Dangerous Angels (4 page)

Weetzie and Dirk and Duck brought Cherokee home and the house felt different, lighter and more musical now, because someone was always opening a window to let in the sun or putting on a record. The sun streamed in, making the walls glow like the inside of a rose. But even in the rosy house, Weetzie felt bittersweet; bittersweetness was like a liqueur burning in her throat and dripping down slowly into her heart.

Then one morning, Weetzie woke up feeling different, not bittersweet, but expectant the way she used to feel on the morning of her birthday. She opened her eyes and saw the flowers—there were flowers heaped on top of the quilt. Big, ruffly peonies, full-blown roses, pink-spotted lilies,
pollen-dusty poppies. Weetzie blinked in the sunlight and saw My Secret Agent Lover Man standing over her and Cherokee. He looked very pale and hunched in his trench coat, and his eyes were moist.

Weetzie put out her arms, and he came and sat on the bed and held her very tight. Then he looked at Cherokee.

“Whose is she?” he asked. “She is so completely perfect.”

“She looks like Dirk,” Weetzie said. “Because of her cheekbones.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man’s mouth twitched a little.

“And she looks like Duck,” Weetzie said. “Because she is blonde…And her nose.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man wrinkled his brow.

“And she looks like me, of course, because she is so itsy-witsy and silly-looking,” Weetzie said, laughing.

“But really, she absolutely has no one else’s eyes but yours, and your pretty lips. I think she’s all of ours,” Weetzie said. “I hope that is okay with you.”

Dirk and Duck came into the room.

“We missed you,” Dirk said. “And we hope you stay around and help raise our kid.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man smiled. Weetzie held Cherokee against her breast. Cherokee looked like a three-dad baby, like a peach, like a tiny moccasin, like a girl love-warrior who would grow up to wear feathers and run swift and silent through the L.A. canyons.

One day, there was a knock on the door of the silly-sandtopped house. Weetzie opened the door, and there stood a beautiful woman with long black hair, purple, tilty eyes, and a long body. She was the type of woman Weetzie and Dirk used to call a “Lanka.”

“Is Max here?” asked the Lanka in a low voice.

“Who?” Weetzie said. It came out like a screech, especially compared to the Lanka murmur, and she said again, “Who?”

“Max,” the woman repeated. “I know he lives here. I’ve tracked him down.”

“There is no one by that name here,” Weetzie said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

“I insist on seeing Max,” the woman said, pressing on Weetzie’s chest with five taloned fingertips.

Weetzie pushed the Lanka away and shut the door.

“Curses on both of you!” the Lanka said.

Weetzie looked out the peephole and saw her slink away down the front path in her long, black Lanka dress.

At dinner that night, Weetzie said, “A crazy woman was here today. She kept asking for some man. She was a real Lanka—a mean Lanka, too. It was a little scary.”

“There are a lot of freaks around,” Dirk said.

“Yeah,” Duck said. “Next time something like that happens, call us.”

“I can handle it,” Weetzie said.

My Secret Agent Lover Man was unusually silent.

The next night, My Secret Agent Lover Man came home early from the set where he had been working on his new horror movie about a coven of witches who pose under the guise of a Jayne Mansfield fan club. His skin was burning and he looked as if there was a heavy weight pressing on his forehead and his shoulders. Weetzie put him in bed and took his temperature, which was very high. She gave him aspirin and megadoses of vitamin C and sponged him off with cool towels.

“You have been working too hard,” she said.

My Secret Agent Lover Man gasped for air all through the night. Weetzie lay awake, watching him so hot and vulnerable, shivering with fever, and she wanted to hold on to him and never let go. It was as if he had no defenses, none of his usual guards up, as if they could merge together so easily.

“I love you, Weetzie,” he said in the middle of the night. Then he twisted as if from a sharp pain.

“I love you, I love you, My Secret Agent Lover Man, my wish list come true,” she said.

In the morning, he was still sick. Weetzie brought him more aspirin and vitamin C, and made him drink grapefruit juice and herb tea, and she put on cartoons for him to watch.

“I have to tell you something, Weetzie,” he said.

“Not now; try to rest. I’m taking you to the doctor later.”

But, in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door.

Weetzie answered it without thinking, and there stood the Lanka.

“Tell Max he had better see me or he will get worse,” she said.

Before Weetzie could shut the door, she heard My Secret Agent Lover Man say, “Wait.”

He had gotten out of bed and was stumbling toward them wearing his trench coat over his pajamas.

