Angie stiffened, listening hard as the singer’s voice skidded without effort up the heightening rhythms of the words—words she had written. Changed somewhat, it was true. But nevertheless, hers. Her own.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
A strange coincidence? No. Impossible. On the airwaves she had just heard her creation, her mind child, a piece of her soul written down on a page of tablet paper, her words. How could they have gotten from her to—
“Volos,” the deejay told her. “The hot new kid from L.A., singing ‘Before I Die.’ And yes I’ve heard it’s true, he does have wings. Don’t ask me how, that’s all I know, folks, so you people phoning in, give me a break, huh? Coming up next—”
Angie turned her radio off and sat fingering her lips, thinking not at all of her father and his wrath, quite a bit of the squares of paper hidden in the linen closet upstairs, but most of all of the singer who had somehow stolen her soul from her, and of how she had heard in his voice the warmth of his throat and tongue.
chapter six
Texas had found himself a job at a dry-cleaning establishment, and it was there, in the steam-thick, chemical-scented hell of the back room, in the midst of machinery reminiscent of a medieval torture shop, that Volos one day came to see him. When the tall, black-cloaked figure walked in, all the poplin-clad Mexican women in the place clustered at the other end of the room, as if they were peasants in the presence of the executioner or chickens cowering in the shadow of a huge dark hawk.
Texas, however, merely nodded hello, unsurprised. Volos had been visiting him every few days to announce with equal delight his first live performance, his first recording session, his first ejaculation. Texas started laying bets with himself as to what was on the kid’s mind this time.
He called to the boss that he was taking his break, lifted his Stetson from a hook near the door and led Volos into the more breathable air outside. It was early fall. The Santa Anas had dispersed the city’s layer of smog, but also the aroma of jasmine. Now L.A. was dry and hot.
“How’s it going, kid?”
“Good.” They sat on a concrete retaining wall spray-painted with graffiti: “Love Stinks,” “Izzy Sucks Donkey Dick,” “God is Dead.” Volos fingered the varicolored lettering as he said, “They are starting to want to give me money.”
Texas had thought Volos’s manager was taking care of the money end of things for him. He exclaimed, “You mean Brett ain’t given you some already?”
“A little. Under the table, she said. I saw no table. But now there are problems.”
It was as Texas had bet himself, the kid wanted something, wanted advice or at least wanted to talk. Volos always wanted something whenever he came to him. That was all right, Texas guessed. What else was an old cowboy like him good for? Though he sometimes wondered: If other people had wings, if Texas had wings and Volos touched them, what would Volos feel? Anything? Was there anything in him to manifest, would anything ever change him at all? Or would he stay just the same, as if all he ever touched was himself?
Texas asked, as he was expected to ask, “What kind of problems?”
“There is a great deal of talk about a Social Security number and a birth certificate and a bank account.”
“Ouch.”
Volos swung his feet, kicking his booted heels against the wall and its spray paint, against an anarchy symbol done in runny orange. He said, “I would rather go on as I have been doing. But they say also that I will need a citizenship and a passport to go on tour. And this touring, it seems it is something I must do. Also, I have decided there are things I want, possessions, that require money.”
“Possessions? You?” Texas teased. “Like what?”
The angel did not respond to his light tone. He replied soberly, “A Harley-Davidson motorcycle.”
“A Hawg! You gonna be a Hell’s Angel?”
This time Volos comprehended the joke, and smiled. “Am I not already?”
“Guess so.”
Volos said, “Also, I want a convertible like Brett’s. Only mine will have a better stereo, and be black. But you see, there it is again, the problem. In order to drive any of these things I need a license. And to get the license I need the certificate of having been born and all the rest of it.”
“I see.”
“Your world is nuts for licenses and papers, Texas.”
“Don’t sweat the cattle in the heat of the day. Just hold your horses.” Texas was thinking. Like most cops, he felt little compunction about breaking the law if it seemed the thing to do at the time. There were laws, and then there was the right thing to do, and he had been around long enough to know the two were often not the same. Also, his state of limbo in L.A. made him feel ready to be reckless. What had he run away for except to be reckless? Though the risk he was contemplating was not about the law so much. More about giving away a secret part of himself.
He decided to do it. Said, “Volos. I had a son once, would have been about twenty years old now if he’d lived. You can use his birth certificate if you like.”
Volos looked at him with blue eyes as blank as an infant’s. “You had a son?”
“Only lived a couple days. Born in the hospital, so he got the birth certificate all right, but he died in his sleep the first night we took him home. Things were rocky for me and Wyoma, we didn’t have no money, we was far from our families, they mostly weren’t speaking to us—see, I was a McCardle, got a no-good for a father, and she was a Catholic when she should have been a Methodist—it’s hard to explain.” Texas frowned at the ground and his scuffed boots, trying. “They didn’t mind us getting in trouble, but they didn’t like us getting married. So we went away for a while. And then when the little guy died, we just moved on. It’s not that we done anything wrong to the baby. But he was young, our hearts was broke, and if we buried him ourselves and didn’t get no death certificate it was like he was still alive, see?”
“Yes.”
