Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  Bob

  McCardle really couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just give it up and go home. Unless it had something to do with Volos.

  He hadn’t seen the kid for almost a week. Volos had been welcome to stay in the hotel room with him awhile, and he had told the youngster so. But as soon as he felt better, the day after the fever broke, Volos began to pace and sweat. The angel couldn’t stand the feeling of being boxed in.

  “I came here to live, Texas! Not to sit within walls.”

  “Just stay a couple days longer till I get a chance to show you how not to get hurt!” Really, Texas knew, a person could spend a lifetime trying to show a kid that, and not succeed. Every parent knew that. “Where you going to live if you go? And what on?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How are you gonna earn your living?”

  It took maybe five minutes of confused conversation before Volos caught on to the human concept of making a living, of exchanging money for shelter and food. Then Texas did not at first comprehend what the kid tried to explain to him, that these concepts did not apply to him.

  “I did not imagine myself to eat or sleep.”

  “Kid, you got to eat and you got to have a place to sleep, or you die!”

  “I will die, yes, but not of those things.”

  “What the hell you think you are, an exception to the rules?”

  “Yes, that is right. I thought it out. A lifetime will seem very short to me, you see. I did not want to spend it on those things.”

  Only because he had nursed the stranger for three days and had seen how hunger did not affect him was Texas able to understand. “You mean—for you, food is fugging optional?”

  “Yes.”

  Texas had been badgering Volos to eat, buying him soups, bread, sliced turkey, fresh fruit, then urging the stuff down him. “Jesus,” he said, his first thought a petty one—he could have been saving his money.

  “But pleasant,” Volos added.

  “Oh. Well, in that case.” Texas let it go, spurring his thoughts onward. “There’s still gotta be some things you need. Clothes. You can’t wear that same pair of jeans all your life. Bus fare.”

  “A guitar,” Volos said.

  “Right.” It did not surprise Texas that Volos intended to be a singer. That last night in the hotel he had heard the music of a strange dark angel. Unsleeping, Volos had sung softly to the shadows, and in Texas each note had turned to a bright-colored, yearning dream, making a bittersweet ache stay with him into daylight. It was with him as he spoke, softening his eyes but sharpening his voice.

  “So you need to buy a guitar. They don’t come free. What d’you plan to use for money?”

  And Volos did not respond to his tone, not even with lifted eyebrows, but merely reached into a jeans pocket and pulled out a flower of solid gold.

  So that the kid would not get hassled or cheated, McCardle was the one who went out and pawned the thing. On the way back to the hotel he had an idea and stopped at some of L.A.’s secondhand stores, which were well stocked by California-style upward mobility and by the movie industry. Without too much trouble Texas found what he was looking for: a cloak. When he got to the room he made the kid put it on before he let him leave.

  And handed over the money. He did not keep any for himself, and probably wouldn’t have done so even if the kid had thought to offer him any, which he did not. Volos thanked him, but not, Texas sensed, with any real comprehension of how much Texas had invested in him. But that was all right, if Volos didn’t realize about the money and about the rest of it, the investment that was not money. It was part of a kid’s job to be thoughtless, to take a lot for granted.

  So there went Volos. Typical kid.

  Texas had stood watching him walk out into the city of angels. Had looked down from the window until he was gone. Had remembered the sound of an angel’s voice in the night, and remembering, had known he would never forget, maybe not even when he was dead.

  That was what was keeping him in L.A. all right, and he might as well admit it: Volos. The kid might need him for something sometime.

  Dawn heated into day. The smell in the air took on substance, became visible, called itself smog. Texas added a line to Wyoma’s letter: “P.S. Wy, I did get into one fight, which is how the hat got ruined.”

