Dangerous Angels (11 page)

When Witch Baby was very little, she had fallen in love with Angel Juan, but he had had to go back to Mexico with his family. He still wrote to Witch Baby on her birthday and holidays and she said she dreamed about him all the time.

“Angel Juan!” Cherokee cried. She and Raphael ran to him and they all embraced.

“Where’ve you been?” Raphael asked.

“Mexico,” said Angel Juan. “I’ve been playing music there since my family and I were sent back. I knew someday I’d get to see you guys again. And how is…?”

“Witch Baby isn’t so great,” said Cherokee. “She won’t come out of the shed in back.”

“What?” said Angel Juan. “Niña Bruja! My sweet, wild, purple-eyes!”

“Come and play some music for her,” said Raphael. “Maybe she’ll hear you and come out.”

Witch Baby, huddling in the mud shed, smelled the food and saw colored lights blinking through the window.
She even imagined the ice cream cake glistening in the freezer. But nothing was enough to make her leave the shed until she heard a boy’s voice singing a song.

“Niña Bruja,” sang the voice.

Witch Baby stood up in the dark shed, shivering. Mud was caked all over her body, making her look like a strange animal with glowing purple eyes. It was raining when she stepped outside, and the water rinsed off the mud, leaving her naked and even colder. The voice drew her to the window of the house and she stared in.

Cherokee was the only one who noticed Witch Baby clinging to the windowsill and watching Angel Juan through the rain-streaked stained-glass irises. Cherokee ran and got a purple silk kimono robe embroidered with dragons, went out into the rain, slipped the robe on Witch Baby’s hungry body, pried her fingers from the windowsill and took her hand. Hiding behind her tangled hair, Witch Baby followed Cherokee into the house as if she were in a trance.

Cherokee handed Witch Baby a pair of drumsticks and helped her tiptoe past everyone to the drums they had set up for her behind Raphael and Angel Juan. Witch Baby sat at her drums for a moment, biting her lip and staring at the back of Angel Juan’s head. Then she lunged forward with her body and began to play.

Everyone turned to see what was happening. The drumming was powerful. It was almost impossible to believe it was coming through the body of a half-starved young girl
who had been hiding in the mud for weeks. As Witch Baby played, a pair of multicolored wings descended from the ceiling. They shimmered in the lights as if they were in flight, reflecting the dawns and cities and sunsets they passed, then rested gently near Witch Baby’s shoulders. Cherokee attached them there. The wings looked as if they had always been a part of Witch Baby’s body, and the music she played made them tremble. Angel Juan turned to stare. Once everyone had caught their breath, they tossed their heads, stamped their feet, shook their hips, and began to dance. Cherokee got her tambourine and joined the band.

When the song was over, Cherokee brought out the ice-cream cake burning with candles and everyone sang “Happy Birthday, dear Witch Baby.” It was hard for Cherokee to recognize her almost-sister. Glowing from music, and magical in the Cherokee wind-wings, Witch Baby was beautiful. Angel Juan could not take his eyes off her.

After she had blown out all the candles, he came up and took her hand. “Niña Bruja,” he said, “I’ve missed you so much.”

Witch Baby looked up at Angel Juan’s smooth, brown face with the high cheekbones, the black-spark eyes. The last time she had seen him, he was a tiny blur of a boy.

“Dance with me,” he said.

Witch Baby looked down at her bare, curly toes. There was still mud under her toenails, but the wings made her feel safe.

“Dance with me, Niña Bruja,” Angel Juan said again.
He put his hands on Witch Baby’s shoulders, hunched tightly beneath the wings, and she relaxed. Then he took one of her hands, uncurling the fingers, and began to dance with her in the protective shade of many feathers. Witch Baby pressed her head of wild hair against Angel Juan’s clean, white shirt.

Everyone clapped for them, then found partners and joined in. Cherokee stood watching. She remembered how Witch Baby and Angel Juan had played together when they were very young, how Witch Baby had covered her walls with pictures she had taken of him, how she never bit her nails or pulled at her snarl-balls or hissed or spit when he was around. Then he had had to leave so suddenly when his family was sent back to Mexico.

Now, seeing them dancing together, the nape of Angel Juan’s neck exposed as he bent to hold Witch Baby, the black flames of her hair pressed against his chest, Cherokee felt like crying.

Raphael came up to Cherokee and took her hands. For almost their whole lives, Cherokee and Raphael had been inseparable, but tonight Cherokee felt something new. It was something tight and slidey in her stomach, something burning and shivery in her spine; it was like having hearts beating in her throat and knees. Raphael had never looked so much like a lion with his black eyes and mane of dreadlocks.

