Dangerous Angels (9 page)

Witch Baby was crying. Witch babies never cry, snapped a voice inside, but she couldn’t stop. Angel Juan had been gone for two days.

Weetzie had never seen Witch Baby cry before and went to hug her, but Witch Baby curled up like a snail in the corner of the bed, burying her face in the embroidered animal T-shirt Angel Juan had given her. It hardly smelled like him anymore. Weetzie saw that the tears streaking Witch Baby’s face were the same color as her eyes.

“Come on,” Weetzie said, scooping her up.

Because Witch Baby was limp from the tears and the effort of trying to find Angel Juan in the T-shirt, her kicks and kitten bites did not prevent Weetzie from carrying her into the pink bedroom.

My Secret Agent Lover Man was in bed, reading the paper. He had never seen Witch Baby cry before either.

“What is it?” he asked gently, moving aside so Weetzie and Witch Baby could sit on the warm place. He reached out to stroke Witch Baby’s tangles, but she shrank away
from him, baring her teeth and clinging to the T-shirt.

“She wants to understand about Angel Juan,” Weetzie said. “I thought you could explain.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man scratched his chin.

“The Perez family came here to work, to make beautiful things. But our government says they don’t belong here and sent them back again. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m sorry, Witch Baby. I wish there was something I could do. Maybe with my movies, at least.”

“Angel Juan belongs anywhere he is,” Witch Baby said. “Because he
knows
, who he is.”

“He is lucky then,” said My Secret Agent Lover Man. “And he will be okay.”

“Will I see him again?” Witch Baby whispered.

“I don’t know, Baby. There are barbed wire fences and high walls to keep the Perez family and lots of other people from coming here.”

Witch Baby crawled under the bed and began to cry loud sobs that shook the mattress. She felt like a drum being beaten from the inside.

My Secret Agent Lover Man got down on his hands and knees and tried to reach for her, but she was too far under the bed. She looked at him through a glaze of amethyst tears.

“Who am I?” she asked, clutching Angel Juan’s T-shirt to her chest. “I need to know. You tell me.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man turned to Weetzie, who was kneeling beside him and she reached out and took his
hand. Then he looked at Witch Baby again. His face was dusky with worry.

“I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you would be ashamed of me,” he began. “I’m sorry, Witch Baby. I should have told you before. See, I’ve always thought the world was a painful place. There were times I could hardly stand it. So when Weetzie wanted a baby, I said I didn’t want one. I didn’t want to bring any baby angel down into this messed-up world. It seemed wrong. But Weetzie believed in good things—in love—and she went ahead and made Cherokee with Dirk and Duck. Or maybe Cherokee is mine. We’ll never be sure who her dad really is. Well, you know all that.

“But then I got jealous and angry because of what Weetz had done, so I went away.

“While I was away I met a woman. She was a powerful woman named Vixanne Wigg and I fell under her spell. I didn’t know what I was doing. Then something happened that woke me up and I left. I found Weetzie again, but I had been through a very dark time.

“One day Vixanne left a basket on our doorstep. There was a baby in it. She had purple tilty eyes.

“The only good thing about what happened with Vixanne Wigg was that we had made you, Witch Baby. I didn’t want to tell you about it because I wasn’t sure you would understand. But you’re mine, Witch Baby. Not only because I love you but because you are a part of me. I’m your real father.”

“And we all love you as if you were our real child,” Weetzie added. “Dirk and Duck and I. You belong to all of us.”

Witch Baby searched My Secret Agent Lover Man’s face for her own, as she had always done. But now she knew. Tassellike eyelashes, delicate cheekbones, sharp chins. When he reached for her again, she let him bring her out from under the bed.

My Secret Agent Lover Man held Witch Baby against his heart, and she felt damp with tears and almost boneless like a newborn kitten. She closed her eyes.

She is holding on to the back of his black trench coat that has the fragrance of Drum tobacco from Amsterdam deep in the folds. His back is tense and bony like hers but his shoulders are strong. She is strong too, even though she is small—strong from playing drums—he has told her that. He will take her with him down arrow highways past glistening number cities, telling her stories about when she was a baby
.