  There had been no chance for him to show Volos how to punch, how not to lead with his chin. He tried not to think of the kid as hurt. Instead, he imagined him singing out there in the city somewhere, on a rooftop maybe, watching sunrise light up a thousand billboards. No rented room, no apartment, no condo for that one. He could be in Watts, La Habra, Van Nuys, Chinatown, wandering anywhere from the harbor to the hills. No sleep, few possessions. Texas envisioned Volos showering in a fountain. Conversing with a wino. Touching a hooker with his wings.

  Okay, maybe hurt. Somewhere in this huge city. Texas felt a cold wind of fear start to blow through his mind. He had to get up out of his chair, go find him. Unless he did, he might never see the kid again—

  His door opened, and Volos came in.

  “Kid!” With surprise and a jab of dismay Texas discovered who needed who. He felt his eyes prickle with relief. Volos was all right—and, what was more, Volos had come to him. He wanted to hug this six-foot-six child, this winged stranger.

  Volos was not looking at him, but glaring around the room instead. “It is all closed in, like a trap,” he said, appalled. “It is tiny. Even smaller than the other. How can you stand it?”

  The angel’s lack of greeting gave Texas’s eyes and smile a chance to right themselves. “Didn’t your mama ever teach you no manners, boy?” he teased.

  “Pardon?” Volos looked at him blankly.

  The kid didn’t understand teasing. Come to think of it, Volos didn’t seem to understand joking in general. If they had a sense of humor in heaven, it must have been different than the human sort. “Never mind,” Texas told him. “You want to go outside to talk?”

  “No. I will be all right in here for a little while.” Sighing, Volos flipped off his cloak and sat on the bed, his wings half-lifted so that they rested on it behind him, trailing from his shoulders like a sky-blue bridal train.

  “How’s the wing?”

  “Good.”

  As Texas could see, it was healing nicely. A few bone-white feathers showed amid the cerulean blue, the ones that had been broken in the fight. If color meant life in Volos’s wings, then those feathers had died, but Texas had not wanted to give up on them. He had spent most of an afternoon finding the right glue and mending them, overruling Volos, who had wanted to pluck them out and throw them away.

  Texas said, “So what’s new? What have you been doing?”

  “I have had an erection.”

  “A first?”

  Volos nodded. “Yes. It felt very good.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So what’s the matter?” Texas could see something was troubling the kid. He looked tired, and physically, Texas now knew, Volos did not get tired. His wings were blue, which meant Volos was blue as well.

  The youngster sighed. He said, “I am never satisfied. I wanted more. I thought I was going to do some fucking.”

  “You found somebody to help you with that?”

  “Yes. But it did not happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wanted to take my wings off.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then it all went wrong. Texas …” Volos looked down. “I am trying to understand. That first day, when you touched my wings, did something happen to you?”

  McCardle found that his mouth had gone dry. He tried not to show it as he said, “I felt something, yeah.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Sort of. No, not exactly. Not then.” Someday, he had a hunch, he would hurt plenty because of this youngster. So what else was new? Life hurt.

  “What, then? What did it feel like?”

  “I really don’t remember
, kid.” That was a whopper. Texas shook his head at himself and stood up. “C’mon. Let’s go take a walk. I got to mail a letter.”

  “Texas.” Volos did not move. “Please. I have to know.”

  McCardle stood looking at him a moment, took the one necessary step and laid a hand softly on sleek feathers. It was not that his memory needed help. He would remember the rush of that first touch of an angel’s wing when he was in his grave, probably. But the words to describe what he had felt were hard to find.

  “Texas?”

  He said in a voice gone only slightly husky, “You make me feel young.”

  “Young?”

  “Never say die. Hero riding into the sunset. Love forever. That sort of thing.”

  “Love,” Volos murmured, his tone puzzled. No reaction to the word other than bemusement, Texas noted. Okay, so he had spilled his guts and the kid barely blinked, okay. He should be used to putting himself on the line for people who took it for granted. He was a cop, and a father.

  He lifted his hand, stepped back.

  “But with those others,” Volos said, “on the street that first night, it was hate. They wanted to kill me.”

