Witch Baby (2 page)

I
n the garden shed, behind a cobweb curtain, Witch Baby was playing her drums.

It was the drumming of flashing dinosaur rock gods and goddesses who sweat starlight, the drumming of tall, muscly witch doctors who can make animals dance, wounds heal, rain fall and flowers open. But it began
in Witch Baby’s head and heart and came out through her small body and hands. Her only audience was a row of pictures she had taken of Raphael Chong Jah-Love.

Witch Baby had been in love with Raphael for as long as she could remember. His parents, Ping and Valentine, had known Weetzie even before she had met My Secret Agent Lover Man, and Raphael had played with Witch Baby and Cherokee since they were babies. Not only did Raphael look like powdered chocolate, but he smelled like it, too, and his eyes reminded Witch Baby of Hershey’s Kisses. His mother, Ping, dressed him in bright red, green and yellow and twisted his hair into dreadlocks. (“Cables to heaven,” said his father, Valentine, who had dreads too.) Raphael, the Chinese-Rasta parrot boy, loved to paint, and he covered the walls of his room with waterfalls, stars, rainbows, suns, moons, birds, flowers and fish. As soon as Witch Baby had learned to walk, she had chased after him, spying and dreaming that someday they would roll in the mud, dance with paint on their feet and play music to
gether while Cherokee Bat took photographs of them.

But Raphael never paid much attention to Witch Baby. Until the day he came into the garden shed and stood staring at her with his slanted chocolate-Kiss eyes.

Witch Baby stopped drumming with her hands, but her heart began to pound. She didn’t want Raphael to see the pictures of himself. “Go away!” she said.

He looked far into her pupils, then turned and left the shed. Witch Baby beat hard on the drums to keep her tears from coming.

Witch babies never cry, she told herself.

The next day Raphael came back to the shed. Witch Baby stopped drumming and snarled at him.

“How did you get so good?” he asked her.

“I taught myself.”

“You taught yourself! How?”

“I just hear it in my head and feel it in my hands.”

“But what got you started? What made you want to play?”

Witch Baby remembered the day My Secret
Agent Lover Man had brought her the drum set. She had pretended she wasn’t interested because she was afraid that Cherokee would try to use the drums too. Then she had hidden them in the garden shed, soundproofed the walls with foam and shag carpeting, put on her favorite records and taught herself to play. No one had ever heard her except for the flowerpots, the cobwebs, the pictures of Raphael and, now, Raphael himself.

“When I play drums I don’t need to bite or kick or break, steal Duck’s Fig Newtons or tear the hair off Cherokee’s Kachina Barbies,” Witch Baby whispered.

“Teach me,” Raphael said.

Witch Baby gnawed on the end of the drumstick.

“Teach me to play drums.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“There is a girl I know,” Raphael said, looking at Witch Baby. “And she would be very happy if I learned.”

Witch Baby couldn’t remember how to breathe. She wasn’t sure if you take air in through your nose and let it out through your
mouth or the other way around. There was only one girl, she thought, who would be very happy if Raphael learned to play drums, so happy that her toes would uncurl and her heart would play music like a magic bongo drum.

Witch Baby looked down at the floor of the shed so her long eyelashes, that had a purple tint from the reflection of her eyes, fanned out across the top of her cheeks. She held the drumsticks out to Raphael.

From then on, Raphael came over all the time for his lessons. He wasn’t a very good drummer, but he looked good, biting his lip, raising his eyebrows and moving his neck back and forth so his dreadlocks danced. For Witch Baby, the best part of the lessons was when she got to play for him. He recorded her on tape and never took his eyes off her. It was as if she were being seen by someone for the first time. She imagined that the music turned into stars and birds and fish, like the ones Raphael painted, and spun, floated, swam in the air around them.

One day Raphael asked Witch Baby if he
could play a tape he had made of her drumming and follow along silently, gesturing as if he were really playing.

“That way I’ll feel like I’m as good as you, and I’ll be more brave when I play,” he said.

Witch Baby put on the tape and Raphael drummed along silently in the air.

Then the door of the shed opened, and Cherokee came in, brushing cobwebs out of her way. She was wearing her white suede fringed minidress and her moccasins, and she had feathers and turquoise beads in her long pale hair. Standing in the dim shed, Cherokee glowed. Raphael looked up while he was drumming and his chocolate-Kiss eyes seemed to melt. Witch Baby glared at Cherokee through a snarl of hair and chewed her nails.

