But what he couldn’t have, Volos had decided, he was not going to stage with performers. As one who knew no other way to sing than from the heart, Volos held an opinion of performers much like Texas’s opinion of whores.
“I have a new song to work out,” he reported. The band quieted at once, too quickly, to hear him. “This is somewhat different. A love ballad, almost. Listen.” What he should have done really was work up a lead sheet, but Volos found it difficult to write. By way of autograph, all he could manage quickly was a sort of vee-bird, the kind of thing small children put in the skies of their crayon pictures. He knew several hundred languages, but he had forgotten to imagine the relays that send language to the hand, so he held a pencil like a first-grader and stabbed holes in paper with it. Necessarily, his band learned his songs by ear.
He and the new guitar sang the ballad for them:
What you call heaven I call hell
It’s all shame and blame
So how can I tell
If I love you….
“Nice,” opined Jack, the keyboard man, in his buttoned-down way after Volos had finished.
They talked about a heartbeat tempo, dark-honey guitar, a few word changes. “Citadel” struck them as obscure. Volos agreed, and they changed the word to “chapel.” The drummer clicked his sticks to get them going, and after that it was Volos’s hot voice that melted them, almost miraculously, into oneness. When the song had come to him a few hours before, he had felt a young woman’s desolation as if it were his own. He sang as if for her alone.
“Man, how do you do that?” Red begged him. The freckled guitarist’s frequent ardor made him seem younger than he was. He was, in fact, a longtime sessions player, and it showed when he said, “I’ve worked with pros who did worse on the tenth try than you do on the first.” They were all, even Jack, looking at Volos with something like awe. But awe is made of distance and fear. He did not want that. What was he to say to them? He turned away.
“Hey, man, something wrong?”
“No,” he said to the wall. “Let us do it again.”
What you call heaven I call hell
It’s all shame and blame …
Then—he could no longer sing, or even hear the song, or move. It was the shock of his incarnate life to date. Taking on flesh, he had thought he would never suffer it again, but—it was happening, the familiar intrusion, the invasion, the rape of his mind they called prayer. Volos stood rigidly, with taut face and wings clenched into the shape of a long, quivering heart, violated by a distant summons:
Volos
Volos
Angel of anarchy
His band faltered to silence and looked at him curiously.
Volos
Volos
Come rescue me
“What’s the matter, man?” the drummer asked.
He managed to move his mouth, to speak. “Nothing,” he whispered.
Volos
Volos
God, he could feel it inching closer. “Shut up!” he begged between clenched teeth.
“Hey, man, are you okay?” Red looked worried. They all did. Their concern impinged on Volos like the prayer. He turned and lunged blindly out of the house, cloakless. In his benighted garage his black Hawg awaited him like a prize stallion sulking in an oversized stall. Once he was on the Harley and moving, no one would bother him.
Volos
Volos
Come to me
Not even Her. Whoever She was.
Volos roared off into the starless city night, running away, drowning out her still-distant voice. His wings caught the wind and spread, translucent, gradually lightening from angry red to fire-orange in the streetlamp light. Speed slapped his face, lifted his hair. Black bike, black night, dark hair flying—he loved these things. Even She could not take them away from him.
In part he knew who she was. It was her, the one whose songs spoke straight to his mind, and somehow she knew him better than he knew her, she called him angel and she was summoning him by name. And he owed her something, he knew that. But loyalty had its limits. No matter who she was, no matter what she said or did, he would not go back to the role of servant, of guardian angel, of comer-when-called. Not even for Texas could he do that. He would scald in her tears first. He would fry in hell.
chapter eight
Gabe, the fussed-over firstborn, had always been the one who was wired too tight, while little two-year-old Mikey was more easygoing. Therefore it was Gabe whom Angela had to carry in her arms as she tried to find shelter her first dark night in the worst streets of downtown L.A. He was too heavy for her, but the fatigue of the long journey and the sight of a hydrocephalic beggar had combined to send him out of control. He would not or could not walk. Lugging the tote bags and the screaming child, with Mikey trailing at her side through the filthy bus station and out to the even filthier streets, Angie felt beyond screaming herself. She had gone numb. The sight of men selling stolen jewelry and the come-ons of rip-off artists could not make her more frightened than she already was.
Her money was all but gone. The long days on the road, even on a nearly constant diet of hot dogs, had been more expensive than she had previously imagined possible. And she had never expected to be on her own for so long, had not thought that Volos, her soulmate, could fail to come to her. It all seemed crazy now, the way she had run to him. Her notion of a linkage, a bond with him was nothing more than a sexually repressed neurotic’s delusion, and that made her a nut case, and she had acted like one. Now she had to find a charity somewhere to take her in, or else spend the night on the street. She didn’t want that… but once around the first corner she could carry Gabe no farther. She sank down on the sidewalk, leaning back against a cinder-block wall. Gabe sprawled on her, weeping more quietly, with his face hidden between her breasts. Mikey sat down and pressed himself against her, far too quiet. A ravaged old man shuffled past on bare feet the gray color of a bloated tick, his toenails so long they curled down under his toes, making him limp. Gabe needed a Kleenex. Mikey began to hiccup. Poor kids, even being taken away from her by their hellfire grandpa might have been better for them than this. She had gone and proved everybody right, she was a worthless mother—
Hellfire. She would show them worthless.
