Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys (7 page)

Then Cherokee passed the room where Raphael and Lulu were sitting on the bed, staring at each other. Raphael did not take his eyes off Lulu as Cherokee walked by.

I don’t need Raphael or Weetzie or Coyote or anybody, Cherokee told herself. She kept her eyes focused straight ahead of her and paraded like a runway model.

Cherokee climbed up the narrow staircase and out onto the roof deck, into the night. She could see the city below, shimmering beyond the dark canyon. Each of those lights was someone’s window, each an eye that would see her someday and fill with desire and awe. Maybe tonight. Maybe tonight each of those people would gaze up at her, at this creature she had become, and applaud. And she wouldn’t have to feel alone. Even without her family and Coyote. Even without the rest of The Goat Guys. Even without Raphael. She would fly above them on the wings she had made.

Cherokee swayed at the edge of the roof, gazing into the buoyant darkness. She felt the boots blistering her feet, the haunches scratching her legs, the horns pressing against her temples; but the wings, quivering with a slight breeze, would lift her away from all that, from anything that hurt. The way they
had lifted Witch Baby from the mud.

Cherokee spread out her arms, poised.

And that was when she felt flight. But it was not the flight she had imagined.

Something had swept her away but it was not the wings carrying her into air. Something warm and steady and strong had swept her to itself. Something with a heartbeat and a scent of sage smoke. She was greeted, but not by an audience of anonymous lights, voices echoing her name. She recognized the voice that drew her close. It was Coyote’s voice,

“Cherokee, my little one,” Coyote wept. They were not the tears of silver—moons and stars—she had once imagined, but wet and salt as they fell from his eyes onto her face.

T
he first things Cherokee saw when she woke were the stained-glass roses and irises blossoming with sun. Then she shifted her head on the pillow and saw Raphael kneeling beside her.

“How are you feeling?” he whispered, his eyes on her face.

She nodded, trying to swallow as her throat swelled with tears.

“We’re all going to take care of you.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry, Kee. Coyote said he is going to help all of us. I’m going to quit drinking and smoking, even. And he called Weetzie. They’re all on their way home.”

“What about Angel Juan’s headaches?”

“Coyote is going to get some medicine together.” He pressed his forehead to her chest, listening for her heart. “I’m so sorry, Cherokee.”

“I just missed you so much.”

“Me too. Where were we?”

Cherokee looked down at herself, small and white beneath the blankets. “Do you like me like this?” she asked. The tears in her throat had started to show in her eyes. “I mean, not all dressed up. I’m not like Lulu. …”

Raphael flung his arms around her and she saw the sobs shudder through his back as she stroked his head. “You are my beauty, White Dawn.”

Coyote, Witch Baby and Angel Juan came
in with strawberries, cornmeal pancakes, maple syrup and bunches of real roses and irises that looked like the windows come to life. They gathered around the bed scanning Cherokee’s face, the way Raphael had done, to see if she was all right.

“What happened?” Cherokee asked them.

“Witch Baby saw how you were acting at the party and she went to get Coyote,” Angel Juan said, squinting and rubbing his temples.

“She told me all about the horns,” Coyote said. “Forgive me, Cherokee.”

“
I’m
sorry,” Cherokee said. “About the horns.”

“It’s my fault!” said Witch Baby. “I should never have taken those clutch horns.”

“Yes,” said Coyote, “we were all at fault. But I am supposed to care for you and I failed.”

“Did you know we had the horns?” Cherokee asked.

“I could have guessed. I turned my mind away from you. Sometimes, there on the hilltop, I forget life. Dreaming of past sorrows and the injured earth, I forget my friends
and their children who are also my friends.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I called your parents and they will be home in a few days.”

“But will you help us now?” Cherokee asked. She looked over at Witch Baby, who was gazing at Angel Juan as if her head ached too. “Will you help take away Angel Juan’s headaches and help Raphael stop smoking?”

The lines running through Coyote’s face like scars were not from anger but concern. He took Cherokee’s cold, damp hands in his own that were dry and warm, solid as desert rock. “I will help you,” Coyote said.