“The wings are beautiful, Kee,” Raphael said. “They are the best gift anyone could give to Witch Baby.” He lifted
Cherokee’s hands into the light and examined them. “How did you do it?” he asked.

“Love.”

“You are magic,” Raphael said. “I’ve known that since we were babies, but now your magic is very strong. I think you are going to have to be careful.”

“Careful?” said Cherokee. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” said Raphael. “I just got a funny feeling. I just want things to stay like this forever.” And he stroked Cherokee’s long, yellow braids, but he didn’t put his arms around her the way he had always done before.

After Witch Baby’s birthday, Cherokee, Raphael, Witch Baby and Angel Juan decided to form a band called The Goat Guys. Every day, when Angel Juan got home from the restaurant where he worked and the others from school, they practiced in Raphael’s garage with posters of Bob Marley, The Beatles, The Doors and John Lennon and a velvet painting of Elvis on the walls around them. Witch Baby sat at her drums, her purple eyes fierce, her skinny arms pounding out the beat; Angel Juan pouted and swayed as he played his bass, and Raphael sang in a voice like Kahlúa and milk, swinging his dreadlocks to the sound of his guitar. Cherokee, whirling with her tambourine, imagined she could see their music like fireworks—flashing flowers and fountains of light exploding in the air around them.

One night, Cherokee and Raphael were walking through the streets of Hollywood. Because it had just rained and was almost Christmas, a twinkling haze covered the whole city.

They passed stucco bungalows with Christmas trees shining in the windows and roses in the courtyard gardens. They stopped to catch raindrops off the rose petals with their tongues.

“What does this smell like?” Cherokee asked, sniffing a yellow rose.

“Lemonade.”

“And the orange ones smell like peaches.”

Raphael put his face inside a white rose. “Rain,” he said.

They walked on Melrose with its neon, lovers, frozen yogurt and Italian restaurants, Santa Monica with its thin boys on bus-stop benches, lonely hot dog stands, auto repair shops where the cars glowed with fluorescent raindrops, Sunset with its billboard mouths calling you toward the sea, and Hollywood where golden lights arched from movie palace to movie palace over fake snow, pavement stars, ghetto blasters, drug dealers, pinball players and women in high-heeled pumps walking in Marilyn’s footprints in front of the Chinese Theater.

Cherokee and Raphael made shadow animals with their hands when they came to bare walls. They stopped for ice-cream cones. Cherokee heard Raphael’s voice singing in her head as she sucked a marshmallow out of her scoop of rocky road.

“We are ready to play out,” she told him. They were hopping from star to star on Hollywood Boulevard.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to deal with the whole nightclub scene,” he said.

“But it would be good for people to hear you.” She looked at him. Raindrops had fallen off some of the roses they had been smelling and sparkled in his dreadlocks. He was wearing a denim jacket and jeans and he stepped lightly on his toes as if he weren’t quite touching the ground.

He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so important. I like to just play for our friends.”

“But other people need our music, too. Let’s just send the tape around,” Cherokee said. She looked up and pointed to the spotlights fanning across the cloudy sky. “I think you are a star, Raphael. You’re my star. I’ll send the tapes for us.”

He shook his head so his hair flew out, scattering the drops of rain. “Okay, okay. You can if you really want to.”

Let’s not be afraid, Cherokee thought. Let’s not be afraid of anything that can’t really hurt us. She grabbed his wrist and they ran across the street as the red stoplight hand flashed.

Cherokee sent Goat Guy tapes to nightclubs around the city. She put a photograph that Witch Baby had taken of the band on the front of the cassette. Zombo of Zombo’s Rockin’ Coffin called her and said he could book a show just before Christmas.

When Cherokee told Raphael, he got very quiet. “I’m not sure we’re ready,” he said, but she kissed him and told him they were a rockin’ slink-chunk, slam-dunk band and that it would be fine.

On the night of the first show, Raphael lit a cigarette.

“What are you doing?” Cherokee said, trying to grab it out of his hand. They were sitting backstage at the Coffin. Raphael coughed but then he took another hit.

“Leave me alone.” He got up and paced back and forth.

Angel Juan and Witch Baby came with Witch Baby’s drums.

“What’s wrong, man?” Angel Juan asked, but Raphael just took another puff of smoke.

Cherokee had never seen him look like this. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin seemed faded. And he had never told her to leave him alone before.

