Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials Read online

  “Charlie,” I say all shaky. “We have to stay here. I have to wait for him to come back.”

  “It’s too cold to stay here now. You don’t have any shoes on.”

  “I don’t care. He was here.”

  “If he was here I don’t think he’s coming back, Witch Baby.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “None of his things are here. And it’s too cold.”

  I sit on the splintery floor of the tree house. I want to live here with Angel Juan. We could just go down to play music and make a little money, buy some food and come back, stay here all the time. In the spring we’d eat raspberries and kiss right in the hug of the branches, the stars shifting through the leaves like sparkles in a kaleidoscope. We’d wake up to a neighborhood of birds’ nests right outside and the world far away down below. Sometimes Charlie Bat and the tree spirits would come over for dinner—or to watch us eat dinner I guess. We’d hardly ever have to leave.

  I pick up a dried leaf and an acorn, with its little beanie cap, lying on the tree house floor. I try to bend the leaf to make it into an elf s coat for the acorn head but it crumbles in my hand. I look down through cracked glass at the winter park, the scattered people with maybe nowhere else to be.

  Everybody should have their own tree house. Maybe Angel Juan and I could help build houses in every tree. If the tree spirits wouldn’t mind. If I ever find Angel Juan again.

  Someone is standing under the house looking up. Who wears white in New York city in the middle of winter except for maybe mannequins in store windows? All of a sudden I feel frosty, stiff and naked like a winter branch.

  “Who’s that?” I whisper to Charlie.

  “He doesn’t look like a tree spirit,” Charlie says.

  I swing down the rope ladder into the lower branches to see better but the snow-colored-no-colored man has disappeared.

  I feel Charlie behind me. “I think we should leave now,” he says.

  On the way home Charlie stops in front of a glassed-in courtyard with a big twinkling tree, little tables underneath, heat lamps all around.

  “What are those lights in the tree?” I ask.

  “Fireflies.”

  “Fireflies in New York city? They look like a whole lot of guys like you.”

  “Let’s go in and eat,” says Charlie.

  I don’t feel like eating. I want to pad around in a circle on the carpet at Charlie’s place like Tiki-Tee making his bed in the dirt and then I want to curl up there and sleep and sleep and have at least one dream about melting into Angel Juan. But I follow Charlie anyway. Maybe because Angel Juan and I used to eat samosas bursting peas and potatoes at an Indian restaurant in L.A. that looked like a camera on the outside. Maybe because of the fireflies.

  I sit near a heat lamp that takes the cold ache out of my knobby spine. A man with incense-colored skin and a turban comes over. He has a liquid-butter voice. Ghee they call it on the menu he gives me.

  Charlie tells me to order saffron-yellow vegetable curry with candy-glossy chutney, rice and lentil-bread. The food is so hot it scalds the taste right out of my mouth but it’s so good I keep eating to get the taste back again. When I’m finished I stop to look through my camera at Charlie. He seems like he rocked on watching the meal about as much as I did eating it.

  “Do you think that would make a good picture?” Charlie asks, pointing.

  “Maybe you should start taking pictures.” I’m sick of him telling me what to take all the time. “I want to go home now.” But I look. Of course I look.

  Across the courtyard are two tall beautiful lankas and a little girl. The little girl has red pigtails and freckles, wide-apart amber-colored eyes and gaps between her teeth. She looks just like one of the lanks. She keeps getting up from her chair and running around the tree squealing at the fireflies. The lankas take turns chasing after her, catching her, hugging her and sitting her down again, trying to get her to eat her rice. There is something about the three of them eating their dinner under the firefly tree that burns inside of me more than the food burning my mouth. They keep touching each other and laughing, sharing their tandoori chicken.

  The red-haired lanka notices I’m staring at them and she smiles at me. She has the same gap-tooth grin as the little girl. Her friend gets up to catch the little girl who is off in another firefly frenzy.

