Dangerous Angels (14 page)

The 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 her.

“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.

“Honeysuckle.”

“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’s 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 Goat 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.

Angel Juan and I walk through a funky green fog. It smells like hamburgers and jasmine. We don’t see anybody, not even a shadow behind a curtain in the tall houses. Like the fog swirled in through all the windows, down the halls, up the staircases, into the bedrooms and took everybody away. Then fog beasties breathed clouds onto the mirrors, checked out the bookshelves, sniffed at the refrigerator—whispering. We hear one playing drums in a room in a tower.

Angel Juan stops to listen, slinking his shoulders to the beat. “Not as good as you,” he says.

I play an imaginary drum with imaginary sticks. I am writing a new song for him in my head.

He sees something on the other side of a wall and picks me up. I feel his arms hard against the bottom of my ribs. Jungle garden. Water rushes. Dark house. Bright window. A piano with the head of Miss Nefertiti-ti on top.

“You look like her,” he says. “Your eyes and your skinny flower-stem neck.”

“But she doesn’t have my snarl-ball hair or my curly toes.” My toes curl like cashew nuts.

He puts me down and messes up my messy hair the way he used to do when we were little kids. Before he ever kissed me.

A black cat with a question-mark tail follows us for blocks. He has fur just like Angel Juan’s hair. Angel Juan crouches down to stroke him and I stroke Angel Juan. We are all three electric in the fog. The cat keeps following us. I hear him wailing for a long time after he disappears into the wet cloud air. Angel Juan has one arm around me and is holding my inside hand with his outside hand. It is our brother grip. We are bound together. My outside hand is at his skinny hips, quick and sleeky-sleek like a cat’s hips. I could put one finger into the change pocket of his black Levi’s.

I want to take his photograph with his hand at the cat’s throat, his eyes closed, feeling the purr in his fingers. I want to take his picture naked in the fog.

The shiny brown St. John’s bread pods crack open under our feet and their cocoa smell makes me dizzy and hungry.

Then Angel Juan stops walking. It’s so quiet. Nothing moves. There’s a shiver in the branches like a cat’s spine when you stroke it. The green druggy fog.

I remember the first time he ever kissed me. I mean really kissed me. We had just finished a gig with our band The Goat Guys and he put his hands on my shoulders. His
hair was slicked back and it gleamed, his lips were tangy and his fingers were callusy and we were both so sweaty that we stuck together. Our eyelashes brushed like they would weave together by themselves turning us into one wild thing.

I say, “I think I missed you before I met you even.”

“Witch Baby,” he says. He never calls me that. Niña Bruja or Baby or Lamb but never Witch Baby. I start to feel a little sick to my stomach. Queased out. Angel Juan’s eyes look different. Like somebody else’s eyes stuck in his head. Why did I say that about missing him? I never say clutchy stuff like that.

“I’m going to New York.”

New York. We were going to go there. We were going to play music on the street. What is he saying? He just told me I looked like Nefertiti. He just had his arms around me in our brother grip.

“You’re always taking pictures of me and writing songs for me but that’s not me. That’s who you make up. And in the band. I feel like I’m just backing up the rest of you. I’ve got to play my own music.”

“Just go do it with her,” I say.

“There’s no her. I don’t even feel like sex at all. Nothing feels safe.”

For the last few weeks we’ve been snuggling but that’s about it. I’ve been telling myself it’s just because Angel Juan’s been tired from working so much at the restaurant.

“But we’ve only ever been with us.”

“Do we want to be together just because we think it’s safer? I need to know about the world. I need to know me.”

Safer? I’ve never even thought of that.

My heart is like a teacup covered with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won’t get shaken and just all shatter and break.

But I start to run anyway. I run and run into the fog before Angel Juan can go away.

By the time I get back to the house with the antique windows, I feel the jagged teacup chips cutting me up. I go into the dark garden shed. The doglet Tiki-Tee who has soul-eyes like Angel Juan’s and likes to cuddle in the bend of my knees at night whimpers and skulks away when he sees me. Skulkster dog. I must look like a beastly beast with a cracked teacup for a heart. I lie on the floor listening for the broken sound inside like when you shake your thermos that fell on the cement.

We used to lie here hugging with a balloon between us. Angel Juan’s body floating on the balloon, his body shining through its skin. Then the balloon popped and we giggled and screamed falling into each other, all the sadness inside of us gone into the air.

All over the walls are pictures I took of Angel Juan. Angel Juan plays his bass—eyelash-shadow, mouth-pout, knee-swoon. Angel Juan kisses the sky. Angel Juan the blur does hip-hop moves. There’s even one of us together in Joshua Tree standing on either side of our cactus Sunbear. It’s like Sunbear’s our kid or something. We’re holding
hands behind him. You can see our grins under our suede desert hats and our skinny legs in hiking boots. I never let anybody take my picture unless it’s Angel Juan or I’m with Angel Juan. If you saw this picture you’d probably think that Angel Juan Perez and Witch Baby Secret Agent Wigg Bat will be together forever. They will build an adobe house with a bright-yellow door in a desert oasis and play music with their friends all night while the coyotes howl at the moon. That’s what you’d think. You’d never think that Angel Juan would go away.

That’s why I like photographs.

And that’s why I hate photographs.

I want to smash the lens of my camera. I want to smash everything.

When I feel like this I play my drums. But I don’t want to play my drums. I want to smash my drums. So I’ll never write or play another song for Angel Juan. “Angel Boy,” “Funky Desert Heaven,” “Cannibal Love.” I wish I could smash the songs and the feelings the way you smash a camera lens or put your fist through the skin of a drum.

Some native Americans believe that the drum is the heart of the universe. What happens to the rest of something when you smash its heart?