Cherokee kissed Raphael’s cheek and went to the front of the club. It was decorated with pieces of black fabric, sickly-looking cupids, candles and fake, greenish lilies. The people seated at the tables had the same coloring as the flowers. They were slumped over their drinks waiting for the music to begin.

Cherokee turned to see a short, fat man in a tuxedo staring at her. His chubby fingers with their longish nails were wrapped around a tall glass of steaming blue liquid.

“Aren’t you a little young to be in my club?”

“I’m in the band,” Cherokee said.

“You sure don’t look like a Goat Guy.” He eyed her up and down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Cherokee glared at him.

“Sorry to stare. I always stare at how girls do their
makeup. It’s a business thing. I like that blue line around your eyes.”

She started to edge away.

“I used to be an undertaker before I opened this place. Still got family in the business. Maybe you could come with me sometime and make up a few faces. You did your eyes real nice.”

Cherokee could smell Zombo’s breath. Her stomach churned and tumbled. “I better go get ready,” she said, feeling him watching as she walked backstage.

When the band came on, Cherokee saw Zombo leering up at her with his hands in his pants pockets. She saw the rest of the hollow-eyed audience lurched forward on their elbows and guzzling their drinks. Standing there in the spotlight, she felt an icy wave crash in her chest and she knew that she was not going to be able to play or sing or dance. She could tell that the rest of The Goat Guys were frozen too. Witch Baby lost a drumstick right away and started to jump up and down, gnashing her teeth. When Angel Juan played the wrong chords, he frowned and rolled his eyes. But it was Raphael who suffered more than anyone that night. He stood trembling on the stage with his dreadlocks hanging in his face. His voice strained from his throat so that Cherokee could hardly recognize it.

The Coffin crowd began to hiss and spit. Some threw cigarette butts and maraschino cherries at the stage. When a cherry hit Raphael in the temple, he looked helplessly around him, then turned and disappeared behind the
black curtain. Witch Baby thrust her middle finger into the air and waved it around.

“Clutch pigs!” she shouted.

Then, she, Cherokee and Angel Juan followed Raphael backstage, ducking to miss the objects flying through the air at them.

Raphael hardly spoke to anyone after Zombo’s Coffin. He didn’t want to rehearse or play basketball, surf or talk or eat. He lay in his room under the hieroglyphics he and Cherokee had once painted on his wall, listened to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and The Doors and smoked more and more cigarettes. Cherokee came over with chocolates and oranges and strands of beads she had strung, but he only glared at her and turned up the volume on his stereo. She didn’t know what to say.

When Christmas came, Cherokee, Witch Baby and Angel Juan planned a party to cheer Raphael up and keep them all from missing their families. Angel Juan drove his red pickup truck downtown at dawn to a place by the railroad tracks and came back with a pink snow-sugared tree that Witch Baby and Cherokee decorated with feathers, beads, and miniature globes; Kachina, Barbie, and Japanese baby dolls; and Mexican skeletons. They filled the rooms with pine branches, red berries, pink poinsettias, tiny white lights, strands of colored stars and salsa and gospel music. They baked cookies in the shapes of hieroglyphics and
Indian symbols and breads in the shapes of angels and mermaids.

On Christmas Eve they made hot cinnamon cider, corn bread, yams, salad and cranberry salmon and invited Raphael over. The table was an island of candles and flowers and cascading mountains of food floating in the dark sea of the room.

And we are the stars in the sky, Cherokee thought, seeing all their faces circling the table.

Raphael was hunched in his chair playing with his food. She had never seen him look so far away from her.

After dinner they opened presents in front of the fire. Big packages had arrived from their families—leather backpacks, woven blankets, painted saints and angels, mysterious stones, beaded scarves and candelabra in the shapes of pink mermaids and blue doves. Coyote, who had been invited but did not want to leave his hilltop, had painted Indian birth charts for everyone—Cherokee the deer, Witch Baby the raven, Raphael and Angel Juan the elks. Everyone loved their presents except for Raphael. He didn’t seem to care about anything.

“Raphael,” Cherokee whispered, “what do you want me to give you for Christmas?”

The fire crackled and embers showered down. The air smelled of pine and cinnamon.

Raphael just stared at her body without saying anything, his eyes reflecting the flames, and Cherokee was glad
she was wrapped in one of the woven blankets her family had sent.

The next day Cherokee went to see Coyote. He was watering the vegetables he grew among his cactus plants.

“Our first show was terrible,” she told him.