  “That’s a goddamn fact. Nothing I can do about that, kid.” Texas sat down again, looking at Volos.

  “And the woman tonight—she never saw me truly, yet she seemed afraid of me.”

  “Kid—I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I think I see, though.” Volos talked quietly to his long, skilled hands, rubbing at the guitar-string calluses on his fingertips. “The wings manifest. Or magnify. They take everything and make it—more. You are a good man, and—and touching me only made you better.”

  “Whoa,” Texas protested. “I’m no saint.” Since he was away from Wyoma, he had the Hustler magazines under the bed to prove it.

  “Of course not. A saint is a dead person. You are alive.”

  “I mean, it’s not that simple.” Texas had known a contract murderer who wept at weddings, a sadistic child abuser who wrote award-winning poetry, a rapist who was the sole and loving support of his aged father. “People aren’t like that, just plain good or bad.”

  “Tell that to the ruler of heaven and hell.”

  Texas heard something very bitter in Volos’s voice, and stared at him for a considerable moment before he said, “Tell me something. You should know.” His voice had gone very soft. “Does God really send people to hell?”

  “How can I tell?” The angel’s eyes flashed up, dark, startling, their color an angry purple. “What you call heaven was hell to me.”

  Texas flinched from the look in those eyes, tried to think of something calming to say. No time. Volos talked on, his words a stormwind, rising.

  “Eternity is a very long time to sing in a choir, Texas. Think of it. Eons and eons of circling the Throne, chanting ‘Gloria, Gloria, Gloria’—”

  “I always heard heaven is what you want it to be.”

  “For you humans, perhaps.” Volos said “humans” with venom. “Not for us slaves. You children of God, you think being a servant of God is all basking in the Lordlight, immortal and sinless, but without free will … To be without freedom is to be without a soul. Summoned here, summoned there, prayed to by generation after generation of mortal wretches, called upon, with no way to say no, with no self to hide in—and you think service to humankind is happiness, it makes us sweet, ladylike things—”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Texas remarked. “Not now that I know you.”

  “But you don’t know. Or you don’t like to remember. For every angel of mercy there is an angel of punishment. If you ever met Chayyliel—”

  “Chayyliel?”

  Volos’s voice softened as he wearied of vehemence. “My choirmaster. The one who will be allowed to put on beast form in the end days, who will swallow the world in a single gulp. When we sang badly he punished us with whips of flame.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes, I remember Jesus. I knew him, a little. He was another one who obeyed and obeyed and obeyed.”

  Texas felt his head start pounding; he was a chopper churning through L.A. smog. He wished he hadn’t started this. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know … for not knowing. I always thought heaven would be what you made it. Like life.”

  “No. It’s all a sham and a trick and an almighty joke. These wings of mine, are they not laughable? Is it not amusing to see me struggle with them?” Now, speaking of his wings, Volos sounded brattish, though a moment before, speaking of Chayyliel, his voice had crackled with truth. “They get in the way of everything,” he complained of his wings, nearly whining. “Movie seats. Bus rides. Shopping. Dancing. Fucking.”

  “Take it easy, big guy.” Texas gladly abandoned theological research. “Fucking will happen. Bound to. Come on, let’s walk. Your wings are going apeshit.”

  Texas got an envelope out and addressed and stamped it. Before he sealed his letter inside, though, he looked at it awhile, then added one more line:

  “P.P.S. Wyoma, are you really pissed? I sure would like to hear from you. Please write.”

  chapter five

  It was not difficult for Mercedes to track down his angel, and no great sacrifice was required for him to come into the holy presence. All he had to do was pay the cover charge at the Club Decimo, where Volos was headlining.

  On the other hand, there was a purgatory to be endured. The place was packed. Mercedes found himself standing in the back of the music hall, jammed disagreeably close to hetero males and their heavily scented dates.

