth move or hear a voice with her ears but rather, inside her head. Oh, well, so it didn't talk. It was only telepathic. That was different. She would have been more flabbergasted, she supposed, had she not seen Bobby the toad's glare or Felicity in her Kwan Yin getup. What was a little catty conversation among friends?

"Well, this toad is different," Felicity told the cat. She pulled Bobby the hit-amphibian out of her pocket after glancing up and down University Avenue to make sure neither the tow truck nor passing pedestrians would notice. Actually, she needn't have worried, Rose thought. People talking to themselves and other invisible beings was rather common on the streets of Seattle. Either these were people who ought to be under someone's care, or Seattle was unusually full of Shakespearean actors memorizing soliloquies. Anyhow, on the weirdness scale, talking to cats scarcely rated a mention.Or so Rose was thinking until Felicity pulled the toad from her pocket and, waving it at the cat, said, "Bobby, this is Puss. She will be happy to translate any utterances you may care to make on the whereabouts of the Quantrill girl."

"Reedeep," Bobby said.

Felicity looked at Puss, who switched her tail in an irritated way and said, "Untranslatable. I understand frog legs are a delicacy, by the way, Feliciteeee. I bet toad legs are just as tasty. Have you ever had any?"

"Why, Puss, what a thought!"

Puss licked her chops. "Yeah, ain't it? How about it, bug-eyes, you gonna talk?"

The toad embarked on a series of croakings and peepings.

"Come on," Felicity prompted. "What does he say?"

Puss's tail lashed from side to side, and her ears lay flat as she faced the toad. "He's saying you wouldn't really let me eat him. He says that wouldn't be playing by the rules. He says I should stay in my own story and stick to my own scenario and not interfere in his. He says fairy godmothers shouldn't interfere in stories they're not part of."

"Does he?" Felicity asked, sounding amused.

"Oh, yesss," the cat hissed, hunkering down so that her chin was on her forepaws and her back end was raised and twitching, ready to spring. "He doesss."

Felicity transferred her grip then, until she was holding the toad only by the scruff of the neck, legs dangling above the cat's outstretched paws.

The toad began croaking furiously as the cat reached up a claw-filled paw.

"Wait, Puss. What's he saying?" Felicity asked, stopping the cat with her free hand.

"Nothing important. Let me at him."

"Behave yourself. What he has to say is important; I can tell from the way he's carrying on. A girl may be dead or dying because of his blood lust, so please try to control your own."

"Oh, don't be so dramatic. The girl's okay."

"She is?" Rose asked, feeling lightheaded with relief. "Where is she? How long has she been there? What did he do to her?"

"He didn't do anything. She decked him with a judo move and the knife went through him. She ran away from him up in the woods somewhere north, on the road to the sharp white mountain. The big one. There's no word for it in toad."

"Baker! She got away from him on the road to Mount Baker. Can he be more specific?"

Puss asked him with more lickings of her lips and whiskings of her tail, and he answered with a few feeble peeps.

"He says maybe if you took him to the spot, he could show you the general area."

The toad began croaking more enthusiastically. "He says how about a deal, Felicitee? Now that he's assured you that the girl is all right—wait—he says he even warned her—how about you give him back his body?"

"Tell him I can't do that," Felicity said. "However, I can keep him safe enough that he can last out the seven years—past his life expectancy in the wild, especially since he's so unaccustomed to his natural toad's instincts and defenses, which could be fatal. I can also promise him unparalleled opportunities to have the spell broken, in the usual contractual way if he cooperates fully."

"You want me to say that in toad?" the cat demanded.

"Please."

The cat uttered a short nasty hiss.

"What was that about?"

"I told him."

"And?"

"He'll cooperate," Puss said, her tail twitch slowing down to a lazy J motion. "Oh, yes, he will."

Dico had been watching all of this through wondering eyes. "What a night, huh?" he said to Rose while Felicity and the cat continued to terrorize the toad.

"It sure is," she agreed. "What have you been up to, other than hanging out with talking cats, getting shot at, and, well—this?"

"Oh, this lady we met down at the Market said Puss and me should go to the open mike at the University Pub and gave us some money, so we took the bus up here. Except there's no animals allowed and the Pub threw us out."

"That's too bad. I guess you couldn't smuggle the cat in."

"No, I tried, but she got away from me and jumped up on the bar and ordered a saucer of beer," he said. After a beat or two, while they watched the cat and the toad in further dialogue, he asked, "Rose?"

"Yes?"

"I've gone crazy, haven't I? I mean, I'm imagining all this?"

"If you are, so am I, Dico," Rose said.