Nobody else Texas knew would have said it so cleanly, the simple “Yes.” He liked that in Volos, the kid’s no-frills honesty. Being around Volos always did something good for him, even when it drove him crazy. He smiled, feeling the new warmth in his voice as he said, “So you can be him if you want.”
“Be a dead person? But yes, I suppose it is the only way.”
“Don’t thank me,” Texas hinted.
“Pardon?”
“Never mind.” Texas didn’t know why, but he damn near loved this guy. “Okay, then. I’ll write Wyoma and tell her to send me the birth certificate. From now on you’re him.” Sliding off the wall, Texas stood on asphalt, making a small, awkward ceremony of saying the name. “You’re Flaim Carson McCardle. ‘Course you’ll still want to call yourself Volos, but it’ll be like a stage name.”
Volos stood also and shook his hand. The angel seemed to understand that no small thing was happening. “Flaim,” he said softly. “It is a beautiful name.”
“I thought so. I chose it. I like that kind of name that’s simple and means something.”
“An old Greek once said that men are flames and the world is a fire. Always the same, yet always changing.”
“He really said that?” Texas was astonished that someone else so long ago had thought the same things he thought, almost in the same words.
“Yes.”
“That’s what you are, then. A flame.”
The two of them stood for a moment in understanding so close it was almost union, like the union of two flames wavering momentarily into one, before Texas spoiled it. It was so good he had to spoil it. So good it made him, like a child on Christmas, want more. Not content just to give and be any longer.
“Volos. I’m doing something for you, now I want you to do something for me. I want you to help me—” He fumbled it slightly. “Help me find my father.”
“He is missing?”
“Been gone a long time now.”
“But how can I find him if you cannot?”
“I thought—you
being what you are—or were—there might be a way.”
Volos said, “No.”
“No, there’s not a way?”
“No, I will not do it.”
That blunt honesty again. This time Texas did not appreciate it at all.
You bastard. “Why not?”
“I came here to be human, Texas.”
“And I saved your goddamn human ass,” Texas said between his teeth, keeping his voice down almost to a whisper, “and took you in, and busted my butt nursing you, and spent damn near my last dime on you—and now there’s something you could do for me—”
“Texas, I can’t!” The kid was being human, all right. Sounded as human as Texas had ever heard him. Whining. Getting his own way, as usual. Something about Volos made Texas so panting mad-dog furious that his mother’s Methodist strictures took automatic hold on him, keeping his voice low, controlled.
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
“Texas—”
“Never mind. Forget it.” Texas came from a family that knew how to do these things, how to speak softly and turn a big knife of guilt. “I got to get back to work. Just forget I asked.” Stalking into the back of Keller’s Kleaners, into the hot, clanking hell where he spent his days, he did not glance at Volos to see him go.
That evening, though still angry fit to spit, he wrote the promised letter to Wyoma—because he had said he would do it, and also because it was a nearly surefire way of getting a reply out of her at last.
After he had sealed the letter he thought of Flaim, the baby he had seldom remembered for years, and of his two daughters, Starr and Merrilee, both already married. Even when he was home he had not seen as much of them as he would have liked. He missed them. Hell, he had been missing them already before he left them behind.
It was peculiar, the way he’d always been, feeling like a stranger in his own home place. Always turning his daydreaming to somewhere else. He’d never in his whole life realized how much he was from the hills he was born in. But now that he was far away, he knew: He was a mountaineer at heart, he came from West Virginia. The Indian legends said West Virginia was the spine of the world, the place where human beings were first created, and now Bob McCardle could believe it. He missed almost everything about the place: the hogbacks, and the trees—old people from his hills said West Virginia trees talked to God. He missed the Indian mounds. And he missed the way a man could look up at night and see the stars floating in the black sky big as water lilies.
He missed the mountains, and the one all his memories gathered round. He missed Wyoma.
During those hot, dry Santa Ana days, Mercedes moved in air so electrically charged it seemed to crackle. He noticed sunsets, saw some that were worth weeping over—though he did not weep, he never wept, had not done so since the childhood day of his first time with his first love, a boy he had not seen since eighth grade. He was twenty-eight now, and in L.A., and beloved of Volos, and filled to the point of giddiness with a sense of his own godlike well-being. The ionized air, the light shows in the sky, and angel Volos himself, all were uniquely for him, Mercedes Kell. California was unzipping itself, opening its penetralia to him. His career was on the climb. He would yet be recognized as great.
Already through Volos he had met Brett Decimo.
Actually he had introduced himself. Volos had no tact, no manners, and refused to play most of the social-pecking-order games. But it was Volos who had taken him to the private party at Club Decimo. No way would he have gotten in otherwise. Some of the most powerful people in the industry were there. And having intuited that he was Volos’s lover, Brett Decimo shook his hand with evident interest.
“Tell me,” she asked him, “does he do everything with his wings on?”
“Absolutely,” Mercedes responded with his most charming and mysterious smile. He had adopted Volos’s unspoken policy of neither affirming nor denying the presence and provenance of the angel’s wings, but letting people function on the basis of their assumptions that those interesting appendages were clever fakes. Mercedes, believing himself to be the only individual on earth sufficiently anointed by the hand of God to know Volos, was to be painfully disillusioned and bitterly jealous some time later, when he finally met Texas.
