Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  There was a black moon up there in the sky, big, like a hole to let in the cold, like a black roller to flatten the clouds. When the white horse carried Birdman behind it, Mikey stirred and whimpered in his sleep. But Birdman came out the other side, and Mikey smiled, because on the white horse with him Daddy was riding.

  “I gotta admit, it’s different,” Texas remarked.

  It was Christmas morning, and sometime during the night the Santa in residence had come up with a tree. Texas hoped Volos hadn’t actually stolen it out of somebody’s yard, but suspected he had. It appeared to be some sort of palmetto or dwarf palm, and Volos had stood it in Gabe’s sand pail in the living room corner and decorated it with all sorts of oddball things: red and yellow guitar picks, crayons, wads of crumpled aluminum foil, cutout paper birds, cereal box Frisbees, toilet tissue garland, a red string tie liberated from Texas’s room, a swag of chain that looked like it came off a bank’s ballpoint pen—

  “How in blazes did you get your hands on that?” Texas asked Volos.

  The kid shrugged, making his shoulder feathers rustle. “I asked the man at the bar for it. It seems he collects them, so he gave me many. He says tell you he hopes you are well soon. He says Merry Christmas.”

  “Well, cut off my head and call me Shorty.”

  There were a number of the cheap metal chains on the tree. “I think it’s the prettiest Christmas tree ever,” Angela said. The way she was gazing, her dark eyes big as a deer’s in her pale face, she looked like she meant it.

  The little boys weren’t wasting any time admiring the tree, Texas noticed. They had ripped straight into their presents, which were piled underneath it. Settling into seats nearby, Angie and Texas watched. Volos stayed on his feet. Hovering.

  “I could have gone out and bought tree things,” the kid said. “You know, those chaser lights and things. There were some stores still open. I checked. But I did not feel as if the things in the store were real.” Volos windmilled his arms, trying to explain something important to him, struggling with what he wanted to say. “For me to make it be Christmas, it was as if I had to do it with my hands. Just like to make it be music, I must pull it out of the guitar.”

  “That’s okay, kid.” Texas did not understand, but did not feel he really had to. Some things were well enough left alone.

  “But it is maybe not okay. I could have bought things last night, and I did not. I never got presents for either of you.”

  Relief and a sort of rueful happiness bubbled up inside of Texas so that he had to laugh. “Volos, that’s fine. I never got you anything either.”

  “Your heart is not broken?” The kid was looking at him so anxiously that Texas got up from his chair and hugged him.

  “Merry Christmas. Hell, no. My heart ain’t even dinged.”

  “Angela?”

  She was smiling. Texas loved the way she smiled. She said, “Volos, nearly every day since I came here has been like Christmas to me.”

  Under the tree Mikey squealed and held up a stuffed toy, his gift from Volos, bought weeks before: a plush white prancing horse.

  chapter ten

  Coming out of Club Decimo one dawn, Volos found a priest awaiting him. A young man. Black shirt, white Roman collar, gray starved face that yearned like many of the faces Volos met, audience faces mostly, as if people thought he could somehow hear them, understand them, accept them, when in fact he craved the same of them. The priest stood still and did not call out or come forward with pawing hands, but Volos recognized the look on his face and stopped in front of him, waiting.

  The priest said, “Thank you. I have very much been wanting to talk with you.” His voice was soft, and shivered with emotion. Volos merely nodded.

  The priest asked, “Are you Him? Have you come again?”

  Volos answered, low-voiced, “Some people say I am the cock of Satan.” The hate mail had been coming in by the bagful from people who found his wings blasphemous, and therefore his behavior offensive, his lyrics obscene. “Why would you believe I am your savior?”

  “For that reason. People did not think much of him either.”

  “Please,” Volos said. “I’m not—”

  But the young priest went on speaking, intense yet dreamy. “Now they do not want to remember the way he was, you know. They like to forget that he scourged the money dealers out of the temple. That he danced at weddings. That he thumbed his nose at bigwigs, and broke all the rules, and loved women, and liked food, and gloried in wine.”