  I’m feeling sort of high from the hot food. “Can I take your picture?” Usually I don’t ask—just do it—but it seems like with them I should.

  “It’s okay with me.” Her voice is deep and rich like the ambery color of her eyes. “Honey,” she says to the other one, “she wants to take our picture. Grab Miss Pigtails.”

  The friend has black hair and a diamond in her nose. She comes back with Miss Pigtails squirming in her arms. That squirmy-wormyness reminds me of me when I was little but I never giggled like that.

  The lankas put their arms around each other and the little girl wriggles in between them still giggling. Through my camera lens I see their love even more. It’s almost like a color. It’s like a firefly halo. I also see that one of the lanks is beautiful in the strong way that only real androgynous ones are. She has really broad shoulders and long muscles and glamster legs. She laughs with a deep voice and if you look close you can see an Adam’s apple.

  I think one was probably once a man. That little girl’s mom was probably once her dad. But it doesn’t matter because she is about the happiest kid I’ve ever seen.

  “I’ll send you one if you want,” I say. I don’t want to take any more pictures of them. I feel like maybe I saw a little too much.

  But they’re just smiling like they don’t mind what anybody sees or thinks. They give me their address on a book of matches and I get up to leave.

  The little girl is off again firefly chasing.

  She points up into the trees. “I want one.”

  I would like to catch some too, put them in a jar. Put the jar in the tree house so Angel Juan would be able to read at night when he and I live there in the spring.

  The red-haired lanka kneels next to the little girl. She plays with her pigtails and says, “They’d die in a jar. But you can have them all the time in the tree.” The little girl looks into her eyes and nods.

  I look through my camera at the firefly tree. For just a second I think I see a ghost-a-rama—a whole bunch of them, like they jumped out of some black-and-white movie except for their sparkly golden eyes—sitting in the branches.

  I am huddling in a corner holding my letter thinking about being right where Angel Juan was living and not finding him.

  Charlie is doing spin-dive-dips in the air and humming that song “Green Onions,” trying to make me laugh but I don’t want to laugh. I wish he’d just shut up and go back into his trunk. I want to think about Angel Juan. How we went surfing til the sun set on a beach where the sand was all polished black rocks. I cut my feet on the rocks and he put Band-Aids on them. We were changing out of our bathing suits behind the truck and saw each other naked under our towels and climbed into the back of the pickup truck and didn’t leave ’til morning. Angel Juan pretended the salt water he dripped onto my cheeks when he kissed me was from the ocean but I knew it was his tears.

  Finally Charlie settles on the trunk, stops humming and says, “Tomorrow I want to take you to the place I was born. I never got to take Weetzie there. I think about it all the time.”

  “Charlie, I have to find Angel Juan. I’m not here on vacation.”

  “Well, where are you going to go look?”

  “I wanted to go to Coney Island but I think it’s closed in winter.”

  “I can get you in. And I grew up right near there. We can stop on the way back.”

  This is the train to Coney Island. This is the darkness roaring around me that seems like it will never end. This is what it might be like to be dead.

  And then the train comes up into the light. And everywhere for as far as I can see are hunched gnome tombstones. I th
ink about what my tombstone will look like. Wonder if I’ll be buried next to Angel Juan.

  This is the darkness again.

  This is the light.

  This is Coney Island.

  “I used to work here when I was a kid,” Charlie says. “I learned how to run the Ferris wheel.” He shows me a hole in a fence and we sneak through—well I sneak, Charlie’s light just kind of glides.