“
My baby, my child that lay on the doorstep smoldering. For such a young child—it frightened us to see that strength and fire. But I knew you. I remembered the way I’d seen the world when I was young. I’d seen the smoke and the pain in the streets, heard the roaring under the earth, felt the rage beneath the surface of everything, most people pretending it wasn’t there. Only those who are so shaken or so brave can wear it in their eyes. The way you wear it in your eyes
.”

They are both dressed in Chaplin bowler hats and turned-out shoes as they ride My Secret Agent Lover Man’s motorcycle around a clock that is a moon
.

The next morning Witch Baby woke at dawn and ran around the cottage naked, crowing like a rooster and dragging Rubber Chicken along behind her. Cherokee climbed out of her tepee and stood in the hallway rubbing her eyes.

“Witch, why are you crowing?”

“My Secret Agent Lover Man is my real dad,” Witch Baby crowed.

“He is not,” Cherokee said. “I know! He and Weetzie found you on our doorstep.”

“He told me he’s my real dad! He went away and met my mom and she had me and brought me here.”

“He is
not
your dad!”

“Yes he is. He’s my real dad but maybe not yours. You’ll never be sure who your real dad is!”

Cherokee began to cry. “My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck are all my dads. None of them are yours!”

“My Secret Agent Lover Man is,” said Witch Baby. “You have three dads but it’s like not having any. You’re a brat bath mat bat.”

Cherokee ran to My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie’s bedroom. Her face and cropped hair were wet with tears.

“Witch says I’m a brat mat because I have three dads!”

My Secret Agent Lover Man took her in his arms. “Cherokee, you’ve known about that all your life. Why are you so upset now?”

“Because Witch says you’re her real dad. I want one real dad if she has one.”

“Honey-honey,” Weetzie said, “My Secret Agent Lover Man is Witch Baby’s real dad, but you get to live with your real dad and two other dads even if you aren’t sure which is which. Witch Baby doesn’t even get to meet her real mom. Think what that must be like.”

Cherokee stopped crying and caught a tear in her mouth. She snuggled between My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie, her hair mingling with Weetzie’s in one shade of blonde.

None of them knew that Witch Baby was hiding at the doorway and that she had heard everything.

I’ll meet my real mom! she told herself. I’ll have two real parents and I’ll know who I am more than Cherokee knows who she is.

The next morning Witch Baby put her baby blanket, her rubber-bug sneakers, her camera, Angel Juan’s T-shirt and some Halloween candy she stole from Cherokee’s hoard into her bat-shaped backpack, and she skated away on her cowboy-boot roller skates.

Later Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man woke up and lay on their backs, holding hands and listening for the morning wake-up crow. But this morning the house was quiet and Rubber Chicken lay limply by the bed.

“Where is Witch Baby?”

They looked at each other, looked at the globe lamp on the bed table, looked at each other again and jumped out of bed. They ran through the cottage, checking under sombreros and sofas, behind surfboards and inside cookie jars, but they couldn’t find Witch Baby. They woke Dirk and Duck, who were surfing in their sleep in their blue bedroom, and told them that Witch Baby was missing. Cherokee came shuffling in, holding the puppy Tee Pee wrapped up like a papoose.

Duck pushed his fingers frantically through his flat-top. “I bet the witch child ran away!” he said.

Cherokee began to cry. “I’ve been so clutch to her.”

“Let’s go!” Dirk said, pulling on his leather jacket and Guatemalan shorts.

My Secret Agent Lover Man took the motorcycle, Duck took his blue Bug, Dirk took Jerry, Weetzie called Valentine and Ping who got in Valentine’s VW van. They drove in all directions looking for Witch Baby. They went to the candy stores, camera stores, music stores, toy stores and parks, asking about a tiny, tufty-headed girl. Cherokee and Raphael ran to Coyote’s shack on the hill, chanting prayers to the sun and looking in the muddy, weedy places that Witch Baby loved. Brandy-Lynn stayed with Weetzie by the
phone, while Weetzie called everyone she knew and peeled the Nefertiti decals off her fingernails.

Weetzie and Brandy-Lynn waited and waited by the phone for hours. Finally, Weetzie’s fatigue swept her into a dream about a house made of candy. Inside was a woman with a face the color of moss who warmed her hands by a wood-burning stove. A suffocating smoke came out of the stove and there was a tiny pair of black high-top sneakers beside it.