Cherokee Brat Bath Mat Bat, she thought. Clutch pig! Go away and leave us alone. You do not belong here.

But Cherokee was lost in the music and began to dance, stamping and whirling like a small blonde Indian. She left trails of light in the air, and Raphael watched as if he were trying to paint pictures of her in his mind.

When the song was over, Cherokee went to Raphael and kissed him on the cheek.

“You are a slink-chunk, slam-dunk drummer, Raphael. I didn’t really care about you learning to play drums. I just wanted to see what you’d do for me—how hard you’d try to be my best friend. But you’ve turned into a love-drum, drum-love!”

“Cherokee,” he said softly.

She took his hand and they left the shed.

Witch Baby’s heart felt like a giant bee sting, like a bee had stung her inside where her heart was supposed to be. Every time she heard her own drumbeats echoing in her head, the sting swelled with poison. She threw herself against the drums, kicking and clawing until she was bruised and some of the drumskins were torn. Then she curled up on the floor of the shed, among the cobwebs that Cherokee had ruined, reminding herself that witch babies do not cry.

After that day Raphael Chong Jah-Love and Cherokee Bat became inseparable. They hiked up canyon trails, collected pebbles, looked for deer, built fires, had powwows, made papooses out of puppies and lay warming their
bellies on rocks and chanting to the animals, trees, and earth, “You are all my relations,” the way My Secret Agent Lover Man’s friend Coyote had showed them. They painted on every surface they could find, including each other. They spent hours gazing at each other until their eyes were all pupil and Cherokee’s looked as dark as Raphael’s. No one could get their attention.

Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, and Valentine and Ping Chong Jah-Love watched them.

“They are just babies still,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “How could they be so in love? They remind me of us.”

“If I had met you when I was little, I would have acted the same way,” Weetzie said.

“But it’s funny,” said Ping. “I always thought
Witch Baby
was secretly in love with Raphael.”

While Raphael and Cherokee fell in love, they forgot all about drums. Witch Baby stopped playing drums too. She pulled apart Cherokee’s Kachina Barbie dolls, scattering their limbs throughout the cottage and even
sticking some parts in Brandy-Lynn’s Jell-O mold. She stole Duck’s Fig Newtons, made dresses out of Dirk’s best shirts and bit Weetzie’s fingers when Weetzie tried to serve her vegetables.

“Witch Baby! Stop that! Weetzie’s fingers are not carrots!” My Secret Agent Lover Man exclaimed, kissing Weetzie’s nibbled fingertips.

Witch Baby went around the cottage taking candid pictures of everyone looking their worst—My Secret Agent Lover Man with a hangover, Weetzie covered with paint and glue, Dirk and Duck arguing, Brandy-Lynn weeping into a martini, Cherokee and Raphael gobbling up the vegetarian lasagna Weetzie was saving for dinner.

Witch Baby was wild, snarled, tangled and angry. Everyone got more and more frustrated with her. When they tried to grab her, even for a hug, she would wriggle away, her body quick-slippery as a fish. She never cried, but she always wanted to cry. Finally, while she was watching Cherokee and Raphael running around the cottage in circles, whooping and
flapping their feather-decorated arms, Witch Baby remembered something Cherokee had done to her when they were very young. Late at night she got out of her bed, took the toenail scissors she had hidden under her pillow, crept over to Cherokee’s tepee and snipped at Cherokee’s hair. She did not cut straight across, but chopped unevenly, and the ragged strands of hair fell like moonlight.

The next morning Witch Baby hid in the shed and waited. Then she heard a scream coming from the cottage. She felt as if someone had crammed a bean-cheese-hot-dog-pastrami burrito down her throat.

Witch Baby hid in the shed all day. When everyone was asleep she crept back into the cottage, went into the violet-and-aqua-tiled bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She saw a messy nest of hair, a pale, skinny body, knobby, skinned knees and feet with curling toes.

No wonder Raphael doesn’t love me, Witch Baby thought. I am a baby witch.

She took the toenail scissors and began to chop at her own hair. Then she plugged in My
Secret Agent Lover Man’s razor, turned it on and listened to it buzz at her like a hungry metal animal.

When her scalp was completely bald, Witch Baby, with her deep-set, luminous, jacaranda-blossom-colored eyes, looked as if she had drifted down from some other planet.

But Witch Baby did not see her eerie, fairy, genie, moon-witch beauty, the beauty of twilight and rainstorms. “You’ll never belong to anyone,” she said to the bald girl in the mirror.