   After they had scrubbed the house clean, glued the broken bowls, washed the salsa-and liquor-stained tablecloths, waxed the scratched surfboards and fastened the dolls’ limbs back on. Coyote, Cherokee, Raphael, Witch Baby and Angel Juan gathered in a circle on Coyote’s hill.

Coyote lit candles and burned sage. In the center of the circle he put the tattered wings, haunches, horns and hooves. Then he began
to chant and to beat a small drum with his flat, heavy palms.

“This is the healing circle,” Coyote said. “First we will all say our names so that our ancestor spirits will come and join us.”

“Angel Juan Perez.”

“Witch Baby Wigg Bat.”

“Raphael Chong Jah-Love.”

“Cherokee Bat.”

“Coyote Dream Song.”

Coyote Dream Song chanted again. His voice filled the evening like the candlelight, like the smoke from the sage, like the beat of his heart.

“Now we will dance the sacred dances,” Coyote said, and everyone stood, shyly at first, with their hands in their pockets or folded on their chests. Coyote jumped into the air as he played his drum, and the music moved in all of them until they were jumping too, leaping as high as they could. Then Coyote began to spin and they spun with him, circles making a circle, planets in orbit, everything becoming a blur of fragrant shadow and fragmented light around them.

“And we will dance our animal spirit,” Coyote said, crouching, hunching his shoulders, his eyes flashing, his face becoming lean and secretive. The circle changed, then. There were ravens flying, deer prancing, obsidian elks dreaming.

Finally, the dancing ended and they sat, exhausted, leaning against each other, protected by ancestors who had recognized their names and glowing with the dream of the feathers and fur they might have been or would become.

“This is the healing circle,” Coyote said. “So you may each say what it is you wish to heal. Or you may think it in silence.” And he put his hand to his heart, then reached to the sky, then touched his heart again.

“The children in my country who beg in gutters and the hurt I gave to Witch Baby,” Angel Juan said.

“My Angel Juan’s headaches and all broken hearts,” Witch Baby said.

“Cherokee’s blistered feet and anything in the world that makes her sad,” Raphael murmured.

“Our damaged earth. Angel Juan’s headaches, Raphael’s desire for smoke. Witch Baby’s sweet heart. Cherokee’s pain,” Coyote said.

Wings, haunches, horns and hooves, thought Cherokee Bat, Wings, haunches, horns, hooves, home. Then, “All of you,” she said aloud.

Coyote put his hand to his heart, reached to the sky, then touched his heart again.

That was when the wind came, a hot desert wind, a salt crystal wind, ragged with traveling, full of memories. It was wild like the wind that had brought Cherokee the feathers for Witch Baby’s wings, but this time there were no feathers. This wind came empty, ready to take back. Cherokee imagined it extending cloud fingers toward them, toward the circle on the hill, imagined the crystalline gaze of the wind when it recognized Witch Baby’s wings made from the feathers it had once brought.

The wings also recognized the wind and began to flap as if they were attached to a weak angel crouched in the center of the circle.
They flapped and flapped until they began to rise, staggering back and forth in the dust. Cherokee, Raphael, Witch Baby, Angel Juan and Coyote stared in silence as the wind reclaimed the wings and carried them off, flapping weakly into the evening sky.

Witch Baby stood and reached above her head, watching the wings disappear. Then she collapsed against Angel Juan and he held hen

“You don’t need them,” he whispered. “You make me feel like I have wings when you touch me.” And as he spoke, one fragile feather, glinting with a streak of green, drifted down from the sky and landed upright in Witch Baby’s hair.

Meanwhile, Raphael was inching toward the haunches that lay in front of him, Cherokee could see by his eyes that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to give them up. But it was too late.

The goat had come down the hill. One old goat with white foamy fur and wet eyes. Unlike the goats who had come before, to give their fur to Coyote and Cherokee, this goat was quiet, so quiet that when he had gone,
dragging the haunches in his mouth, Coyote and The Goat Guys were not sure if he had been there at all. Raphael started to stand, but Cherokee touched his wrist. He reached for her hand and they turned to see the goat being swallowed up by the hillside, a wave vanishing back into the ocean.

