Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  “Witch Baby is in danger,” Weetzie said.

  “Come on, sweet pea,” said Brandy-Lynn. “I’ll make you some tea. Chamomile with milk and honey like when you were little.”

  They sat drinking chamomile tea with milk and honey by the light of the globe lamp and Weetzie stared at the milk carton with a missing child’s face printed on the back. She read the child’s height, weight and date of birth, thinking the numbers seemed too low. How could this missing milk-carton child be so new, so small? Weetzie imagined waking up day after day waiting for Witch Baby, not knowing, seeing children’s faces smiling blindly at her from milk cartons while she tried to swallow a bite of cereal. Seeing a picture of Witch Baby on a milk carton.

  “Where do you think she could be?” Weetzie asked her mother. “Would she just run away from us? Last time she was with Dirk and Duck.”

  Brandy-Lynn was staring at the clock on the wall and the pictures Witch Baby had taken. There they all were—the family—bigger and bigger groups of them circling the clock up to the number eleven. They were all laughing, hugging, kissing. In one picture, Weetzie and Brandy-Lynn were displaying their polished toenails; in one, Weetzie and Cherokee wore matching feathered headdresses; Ping was playing with Raphael’s dreadlocks; Darlene was messing up Duck’s flat-top. There were pictures of My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Valentine and Coyote. But there was no picture on the number twelve.

  “Look at all those beautiful photographs,” Brandy-Lynn said. “And Witch Baby isn’t even on the clock. No matter how much we love her, she doesn’t feel she belongs. You have me, Cherokee has you, but Witch Baby still doesn’t know who her mother is.”

  “I’ve been a terrible almost-mother,” said Weetzie. “I won’t just stop and pay attention when someone is sad. I try to make pain go away by pretending it isn’t there. I should have seen her pain. It was all over her walls. It was all in her eyes.”

  “It takes time,” Brandy-Lynn said, fingering the heart locket with the shadowy picture of Charlie Bat. “I didn’t want to let you be the witch child you were once. I couldn’t face your father’s death. And even now darkness scares me.” She set down the bottle of pale amber liqueur she was holding poised above her teacup, and pushed it away from her. “I didn’t understand those newspaper clippings on Witch Baby’s wall.”

  “How will I ever be able to tell Witch Baby what she means to us?” Weetzie cried. “She isn’t just my baby, she’s my teacher. She’s our rooster in the morning, she’s…How will I ever tell her?” she sobbed, while Brandy-Lynn stroked her hair. But Weetzie could not say the other thought. Would she be able to tell Witch Baby anything at all?

  Vixanne Wigg

  When she left the cottage, Witch Baby skated past the Charlie Chaplin Theater and the boys in too-big moon-walk high-tops playing basketball at the high school. She passed rows of markets where old men and women were stooped over bins of kiwis and cherries. They lived in the rest homes around the block, where ambulances came almost every day without using their sirens. One old woman with a peach in her hand stared as Witch Baby took her photograph and rolled away.

  At Farmer’s Market she skated past stalls selling flowers, the biggest fruits she had ever seen, New Orleans gumbo, sushi, date shakes, Belgian waffles, burritos and pizzas—all the smells mingling together into one feast. At the novelty store she saw pirate swords, beanies and vinyl shoppers covered with daisies. There were mini license plates and door plaques with almost every name in the world printed on them. But there was nothing with “Witch Baby” or “Vixanne” on it. Witch Baby knew she wouldn’t find her mother here, eating waffles and drinking espresso in the sunshine. So she caught a bus to the park above the sea.

  Under palm trees that cast their feathery shadows on the path and the green lawns, Witch Baby photographed men in ragged clothes asleep in a gazebo, and a woman standing on the corner swearing at the sun. Near the woman was a shopping cart packed with clothes, blankets, used milk cartons, newspapers and ivy vines. Witch Baby took a picture and put some of her Halloween candy into the woman’s cart. Two young men were walking under the palms. They looked almost like twins—the way they were dressed and wore their hair—but one was tanned and healthy and one was fragile, limping in the protection of the other man’s shadow over a heart-shaped plot of grass. Because of the palm trees, for a moment, the healthy man’s shadow looked as if it had wings. Witch Baby took a picture and skated to the pier lined with booths full of stuffed animals.