  “I hear they done it by surgical implant,” a man with an orange mohawk was saying to his girlfriend. “Took condor wings, something like that, put them on him.”

  “That’s stupid. They can’t do that, not between different species.”

  “Sure they can. It’s no weirder than the stuff Michael Jackson does to himself.”

  His girlfriend looked at him with utmost scorn. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. So, say they did that. You telling me condor wings change colors?”

  “Microcircuitry.”

  “Nah,” a denim-jacketed man put in, an aging hippie with a gray ponytail. “It’s all lights. Special effects. You know, like an illusionist.”

  The mohawk and his girlfriend both ignored the ponytail, for they were too involved with detesting each other. When they went home, Mercedes knew, they would fall into each other’s arms, slobbering. The mohawk was young, hard, lean and mean in black leather, and the thought that he was going to let her female sloppiness touch his smooth male body disgusted Mercedes almost as much as the unidentified mammaries pressing into his back.

  “Dumb,” the girlfriend said.

  “Well, what do you think they are, big mouth?”

  “I think they’re just plain light-up fake wings. The trouble with men is they always want to complicate things.”

  The woman was right in a way, Mercedes thought. It was all very simple: The wings were real. Volos was just what he appeared to be. Though his reasoning, founded in his mysticism, was inexpressible, Mercedes Kell felt not a doubt in the world that soon he would meet an angel. The thought caused him excitement but no nervousness, for angelic intervention on his behalf was no more than he needed and deserved.

  “Me, I don’t care about no wings, man,” the ponytail announced to anyone who would listen. “What I say is, if he can’t rock my ass, I’m gonna kick his.”

  This, Mercedes sensed, was the mood of the crowd overall. Volos had come out of nowhere, he had shortcut his way to the stage, and no true rock fan really likes a gimmick. There were a lot of people there; they had come to see a freak show, but some of them had brought things to throw. The unfortunate glam rock band that opened for Volos drew only boos. Then there was a long wait before the main act, letting the audience mutter and grow restless, not a good move—

  The room lights went out.

  Not down, but out, hushing the cro
wd, turning its muttering to a whisper. In blackness like that of the chaos before creation Volos came onstage.

  Then a single still, small light dawned, and the dawn had wings.

  With his back to the congregation Volos stood, and the spotlight started just at his feathered shoulder blades and slowly spread, as slowly as the wings themselves were lifting and spreading to fill the small stage, shimmering, their color pulsing somewhere between crimson and electric-blue. Then Mercedes couldn’t see, there were people craning their necks in front of him, it made him furious, he missed the turn and that first bone-quivering downbeat, but he felt the tremor of the crowd amid the seism of the music and knew he was standing heart-deep in rock-and-roll history. Whether he could see or not, he was a witness: There was revelation in the room.

  He caught glimpses of Volos between the heads of annoyingly taller people. Even at this distance, the singer’s face gave Mercedes hope for some sort of understanding between the two of them, for it was so beautiful as to be nearly androgynous. And that body—Volos was tall, strong, and he carried himself with a huge, half-naked joy. Except for the plain leather guitar strap across one shoulder the guy wore nothing above the waist, nothing at all. If he were mine, Mercedes thought, I would dress him in gold armbands, gold chains, topaz pendants the size of his balls. He shivered in anticipation, for he had heard all the legends of rock star prowess, of groupies laid in the dressing room, the bus, the hotel stairwell, of clusterfucking, of lingam worship, of erections sustained while being cast in plaster.

  Volos looked as if he could do all those things. Yet, Mercedes thought, there was something vulnerable in the utter bareness of that exquisitely muscled, hairless chest.

  “Great buns,” he heard the woman behind him remark to her friend. “Great everything.” Her voice yearned.

  Not for you, Mercedes thought.

  “He’s a hunk,” the friend, another woman, agreed. “And he sure does know how to swing his ass. Hey. He even knows how to sing.”

  Not for you. Swine, you think the world is going to give you pearls to eat?