  An amusement park in winter is like when you go to the places where you went with the person you love but they’re not with you anymore. Everything rickety and cold and empty. If you had cotton candy it would burn your lips and cut your throat like spun pink glass. If you rode the roller coaster you’d have to hold on tight to the bar to keep your whole body from being lifted right off the seat with nobody there to hang on to you except maybe a ghost. You used to always want to go fast—speed monster—faster than anybody but now if you rode the roller coaster you’d just keep wishing for it to be over. The bathroom is filthy, stinky so you don’t go, and you have to walk around holding it in. The booths are empty. No fur beasties for sale. Why are you here? You remember the card in your pocket. Your friend the ghost wants to cheer you up and runs the Ferris wheel while you ride it all by yourself thinking about the one on the West Coast where you and your pounceable boyfriend made the cart you were in swing and swing while you kissed and kissed above the ocean and the pier and the carousel, drenched in sunset, lips salty with popcorn and sticky sweet with ice cream, not sick at all. This Ferris wheel is different. Here you are on the most coupley kind of ride in the world all by yourself. You never knew you were scared of heights before. You just grip the bar and wish you were down. If you thought you were empty inside from being alone you know that you for sure have a stomach anyway but it doesn’t want to stay in there. You also for sure have a heart which is beating hard and doesn’t want to stay where it is either. You look down trying to think about something else and you can see popcorn bags, scarves, mittens and some rotting stuffed beasties in the weeds below where they must have fallen when the wheel turned last summer. You hold on tight to the card in your pocket and the angel around your neck and the camera in your lap. You remember how the card said that thing about riding the Ferris wheel to get outside of yourself. You try to look out over the park and up into the sky. You try to get outside of yourself to someplace where you don’t feel so alone. The carnival booths are not tombstones, you tell yourself. But you think about the tombstones you saw from the train and how Charlie Bat is really dead and Angel Juan is gone. Then the plastic skeleton bracelet slips off your wrist. You watch it fall down into the thing-graveyard under the Ferris wheel.

  When the ride is over you and the ghost go down to the weedy muddy slushy place and grope around in the dirt. You kick and pick through some stuff and after a while your friend spotlights the string of skeletons all quiet in the weeds. You pick them up and they start to shimmy, and underneath them you see what you probably most want in the whole world—or a picture of what you want most in the whole world anyway: his face three times in black and white. The boy you love caught in three photo-booth clicks. He looks very serious and older. And something else. There’s a man sitting next to him. You can only see the man’s mouth and chisel chin and his white shirt—the rest of him is cut off. You wonder who the man is and how you could have found this and what it means. You look into the dark of your angel’s sunglasses like they are his eyes trying to see clues but there aren’t any. You put the strip of pictures of his face into your pocket along with the card.

  You see a photo booth and for a second you have the crazy thought that the boy whose face is in your pocket three times might be in there, sitting behind the dark curtain waiting for the shot.

  You throw back the curtain with a negative of his smile flashing behind your eyes. But it’s empty.

  You sit down. “This is where Weetzie and Cherokee and I took our picture,” says the ghost. “Maybe you could send her this one.” He sits next to you reflected in the glass but you both know there will just be empty space when the photo comes out.

  Three. In one you smile sickly sweet as cotton candy. In one you grimace like a little grumpster demon. In one you are just you—Witch Baby—looking straight out at yourself.

  This is Brooklyn. This is the station and these are the people walking with their heads down and their hands in their pockets.

  The rows of brownstones all look kind of the same at first until I notice the little piece of lace in a window, cat on a piano, the Big Wheel bike on the front step, the raggedy dead geranium plant waiting for spring. Some bearded guys in long black coats and fur hats walk by separate from the rest of the world like prayers in a book. Kids playing basketball, slammin’ the way kids do, into it, not thinking about anything except the game. Pregnant teenagers with strollers.

  I think about what it would be like if I had got pregnant with Angel Juan. Brown baby twins with curly cashew nut toes and purple eyes. Kid Niblett and Señorita Deedles. With no dad now.

  Charlie’s been quiet this whole time. Now he goes, “Would you like to see how it was?”

  “Charlie, I just want to go home,” I grunt. “Every time I get closer to Angel Juan you want to take me off in some other direction.”

  “I’m not taking you in any other direction. You tell me where we should go next.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “We’ll go home soon. I really want to show you this. Over here.”