Weetzie woke crying and Brandy-Lynn held her until the sobs quieted and she could speak.

“Witch Baby is in danger,” Weetzie said.

“Come on, sweet pea,” said Brandy-Lynn. “I’ll make you some tea. Chamomile with milk and honey like when you were little.”

They sat drinking chamomile tea with milk and honey by the light of the globe lamp and Weetzie stared at the milk carton with a missing child’s face printed on the back. She read the child’s height, weight and date of birth, thinking the numbers seemed too low. How could this missing milk-carton child be so new, so small? Weetzie imagined waking up day after day waiting for Witch Baby, not knowing, seeing children’s faces smiling blindly at her from milk cartons while she tried to swallow a bite of cereal. Seeing a picture of Witch Baby on a milk carton.

“Where do you think she could be?” Weetzie asked her mother. “Would she just run away from us? Last time she was with Dirk and Duck.”

Brandy-Lynn was staring at the clock on the wall and the pictures Witch Baby had taken. There they all were—the family—bigger and bigger groups of them circling the clock up to the number eleven. They were all laughing, hugging, kissing. In one picture, Weetzie and Brandy-Lynn were displaying their polished toenails; in one, Weetzie and Cherokee wore matching feathered headdresses; Ping was playing with Raphael’s dreadlocks; Darlene was messing up Duck’s flat-top. There were pictures of My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Valentine and Coyote. But there was no picture on the number twelve.

“Look at all those beautiful photographs,” Brandy-Lynn said. “And Witch Baby isn’t even on the clock. No matter how much we love her, she doesn’t feel she belongs. You have me, Cherokee has you, but Witch Baby still doesn’t know who her mother is.”

“I’ve been a terrible almost-mother,” said Weetzie. “I won’t just stop and pay attention when someone is sad. I try to make pain go away by pretending it isn’t there. I should have seen her pain. It was all over her walls. It was all in her eyes.”

“It takes time,” Brandy-Lynn said, fingering the heart locket with the shadowy picture of Charlie Bat. “I didn’t want to let you be the witch child you were once. I couldn’t face your father’s death. And even now darkness scares me.” She set down the bottle of pale amber liqueur she was holding poised above her teacup, and pushed it away from
her. “I didn’t understand those newspaper clippings on Witch Baby’s wall.”

“How will I ever be able to tell Witch Baby what she means to us?” Weetzie cried. “She isn’t just my baby, she’s my teacher. She’s our rooster in the morning, she’s…How will I ever tell her?” she sobbed, while Brandy-Lynn stroked her hair. But Weetzie could not say the other thought. Would she be able to tell Witch Baby anything at all?

When she left the cottage, Witch Baby skated past the Charlie Chaplin Theater and the boys in too-big moon-walk high-tops playing basketball at the high school. She passed rows of markets where old men and women were stooped over bins of kiwis and cherries. They lived in the rest homes around the block, where ambulances came almost every day without using their sirens. One old woman with a peach in her hand stared as Witch Baby took her photograph and rolled away.

At Farmer’s Market she skated past stalls selling flowers, the biggest fruits she had ever seen, New Orleans gumbo, sushi, date shakes, Belgian waffles, burritos and pizzas—all the smells mingling together into one feast. At the novelty store she saw pirate swords, beanies and vinyl shoppers covered with daisies. There were mini license plates and door plaques with almost every name in the world printed on them. But there was nothing with “Witch Baby” or “Vixanne” on it. Witch Baby knew she wouldn’t find her mother here, eating waffles and drinking espresso
in the sunshine. So she caught a bus to the park above the sea.

Under palm trees that cast their feathery shadows on the path and the green lawns, Witch Baby photographed men in ragged clothes asleep in a gazebo, and a woman standing on the corner swearing at the sun. Near the woman was a shopping cart packed with clothes, blankets, used milk cartons, newspapers and ivy vines. Witch Baby took a picture and put some of her Halloween candy into the woman’s cart. Two young men were walking under the palms. They looked almost like twins—the way they were dressed and wore their hair—but one was tanned and healthy and one was fragile, limping in the protection of the other man’s shadow over a heart-shaped plot of grass. Because of the palm trees, for a moment, the healthy man’s shadow looked as if it had wings. Witch Baby took a picture and skated to the pier lined with booths full of stuffed animals.

