Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials Read online

  They lay on the floor of Dirk’s room reading comics until the room turned jacaranda-blossom-purple with evening and the glow-in-the-dark constellations that Fifi had pasted on the ceiling began to come out.

  “Superheroes aren’t afraid of anything,” Pup said softly, his voice fading with the light.

  Kit jumped off the windowsill where she had been gazing at the blur of a hummingbird in the bottlebrush bush and sat on Pup’s chest, over his heart. Kaboodle licked between his fingers.

  “You don’t seem afraid of much,” said Dirk.

  “I’m afraid of everything. That’s why I do stuff. My mom is afraid of everything too but she just stays inside. She’s afraid to go to the market, even.”

  “You can come over and eat with us when you want,” Dirk said. “My grandma would like it.”

  “Thanks,” said Pup.

  He stayed for chicken pot pie with carrots and peas and peach pie for dessert. When you asked Fifi for pie you got it.

  While they ate their dessert Fifi played an old record.

  “Chills run up and down my spine / Aladdin’s lamp is mine,” the singer crooned, and Dirk felt silvery chills, saw, beneath his eyelids, the glinting lamp of love.

  “This is cool music,” Pup said.

  “Do you dance, Pup?” Fifi asked.

  “Not really,” Pup said. “But I’m willing to have some lessons.”

  Fifi blushed. “Oh, I’m not very good anymore.”

  “That’s not true,” Dirk said. “She’s a cool dancer.”

  “Show me,” Pup said.

  He stood and offered Fifi his hand. She took it, putting his other arm around her waist. Dirk watched as Fifi led Pup around the room so skillfully that it appeared he was leading her. But that was also because Pup was a natural dancer. Dirk watched how he held his head, proud on his straight strong neck, the way his shoulders curved.

  “Your turn now, Dirk,” Fifi said.

  Dirk wasn’t embarrassed the way he would have been around anyone else except Pup. Fifi felt light in his arms as they danced over the garlands of roses on the carpet. Pirouette and Mini did a waltz in their cage. Kaboodle sat up on his hind legs and offered Pup his paws. While Pup danced with Kaboodle, Kit watched them all from the mantelpiece.

  When the record ended Pup insisted on skateboarding home although Fifi tried to offer him a ride. He and Dirk planned to meet in the quad at school the next day at lunch.

  That morning Dirk told Fifi he was especially hungry so when he opened his lunch there was one sandwich with cheese, avocado, lettuce, pickles, artichoke hearts, olives, red onion and mustard and one with peanut butter, raspberry jam, honey, bananas and strawberries, both on home-baked bread.

  “She always does that,” Dirk said, pulling out the sandwiches and shaking his head. “Would you eat one of these, Pup?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She acts all hurt when I bring one home but she keeps giving them to me.”

  Every day after that Fifi put two sandwiches in Dirk’s lunch. She never asked her grandson why he had started to eat twice the normal amount. She just beamed at him and said, “You are growing so tall and strong. And so is your friend Pup Lambert. When I first met him I was sad to see how thin he was.”

  “I love you, Fifi,” said Dirk.

  “I love you, Dirk,” Fifi said.

  After school Pup and Dirk listened to music in Dirk’s room. They could play it loud because Fifi was a bit hard of hearing. On the wall was a chalk drawing Dirk had made of Jimi Hendrix.

  “That is hell of cool,” said Pup. “You are a phenomenal artist, man.”

  Dirk tried to concentrate on keeping his ears from turning red.

  “My mom went out with this gross trucker guy once,” Pup told him. “He saw the Jimi poster in my room and goes, That nigger looks like he’s got a mouth full of cum.’ I wanted to kill him. I told my mom I would if she didn’t stop seeing him.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t think that’s why. Her next boyfriend saw my Bowie poster and started calling him a fag. My mom said if I ever dressed like that she’d kick me out of the house.”

  Dirk and Pup looked up at Jimi burning his guitar. It flamed beneath the steeple of his hands, between his legs. Jimi had said it was like a sacrifice. He loved his guitar. He was giving up something he loved. Dirk wondered if Jimi had felt that way about life.

  “We should start a band,” Dirk said.

  “Can you play?” asked Pup.

  “A little. I mess around with my dad’s guitar.”

  Dirk got out the guitar that he kept hidden in the closet.