“Max,” said the woman, “I must talk to you. Tell this girl to let me in. Or I will make her sick, too. I have a Barbie doll that will look a lot like her when I chop off all its hair, and I have plenty of pins to stick into it.”

“Weetzie,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said, “can I please speak to her? I will tell you everything after.”

Weetzie looked at him and at the Lanka and then back at him. He was really sick.

“Whatever you need to do,” she said, going into the kitchen.

A little while later, My Secret Agent Lover Man came into the kitchen, too. He looked better, as if the fever had
broken. “She’s gone. Now I have something to tell you,” he said, sitting down beside her.

“When I went away I was very confused,” he began. “I knew I was afraid of having a baby, and I hated myself for being afraid. And I was so jealous of you with Dirk and Duck that I couldn’t even think. I just had to leave.

“So while I was away, all I thought of was you. And one day I saw a sign that said ‘Jayne Mansfield Fan Club.’ The picture of Jayne Mansfield reminded me of how you make that siren noise out of
The Girl Can’t Help It
, and I went to the place it said. It was a house in a run-down part of town, real spooky and dark, and there were all these people wearing white wigs and doing drugs and watching weird old Jayne film clips and talking about the sick way she died. How her head got cut off in her pink T-bird or something. I was such a wreck from being without you, and from not eating, and from sleeping in my car, and from drinking too much that I just stayed and watched and listened. And then this one woman, Vixanne Wigg, the one today, she asked me if I needed a place to stay, and I did, so she let me stay in the attic of this house where she lived. But soon I realized that these people were pretty sick. They were witches. They had séances and shit, and some pretty bad things happened.”

“Like you saw maggots in the sink, and then they were gone, and someone hanged himself in the backyard, and you started to leave but Vixen or Vixanne or whatever
seduced you and you slept together just like in your movie, right,
Max?
” Weetzie said.

My Secret Agent Lover Man looked down at his blue suede creepers, and then he looked into Weetzie’s eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “I was very sick then, Weetzie, and now there is more. I left the next day. We only slept together once. It was a terrible thing. But now she says she is pregnant and she needs money for the abortion, so I gave her money, and now she’ll leave us alone. But I had to speak to her because she is very powerful and she could have made you sick, too.”

“She could not have made me sick,” Weetzie said. “You got sick because you felt guilty and afraid.”

She got up and walked out of the room.

When she told Dirk and Duck that night they said, “Miss Weetzie Girl, I bet she did make him sick. But don’t be mad. Don’t hang on to it. He loves you.”

And Weetzie remembered him sweating and shaking and gasping in the night and twisting with pain as if he were a Ken doll stuck with pins, and she knew she couldn’t be mad for long, and when he came to her that night and stood there so vulnerable and naked and with painful memories tattooed on his body, she forgot everything except that he was back.

Months passed, and the Jayne Mansfield witches were only a movie, and everything was happy in Fifi’s cottage.
Until the witch baby appeared on the front step.

Duck came into the house one day, carrying a basket. “Look what I found on the front step,” he said.

Inside the basket was a newborn baby with purple, tilty eyes and pouty lips. There were a Ken doll and a Barbie doll with chopped-off hair in the basket, too, and Weetzie took one look at the baby and knew who it was.

“It is the witch baby,” she said.

“What?” Dirk and Duck said.

“It is My Secret Agent Lover Man and Vixanne’s witch baby,” Weetzie said.

My Secret Agent Lover Man sat silently for a moment and then he said, “She lied. I’ll find her and give it back. I’m sorry, Weetzie.”

The witch baby began to cry.

“She is beautiful,” Weetzie said. “Even if her mother is a Lanka witch.”

Weetzie took the witch baby out of the basket and held her close until she stopped crying. Cherokee eyed her suspiciously.

Duck said, “What are those?” noticing the Ken and Barbie.

“Those are Vixanne’s voodoo dolls,” Weetzie said. “I think Vixanne gave them to us as a peace offering.”

“Vixanne is evil,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “I’ve got to give this baby back.”

“If she is evil, we can’t do that,” Weetzie said. “We have to take care of this baby.”

“Yeah, we can call her Witch Baby,” Duck said. “How totally cool!”

“No, we can call her Lily,” Weetzie said. “And she can be Cherokee’s sister. Okay, Cherokee Love?”

Cherokee didn’t look pleased. My Secret Agent Lover Man picked her up and put her on his knee and gave her the Ken doll to play with. This made her smile.

“If you can accept Cherokee as yours without being sure, then I can accept Lily, even though I know she’s not mine; I can accept her because you are her daddy-o,” Weetzie said. “Besides, she is cool and she likes me. What do you guys think about keeping her?”

