Beautiful Boys Page 5

  “Genies?”

  “Weetzie tried to tell me once, something about three wishes and a genie? I believed in my monsters but not creatures that take care of you and grant wishes.”

  “Weetzie says people can be their own genies,” I tell him.

  “Well, you do look like a genie child to me. What would you do if you were a genie?”

  Make Angel Juan come back.

  “I think if you were a genie you’d live in your globe lamp and you’d ride this carpet everywhere taking pictures. You could get some pretty amazing shots from a magic carpet. You could go to Egypt and take pictures of kids riding the Sphinx. In Mexico you’d take pictures of kids in Day of the Dead masks running through the graveyards. And in exchange for letting you take their pictures you could grant their wishes.”

  That doesn’t sound too sludgy. But it would have to be me and Angel Juan together.

  Charlie laughs his crackle laugh. It reminds me of the sound of me eating the fortune cookie. “You should see yourself sitting there cross-legged,” he says. “You look about to take off. Is there a mirror in here?”

  We both look at the broken pieces.

  “I was never into mirrors either,” he says.

  “Now you’re only in mirrors.”

  “Maybe you could put that one back together again so you could see me. Don’t you have some glue with you?”

  I roll my eyes. Is he a clutch or what? How is gluing a mirror together going to help? But I get the glue from my bat-shaped backpack, pick up all the pieces from the mirror and start sticking them to the wall like a big starburst thing. It takes a while. Charlie whistles the theme to I Dream of Jeannie. Mr. Goof.

  I look into the glass. Like that—all close together—the pieces break me up into a shattered Witch Baby the way I wanted last night.

  “But you’re not,” Charlie says. “You’re all one Witch Baby. And you are very beautiful, you know.”

  And there he is hovering just a little above me in the pieces of mirror. I think about the mannequin in white and Charlie calling me away, twinkling ahead of me as we went down into the subway dark.

  “Good night, Witch Baby,” Charlie says. He leaves the mirror, turns back into light and flash-dashes into his leather trunk.

  “Good night, Charlie.” My voice echoes—ghosts of itself—in the empty room.

  I wake up to horns honking, tires screeching, snarling and yelling in the street.

  At home Angel Juan and I used to wake up to the tartest summer-yellow smell of lemons and the whisper of the slick lemon leaves and the singing birds in the tree outside the shed. We named the birds Hendrix, Joplin, Dylan, Iggy, Ziggy and Marley. But here I haven’t heard a bird the whole time. Not even a Boone bird or a Humperdink bird or a Neil Sedaka bird.

  I want to go someplace where there are trees today. And mostly a boy living in the trees.

  “I’m going to the park,” I say.

  “I took Weetzie and Cherokee to the park,” says the only sunbeamer in the city flying out of the trunk in the corner. He always has to talk about Weetzie and Cherokee, Weetzie and Cherokee.

  But then he says so soft and sweet, like he’s talking to Josephine Baker or Weetzie or something, “May I escort you?”

  In Central Park the trees are scratchy from winter. But they are trees at least. I follow the paths for a while—Miss Snarly Skate Thing—while Charlie flies around in the branches—Star Helicopter on Speed.

  “Weetzie loved it here,” he says. “It was spring. Weetzie took Cherokee running with her in a stroller. I thought they were like the flower goddesses bringing spring to the city. I couldn’t keep up with them. Weetzie thought that kids who grow up seeing the world from a running stroller would be less anxious.”

  I wish Weetzie had taken me running in a stroller through Central Park with Charlie panting behind us, probably wearing his oxfords, baggy pants, his shirttails flying out. The world rushing by. Flowers in our hair. Leaves on the trees then. Ducks in the pond that’s frozen now. People rolling on the grass ’til their jeans turned green. Maybe I wouldn’t have shredded fingernails now if I had been in that stroller with Cherokee.

  It looks more fun up there where Charlie is and easier to see what’s happening so I take off my skates, hide them in between some roots and shimmy up.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” he asks from the branches. Mr. Flash.