"I mean, I know your friend Felicity is actually the fairy godmother from all those stories and Puss says she is kinda like the born-again, what's the word?"

"Reincarnation?"

"Yeah, that, of the cat from 'Puss in Boots,' and that's pretty easy to believe, but what I don't get is why we're in it?"

"How do you know all this, Dico? Did Puss tell you?""Some. But mostly I just figured it out. My mom was really big on reading me fairy tales. I sure miss her, Rose. My dad too. But it's good to have Puss. Puss is really smart, though sometimes she's not very nice. But it's not too good to be nice on the street, Rose."

"No, Dico, it's not," Rose agreed with a little sigh and a new appraisal of Dico's perceptiveness. Dico was not exactly retarded, but he was not very smart either. That's one reason she'd been worried about him being on the streets alone. He was not highly employable and he was gullible. Maybe his current life was curing that—which was too bad in a way, since gullibility passed for innocence anymore—or maybe it was associating with Puss that made him seem suddenly a little wiser.

"I'd sure miss Puss now, but if she can help Felicity—I mean, the godmother lady—find that missing girl, well then, I guess I just gotta do without her."

Such self-abasement called to Rose's training and naturally helpful nature as an occasion to reinforce the youth's self-esteem. "Oh, I think Felicity intends that you and Puss stay together for a while, Dico, so I think you need to help us look for Sno."

Dico's face broke into a smile. "I'd really like to help you, Rose, and help the fairy godmother too. Between me and Puss, we'll find her."

"We'd appreciate your help, Dico, but right now, I think maybe you should come back downtown with us and we'll try to get you into the shelter."

"Not me. No way. I'd rather stay on the streets."

"Why? I mean, I know it's not the Ritz, but—"

"I had my dose of gettin' mugged and chased for one day. There's gangs hang out around there just waitin' for somebody to hurt."

Felicity, Bobby safely tucked back in her pocket and Puss twining around her heels, chimed in, "That's a disgrace, Dico. Never you mind. Rose and I will come with you and sort it out. Not that you don't deserve a home of your own, but if you don't feel the shelter is a safe haven, neither will hundreds of other people who need it."

Rose rolled her eyes. When she had wished for a fairy godmother, she had no idea she'd get one who was on a new crusade every two and a half seconds. And she thought she was an idealist.

The three of them plus Puss piled back into Felicity's car and were towed to the garage, where the garage owner demanded one hundred fifty dollars cash because he wasn't registered with the auto club Rose belonged to, and also told them he was backed up and it would take a week to get to Felicity's car. "And that's just until he finds out what kind of car it is," Rose said. "I'd like to be here for that. Are you sure you don't have any mechanically inclined magic?"

"I told you, I don't like to waste my allotment on trifles. New tires and a bit of body work and it will be good as new. He needn't even find out that it is somewhat—avant-garde. Meanwhile, the night is cool, but relatively dry. A bus is appropriate transportation for us to accompany Dico to the shelter and determine what further problems need addressing."

"Okay, that's fair enough," Rose said, and they walked up the Ave, as University Avenue is known, to meet the next available bus. At the bus stop with them were a blind man with a cane, but no dog, fortunately, and a man in a wheelchair. Rose immediately felt guilty for griping about the inconvenience of doing without a car.

Dico hid Puss in the long overcoat he had acquired, and she complained until they were within earshot of the driver; then Felicity told her to hush and Puss uncharacteristically obeyed.

After they boarded, the bus driver lowered a platform and the man in the wheelchair navigated onto it, was raised to the bus's floor level, and drove back to one of the special areas where the driver locked the chair to one of the other bus seats.

"It's a good thing we're along," Felicity told Rose. "That man is on his way to the shelter too, and he was beaten and robbed there two weeks ago."

"Wow," Dico said. "How'd you know that?"

"Yes," Rose said. "How did you? I didn't see you pack your crystal ball."

"I hardly need a crystal ball for such an observation. If you must know, quite aside from my special godmother attributes, I'm psychic, okay? It isn't an absolute requirement of the job, but those who have a bit of a tendency in that direction find it quite handy on the job, and all the practice we get in this line of work is inclined to amplify such abilities. It's not magic, though, and it isn't like having wings or that sort of thing. It's rather like having the proper sort of personality to be a good salesperson or the right temperament to be an artist. The only really special thing about fairy godmothers, the only what you would call supernatural thing, is that we're quite long-lived."

"Like how long-lived?" Rose asked. "You're going to tell me you were 'born a hundred thousand years ago and there ain't nothin' in the world that you don't know,' like the hundred-thousand-year-old hobo in the song or the wandering Jew, maybe?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Nothing like that."