“I hope she is not a voodoo queen already,” Dirk said.

“She is only a baby,” Weetzie said.

“I hope she is not going to hex me if I don’t give her her favorite kind of Gerber’s,” Duck said.

“She is only a baby,” Weetzie said.

“She is a witch baby,” said My Secret Agent Lover Man.

“Look at her,” Weetzie said. “She is
your
baby.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man looked at Lily’s pointy little face.

“What does Cherokee think?”

Cherokee smiled and clapped her hands.

“It is cool with me,” said Duck. “It will be like
Bewitched
.”

“Me too,” said Dirk.

They all looked at My Secret Agent Lover Man.

“Okay,” he said. “Witch Baby, I mean, Lily, welcome to the family.”

Weetzie put Lily onto his other knee.

It was not easy at first. Witch Baby was a wild witch baby. The name Lily never stuck. As soon as she could walk, she would run all over the house like a mad cat, playing torpedo games. As soon as she could talk, she would go around chanting, “Beasts, beasts, beasts,” over and over again.

“Who taught her that?” Weetzie asked Duck suspiciously.

“I swear, she just knew it,” Duck said. “Pretty creepy, huh?”

Once, Witch Baby pulled Cherokee’s hair and ran away laughing shrilly. The next night, Cherokee cut off Witch Baby’s shaggy black hair with a pair of toenail scissors while the witch baby slept. Witch Baby ate and ate but she stayed as skinny as bones and she became more and more beautiful.

“What are we going to do with her?” My Secret Agent Lover Man said.

“She just needs time and love,” Weetzie said. “It must be hard for her, knowing she’s a witch baby. Besides, I was a terror when I was little, too.”

And so, Witch Baby stayed on in the house, and took turns terrorizing Cherokee and being terrorized by Cherokee, and eating up all of Duck’s Fig Newtons, and
using Dirk’s Aqua Net, and insisting on being in My Secret Agent Lover Man’s movies, and dressing up in Weetzie’s clothes, and pulling heads off Barbie dolls and sticking them on the TV antenna and ruining the reception.

But that’s how witch babies are.

Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl and the puppies Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee were driving down Hollywood Boulevard on their way to the Tick Tock Tea Room for turkey platters.

“They are already putting up Christmas lights,” Duck said.

“It’s only the beginning of October,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said.

“They’re making a movie,” Dirk said.

Cherokee clapped her hands for the feathery golden bridges of lights that were being strung from Frederick’s of Hollywood to Love’s.

“We live in Shangri-la,” Weetzie said. “Shangri Los Angeles. It’s always Christmas.”

“That’s it!” My Secret Agent Lover Man said.

“What?” they all asked.

“The name of our new movie.”

Shangri-L.A
. was a remake of
Lost Horizon
, except that in the movie the horizon was a magical Hollywood where everyone looked like Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo, Bogart, or Garbo, everything was magic castles and star-paved streets and Christmas lights, and no one grew old. Weetzie played a girl on her way to the real Hollywood to become a star. The bus on which she is traveling crashes, and when she regains consciousness she and the other passengers who have survived find themselves in the magic land. Weetzie falls in love with the Charlie Chaplin character from Shangri-L.A., and he tells her she can stay there with him and never grow old. She doesn’t believe him and insists that they leave together. They fix the bus and drive away, but he immediately ages and dies, leaving her caught in the real Hollywood.

“Hell-A,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said.

Making the movie was like dreaming twenty-four hours a day. Weetzie styled her blonde hair in Marilyn waves, and wore strapless satin dresses and rhinestones. She made fringed baby clothes and feathered headdresses for Cherokee and tutus and gauze wings for Witch Baby. Dirk had grown out his Mohawk into a ducktail, and he wore sparkling suits and bolo ties. Duck, in leather, squinted his face up, pretending to be Jimmy Dean. And My Secret Agent Lover Man, in a baggy suit, walked toes out, his eyes like charcoal stars. They drove around in the T-bird eating ice cream and filming. In the movie, they got
to be a rock band. Dirk and Duck played guitar, My Secret Agent Lover Man bass, Valentine and Raphael drums. Weetzie and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Ping sang. They performed “Ragg Mopp,” “Louie-Louie,” “Wild Thing,” and their own songs like “Lanky Lizard,” “Rubber-Chicken Strut,” “Irie-Irie,” “Witchy Baby,” and “Love Warrior.”

The movie was going very well except they weren’t sure about the ending.

“We should ask your dad,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “He is great at those things.”