As if her desperation had made her into nothing but a torch waiting to be lit, as if a match had struck, Angela Bradley blazed into incandescent fury.
“Volos!”
She shrieked the name aloud, startling her children—but her rage was not at them, or even at the two God-fearing men, her father and her husband, who had driven her to this place where already she had seen an old woman squatting and defecating in a dumpster. Rather, like the wrath of the mob on Calvary day, her anger was all for the savior, the rescuer who had failed.
“Volos, you wretch, I am calling you!”
Except for her frightened sons, no one actually within earshot paid any attention to her. It was not the sort of place where a woman’s screaming meant much. In a nearby alley a hooker administered a stand-up quickie and collected her fee, already on the lookout for the next john. Across the street teenagers peddled crack.
“You half-finished excuse for a human being! Volos! You come to me now, or I swear I’ll tell the world everything I know about you!”
She raged with no effect whatsoever on the whores and pimps and dealers or the drifters lying stoned in stairwells. But miles away, on his Hawg for the seventh night in a row and roaring far up the Hollywood hills, Volos felt her white-hot summons go through him like a barbed spear through a river carp, like a lightning strike through a yellow pine, and there was nothing he could do but obey her. Against his will, but at once.
Instantly. So hastily that he left his beloved Harley lying by the roadside and used his wings for the first time in his incarnate life, flying to her at a speed that far exceeded anything his bike could do. Just as she had ranted herself out and leaned back silent and panting against the chill wall, arms around he
r two frightened little boys, a booted apparition landed with a thump in front of her. A tall visitant with glaring eyes and wings the color of dried blood. Volos.
“Where have you been?” she snapped at him. Because she had given up on him, had forgotten she was ever in love with his picture in Metal Mag, no longer remembered how she had once kissed a centerfold poster of his perfect full-lipped face, the sight of him made her angry all over again. There was much more she could have said to him if she had not been so tired.
“You—called—me.” He seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Out of breath, she thought. Served him right.
“I’ve been calling you.” She heaved herself to her feet, graceless with fatigue, conscious of how her jeaned legs spraddled and her hair hung in strings and the fact that she smelled. Never mind all that. Rebellious. To hell with being attractive, especially for this hugging-himself hotshot of an angel. Tote bags hunching her shoulders, a child hanging from each hand, she stood weary and proud.
“You—made me—fly.”
“Well, about time, isn’t it?”
“No! By the devil, no! I am never in eternal suffering going to be a servant again!” He took a step toward her, wings half-lifted and rustling, head forward like that of a charging stallion, and she saw that his choked speech was due not to breathlessness but to anger that maybe matched hers. The realization did not trouble her. She had reached a point where she was not afraid of anything.
He raged, “I am no one’s guardian, no one’s rescuer, and no one is going to make a carrier pigeon of me! Or a savior. I don’t care how much you recognize me. You don’t get to put my head on a plate or nail me to a tree.”
None of this impressed Angie, but little Mikey started to cry. Lifting him, she said automatically to Volos, “Shush. You’re scaring the babies.”
“Babies.” His gaze shifted, and even in the shadowy street the whites of his eyes showed. “Babies yet!”
Angela commanded, “We need a place to stay and something to eat and a bath.”
“I have told you, I am not an errand boy anymore! Why should I—”
“I AM YOUR LYRICIST.” She did not raise her voice, but more than she knew, Angela Bradley was her father’s daughter; the statement crackled with her righteous wrath. “You have taken my words and called them your own. Have you forgotten?”
Volos stood silent, his wings folded and still.
“And if that’s not enough,” Angie added, “you have destroyed my marriage.” She believed this at the time, with the unaccustomed anger in her—more anger than she would have previously thought possible.
Volos blurted, “I have done that? But you said it was all shame and blame, that you could not tell if you loved him.”
“You used—you used Ennis’s song? You swine!”
Her shout made Gabe start again to cry, adding his thin, weary clamor to Mikey’s. “Shush,” Volos told Angie sourly. “You are frightening the babies.” He reached down and picked up the youngster, slinging him over his shoulder. Gabriel’s startled, pudgy hand brushed the angel’s wing, and the boy quieted at once, settling his head against Volos’s naked neck to sleep. Watching, with Mikey still sobbing in her arms, Angie felt a perverse annoyance that Volos had done something helpful just as she had decided to hate him always.
“You are right that I owe you for the songs,” he said. His voice had gone very quiet.
“Thank you.” She was quiet also, but in a different way.
Even in this most inhospitable of downtowns at three in the morning, Volos was a celebrity. A small crowd of street people had gathered around him. The shuffling man with the blue bare feet and the laming toenails reached out and touched one finger to the very tip of a pinion. Tears began to wash his gray face, but when Volos felt the touch he stepped sharply away.
“Come,” he told Angie, striding down the street. The tote bags bounced and dug into her shoulders as she struggled to keep up with him.