She rode a black horse on the carousel, made faces at the mechanical fortune teller with the rolling eyeballs and bought a hot dog at the Cocky Moon. Nibbling her Cocky Moon dog, she stood at the edge of the pier and looked down at the blue-and-yellow circus tent in the parking lot by the ocean. Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man had taken Witch Baby and Cherokee to the tent to see the clowns coming out of a silvery-sweet, jazzy mist. The silliest, tiniest girl clown hid behind a parasol and was transformed into a golden tightrope walker.

Witch Baby thought of the old ladies and the basketball boys, the street people and the clowns, the tightrope walker goddess and the man who could hardly walk. She remembered the globe lamp burning with life in the magic shop. She remembered Angel Juan’s electric black-cat hair.

This is the time we’re upon.

She skidded down to the sand, took off everything except for the strategic-triple-daisy bikini Weetzie had made for her and jumped into the sea. Oily seaweed wrapped around her ankles and a harsh smell rose up from the waves, only partly disguised by the salt. Witch Baby thought of how Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck and Coyote had once walked all the way from town to bless the polluted bay with poems and tears. She got out of the water and built a sand castle with upside-down Coke cup turrets and a garden full of seaweed, cigarette butts and foil gum wrappers. Then she took pictures of surfer boys with peeling noses, blonde surfer girls that looked like tall Cherokees, big families with their music and melons, and men who lay in pairs by the blinding water.

When evening came Witch Baby had a sunburned nose and shoulders and she was starving. After she had eaten the sandy candy corn and Three Musketeers bars from her bat-shaped backpack, she was still hungry and it was getting cold.

I won’t find my mother here, she thought, getting back on a bus headed for Hollywood.

She found a bus stop bench in front of the Chinese Theater and curled up under the frayed blanket in her backpack, the same blanket that had once covered her in the basket when Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk and Duck had found her on their doorstep. Shivering with cold, she finally slept.

The next morning Witch Baby waited until the tourists started arriving for the first matinee. She rolled backward, leaping and turning on her cowboy-boot skates over the movie-star prints in the cement all day, and some people put money in her backpack. Then she went to see “Hollywood in Miniature,” where tiny cityscapes lit up in a dark room. Hollywood Boulevard was very different from the clean, ice-cream-colored miniature that didn’t have any people on its tiny streets.

If there were people in “Hollywood in Miniature,” they’d be dressed in white and glitter and roller skates, with enough food to eat and warm places to go at night, Witch Baby thought, watching some street kids with shaved heads huddling around a ghetto blaster as if it were a fire.

That was when she saw a piece of faded pink paper stapled to a telephone pole. The blonde actress in the picture pressed her breasts together with her arms and opened her mouth wide, but even with the cleavage and lips she looked small and lost.

“Jayne Mansfield Fan Club Meeting,” said the sign. “Free Food and Entertainment! Candy! Children Welcome!” and there was an address and that day’s date.

So Witch Baby ripped the pink sign from the telephone pole and took a bus up into the hills under the Hollywood sign.

Witch Baby skates until she comes to a pink Spanish-style house half hidden behind overgrown-pineapple-shaped palm trees and hibiscus flowers. Some beat-up 1950’s convertibles are parked in front. Witch Baby takes off her skates, goes up to the house and knocks
.

The door creaks open. Inside is darkness, the smell of burning wood and burning sugar. Witch Baby creeps down a hallway, jumping every time she glimpses imps with tufts of hair hiding in the shadows, and breathing again when she realizes that mirrors cover the walls. At the end of the hallway, she comes to a room where blondes in evening gowns sit around a fire pit roasting marshmallows and watching a large screen. Their faces are marshmallow white in the firelight and their eyes look dead, as if they have watched too much television
.

One of the women stands and turns to the doorway where Witch Baby hides. She is a tall woman with a tower of white-blonde hair and a chiffon scarf wound around her long neck
.

“
We have a visitor, Jaynes,” the woman says
.

Witch Baby feels herself being drawn into the firelit room. She stares into the woman’s tilted purple eyes, a purple that is only found in jacaranda tree blossoms and certain silks, knowing that she has come to the right place
.