  She rode a black horse on the carousel, made faces at the mechanical fortune teller with the rolling eyeballs and bought a hot dog at the Cocky Moon. Nibbling her Cocky Moon dog, she stood at the edge of the pier and looked down at the blue-and-yellow circus tent in the parking lot by the ocean. Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man had taken Witch Baby and Cherokee to the tent to see the clowns coming out of a silvery-sweet, jazzy mist. The silliest, tiniest girl clown hid behind a parasol and was transformed into a golden tightrope walker.

  Witch Baby thought of the old ladies and the basketball boys, the street people and the clowns, the tightrope walker goddess and the man who could hardly walk. She remembered the globe lamp burning with life in the magic shop. She remembered Angel Juan’s electric black-cat hair.

  This is the time we’re upon.

  She skidded down to the sand, took off everything except for the strategic-triple-daisy bikini Weetzie had made for her and jumped into the sea. Oily seaweed wrapped around her ankles and a harsh smell rose up from the waves, only partly disguised by the salt. Witch Baby thought of how Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck and Coyote had once walked all the way from town to bless the polluted bay with poems and tears. She got out of the water and built a sand castle with upside-down Coke cup turrets and a garden full of seaweed, cigarette butts and foil gum wrappers. Then she took pictures of surfer boys with peeling noses, blonde surfer girls that looked like tall Cherokees, big families with their music and melons, and men who lay in pairs by the blinding water.

  When evening came Witch Baby had a sunburned nose and shoulders and she was starving. After she had eaten the sandy candy corn and Three Musketeers bars from her bat-shaped backpack, she was still hungry and it was getting cold.

  I won’t find my mother here, she thought, getting back on a bus headed for Hollywood.

  She found a bus stop bench in front of the Chinese Theater and curled up under the frayed blanket in her backpack, the same blanket that had once covered her in the basket when Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk and Duck had found her on their doorstep. Shivering with cold, she finally slept.

  The next morning Witch Baby waited until the tourists started arriving for the first matinee. She rolled backward, leaping and turning on her cowboy-boot skates over the movie-star prints in the cement all day, and some people put money in her backpack. Then she went to see “Hollywood in Miniature,” where tiny cityscapes lit up in a dark room. Hollywood Boulevard was very different from the clean, ice-cream-colored miniature that didn’t have any people on its tiny streets.

  If there were people in “Hollywood in Miniature,” they’d be dressed in white and glitter and roller skates, with enough food to eat and warm places to go at night, Witch Baby thought, watching some street kids with shaved heads huddling around a ghetto blaster as if it were a fire.

  That was when she saw a piece of faded pink paper stapled to a telephone pole. The blonde actress in the picture pressed her breasts together with her arms and opened her mouth wide, but even with the cleavage and lips she looked small and lost.

  “Jayne Mansfield Fan Club Meeting,” said the sign. “Free Food and Entertainment! Candy! Children Welcome!” and there was an address and that day’s date.

  So Witch Baby ripped the pink sign from the telephone pole and took a bus up into the hills under the Hollywood sign.

  Witch Baby skates until she comes to a pink Spanish-style house half hidden behind overgrown-pineapple-shaped palm trees and hibiscus flowers. Some bea
t-up 1950’s convertibles are parked in front. Witch Baby takes off her skates, goes up to the house and knocks.

  The door creaks open. Inside is darkness, the smell of burning wood and burning sugar. Witch Baby creeps down a hallway, jumping every time she glimpses imps with tufts of hair hiding in the shadows, and breathing again when she realizes that mirrors cover the walls. At the end of the hallway, she comes to a room where blondes in evening gowns sit around a fire pit roasting marshmallows and watching a large screen. Their faces are marshmallow white in the firelight and their eyes look dead, as if they have watched too much television.

  One of the women stands and turns to the doorway where Witch Baby hides. She is a tall woman with a tower of white-blonde hair and a chiffon scarf wound around her long neck.

  “We have a visitor, Jaynes,” the woman says.

  Witch Baby feels herself being drawn into the firelit room. She stares into the woman’s tilted purple eyes, a purple that is only found in jacaranda tree blossoms and certain silks, knowing that she has come to the right place.

  “Are you Vixanne?”