“Yes?”

“Raphael is very upset. I don’t know what to do.”

“You must practice.”

“He won’t even pick up his guitar.”

“What did you come to me for, Cherokee?”

“I was wondering,” she said, “if maybe you would help me make something for Raphael. The wings helped Witch Baby so much.”

Coyote squinted at the sun. “And what do you think would help Raphael?”

“Not wings. Maybe some goat pants would help. Then he’d feel like a Goat Guy and not be so scared on stage. He’s really good, Coyote. He just gets stage fright.”

Coyote sighed and shook his head.

“Please, Coyote. Just one more gift. I am really worried that Raphael will hurt himself. It’s kind of hard for him with his parents away and everything.”

Coyote sighed again. “I did promise all your parents I would help you,” he said. “But I must think about this. Go now. I must think alone.”

So Cherokee went to Raphael’s house, where she found him lying on his bed in the dark listening to Jimi Hendrix and smoking a cigarette. She sat cross-legged beside him.
The moonlight fell across the blankets in tiger stripes.

“What?” he growled.

“Nothing. I just came to be with you.”

Raphael turned his back, and when she tried to stroke his shoulder through the thin T-shirt, he jerked away.

“Come on, Raphael, let’s play some music.”

“I am playing music,” he said, turning up the volume on the stereo.

“We can’t just give up.”

“I can.”

Cherokee wanted to touch him. She felt the tingling sliding from her scalp down her spine and back again. “We need practice, that’s all. That club wasn’t the right place anyway.” As she spoke, she loosened her braids, tossing her gold hair near his face like a cloud of flowers.

He stirred a little, awakened by her, then smashed his cigarette into an Elvis ashtray. She noticed how thick the veins were in his arms, the strain in his throat, the width of his knees in his jeans. He seemed older, suddenly. The small brown body she had grown up with, sprawled beside on warm rocks, painted pictures on, slept beside in her tepee, was no longer so familiar. He reached out and barely stroked the blonde bouquet of her hair with the back of his hand. Then, suddenly, he grabbed her wrists and pulled her toward him. Cherokee didn’t recognize the flat, dark look in Raphael’s eyes. She pulled away, twisting her wrists so they slipped from his hands.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Cherokee!” His voice sounded hoarse.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Cherokee backed out of the room. When she got outside she heard howling and the trees looked like shadow cats ready to spring. She thought there were men hiding in the dark, watching her run down the street in her thin, white moccasins.

The next day, after school, Cherokee went to see Coyote again. He was standing in his cactus garden as if waiting for her, but when she went to greet him he didn’t say anything. He turned away, shut his eyes and began to hum and chant. The sounds hissed like fire, became deep water, then blended together, as hushed as smoke. Cherokee felt the sounds in her own chest—imagined flames and rivers and clouds filling her so that she wanted to dance them. But she stayed very still and listened.

Cherokee and Coyote stood on the hillside for a long time. Cherokee tried not to be impatient, but an hour passed, then another, and even Coyote’s chants were not mesmerizing enough to make her forget that she had to find a way to make goat pants or something for Raphael. It was getting dark.

Coyote turned his broad face up to the sky and kept chanting. It seemed as if the darkening sky were touching him, Cherokee thought, pressing lightly against his eyelids and palms, as if the leaves in the trees were shivering to be near him, even the pebbles on the hillside shifting, and then she saw that pebbles were moving, sliding down; the leaves were shaking and singing in harsh, throaty voices.
Or something was singing. Something was coming.

The goats clambered down sideways toward Cherokee and Coyote. A whirlwind of dust and fur. Their jaws and beards swung from side to side; their eyes blinked.

“I guess these are the real goat guys,” Cherokee said.

Coyote opened his eyes and the goats gathered around his legs. He laid his palms on each of their skulls, one at a time, in the bony hollow between the horns. They were all suddenly very quiet.

Coyote turned and the goats followed him into his shack, butting each other as they went. Cherokee stood in the doorway and watched as Coyote lit candles and sheared the thick, shaggy fur off the goat haunches. They did not complain. When he was done with one, the next would come, not even flinching at the buzz of the electric shears. The dusty fur piled up on the floor of the shack, and when the last and smallest goat had been shorn, they all scrambled away out the door, up the hillside and into the night.

Cherokee watched their naked backsides disappearing into the brush. She wanted to thank them but she didn’t know what to say. How do you thank a bare-bottomed goat who is rushing up a mountain after he has just given you his fur? she wondered.