  Pup stroked it. Dirk had never seen him touch anything with such concentrated love except for Kit and Kaboodle. Just like Kit and Kaboodle, the guitar seemed to love Pup. Dirk imagined he could hear it singing in Pup’s arms although Pup’s fingers never touched the strings.

  “It’s beautiful,” Pup said. “Your dad was cool.”

  “I don’t remember him,” Dirk said.

  “What happened?”

  “My mom and dad died in a crash.”

  Pup looked up at the picture Dirk had drawn of his hero standing with his hands in his jeans pockets, shoulders hunched, feet rolling out.

  “Like James Dean?”

  “Kind of.”

  Pup’s eyes got big. “I bet your dad looked like James Dean,” he said. “’Cause you do.”

  Dirk picked up the guitar and bent to tune it so that Pup wouldn’t see that his ears were turning red. He felt almost as if Pup had put his arm around him and said, “I’m so sorry about your parents, Dirk. I wish they were alive.”

  Pup took a cigarette out of his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?” Dirk asked.

  “I steal them from my mom.”

  He lit the cigarette and handed it to Dirk. Dirk hesitated. He didn’t want Pup to see him cough like someone who had never smoked before.

  “You know I still cough sometimes,” Pup said as if he could read Dirk’s mind. “And I’ve been smoking for a year.”

  Dirk inhaled. He could feel where Pup’s lips had been, moist on the paper end. Pup was unscrewing one of the large brass balls on Dirk’s bedposts. “This is perfect,” he said.

  “For what?” Dirk coughed.

  “For a tobacco stash,” said Pup, depositing another cigarette inside the ball.

  After he met Pup, Dirk’s room became full of secrets. The cigarettes in the bedposts. The stolen Three Musketeers bars in the dresser drawer. The Playboy magazines under the bed. And the real secret that had always been there grew larger and larger each day until Dirk thought it would burst out licking its lips and rolling its eyeballs and telling everyone that Dirk McDonald wasn’t normal.

  Dirk looked at the Playboys that Pup brought, trying to feel something. All he could think of was that the giant breasts must keep the women safe somehow, protected. As if the breasts were padding for their hearts. His own was so close to the surface of his chest. He was afraid Pup might be able to see it beating there.

  Dirk’s heart sent sparks and flares through his veins like a fast wheel on cement when he was with Pup. They rode their bikes and skateboards, popping wheelies, doing jumps and flips. Dirk wanted to do wilder and wilder things. It wasn’t so much that he was competing with Pup or showing off for him; he wanted to give the tricks to Pup like offerings. He wanted to say, neither of us has to be afraid of anything anymore. Their knees and elbows were always speckled with blood and gritty dirt from falling but Fifi treated them with gel from Love’s leaves.

  Every morning Pup came by on his skateboard or his bike. He never let Dirk meet him at his house. Dirk wondered what Pup’s room was like, what his mother was like.

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” Pup said. “She’s just all sad and scared.”

  Dirk didn’t push Pup. It didn’t matter anyway where Pup came from as long as they were together. At school they met for lunch. Dirk always had two sandwiches—so
metimes he even had peanut butter and jam on waffles, which was Pup’s favorite. Dirk rolled his eyes and acted as if Fifi had always given him two sandwiches. He and Pup didn’t talk much at school, just sat eating and scowling into the sun. Sometimes girls walked by giggling in their pastel T-shirts, matching tight jeans and pale suede platform Corkees sandals. Pup winked at them, and they tossed their winged hair, smacked their lip-glossed lips. Dirk was glad the girls were too shy to do much more than that. Even the tough boys never approached Dirk and Pup although Dirk was always braced for it, a tension in his shoulders that never went away. It seemed Pup was braced too. His muscles were a man’s already, as if his fear had formed them that way to make up for his small size. So the tough boys never bothered them. Together they were invincible. You couldn’t find anything nasty to say. They were brown all year long, lean and strong, good at sports, smart; they smoked cigarettes and skateboarded. They wore Vans and their Levi’s were always ripped at the knees. The most popular girls dreamed about them.

  They shot baskets in strangers’ driveways and swam in neighbors’ pools and picked flowers and fruits from gardens for Fifi. Sometimes they borrowed dogs from backyards and took them on walks for a while, bringing them home before their owners returned.