“Well,” Brett Decimo remarked to him, “I’ve met guys who wear their glasses to bed. But not my bed.” She showed Mercedes her very straight, very white teeth. “You know he likes women too?”
“Of course.” Mercedes had accepted even before he met Volos, as part of his theology of power, that the angel would be a bisexual. This ability, this virility, was potency. Mercedes had always found real men, the ones who could get it up with women as well as with him, far more attractive and exciting than the faggoty-looking ones the world identified as homosexuals. His ideal, like Plato’s, was the androgyne. He believed that this ideal had been Yahweh’s as well, as he created Adam from clay. It had all been there in Adam. That business with the rib afterward, the division of humans into two sexes, had been an afterthought, a tragic mistake, the beginning of the Fall and of alienation.
The blond and important woman to whom he was speaking, however, would not understand or care about much of this. She would want to keep things light. Mercedes quipped at her, “Like Mae West said, why cut yourself off from half the population?”
Brett’s Hollywood smile softened, became fairly genuine. One of the odd ironies of Mercedes’s life, as he knew well, was that women seemed to like him even though he did not particularly like them. With Brett, however, things were different. She could like him if she wanted to, because it was not his exposed chest or his bared homosexuality that attracted her to him—it was his ambition. Bright, hard, and calculating, their eyes met, and they recognized each other across the gender barrier: They were two of a kind. They understood each other. Brett nodded.
“Come have a drink with me next time you’re free,” she invited before she turned away to greet other guests.
It was all he could have asked for at the moment—though, of course, soon enough he would ask for more. And so would she. That was what it was all about, this matter of grabbing a comet by the tail and hanging on. When Volos burned to ash, suicided in the sunblaze of his own fame, she would be there, as high in the Hollywood hotshot rankings as Volos’s wings could lift her. And so would Mercedes be there, right by her side.
At the buffet he got himself a mushroom stuffed with snow crab and langostino, which he ate with slow delectation. He licked bits of seafood from his lips with the supple tip of his tongue. Caught Volos’s eye across the room, and Volos smiled at him, the sunrise smile of a child in love. Mercedes was doing just what he had said he would: He was making an angel very happy.
Yes, things were going very well for Mercedes Kell. And it was not just a matter of riding to immortality on Volos’s broad shoulders. The sexual liaison gratified him too. Everything about Volos turned him on, even the touch of his wings. Especially the quivering touch of his wings on naked skin. … Quite simply, Volos was the best lover he had ever experienced. He would have wonderful memories to savor when he moved on to even more pleasurable things.
Lying in the satin-and-polyester nest of the waterbed with his lover the night after his quarrel with Texas, Volos found himself for the first time indifferent to the skilled touch of Mercy’s lips and hands. Out of sync with the rhythms of lovemaking, bone-weary, unaroused, he felt his chest heave and knew that he had done something deeply wrong.
What of it? Had he not become flesh in order to do wrong?
Yet he had thought it would be a matter of free choice, of a head-tossing defiance, and now he was finding—it had not been that way at all, he had wanted to do the favor for Texas, he would have done it if … if … Was this the almighty joke, was this what it meant to be human—to want to do right, yet do wrong and wrong and wrong?
He struggled out of the bed’s clinging touch. “Some other time,” he told Mercedes.
His lover was not angry. “Think
ing of a song?”
“Something like that, yes.” Which was a lie, and another way in which he did evil, by letting it be thought that he wrote his own songs. He had told himself he did not care that it was wrong. That night, though, he knew he did care, and he knew why. He wanted to do this thing, he wanted to create music out of himself the way he made sperm. Being unable to write songs was like being impotent. There were things about himself he had failed to fully imagine. He lacked memories, he lacked a childhood, he lacked parents and a hometown to love and hate. He could not have been Volos the rocker at all if it were not for the young woman somewhere far to the east, whose name and provenance he did not know.
Some important aspect of him was missing.
He pulled on his jeans and his boots, kissed Mercedes, and went out in the night to wander the streets.
He loved the night. There was peace in it, and loneliness, and danger. The peril—that of ravaged people who roamed, as he did, in the night—the danger only made the peace more lovely, and the peace made danger’s knife glint more bright.
Black-cloaked, black-jeaned, black-booted, he strode under the broad black shadow of a freeway overpass. There he could see nothing and thought at first that nothing could see him until he heard the pigeons murmuring from their roost somewhere above his head.
“Look at him. Humans don’t know how to dress. He could put on anything he wants, and he’s all one color, like a wretched crow.”
“At least he has those nice shiny toenails. See? Like tin foil.”
“Oooo, tacky. You have bad taste, Banana Beak.”
“I like a little something different, White Ass. Trendy. Daring. New wave.”
“Just what I should expect of a variant. Never trust a hen in speckled feathers.”
“I like high fashion.”
“Low class is what you mean.”
There were, Volos decided, two of them. The female, she of the impugned beak, gave her soft utterances edge by means of that hard nasal protuberance. The male, he of the white rump-patch, had a bitchy charm that reminded Volos of Brett or Mercedes.
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