  “I’ve been climbing since I was little.”

  “Since you were little? What are you now?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Since you were knee high to a grasshopper? A rug ratter? A baby witch baby?”

  Where does he come up with this stuff?

  “Aren’t your feet cold?”

  Is he kidding? My curly toes are furling up even more than ever in my socks. “Yes.”

  “Do you want to go back and get some shoes?”

  “No.”

  I can almost hear him shrug. “Well, you could probably get some good shots from up here.”

  I look through my lens and there’s Charlie perched on a branch clutching with his fingers. He doesn’t seem too at home. He lets go for a second with one hand and points to the ground.

  A woman with a baby on her back is looking through a trash can. The light is chilly and the color of lead. Even if I had color film it would be this black and white.

  “Are you going to take a picture of her?” Charlie asks.

  I dangle my legs and freezy feet over the branches and look down at the path. The woman is going through another trash can. I hold up my camera and she looks different all of a sudden. Or maybe it’s just ’cause I feel different looking at her. I feel hungry, dizzy with hungry, sick with hungry even though I had breakfast this morning. I take my lunch—the loaf of French bread and the piece of cheese wrapped in a clean red bandana—and toss it down. It lands on the scraggly grass by the woman’s feet. She turns and picks it up, peeks inside and slips it into her jacket like she doesn’t want anybody to see and then she goes away with her baby. I press my face against tree bark feeling the rough edges ridging my skin.

  I follow Charlie over a bridge of branches into the next tree—a small gray one. I feel strong holding on to the limbs full of sap like blood. I think about lanka love goddesses with lots of arms. I want to hold on forever.

  “Have you ever seen a tree spirit?” Charlie asks me and I shake my head.

  “But I’ve thought about them. I used to look at trees and try to make up what their spirits were like.”

  “If you were one you’d be the spirit of those Weetzie-trees—you know, the ones with the purple flowers that get all over everything in the spring in L.A? They fell in the T-bird when the top was down but my little girl liked it. She said it made the T-bird like a just-married-mobile.”

  “I bet the spirit of this tree is an old woman—real smart—who talks to the squirrels and the moon,” I say. I want him to come back, pay attention to me.

  “Hey,” Charlie says. “Look. Way up there.”

  I don’t see anything.

  “Through your camera.”

  In the highest branches a pair of legs swing back and forth. A woman with bird bones and skin like autumn leaves. She blinks her milky opal-sky eyes. Then she’s gone.

  Did I see that?

  “You were right,” Charlie says. “What about that one?” He points to a big muscle tree.

  “A warrior dude with a hawk nose and raven-wing hair.”

  Just when I say it I spot somebody through my camera in the strong tree. A dark sleekster guy with tangly snarl-ball nests full of birds on his bare chunkster shoulders. He disappears into the top branches.

  “Pretty good,” says Charles.

  “Let’s follow him.”

  I have to go down on the ground to scramble back up into the next tree, and by the time I get there tree man is gone. Then I see something dangling in the branches hidden by the few leaves that are still clinging on. It’s a rope ladder slinking from
a square cut in some wooden boards. I hoist myself up behind Charlie into a serious kick-down tree house.

  There’s a rope hammock and an old cracked piece of glass fit into one window. And around the window frame somebody started to carve rough roses.

  The kind that you carve on picture frames. The kind that Angel Juan’s father taught Angel Juan to carve.

  I feel like I’m still on the rope ladder. I feel like I am a rope ladder trembly in a wind storm. I grab onto the hammock but it swings and I stumble against the tree house wall. A ghost is here with me and I’ve seen two tree spirits, but finding this is the most slamminest thing of all.

  Angel Juan told me that someday he would build a tree house for us in the lemon tree looking out over the canyon. And the lady at Sylvia’s told me that a boy who loved her grits and wore a mole-man sweatshirt and a bandana had leaves in his hair and said he lived in the trees.

  “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 think 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.