  It was not just Kaboodle—Pup loved all dogs and all dogs loved Pup. They came running up to him with worshipping eyes and licked his fingers, immediately flopping onto their backs like hot dogs to let him pet their bellies. He always had scraps of bread in his pockets for them.

  “What do you think dogs dream about?” Pup asked Dirk one day as Kaboodle lay stretched on top of his Vans, long eyelashes curling as if he had styled them that way.

  “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “I think dogs dream about wind and light and leaves and squirrels and birds and when they cry they are dreaming about wolves and freeways. I wish I dreamed about those things.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  “I don’t know,” Pup said.

  Dirk was glad that Pup didn’t ask him what he dreamed.

  Dirk dreamed about Pup.

  He dreamed they were the superheroes Slam and Jam—skateboarding in the sky over the city, rescuing hurt children and animals. The clouds were the shape and color of giant flowers. In Dirk’s dream, he and Pup held each other in the center of a purple orchid cloud.

  In the summer Dirk and Pup took the bus to the beach with Pup’s two surfboards. Dirk never asked where he had gotten the boards but he thought Pup might have stolen them on one of his runs through the neighbors’ backyards. As they waxed the boards with Mr. Zogg’s Sex Wax to make them glide through the water, Pup told Dirk that surfing wasn’t much different from skateboarding.

  “You’ll be a pro.” He looked out at the horizon, measuring the swells.

  Dirk followed Pup into the water with the board under his arm. All around him the ocean was blindingly bright, the color of water on a map. Through the sparkles of wet light Dirk saw Pup’s smile before Pup paddled out on the surfboard, climbed onto it and was carried away like a part of the wave. Thinking about giving Pup his surfing like an embrace, Dirk plunged into the water with the board, steadying his body as the waves filled and fell beneath and around him.

  Afterward they raced up the hot sand and collapsed belly-first onto their towels. They lay there until their hair was dry and the sun and salt water made their skin feel taut against their bones. Then they used the outdoor showers, peeling their trunks away from their bodies, feeling the granules of scratchy sand rinse off from between their legs in the cold water. Pup wrapped his towel around his waist and pulled off his trunks from underneath. Dirk tried not to look. He wrapped his towel the same way and tried to get out of his trunks as smoothly as possible while Pup pulled up his jeans under the towel.

  Sometimes after they’d been surfing they sat at The Figtree Cafe on the Venice boardwalk drinking smoothies, eating blueberry muffins and watching the parade. There were velvet and tie-dye women who read tarot cards. Dirk never even wanted them to look at him, afraid they would guess his secret. There were kids break dancing and bulky bronze bodybuilders, a carnival of half-naked roller women, bicycle magician trickster boys, a clown who painted faces, a mocha-colored, electric blue-eyed man in a white turban who played electric guitar and warbled electric songs like a skating genie. There was an accordion-playing devil with a circus cart drawn by mangy stuffed animals on bicycles. More animals dangled from a miniature carousel, and there was a real stuffed taxidermy dog, rigid and nightmarish. Sometimes, to get away from all of it—especially that dog carcass—Dirk and Pup walked under the arcade of pastel Corinthian columns decaying in the salt air, past the vine-covered wood-frame houses and rose-jasmine gardens on the canals and the ducks flapping their feet through the streets like little surfers.

  One day after they’d been surfing Dirk started to get on the bus but Pup put his sun-warmed hand on Dirk’s surf-sore biceps.

  “I know a faster way.”

  Pup stuck out his thumb. With the freckles on his nose and his bare feet he reminded Dirk of Huckleberry Finn, his Huckleberry friend. Fifi had told Dirk never to hitchhike but Dirk didn’t want to be afraid of anything, and besides Pup looked so cute standing there with his thumb out, so defiant and twinkly holding his surfboard, one hip a little higher than the other, behind him the sky turning as pink as the skin on his shoulders where his tan was peeling.

  Two girls in a white convertible Mustang stopped. Dirk recognized them—it was Tracey Stace and Nancy Nance, two of the most popular girls from their school.

  “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?” Pup teased.

  “You guys aren’t dangerous. You’re too cute,” Tracey Stace said. “Besides, you go to Fairfax.”

  She had dimples and her hair was almost white in the sun, her breasts straining her crocheted bikini top. She was wearing cutoffs ripped the whole way up the sides to show her sleek tan thighs. Nancy Nance was a smaller, less dimpled, less cleavaged version of Tracey Stace. She flopped over into the backseat, and Dirk sat next to her. Pup sat in front with Tracey Stace.