“
Are you Vixanne?
”

“
Who are you?” The woman’s voice is carved—cold and
hard. The necklace at her throat looks as if it is made of rock candy
.

“
Witch Baby Wigg, your daughter
.”

All the people in the room begin to laugh. Their voices flicker, as separate from their bodies as the shadows thrown on the walls by the flames
.

“
So this is Max’s little girl. I wonder if she’s as quick to come and go as her father was. Did Max and that woman tell you all about how he left me, Witch Baby?” Vixanne asks. Then she turns to the people. “Do you think my daughter resembles me, Jaynes?” She reaches up and removes her blonde wig, letting her black hair cascade down, framing her fine-boned porcelain face
.

“
Let’s see how my baby witch looks as a Jayne blonde,” she says, putting the wig on Witch Baby. “You need a wig with that hair, Witch Baby!” The people laugh again
.

“
Now you can be a part of the Jayne Club.” Vixanne leads Witch Baby over to the screen. Jayne Mansfield flickers there, giggles, her chest heaving
.

“
Sit here and have some candy,” says someone in a deep voice, delicately patting the seat of a chair with two manicured fingers. Witch Baby can’t tell if the thick, pale person in the wig and evening gown is a man or a woman
.

Witch Baby sits up all night, gnawing on rock candy and divinity fudge, drinking Cokes, which aren’t allowed at the cottage, and watching Jayne Mansfield films. After a while she feels sick and bloated from all the sugar. Lipstick-smeared mouths loom around her. Her eyes begin to close
.

“
I’ll put you to bed now, Witch Baby Wigg,” Vixanne says, lifting Witch Baby up in her powdery arms
.

There is something about being held by this woman. Witch Baby feels she has fallen into an ocean. But it is not an ocean of salt and shadows and dark-jade dreams. Witch Baby’s senses are muffled by pale shell-colored, spun-sugar waves that press her eyelids shut, pour into her nostrils and ears, swell like syrup in her mouth. A sea of forgetting
.

Vixanne carries Witch Baby up a winding staircase to a bedroom and tucks her beneath a pink satin comforter on a heart-shaped bed. Then she sits beside her and they look at each other. They do not need to speak. Without words, Witch Baby tells her mother what she has seen or imagined—families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes listening for sirens, ragged men and women wandering barefoot through the city, becoming ghosts because no one wanted to see them, children holding out wish bracelets as they sit in the gutter, the dark-haired boy who disappeared. What do I do with it all? Witch Baby asks with her eyes. Vixanne answers without speaking
.

We are the same. Some people see more than others. It gets worse. I wanted to blind myself. You must just not look at it. You must forget. Forget everything
.

And Witch Baby falls into a suffocating sleep
.

In the morning, Witch Baby is too weak to get up. Vixanne comes in dressed in perfumed satin and carries Witch Baby’s limp body downstairs. The others, the “Jaynes,” are already gathered around the screen, eating candy and watching Jayne Mansfield waving from a convertible. Witch Baby sits propped
up among them, wearing a long blonde wig. Her eyes are glazed like sugar cookies; her throat, no matter how many sodas she is given, is parched
.

Late that night she wakes in her bed. “How will I ever be able to tell her what she means to us?” says a voice. Weetzie’s voice. “Weetzie,” she whispers
.

She stumbles out of the room to the top of the stairs and looks down. Vixanne and the Jaynes are still watching the screen and charring marshmallows over the fire pit. A soft chant rises up. “We will ward off pain. There will be no pain. Forget that there is evil in the world. Forget. Forget everything.” Vixanne is holding herself, rocking back and forth, smiling. Her eyes are closed
.

Witch Baby goes back into her room and packs her bat-shaped backpack. For a moment she stops to look at the pictures she has taken on her journey. The floating basketball boys. The old woman with the peach. The hungry men in the gazebo. The dying young man and his angel twin. A picture of a child with tangled tufts of hair and mournful, tilted eyes. She leaves the pictures on the heart-shaped bed, hoping that Vixanne will look at them and see
.

Then she slips downstairs, past the Jaynes and out the front door. She sits on the front step, tying her roller skates, clearing her lungs of smoke, gathering strength from the night
.

The mint and honeysuckle air is chilly on her damp face, awake on the nape of her neck as Witch Baby Wigg skates home
.