T
he chain saws were buzzing like giant razors. Witch Baby pressed her palms over her ears.

“What is going on?” Coyote cried, padding into the cottage.

Witch Baby had hardly ever heard Coyote raise his voice before. She curled up under the
clock, and he knelt beside her so that his long braid brushed her cheek. She saw the full veins in his callused hands, the turquoise-studded band, blood-blue, at his wrist.

“Where is everyone, my little bald one?” he asked gently.

“They went to the street fair.”

“And they left you here with the dying trees?”

“I didn’t want to go with them.”

Coyote put his hand on Witch Baby’s head. It fit perfectly like a cap. His touch quieted the saws for a moment and stilled the blood beating at Witch Baby’s naked temples. “Why not?” he asked.

“I get lonely with them.”

“With all that big family you have?”

“More than when I’m alone.”

Coyote nodded. “I would rather be alone most of the time. It’s quieter. Someday I will live in the desert again with the Joshua trees.” He took a handkerchief out of his leather backpack and unfolded it. Inside were five seeds. “Joshua tree seeds,” he said. “In the blue desert moonlight, if you put your arms
around Joshua trees and are very quiet, you can hear them speaking to you. Sometimes, if you turn around fast enough, you can catch them dancing behind your back.”

Coyote squinted out the window at the falling branches, the whirlwind of leaves, blossoms and dust.

“Now I’m going to do something about those tree murderers.” He went to the phone book, found the number of the school across the street, and called.

“I need to speak to the principal. It’s about the trees.”

He waited, drumming his fingers. Witch Baby crept up beside him, peering over the tabletop at the sunset desert of his face.

“Is this the principal? I’d like to ask you why you are cutting those trees down. I would think that a school would be especially concerned. Do you know how long it takes trees to grow? Especially in this foul air?”

The saws kept buzzing brutally while he spoke. Witch Baby thought about the jacaranda trees across the street. Coyote had told her that all trees have spirits, and she
imagined women with long, light-boned limbs and falls of whispery green hair, dark Coyote men with skin like clay as it smooths on the potter’s wheel. Some might even be hairless girls like Witch Baby—the purple-eyed spirits of jacaranda trees.

Finally, Coyote put the phone down. He and Witch Baby sat together at the window, wincing as all the trees in front of the school became a woodpile scattered with purple blossoms.

Coyote is like My Secret and me, Witch Baby thought, feeling the warmth of his presence beside her. But he recognizes that I am like him and My Secret doesn’t see.

Witch Baby’s almost-family came home and saw them still sitting there. Weetzie invited Coyote to stay for dinner but he solemnly shook his head.

“I couldn’t eat anything after what we saw today,” he said.

That night, when everyone else was asleep, Witch Baby unfolded the handkerchief she had stolen from Coyote’s backpack and looked at the five Joshua tree seeds. They seemed to
glow, and she thought she heard them whispering as she crept out the window and into the moonlight. In the soil from which the jacaranda trees had been torn, Witch Baby knelt and planted Coyote’s five seeds, imagining how one day she and Coyote would fling their arms around five Joshua trees. If she was very quiet she might be able to hear the trees telling her the secrets of the desert.

“Where are they?”

Coyote stood towering above Witch Baby’s bed. She blinked up at him, her dreams of singing trees passing away like clouds across the moon, until she saw his face clearly. His hair was unbraided and fell loose around his shoulders.

“Where are my Joshua tree seeds, Witch Baby?”

Witch Baby sat up in bed. It was early morning and still quiet. There was no buzzing today; all the trees were already down.

“I planted them for you,” she said.

Coyote looked as if the sound of chain saws were still filling his head. “What? You planted
them? Where did you plant them? Those were special seeds. My Secret Agent Lover Man brought them to me from the desert. I told him I had to take them back the next time I went, because Joshua trees grow only on sacred desert ground. They’ll never grow where you planted them.”

“But I planted them in front of the school because of yesterday. They’ll grow there and we’ll always be able to look at them and listen to what they tell us.”

“They’ll never grow,” Coyote said. “They are lost.”

Witch Baby spent the next three nights clutching a flashlight and digging in the earth in front of the school for the Joshua tree seeds, but there was no sign of them. Her fingers ached, the nails full of soil, the knuckles scratched by rocks and twigs. She was kneeling in dirt, covered in dirt, wishing for the tree spirits to take her away with them to a place where Joshua trees sang and danced in the blue moonlight.