Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  Living in the trees. “Come on, Charlie.”

  Outside.

  It’s overcast again. I look for trees where Angel Juan might be living but there aren’t too many around here.

  I skate past the Apollo Theatre and Charlie whistles for me to stop. I look into the glass of the ticket booth, Charlie reflected next to me. He takes off his top hat, rests it on his chest and bows his head.

  “I used to make pilgrimages here from Brooklyn when I was a little boy. I wanted to move in,” he says. “All the greatest of the greats played the Apollo. James Brown. Josephine Baker dressed up like a chandelier or a peacock. Weetzie’s mother was always dressing up in things like that when I met her. And then Weetzie started with the feathers.”

  I look at the theater. I try to imagine the music steaming out and the people rushing in, the dancing, sweating, the lights like jewel rain glossy on everybody’s skin. But it just looks like a run-down theater to me. I wonder if Angel Juan saw the Apollo, if he felt sad or if he could imagine everything the way it was. Maybe he doesn’t need me around to see beauty the way I need him to see it.

  “Charlie, I need to go now.”

  Some little girls are sucking on pink sticky candy and playing hip-hop-hopscotch in front of the theater to the ghetto blaster blasty blast.

  “That might make a good picture,” Charlie says.

  I hold up my camera not really planning on taking anything. But through my lens I see they are mini flygirls with skin like a dark pony’s velvetness. They are doing the Running Man and Roger Rabbit, Robocop and Typewriter in the chalk squares. There is something so complete about them. Like they don’t need anything or anyone else in the world. I wish I felt like that.

  “Go ahead,” Charlie says.

  I take their picture and they give me dirty looks at first but then they start getting into it showing off their moves.

  “Hey,” they say. “Hey. Yo.” And I snap more and more hip hop-hopscotch shots. Sometimes I can see Charlie workin’ it in the background looking kind of gawky and funny and rhythmless trying to dance with them.

  “You going to make us famous?” one of the girls asks.

  “Maybe so,” I say.

  After a while they stop and stand around me. They’re as tall as I am. One stares at my hair.

  “You could have some white-girl dreads if you wanted,” she says. My hair is so tangled it does almost look like dreadlocks sometimes.

  “What are you doing up here?” another says.

  I’ve forgotten for a little while. It was so cool watching them. “I was looking for somebody.”

  “Can you dance?”

  I look down at my feet in the roller skates.

  “Any kid who can skate like you can dance,” Charlie says. “Come on, Witch Baby.”

  I give him a grumpy scowly scowl. But the girls are waiting with their arms crossed. I take off my skates, hand one of them my camera and hip-hop into the chalk squares while Neneh Cherry raps on the ghetto blaster. The girls jump around laughing. When I get to the end of the hopscotch I do it backwards. I feel better. I feel almost free.

  “Miss Thing! Now you can forget Homes, girlfriend,” one of the girls says, giving me my camera. “He’ll come back on his own. Just get yourself some tunes and a piece of chalk.”

  I put my skates back on. “I’ll send you the pictures.”

  One of the girls writes her address on the back of my hand.

  And I skate away, Charlie next to me, leaving them hip-hopscotching like maybe the next funky Josephines.

  By the time we get downtown it’s dusk.

  “I want to go look in the trees,” I say.

  “We’ll look tomorrow,” says Charlie. “It’s too dark now. Are you hungry?”

  “Charlie, I ate all that food before.”

  “Witch Baby, that was hours and hours ago and you danced a long time. This is the best market in town.”

  “Were you always so into food?”

  He’s quiet for a minute doing dips and circles in the air like a firefly. “Actually no. But if I were to do life again I’d probably enjoy everything a lot more. For instance, I never used to dance.”

  I could have guessed that. “Weetzie said you were kind of a grumpster.”

  “Grumpster? Maybe. You learn things.”

  The little market has piles of fruit out in front lit up so they almost don’t look real. Inside, the market’s warm and bright and jammed with single people buying their dinners. There’s a wild salad bar with Christmas lights all around and flowers frozen in the ice between the food. Charlie is flickering from the rainbow pastas to the stuffed grape leaves, from the egg rolls to the greens, between the beans, seeds, nuts, cheese, dried figs and dates and pineapple, muffins, corn bread, carrot cake, pastel puddings, fruit, cookies. He wants me to get everything but I just take a pink sushi roll and a fortune cookie.

  In the window of the store next door there are things like huge ostrich eggs and snakeskins and skulls. I press my face up to the glass to look at a human skull, trying to imagine what my own skull looks like inside my head and what Angel Juan’s looks like and if our bones look the same.

  “Thoughts like that will mess you up,” Charlie says in my ear. I keep forgetting about this mind-reading thing.

  We cross the street to get to the subway. But I see a boutique—all chrome with high windows—and I want to stop. Boy and girl mannequins in black leather are kneeling around a man mannequin. He’s wearing a white coat with the collar turned up and white gloves. He has white hair and pale no-color glass eyes and girl’s lips.

  I feel so cold. I feel like one of those flowers in the salad bar frozen in ice. But I don’t want to move away from the window.

  “Witch Baby,” Charlie calls. “Come on.” His voice sounds nerve urgent. Maybe that mannequin freaks him out too.

  “You have to be careful,” he says. “There’s some nastiness around.”

  We go down into the subway where the noise and the dark are better than that plastic face.

  “How does it taste?”

  “Good.”

  “I mean really how does it taste?”

  I am eating my pink sushi roll on the carpet at Charlie’s place by the light of the globe lamp. I sigh. I wish he’d just let me alone to think about Angel Juan’s bone structure.

  “Seaweed, sesame, spinach, carrot, radish sprouts.”

  “Witch Baby, remember I’ll never get to eat another thing.”

  “Okay okay.” I close my eyes to get the tastes better. “The avocado’s silky and the rice is sweetish—that might be pink sugar or something. The ginger’s got like a tang. The horseradish burns right through my nostrils to my brain.”

  “Thankyou,” he says. He sighs like he’s just eaten a big meal.

  Later he goes, “What about dessert?”

  I crackle open my fortune cookie and slip out the strip of paper from the tight glazed folds.

  Make your own wishes come true.

  Oh, really helpful. I crunch the cookie in my mouth and spread out the fortune so Charlie can read it. I sit cross-legged on the carpet.

  “Do you believe in genies?” Charlie asks.

  “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.”

  Th
at 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.