  “Who are you?” The woman’s voice is carved—cold and hard. The necklace at her throat looks as if it is made of rock candy.

  “Witch Baby Wigg, your daughter.”

  All the people in the room begin to laugh. Their voices flicker, as separate from their bodies as the shadows thrown on the walls by the flames.

  “So this is Max’s little girl. I wonder if she’s as quick to come and go as her father was. Did Max and that woman tell you all about how he left me, Witch Baby?” Vixanne asks. Then she turns to the people. “Do you think my daughter resembles me, Jaynes?” She reaches up and removes her blonde wig, letting her black hair cascade down, framing her fine-boned porcelain face.

  “Let’s see how my baby witch looks as a Jayne blonde,” she says, putting the wig on Witch Baby. “You need a wig with that hair, Witch Baby!” The people laugh again.

  “Now you can be a part of the Jayne Club.” Vixanne leads Witch Baby over to the screen. Jayne Mansfield flickers there, giggles, her chest heaving.

  “Sit here and have some candy,” says someone in a deep voice, delicately patting the seat of a chair with two manicured fingers. Witch Baby can’t tell if the thick, pale person in the wig and evening gown is a man or a woman.

  Witch Baby sits up all night, gnawing on rock candy and divinity fudge, drinking Cokes, which aren’t allowed at the cottage, and watching Jayne Mansfield films. After a while she feels sick and bloated from all the sugar. Lipstick-smeared mouths loom around her. Her eyes begin to close.

  “I’ll put you to bed now, Witch Baby Wigg,” Vixanne says, lifting Witch Baby up in her powdery arms.

  There is something about being held by this woman. Witch Baby feels she has fallen into an ocean. But it is not an ocean of salt and shadows and dark-jade dreams. Witch Baby’s senses are muffled by pale shell-colored, spun-sugar waves that press her eyelids shut, pour into her nostrils and ears, swell like syrup in her mouth. A sea of forgetting.

  Vixanne carries Witch Baby up a winding staircase to a bedroom and tucks her beneath a pink satin comforter on a heart-shaped bed. Then she sits beside her and they look at each other. They do not need to speak. Without words, Witch Baby tells her mother what she has seen or imagined—families dying of radiation, old people in rest homes listening for sirens, ragged men and women wandering barefoot through the city, becoming ghosts because no one wanted to see them, children holding out wish bracelets as they sit in the gutter, the dark-haired boy who disappeared. What do I do with it all? Witch Baby asks with her eyes. Vixanne answers without speaking.

  We are the same. Some people see more than others. It gets worse. I wanted to blind myself. You must just not look at it. You must forget. Forget everything.

  And Witch Baby falls into a suffocating sleep.

  In the morning, Witch Baby is too weak to get up. Vixanne comes in dressed in perfumed satin and carries Witch Baby’s limp body downstairs. The others, the “Jaynes,” are already gathered around the screen, eating candy and watching Jayne Mansfield waving from a convertible. Witch Baby sits propped up among them, wearing a long blonde wig. Her eyes are glazed like sugar cookies; her throat, no matter how many sodas she is given, is parched.

  Late that night she wakes in her bed. “How will I ever be able to tell her what she means to us?” says a voice. Weetzie’s voice. “Weetzie,” she whispers.

  She stumbles out of the room to the top of the stairs and looks down. Vixanne and the Jaynes are still watching the screen and charring marshmallows over the fire pit. A soft chant rises up. “We will ward off pain. There will be no pain. Forget that there is evil in the world. Forget. Forget everything.” Vixanne is holding herself, rocking back and forth, smiling. Her eyes are closed.

  Witch Baby goes back into her room and packs her bat-shaped backpack. For a moment she stops to look at the pictures she has taken on her journey. The floating basketball boys. The old woman with the peach. The hungry men in the gazebo. The dying young man and his angel twin. A picture of a child with tangled tufts of hair and mournful, tilted eyes. She leaves the pictures on the heart-shaped bed, hoping that Vixanne will look at them and see.

  Then she slips downstairs, past the Jaynes and out the front door. She sits on the front step, tying her roller skates, clearing her lungs of smoke, gathering strength from the night.

  The mint and honeysuckle air is chilly on her damp face, awake on the nape of her neck as Witch Baby Wigg skates home.