“Maybe I’ll go visit him,” Weetzie said. “He hasn’t seen Cherokee in a long time, and besides, I’m worried about him.”

So Weetzie and Cherokee went to New York to see Charlie Bat.

Charlie was unshaven and he looked even taller because he was so skinny now. He stood in the doorway of the dark apartment shaking his head.

“My babies,” he said.

Being with Charlie was always a romantic date. The first day, he took them to the Metropolitan Museum, where they looked at Greek marbles and French Impressionist paintings and costumes until their eyes were blurry and their feet were sore. Weetzie loved the Egyptian rooms the most.

“They spent their whole lives covering these walls with pictures,” Charlie said, showing them gods, goddesses,
stars, eyes, rabbits, birds, on the tomb walls. “And they filled the tombs with everything you could want. Now that’s the way to die.”

After the museum, they went to Chinatown and ate squid and broccoli and hot-and-sour soup. Then they wandered through the angled streets that smelled meaty and peppery. The Chinatown museum looked like a movie set and inside was a dancing chicken—a real, live chicken that turned on its own tunes with its beak and did a slidy dance for seventy-five cents. Charlie Bat made the chicken dance and he played air hockey with Weetzie. Then, on the way home, he bought cannolis in Little Italy for all of them.

The next day, Charlie took them to the top of the Empire State Building, and there was his city spread out in front of them. It reminded Weetzie of the time she and My Secret Agent Lover Man had hiked to the top of the Hollywood sign, and she had dreamed of Cherokee and he had been afraid. She wished that the world could be the way it looked from up here—that Charlie could live in a city of perfect buildings and cars and people if he was going to live so far away. The Chrysler Building looked like an art-deco rocket that had caught fans of stars on its way up, and the Statue of Liberty looked like a creature risen green and magical from the sea, and everything looked at peace in the blue, clear day. Charlie bought Cherokee a bottle filled with tiny buildings and blue glitter and water, and she shook it and laughed, watching the glitter come down, and Weetzie wished she could shake blue glitter
around all of them—keeping them sparkling and safe.

By the time they came down in the elevator, they all had blue glitter on their eyelids and cheeks from the little bottle.

Charlie took them out for Italian food and French food and Jewish deli and lobster. He bought them strawberries and whipped cream at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel, where musicians played to them among the peachy marble columns, mirrors, and floral tapestry chairs. He took them to galleries and shops in SoHo and the East Village and bought them gifts: flowers, Peter Fox shoes for Weetzie, and a Pink Panther doll from F.A.O. Schwarz for Cherokee. Charlie smiled, but he looked lost.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” Weetzie asked.

They had come to Harlem for breakfast. On the street, a man in a black hat had touched Charlie’s shoulder and muttered something about “Doctor Man,” and Charlie went pale and started to cough as he walked away. Now they were in Sylvia’s, eating eggs and grits and biscuits and sweet-potato pie.

“I’m okay,” Charlie said. He was on his third cup of coffee and hadn’t touched his breakfast. “How’s Brandy-Lynn?”

“She is okay,” Weetzie said. “She doesn’t like the idea of Cherokee having three dads.”

“Well, it is a little hard to get used to,” Charlie said.

“I think she really misses you,” Weetzie said. “You should come and visit.”

“And how is that boyfriend of yours?” Charlie asked, trying to change the subject. “The one with the funny name.”

“You mean My Secret Agent Lover Man.”

“That sure is a funny name,” Charlie said.

Weetzie laughed because Charlie had named her Weetzie and his last name was Bat.

“What is Cherokee’s last name?” Charlie asked. “Is it My Secret or Secret Agent or Lover or what?”

“Bat, like ours,” Weetzie said. “Cherokee Bat.”

“She is a wonder,” Charlie said dreamily, looking at his granddaughter in her pink fringed coat. “Cherokee Bat…”

Before she left, Weetzie asked Charlie how to end
Shangri-L.A
.

“Maybe this girl tries to get back by taking drugs,” he said. “And she dies.”

“That is such a sad ending, Dad,” Weetzie said with dismay. She knew something was wrong. The paint on Charlie’s apartment walls had cracked and chipped and his eyes were as dark and hollow as the corners of the room.

Charlie sighed.

“Move back,” Weetzie said. “It is no good for you here. You could work on the movie. We need you. In L.A. we have a fairy-tale house. We have pancakes at Duke’s, and dinners at the Tick Tock Tea Room. We have the sky set; remember, you used to take me to see it, and Marilyn’s star. And we have Cherokee.”