Then I hear a noise outside and my heart starts going to the beat of “Cannibal Love.” It’s him. It’s him. Him. Him. Him. Hymn.

“Witch Baby,” he whispers on the other side of the door. I don’t say anything.

“I still love you,” he says. “I’m sorry.” His voice sounds different, like somebody else is inside of him using his voice.

I don’t move. It’s hard to breathe. Afraid the broken pieces cutting.

“Let me in,” he says. “Please. I leave tomorrow.”

I sit up like electric shocked. I start ripping the pictures of Angel Juan off my walls. Tomorrow.

“Go away now!” I growl, shredding the picture of us in the desert, shredding Angel Juan. Shredding myself.

After all the pictures are gone I slam my arms against the wall of the shed again, again, and crumple down into a shred-bed of eyes and mouths and bass guitars and cactus needles. I am not going to let myself cry.

When I wake up I reach for him—his hair crisp against my lips, his hot-water-bottle heat. I crawl clawing and sliding over the torn photographs to the door. Out in the empty garden it is already tomorrow.

I don’t go to school. I lie in the bed of ruined pictures for hours. The shed is dark. Smells of soil and sawdust. Blue and yellow sunflower bruises bloom on my arms.

I remember the time when I was a kid and I first met the little black-haired boy named Angel Juan. He was the first person that made me feel I belonged—like I wasn’t just some freaky pain-gobbling goblin nobody understood. Then he had to go back to Mexico with his parents, Marquez and Gabriela Perez, and his brothers and sisters,
Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro, Angelina and Serafina. I didn’t see him for years. But it was okay. I had myself. I knew that I could feel things. Not just smashing anger and loneliness. But love too. It was inside of me. And then on my birthday a few years later Angel Juan came back.

Now it’s different because he doesn’t
have
to go away. He wants to. And also we’ve done it—the wild love thing. So I feel like I need him to put me back together every night. After his kisses and hugs it feels like without them my body will fall apart into pieces.

I get up and take the shoe boxes out from under the bed. They are filled with newspaper clippings I used to have on my walls—before Angel Juan. “Whales Die in Toxic Waters.” “Beautiful Basketball God Gets Disease.” “Family Burned in Gas Explosion.” “Murderer Collects Victims’ Body Parts.” Even after Angel Juan I cut them out when we had a fight or something but I’d always hide them under my bed. Pictures of all the pain I could find. A pain game.

“What a world!” says the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
before she melts.

The only way I used to be able to stand being in this world was to hold it in my hands, in front of my eyes. That way I thought—it can’t get me or something. But when I had Angel Juan I only wanted to touch and see
him
. He was the only way I’ve ever really been able to escape.

Now it’s the pain game again.

Night.

Across the garden my family is together eating vegetarian lasagna, edible flower salad and fruit-juice-sweetened apple pie. They are laughing in the beeswax candlelight, talking about the next movie they are going to make and looking out over the ruins of the magician’s castle through stained-glass flowers. I wonder if they wonder where I am. They probably think I’m having a picnic at the beach in the back of Angel Juan’s red pickup truck. Or maybe by now they all know that Angel Juan is gone. Maybe he told them before me.

There is a knock on my door.

It’s him. He’s back. I made this whole thing up. He is here with his pickup truck full of blankets and Fig Newtons for a moonlight picnic.

But then I hear my almost-mom Weetzie Bat’s voice.

“Honey-honey,” she says. “Aren’t you going to eat tonight?”

I don’t move. It’s like I’m a statue of me.

Weetzie opens the door slow. I didn’t lock it this morning. Should have. She’s carrying the lamp shaped like a globe that I gave to my dad a long time ago. She plugs it in and the world lights up.

Weetzie looks around at the torn-up pictures of Angel Juan and the scattered newspaper clippings. Then she sits down next to me on the floor. The blue oceans make her shine.

Suddenly remember. Lifted into the light. Somebody playing piano. Vanilla-gardenia. Weetzie’s white-gold halo
hair. It’s the day I was left in a basket on the doorstep and Weetzie found me like those changeling things in stories, the ones that fairies leave in baskets, strange kids with some mark on them or the wrong color eyes. My eyes are purple. In a way I want Weetzie to lift me up into the light again. But more I want to sink back into the darkness where I came from. I want to drown under the newspaper pain and the shreds of Angel Juan.

“Go away,” I growl at Weetzie. But she knows me too well by now. And I feel too old and weak to bite and scratch the way I did when I was a little kid before Angel Juan came. So she just sits there with me not touching, not talking for a long time. I wonder if she can see the bruises on my arms.

Finally she says, “I wanted to bring you something magic that would make everything okay.” She must have already heard about Angel Juan. “But now I know that magic’s not that simple. I wish I could give you a lamp with a genie in it to make all your wishes come true. But you’re a genie. Your own genie. Just believe in that.”

Supposedly a long time ago Weetzie wished on her genie lamp and that’s how she met my dad and how her best friend Dirk McDonald met his true love Duck Drake and how they all ended up living together. Weetzie thinks life’s so slinkster-cool as she would say because all her wishes came true.

But right now I don’t believe in that magic crap. I don’t believe in anything. All I want is to find Angel Juan.

“I want to go to New York,” I say. My voice sounds gritty. My throat hurts like my voice is made of broken glass.

“To find him or to find you?” Weetzie asks.

Why is she asking me stuff like this like she thinks she knows so much? I want her to leave me alone.

I look at the globe lamp. If somebody said to me, You can go all over the world by yourself looking at everything—all the death and all the love—or you can sleep inside the globe lamp with the echo of the oceans as your lullaby and the continents floating around you like blankets with Angel Juan beside you, I would choose to sleep with Angel Juan in a place he can never leave.

To find him.