Dangerous Angels (15 page)

School’s out pretty soon. Can’t wait. I hardly talk to anybody there. Sometimes I feel like I come from another planet. Planet of the Witch Babies where the sky is purple, the stars are cameras, the flowers are drums and all the boys look like Angel Juan. When I’m at school I wish I came from my own planet. And I want to go back.

I’ve got some money from
The Goat Guys
, the movie my dad directed about the slam-jam band my almost-sister Cherokee and her soul-love Raphael and me and Angel Juan are in. Were in—before. In the movie we all played us.

The angel medallion that came in the mail sleeps in the hollow part of my neck. I can’t send a letter telling that or anything else to Angel Juan.

I don’t know where he is. But I’m going to look for him.

The only thing is where to stay in New York. So I ask Weetzie about Charlie Bat’s place.

Weetzie’s dad Charlie Bat died a long time ago before I was born. But Weetzie begged her mom Brandy-Lynn not
to let go of his old apartment in the Village. It’s like she doesn’t want to admit that he’s dead.

Weetzie is sitting in the room with the dried roses and painted fans all over the walls and the stained-glass pyramid-palm-tree windows that look out on the canyon. From here you can see a few blue pools like the canyon’s eyes and the waves of palm, eucalyptus and oleander like the canyon’s swirly green hair. The canyon talks in different voices. In the day she growls with traffic, but real early or late at night she sings with mockingbirds and you can hear her wind-chime jewelry. Angel Juan and I used to sneak over garden walls and swim in the pool eyes at night. We used to climb the trees, tangling in the braids of leaves, and Angel Juan told me he was going to build us a tree house someday. His dad Marquez, who makes frames and furniture, taught him how to build tree houses.

In our house that feels like a tree house sometimes—deep in the canyon, nested in leaves—Weetzie’s working on the script for the next movie she and my dad are making. It’s a ghost story.

“I’m going to New York,” I say. “Could I stay at Charlie Bat’s?”

“Are you sure you want to go to New York, honey?”

“I’m going to New York,” I say. I start to nibble at my fingernails, chew my cuticles.

Weetzie goes over to her 1920’s dressing table with the round mirror and the lotus-blossom lights. The little genie lamp is sitting there—still gold but empty of genies and
wishes now. Weetzie takes an old photo album out of a dressing table drawer. It’s so old that almost all the pile of the pink velvet has worn down around the gold curlicues and cupids. It’s so old that it was probably red velvet once, a long time ago. Weetzie sits on her seashell-shaped love seat that is the same velvet pink as the photo album and pats it for me to sit next to her. I climb up the side and perch, looking over her shoulder instead. Inside the photo album is a picture of a tall skinny man with sunken eyes and bones like the guys in those old black-and-white silent movies. Kind of like Valentino but a lot thinner and not so healthy-looking. The man has his arm around a little blonde woman with a big lipsticky smile and slidey gold mules on her feet. They seem really in love standing in front of this cherry yellow T-bird clinking champagne glasses: Weetzie’s mom and dad when they were young. Before Brandy-Lynn and Charlie and the champagne glasses and the T-bird got smashed. Before Brandy-Lynn kicked Charlie out and he went to New York and died there.

Weetzie shows me a picture of her and her real daughter, my almost-sister Cherokee, with Charlie from the time when they went to visit him just before he died. It was taken in one of those photo booths. Cherokee was just a baby then with little tufts of white hair like a Kewpie doll or something. Weetzie looks exactly the same as she does now—elf mom—maybe a little skinnier and her hair was a little shorter, kind of spiky. But Charlie doesn’t look much like a silent-movie star anymore. He looks more like
a ghost. There’s a spooky light around his head and his eyeballs are rolled up. Weetzie has her arm around him really tight and her fingers pressed into his shoulder.

She’s never held on to me like that.

Not that I’d let her.

“I think people leave here before we think they’re gone,” Weetzie whispers as she looks at the picture. “And when you’re with them you know it. Part of you knows it—that they’ve left. But you don’t let yourself really accept it. And then later you think about it and you know you knew.”

I can see her going back to that time, trying to find her dad.

“We had to walk up nine flights of stairs to his apartment in the dark and every time he whistled ‘Rag Mop’ to us—you know, ‘R-A-G-G M-O-P-P Rag Mop doodely-doo’ to make us laugh. But that time he was quiet. When we got to the apartment he went and stood by the window and shut his eyes, listening to the echoes of kids playing outside way down there in the distance, and he said, ‘It sounds like when I was a little boy in Brooklyn and we ran around the streets in the twilight, hoping it would never get all the way dark so we’d have to go in. Kids playing sound the same wherever you are. They sound so happy. They don’t know what’s in store for them.’

“I said it could still be happy, like kids playing in the street before they have to go in for dinner. My friends and I, we live like that. Come live with us. But he was far away already.” Weetzie closes her eyes. It’s real quiet for a minute
and I can hear the canyon tossing her hair and her wind-chime earrings clinking like Charlie and Brandy-Lynn’s champagne glasses in the photograph.

I wonder what it would be like to talk to Charlie Bat. I bet he would get it. He died from drugs all alone. He was an artist but he didn’t make pretty things. Weetzie says he wrote movies and plays about monsters, but they were really about the monster feelings inside.

“I miss him so much. But I can’t even dream about him,” Weetzie says.

What she says reminds me of Angel Juan. Sometimes it almost feels like Angel Juan is dead too.

It’s like Weetzie’s reading my mind for a second. “You really need to look for him, don’t you?”