"But how old?"

"Well, let me put it this way. A little boy who got caught in the children's crusades and wanted desperately to go home again was one of my first projects."

"That's a good story, but anyone could claim that," Rose said.

"Could anyone get a toad to confess to a cat and get the cat to speak the human tongue to translate?"

"You've got a point there," Rose admitted.

Dico looked from one of them to the other and back to Felicity. "So how old are you?" he asked.

"I was originally born in Limerick, Ireland, in the time of King John," she said, "which was approximately nine hundred years ago, give or take a couple of decades.""Hmph," Rose said. "And I suppose you stopped counting after you got to twenty-nine."Felicity raised an eyebrow and smiled. "Naturally. Nevertheless, I'm a sweet young thing as godmothers go."

"Felicity Fortune doesn't sound like an Irish name," Rose commented.

"It's not a Limerick name," Felicity said. "My widowed mother and my sister and I moved to Limerick from Wexford when my widowed mother met and married a merchant. My father was a seaman, and Mother always said he had Spanish blood in him. She said it was he who insisted on naming my sister Theresa, a saint's name after all and not so unusual, and me Felicity, a family name he said. Of course, I was also named Mary Bridget, but Felicity was what my mother and sister called me—though I don't suppose the daughter of my mother's new husband thought it appropriate."

Rose thought that over as the bus rolled down 99, along a trail of white lights on one side, a trail of red lights on the other. On the right side of the bus, city lights played against the water; on the left side, the Cascade Mountains were a darker blackness against the night, beyond the lights of Seattle, Bellevue, and Issaquah in the east.

The bus threaded its way down and through the bus tunnel and out again. Conversation hushed, and the bus grew quiet except for the rush of its tires on the pavement, Dico's intermittent snoring and Puss's purring from within his jacket.

Rose was only partially listening. "There," she said, as the bus rounded a corner near the courthouse. From the jail entrance emerged a beige-overcoated young man with lank blond hair and a two-day beard. He began pacing back and forth, carrying on an angry conversation with himself. Rose regretted her earlier frivolous thoughts about soliloquies. This was no actor. Despair and degradation radiated from this man like the smell of decay radiated from, well, a corpse left three days in the woods in the middle of summer, she supposed, but she had never seen one and, shuddering at the thought when she remembered Sno, never hoped to. Like the smell of decay emanating from the fruit freshener of her refrigerator most of the time, she decided instead.

Puss peeked out from Dico's coat, sniffing at the man who was walking beside the bus, just outside the window. "Oh, look, there's Ed again, Dico. I wonder who's in charge today, Eddy or John Lennon."

"Eddy, I'd say," Dico replied, watching the man. "Definitely Eddy. When he's Lennon he wears them little glasses and walks a lot cooler."

"You know him?" Felicity asked.

"Oh, yeah. I see him around. He's crazy. He used to be in the loony bin, but like they closed the place down. Lotsa folks like him out here because of that. They said institutions wasn't a good place for folks but hey, I'd act crazy if it'd get me a warm place to sleep and three squares a day. These folks too sick to even do something against the law so they can go to jail once in a while."

Rose added, "The city streets are full of these folks. People thought closing mental institutions would be a humane thing to do, but it was intended that the money instead go to more personal supervision in a societal context. Instead, the money got filtered into other areas of government and now there's no place for people like Dico's friend there. They wander around the streets too bewildered to seek what help is available. Is there anything you can do for them, for him?"

"Dico, Rose, Puss, my dear friends, I'm a fairy godmother, not God, the Goddess or a god. Not even Wonder Woman or Superman. Rose, I can do no more for people like that man than you are attempting to do already—try to help him stay safe, and warm and fed."

"You can't—make him sane, think of some wonderful job only he could do, something like that?"

Felicity shook her head. "No. I could buy him a hot dog, though, or give him a new pair of shoes, if you like."

"Hey, me too," Dico said. "I'd like a hot dog and new shoes. I spent all my bread on the cat here."

Puss hissed, "It wasn't enough."

Rose told Felicity, "I might be able to adopt Puss or help support Dico, but what about everybody else? My salary just wouldn't stretch that far."

Felicity was silent for a moment, then said, "Well, then, we'd better see what we can do about this shelter, shall we?"

The bus wheezed to a stop in two more blocks and they got off, followed by the man in the wheelchair.

"I have another question," Rose said, as they stepped into Pioneer Square.

"Yes?"

"Well, you do have a crystal ball?"

"I do."

"Then why don't you use it to find Sno? Or at least see if she's alive?"

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