  “Want to come over?” she asked. “My mom’s out of town.”

  Tracey Stace lived in a modern house in the hills, all wood and glass. There was a Jacuzzi in the backyard. She told Pup and Dirk to test the water while she and Nancy got what she called “refreshments.” Pup slipped in. Dirk followed him, feeling big and awkward. The blasts of hot water massaged deep into the muscles of his lower back. Tracey and Nancy came out in their bikinis, carrying cold beers and a joint. Their bodies hardly made a ripple as they slid into the Jacuzzi. The moon was full, reflecting the whole of the sun. Lit up with it, the flowers in the garden looked like aliens with glowing skins. The palm trees shook in the Santa Ana winds like the hips of Hawaiian hula girls. Dirk thought about how Fifi called them palmistrees. She said she wondered if you could read their fortunes from above in the sky. He was glad that no one here could read his fortune.

  Dirk watched how Pup held the joint and sucked in, narrowing his eyes. He did it too. The smoke burned sweetly in his throat and chest, releasing the place in his shoulders that was always tight, ready to react, to fight back, if someone found out his secret.

  Tracey smacked some pink bubblegum-scented gloss from a fat stick onto her lips and moved closer to Pup. Then Dirk watched Pup lean over, just like that, not even thinking, not even trying, and kiss Tracey Stace’s mouth. Seeing Pup like that, kissing the most beautiful girl in school, made Dirk want to weep—not just because it was Tracey Stace and not Dirk who Pup was kissing but because of the beauty of it, the way Pup’s hand looked against Tracey Stace’s back and the way his eyes closed, the long lashes clumping together, the moonlight washing over everything like the waves that Dirk still felt pulling his body and seething beneath him although they were now miles and hours away.

  Dirk turned to Nancy Nance, who looked very delicate, like a little girl. He was afraid he might
crush her. Her lashes were like flickers of moonlight on her cheek.

  “You’re so pretty,” Dirk said. He wanted her to know that if something went wrong it wasn’t because of that. She smiled shyly at him and he reached out for her, eyes closed, pressing his lips against hers.

  Nancy did all the work after that. Dirk’s beauty was all he had to give her although he would have given her more if he could. When he felt as if she would guess his secret he looked over at Pup and Tracey Stace. Pup had his legs around her and their bodies were moving up and down in the water.

  Then Pup looked at Dirk. When Dirk saw what was in Pup’s eyes his heart contracted with tiny pulses, the way Nancy Nance’s body was trembling near his. Dirk knew then that Pup loved him too. But mixed with Pup’s love was fear and soon it was just fear sucking the love away. Pup closed his eyes and there wasn’t even fear anymore. There was just a beautiful boy with pointed ears kissing a girl in a Jacuzzi, a boy who hardly knew that Dirk existed.

  After what had happened with Tracey Stace and Nancy Nance, Dirk knew that everything had changed. Before Dirk and Pup had kissed the girls they were still safe in their innocence, little Peter Pans never growing old, never having to explain. Now Dirk’s love for Pup raged through him bitterly. It burned his shoulders like the sun, blistering as if it could peel off layers of skin. It stung like shards of glass embedded in a wound. It jolted him awake like an electric shock.

  Tracey Stace and Nancy Nance picked Pup and Dirk up at Fifi’s cottage. The girls were wearing tight white jeans that laced up front and back and lace-up T-shirts.

  “Where we going?” Pup asked, kissing Tracey Stace’s cheek.

  “A dance club in the valley,” Tracey said.

  “We don’t dance,” Pup said. “We hate disco.”

  “It’s not a disco place. They play KROQ music.”

  “We still don’t dance,” said Pup.

  Dirk was glad he hadn’t told them about dancing with Fifi in the kitchen.

  “You can watch us,” Tracey said and Nancy giggled.

  Dirk and Pup sat behind the dj booth watching Tracey’s and Nancy’s blond hair change colors under the strobe lights as they danced to Adam and the Ants, Devo, and the Go-Gos. Pup lit up a cigarette. Dirk waited for Pup to hand it to him but instead Pup held out the pack. Dirk took his own cigarette. It was the first time they hadn’t shared.