Charlie said: “Weetzie, I love you and Cherokee and…Well, I love you more than everything. But I can’t be in that city. Everything’s an illusion; that’s the whole thing about it—illusion, imitation, a mirage. Pagodas and palaces and skies, blondes and stars. It makes me too sad. It’s like having a good dream. You know you are going to wake up.”

“Daddy,” Weetzie said. “Please come home.”

“I love you more than everything,” Charlie said. “You and Cherokee and Brandy-Lynn still, too. But I can’t come back. It would hurt you.”

So Weetzie and Cherokee had to leave New York. They left Charlie Bat standing at the airport in his trench coat. He was smiling, but his eyes were like dark corners.

“Mom,” Weetzie said. “I am worried about Charlie.”

Brandy-Lynn looked up from polishing her nails. “What is it? What’s he doing to himself?”

“I think you should call him,” Weetzie said.

“It makes me too sad,” said Brandy-Lynn.

Charlie was dreaming of a city where everyone was always young and lit up like a movie, palm trees turned into tropical birds, Marilyn-blonde angels flew through the spotlight rays, the cars were the color of candied mints and filled with lovers making love as they drove down the streets paved with stars that had fallen from the sky. Charlie was dreaming of a giant poppy like a bed. He had
taken some pills, and this time he didn’t wake up from his dream.

Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Cherokee and Witch Baby huddled on the pink bed and cried. Grief is not something you know if you grow up wearing feathers with a Charlie Chaplin boyfriend, a love-child papoose, a witch baby, a Dirk and a Duck, a Slinkster Dog, and a movie to dance in. You can feel sad and worse when your dad moves to another city, when an old lady dies, or when your boyfriend goes away. But grief is different. Weetzie’s heart cringed in her like a dying animal. It was as if someone had stuck a needle full of poison into her heart. She moved like a sleepwalker. She was the girl in the fairy tale sleeping in a prison of thorns and roses.

“Wake up,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said, kissing her. But she was suffocated by roses that no one else saw—only their shadows showed on her lips and around her eyes.

“Weetzie,” he said, kissing her mouth. “You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my ‘Hollywood in Miniature,’ my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up,” he said.

Weetzie curled up in a little ball in the bed.

“Weetzie,” he said, “your dad’s dead. But you aren’t, baby.”

She put her arms around him and cried. Their clothes
fell away like clothes in a dream—like a dream peels away when you wake up. Their bodies clung together like warriors fighting out the pain in each other.

My Secret Agent Lover Man finally relaxed, his body becoming heavy with sleep. Weetzie held on to him.

“Don’t sleep,” she said. “Don’t sleep. How can we sleep? Suddenly I felt what it is like to know I am not always going to be able to see you and touch you.”

My Secret Agent Lover Man wrapped her in his pale warrior arms. The veins pulsed with blue peace like rivers that lead to a mountain lake. Weetzie shut her eyes finally, and the roses did not grow over her in the night. She dreamed that she and My Secret Agent Lover Man were holding hands and climbing a waterfall.

Weetzie went to see Brandy-Lynn the next day.

Brandy-Lynn was drinking vodka and lying on a chaise lounge by the pool. She wore curlers and she was getting very tan.

“When I was a kid my mother brought me to Hollywood,” Brandy-Lynn said. “We lived at the Garden of Allah. She left me alone all day and I went around the pool with my cute little autograph book. It said ‘Autographs’ on the cover in gold. Clark Gable even signed it! Everyone was so gorgeous. I used to walk to Schwab’s and have a hamburger and a milkshake for dinner, and I’d swivel around and around on the barstool reading Wonder Woman comics and planning how it would be when I became a star. But what I really wanted was a Charlie Bat. I always
loved that man. What happened, Weetzie?”

Weetzie hugged Brandy-Lynn. She felt greasy from the suntan oil and her shoulders felt very small.

“He loved you too, Brandy-Lynn,” Weetzie said. “Now that’s enough.” She took away the bottle of vodka. “Let’s go out for some health food.”

“Did he really?” Brandy-Lynn said. A blurry lipstick smile showed through her blue-mascara-tinted tears. “I haven’t been a very good mother, have I?”

“You are a wonderful mother.”

“He was the man of my dreams….”

At the end of
Shangri-L.A.
, Weetzie played a scene in which the starlet shoots up so she can get back to the dream city. After she dies of an overdose in her apartment, she is transported back. In the final scene, she is reunited with the Charlie Chaplin bass player, and the band performs “Love Warrior” in a
Casablanca
nightclub filled with fans, fronds, and fireflies. Then darkness.

“This film is dedicated to the memory of Charlie Bat,” it said on the screen.