“Where, O Superstar?”
“To get you a cab.” He slowed down somewhat when he had left the crowd behind.
Later, when she knew him better, she would understand why he had not offered to take the baggage from her or to comfort weeping Mikey with the touch of a wing. It was not that he was evil, though as a fallen angel he tried hard to be evil. It was just that he was incomplete.
At the time, however, she detested everything about him, from his boots to his curling mane of dark hair to the perfect ass swinging between his wings.
He found a cab near the bus station, gave the driver money and the address and, when the man asked, an autograph. “Go in through the garage,” he told Angie. That door, Angie later learned, was kept unlocked because Volos generally forgot to carry a key. “If Texas is there, just tell him I sent you.”
Placed on the taxicab seat, Gabe woke up, grasped the situation, and started to cry again. “Birdman come with us!” he wailed.
“I can’t, little one. I do not fit in.” Volos spread his wings partway in illustration. “It is not possible for me to get into a cab. I’ll walk.”
“Not fly?” Angie asked, so startled that she spoke to him almost civilly. It had always seemed to her that flying would be wonderful.
“No. I look laughable when I fly.” Volos knew himself to be a dunce among angels. “I cannot keep my legs from dangling like a crane’s.”
“But—why did you keep your wings, then?” What were wings for but to fly?
“It was not my idea. I hate my wings. They get in the way of everything.”
“Birdman come too!” Gabe implored.
“Little one, listen, you go to sleep. Wait a minute. Here.” On the inner surface of his left wing he found a small feather that was coming loose and handed it to Gabe. “I will see you when you wake up, yes?”
“You might give one to Michael too,” Angie told Volos crossly.
“Oh.” He did so, then stood balancing on the uneven sidewalk as the cab drove away, watching after it in bewilderment.
By all the little devils, but it was shiversome to see her. There she was, physical, separate, in a very appealing female body, and he had never really thought of her in that way. The songs—they were heart of his heart, soul of his soul. It had always seemed to Volos that anyone listening to those songs should know him utterly, should understand him. Yes, they had come to him from somewhere else; as clear and eerie as a far-side-of-the-world radio signal skipping off the stratosphere they had reached him in the starless L.A. nights, and he had committed them to memory, nothing more, only changing them to suit the shape his guitar gave the music. And yes, he had sensed direction and gender, he had known that his telepathic soulmate was female—what of it? Genderless most of his existence, he might just as readily have incarnated as a woman, except that he selfishly wanted the more privileged life of a male. Women were the lowest choir here, an underclass—no wonder he felt so much at one with them. No wonder there were those who looked at his face and snickered that he should have been a girl.
This woman, he had known about her all along—yet she had seemed so much a part of him that, meeting her, it was as if he had cut his thigh open to look at his body’s longest bone.
She had a straight, stark flow of dark hair, a wide brow, very direct eyes. A heart-shaped face, golden skin, and a pointed chin, as if she had stepped out of an old masterpiece, a Botticelli. There was something level and anchored and innocent about her gaze, as if she believed in God. Yet something wise, as if she believed in more gods than one.
Volos sighed, knowing that here was another mortal who could hurt him.
He started walking, not toward the Hokey Hacienda or toward where he had left the motorcycle, but toward West Hollywood. It would be dawn when he knocked at the apartment door, and he hoped Mercedes would not mind being awakened. Suddenly he needed the ease of that bed and the bliss that clever body could offer him and the comfort of Mercy’s kiss.
Looking back later, Texas saw how Volos, supernatural being an
d fallen angel, had happenstanced into his life, backed in almost, just another chance encounter in the big city—but Angela, mortal woman, had dawned on him like an epiphany, turning to him from the first the face of someone holy. A goddess. No, a madonna. That was what he thought the first moment he saw her standing proud and dirty in the doorway, with a sleeping child in one arm and a stumbling toddler clinging to the other hand and her hair flowing off her brow long and smooth as the Virgin Mary’s headcloth: a quiet-faced pietà, a brave mother. He thanked whatever power was intermittently looking after him that he had not brought a floozie home with him that night.
As long as Angie lived in that house, he did not bring one home again.
His hands remembered what it was like to be a father. He took Gabe from her, got the child halfway fed and approximately bathed and put down behind a barrier of chair backs to keep him from rolling off the bed onto the floor. She laid Michael in the same bed and rewarded Texas with a tired smile. It dizzied him. He had forgotten how a mother’s smile could do that, made up as it was of tenderness and weary cynicism and the bone-deep surrender that goes with loving a baby. There was not much need for talk between Texas and Angela. She saw him for what he was, and in her eyes he saw himself: more in danger than Volos. Not a clumsy fighter who always led with his chin, but a blundering country boy who led with his heart.
He went back to bed, and found to his amazement when he awoke that the exhausted children were up before him. The sound of their birdlike voices filled the house. Texas had forgotten how tired or overburdened children got to be like self-winding tops, moving louder and faster by the moment until something stopped them. He went out to the equipment-filled living room and found Volos there, flat on the floor, wings outspread, with both little boys bobbing atop his broad chest.
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