Cherokee knew what she had to do. Coyote was standing, facing her with a shovel in each hand. He held one out. Together, Cherokee and Coyote began to dig a hole in the dirt in the center of the circle. Dust clouds rose, glowing pink as the sun set, and the pink dust filled Cherokee’s eyes and mouth.

The hooves were much heavier than they looked, heavier, even, than Cherokee remembered them, and the bristles poked out, grazing her bare arms. The hooves smelled bad, ancient, bitter. She dropped them into their grave. Then she and Coyote filled the grave up with earth and patted the earth with their palms. The dust settled, the sun slipped away, darkness eased over everything.

Coyote built a fire on the earth where the hooves were buried. The flames were dancers
on a stage, swooning with their own beauty.

Angel Juan was staring into these flames. His horns lay at the edge of the fire and Cherokee remembered her dream of flame horns springing from goat foreheads. She watched Angel Juan stand and pick up the horns. Then Coyote held out his arms and Angel Juan went to him, placing the horns in Coyote’s hands. Coyote set the horns down in the fire and embraced Angel Juan. Like a little boy who has not seen his father in many years. Angel Juan buried his head against Coyote’s chest. All the pride and strength in his slim shoulders seemed to fall away as Coyote held him. When he moved back to sit beside Witch Baby, his forehead was smooth, no longer strained with the weight or the memory of the horns.

Later, after Cherokee, Raphael, Witch Baby and Angel Juan had left, looking like children who have played all day in the sea and eaten sandy fruit in the sun and gone home sleepy and warm and safe; later, when the fire had gone out. Coyote took the horns from the log ashes and brushed them off. Then Coyote
Dream Song carried the horns back inside.

   When Cherokee and Raphael got back to the canyon house, they set up the tepee on the grass and crept inside it. They lay on their backs, not touching, looking at the leaf shadows flickering on the canvas, and trying to identify the flowers they smelled in the warm air.

“Honey suckle.”

“Orange blossom.”

“Rose.”

“The sea.”

“The sea! That doesn’t count!”

“I smell it like it’s growing in the yard.”

They giggled the way they used to when they were very young. Then they were quiet. Raphael sat up and took Cherokee’s feet in his hands.

“Do they still hurt?” he asked, stroking them tenderly. He moved his hands up over her whole body, as if he were painting her, bringing color into her white skin. As if he were playing her—his guitar. And all the hurt seemed to float out of her like music.

They woke in the morning curled together.

“Remember how when we were really little we used to have the same dreams?” Cherokee whispered.

“It was like going on trips together.”

“It stopped when we started making love.”

“I know.”

“But last night …”

“Orchards of hawks and apricots,” Raphael said, remembering.

“Sheer pink-and-gold cliffs.”

“The sky was wings.”

“The night beasts run beside us, not afraid. Dream-horses carry us …”

“To the sea,” they said together as they heard a car pull into the driveway and their parents’ voices calling their names.

   At the end of the summer. The Goat Guys set up their instruments on the redwood stage their families had helped them build behind the canyon house. Thick sticks of incense burned and paper lanterns shone in the trees like huge white cocoons full of electric butterflies. A picnic of salsa, home-baked bread still
steaming in its crust, hibiscus lemonade and cake decorated with fresh flowers was spread on the lawn. Summer had ripened to its fullest—a fruit ready to drop, leaving the autumn tree glowing faint amber with its memory as the band played on the stage for their families and friends.

Cherokee looked at the rest of The Coat Guys playing their instruments beside her. Even dressed in jeans and T-shirts, Raphael and Angel Juan could pout and gallop and butt the air. Witch Baby seemed to hover, gossamer, above her seat. The music moved like a running creature, like a creature of flight, and Cherokee followed it with her mind. She was a pale, thin girl without any outer layers of fur or bone or feathers to protect or carry her. But she could dance and sing, there, on the stage. She could send her rhythms into the canyon.