  He turns onto an empty street, looking like a sunbeam that decided to hang out a little longer than the rest. It’s creepy-quiet and I wonder where everybody is. The sky is starting to get purplish.

  “Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

  I look. But instead of him I see this little boy wearing short pants, bruised knees sticking out. He’s black and white, shadows and light like Charlie.

  “This is me when I was a kid,” he says in a kid’s voice.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s one of the things I can do now. Like climbing trees and walking through fences and dancing.”

  I hope he can’t read my mind about the dancing.

  “Besides, I used to be a special effects man,” he says. “Come on.”

  I cross the street and stand next to him in front of a chunkster brownstone with dead rosebushes clinging to the sides. One time Angel Juan and I stole roses from the neighbors’ gardens and put them on a cake we made but nobody would eat the cake because they were afraid of the bug spray (not ’cause of the stealing—they thought we asked) so we ate it all ourselves and got high maybe from the sugar or maybe from the bug spray or maybe because it was our special secret stolen thing.

  Charlie points to a window on the top floor.

  “That’s where we lived when I was growing up.”

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  I turn around and hold up my camera. A little girl is standing in the street but she’s not a real little girl. She’s like Charlie, like her own movie without a projector.

  “That’s my sister Goldy,” I hear Charlie say. He runs over to her and they start throwing a shadow ball back and forth. Then after a while I hear somebody calling their names from the window. I can’t see anything but a champagne-colored glow until I hold my camera up and then I see the flickery face of a woman.

  “That’s my mother.” Charlie’s voice clicks a little. “She makes hats.”

  Charlie and Goldy run inside the building and I follow their echoing laughter upstairs into a deserted apartment that looks like nobody but maybe skulky rats have lived in for a long time.

  “Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

  The apartment changes. It’s suddenly warm and full of ghosty chairs and couches printed with cabbagy roses, crochet blankets, lamps with slinky silk fringe. There’s a table covered with laces and ribbons, a sewing machine and a bunch of mannequin heads wearing huge hats decorated with flowers, fruits and vegetables, tiny birds’ nests, butterflies, fireflies. I can s
mell onions cooking. The door opens and a man comes in. He’s tall and his eyebrows grow together making him look kind of scary.

  “That’s my father,” Charlie says to me. “He came from Poland on a ship when he was a little boy. They couldn’t understand his name so they put down ‘Bat’ because of his eyebrows. His father was a fisherman. In Poland in the spring they filled their cottage with lilacs and covered the floor with white sand.”

  Charlie’s dad goes over to where Charlie’s mom is setting the table with china plates and he puts his arms around her. She pushes him away like playing but he spins her and lifts her up onto his wing-tip shoes and starts dancing with her like that, two grainy black-and-white images twirling like they got bored of staying inside their movie.

  “Not tonight.” Charlie’s mom is out of breath. “It’s the sabbath. Now stop that.” She tries not to giggle.

  Charlie and Goldy dance too, like the ghosts in the haunted house at Disneyland. Angel Juan’s favorite. He wanted to dance in the ballroom with me and see if the ghosts would go through our bodies.

  “Now stop,” Charlie’s mom says.

  She pulls away from their grinning goofster dad and straightens her apron. She goes over to the table and puts a piece of lace on her head. Everybody else sits down while Charlie’s mom lights some candles. She says a prayer with sounds from deep inside her throat. Then she serves baked chicken, peas, carrots and pearl onions. I’ve never seen a movie that smells this good.

  “We light the candles for your grandparents in a few days.” Charlie’s mother passes a loaf of braided bread.

  “When does the angel visit?” asks Goldy.

  “Elijah doesn’t come until Passover,” Charlie’s father says.

  “And he’ll drink the wine out of Papa’s cup,” says Goldy.

  “Maybe someday Charlie will write a play about angels,” Charlie’s mother says.

  “Charlie just writes about monsters,” Goldy says. “He scared me again today, Papa.”