I am busy with my cuticle gnaw. “Can I go see Charlie Bat?” I mumble.

Weetzie stares at me like she’s seen a ghost. “Lanky lizards,” she whispers.

“I mean Charlie
Bat’s
—his place,” I say.

Weetzie nods, looking at her photo album.

In a way I’m glad she’s into letting me go. But another part of me wishes she didn’t want me to. It seems like she’s thinking more about Charlie Bat than about me.

I get up, put on my cowboy-boot roller skates and go out into a fog as green as the fog was green on the night before Angel Juan left.

I haven’t been to the big pink house in the hills for years but somehow I know exactly how to get back there.
The way our dog Tiki-Tee keeps going back to where he was born, the place my family uses as a studio now. He slinks out and trots through the canyon down the street named for the newest moon all the way to the cottage. Whenever he’s missing, we know we’ll find him there curled up in between the stone gnomes under the rosebushes.

Just like Tiki-Tee finds the cottage, I find the place where I was born. It blooms out of the fog. It’s all falling apart now. The driveway is empty and the windows are caked with dust. Maybe Vixanne moved away.

I take off my skates, creep up to the door and knock. No one answers. The door swings open by itself and I slip in, skidding on my socks.

There’s the hallway lined with mirrors where I freaked myself once. Now I know they’re me but I want to smash my reflections. So in the mirror I’ll look like I feel. Pieces. But if you break a mirror there are just more whole little yous in every piece.

I go into the dusty sunken room. Empty. Cold air burns in the empty fireplace. There are squished tubes of paint and canvases everywhere. And lots of big portraits of Vixanne Wigg in colors like tropical flowers—almost glow-in-the-dark.

Vixanne powdery-pink and sparkle-platinum as Jayne Mansfield chomp-gnawing off a cluster chunk of crystally-white dry-ice rock candy. Vixanne lounging in a fluorescent green jungle tied up in her own jungle-green writhe-vine hair. Dressed in milky apple blossoms and holding a
grimacy shrively monkey-face apple. Wreath of giant blue and orange butterflies around her head. With a rainbow-jewel-scaled mermaid tail. A ripple-haunched horse from the waist down. Vixanne with black roses tattooed on her naked chest. All of the Vixannes staring at me with purple eyes.

I go up to the one with the tattoo. Pain-ink flowers. Meat-eating roses in a demony garden. The paint is rich and smooth like batter. I wish Vixanne would paint me:

Angel Juan’s name tattooed on my heart in a wreath of black roses.

Something rustles. Heavy crunched silk. I turn around.

“You’ve been gone a long time,” says a voice. She sounds tired.

Vixanne’s long dark hair that she used to wear under the Jayne Mansfield wig is hacked short and kind of uneven like she did it herself. It reminds me of me when Cherokee cut off my hair with toenail scissors when we were babies. Vixanne wears a black silk dress with watery patterns in it. She is so different from the glam lanka I remember.

“Remember those photographs you gave me?” she says.

When I found her the first time, I gave her some pictures I took. An old woman shaking her fist and screaming at the sun. A man who was too young to be dying. Me looking like a little lost loon waif thing. I wanted my mother to have something when I left. I wanted her to see.

“At first I put them away and didn’t look at them but
I kept thinking about you. You were so little skating around with that camera seeing all the pain.”

Her eyes roll in her head. I want to leave but instead I sit down and start playing with the paints on the table. It feels good to squeeze the tubes of paint. Smell the stinkster turpentine. Vixanne sits down next to me. I want to paint a picture of Angel Juan. As big as life. A boy that will never leave.

“I like to be alone,” Vixanne says. “I’ve started painting. I’m not anyone’s slave now.”

I listen to the sound of her voice and feel all the twilight purple eyes watching me while my hand moves by itself in the shadowy room.

Maybe hours go by.

“I look things right in the eye now. That’s the best way. Right in the eye and without anything to make it easier,” says Vixanne.

I look down and drop my paintbrush. It skids across the floor. Instead of Angel Juan I’ve made a picture of a man with big teeth eating a cake that drips icing all over his face and hands. It gives me a creepy-crawly-heebee-jeebee feeling.

I pretend the goose bumps studding my arms are ’cause I’m cold.

I take black paint and wipe out the man with the cake like he was never there. “I don’t want to look at anything or anybody except for Angel Juan.”

Vixanne shakes her head. Then she says, “You have
to leave now, Witch Baby. You can come back after your journey.”

She goes to the door with me and I put on my skates. I wonder how I will ever make it home and then all the way to New York. The parts of my body feel held together by strings you could cut with a scissors.

“Remember to look in the eye. That’s what you taught me,” Vixanne says. “Look at your own darkness.”

I leave my mother all complete in a gnarly snarly forest of herself, and the puppet parts of my body skate away into the fog.

I am going to leave.

I think that Weetzie misses her dead dad more than she will miss me.

Vixanne is busy painting pictures of her own face.

The rest of my family is working on their movie. It’s about ghosts but if anybody knows about being haunted it’s me.

In the shed by the light of the globe lamp I pack up my bat-shaped backpack. Angel Juan has taken my mind and my heart away and his ghost is trapped in the empty places that are left. Not so I feel like he’s with me. Just like always remembering that he’s not. So it’s not like I can just sit around here waiting. I have to go find him.

I am going to take a cab to the airport because everybody’s too busy to drive me. My dad is in the desert by himself meditating about the new movie. Weetzie has a yoga class that she hates to miss.