  Black Lamb Baby Witch

  When Witch Baby tiptoed into the cottage, she saw Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man holding each other and weeping in the milky dawn light. They looked as pale as the sky. She stood beside them, close enough so that she could feel their sobs shaking in her own body.

  Weetzie lifted her head from My Secret Agent Lover Man’s shoulder and turned around. Blind with tears, she held out her arms to the shadow child standing there. Only when Witch Baby was pressed against her, My Secret’s arms circling them both, did Weetzie believe that the child was not a dream, a vision who had stepped from the milk-carton picture.

  Beneath the pink feather sweater Weetzie was wearing, Witch Baby felt Weetzie’s heart fluttering like a bird.

  “Will you tell everyone she’s home? I need to be alone with her,” Weetzie said to My Secret Agent Lover Man. She turned to Witch Baby. “Is that okay with you, honey-honey?”

  Witch Baby nodded, and Weetzie put on her pink Harlequin sunglasses and carried Witch Baby out into the garden. The lawn was completely purple with jacaranda blossoms.

  “Are you all right? We were so worried. Where did you go? Are you okay?” Witch Baby nodded, not wanting to move her ear away from the bird beating beneath Weetzie’s pink feathers.

  They were silent for a while, listening to the singing trees and the early traffic. Weetzie stroked Witch Baby’s head.

  “When I was little, my dad Charlie told me I was like a black lamb,” Weetzie said. “My hair is really dark, you know, under all this bleach, not like Brandy-Lynn’s and Cherokee’s. I used to feel like I had sort of disappointed my mom. Not just because of my hair, but everything. But my dad said he was the black sheep of the family, too. The wild one who doesn’t fit in.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes,” said Weetzie. “You remind me of a lamb. But you know what else Charlie Bat said? He said that black sheeps express everyone else’s anger and pain. It’s not that they have all the anger and pain—they’re just the only ones who let it out. Then the other people don’t have to. But you face things, Witch Baby. And you help us face things. We can learn from you. I can’t stand when someone I love is sad, so I try to take it away without just letting it be. I get so caught up in being good and sweet and taking care of everyone that sometimes I don’t admit when people are really in pain.” Weetzie took off her pink sunglasses. “But I think you can help me learn to not be afraid, my black lamb baby witch.”


  When they went back into the cottage everyone was waiting to celebrate Witch Baby’s return. My Secret Agent Lover Man, dressed like Charlie Chaplin, was riding his unicycle around the house. Dirk was preparing his famous homemade Weetzie pizza with sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, red onions, artichoke hearts and a spinach crust. Darlene Drake, who had arrived the day before, was helping Duck twist balloons into slinkster dogs. Valentine and Ping Chong presented Witch Baby with film for her camera. Brandy-Lynn lifted her up onto Coyote’s shoulders.

  “I think I saw five little Joshua tree sprouts coming up across the street,” Coyote said, parading with Cherokee, Raphael, Slinkster Dog, Go-Go Girl and the puppies following him.

  Then Coyote put Witch Baby down and knelt in front of her, like a sunrise, warming her face. “I’m sorry about the seeds. Even if they never came up, I shouldn’t have been angry with you. We are very much the same, Witch Baby.”

  Everyone else gathered around.

  “We want to thank you,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “I’ve been remembering that night when the article and the globe lamp appeared, and I realized that they must have been from you.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t know how I didn’t see that before. They are beautiful gifts, the best gifts anyone has ever given me. Gifts from my daughter.”

  “And I want to thank you, too,” Darlene Drake said shyly, placing a slinkster dog balloon at Witch Baby’s feet. “You knew more about love than I knew. You helped me get my son back again.”

  “Without you, Miss Pancake Dancer Stowawitch, we might never have really known each other,” said Duck, stooping to kiss Witch Baby’s hand.

  “Welcome home, Witch,” Cherokee said. “I don’t even mind my haircut anymore. I deserve it, I guess, since I did the same thing to you once. And besides, I look more like Weetzie now!”

  Witch Baby snarled just a little.

  “And thank you for helping me and Raphael find each other,” Cherokee went on. “While you were away, Raphael told me it was your drumming I heard that day. You are the most slinkster-cool jamming drummer girl ever, and we hope you will play for us again even though we are clutch pigs sometimes.”