  “I know those things,” Volos said. “I know he was not a candy-ass. I remember him. He was my friend, and I’ve never forgiven what happened to him. Please just shut up and go home. I am not the one you want.”

  “Take courage,” the priest said.

  “Please. No. You know what they did to him.”

  Something about the incident with the priest spurred Volos to undergo the passion he had been putting off, the communion, the mystic act, the bonding into brotherhood. That night after rehearsal he had his band stay and choose a name. It had to be done in the witching hours, of course. But first he had to explain that he wanted no name that had anything to do with wings or heavenly mythology. He was a rocker, not an angel.

  “Then what the hell do you wear the wings for, man?” Cisco, the drummer, wanted to know.

  “Just ignore the wings, please? Humor me.”

  “Okay, but I think we’ll be missing out—”

  “Fuck the wings! I hate the goddamn wings!”

  His irrational behavior allowed them to roll their eyes and not say what they were thinking: Why did he not take them off? But Red said, “Hey, Volos, like it or not, you’re our front man. Without you we ain’t nothing. The name’s got to have something to do with you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Yes, it does. I think it does. What about you guys?” Nods all around. “So if you don’t want it to do with the wings, then tell us something else about yourself. Where you from?”

  “Air.”

  “Give us a break, man.”

  “It is true. I was nothing.”

  “You gotta come from somewhere.”

  “I was a minor Slavic fertility god.”

  They laughed and kicked that around awhile, brain-storming names: Electric Prick, What Rhymes with Venus, Man from Nantucket. Volos had never heard some of the filthier limericks, and was delighted with them. But a gross-out name did not suit the group’s image, and everyone knew it. In the metal spectrum, Volos was way over at the “lite” edge. If he had ever truly wanted to be black-snake heavy-duty steely-evil, he had failed. There was an innocence about him.

  So after a while his band members started asking the basic human questions again: What is your sign? Your birthplace? Your real name? (For they made the assumption, reasonable in L.A., that “Volos” was a pseudonym.) With a sense first of struggle, then of surrender to the lie that might be more true than he knew, Volos told them: Gemini. Moundsville, West Virginia. Flaim Carson McCardle.

  He expected them to make the connection with Texas, but they did not. Texas was a sort of janitor to them, just another nice guy, nearly anonymous.

  They were, however, impressed by the name. “Christ,” the no-nonsense keyboard player said. “A name like Flaim, and you changed it?”

  “It was not my choice. I like the name,” Volos protested. “All men are fire. Burn and die and turn to dirt. Earth is the inferno.” As a bodiless being, full of envy for human passion, sometimes he had been able to see the air waver above people’s heads as if above candle flame.

  “Hey,” said Red softly.

  “Yeah,” said both the drummer and the keyboard man.

  Thus it was that Burning Earth was christened. And once named, immediately it began inexorably to take on identity. The lead guitarist started to grow his hair longer and dyed it to match his name, red. The drummer began hiding his barrel chest under chains and pendants. Even the balding keyboard man abandoned button-downs in favor of open collars.
Except for the drummer, who was overweight and had to sit down, they began wearing their jeans skintight. Red smoked joints before rehearsal. Cisco started carrying a flask.

  The Buddy Holly look-alike woman, on the other hand, surprised Volos by shouting at him that she was a married woman, how could he expect her to go on tour and leave her family behind? She quit. Her anger astounded him, but within a week he forgot her, once Brett had replaced her with a lank, morose, and hollow-chested individual named Bink. Tall, dark, and obnoxious, he had cobra tattoos on each arm and wore a rat-skull earring. By that time Burning Earth had progressed to the point that he fit right in.

  Volos and Burning Earth cut their album in a few days’ time, straight and honest-to-the-devil as they could do it, with not much mixing and very few overdubs. It turned out fresh as a city kid’s mouth. The cover consisted of a shot of Volos’s unclothed back, off-center and close up to show the small downy feathers at the base of the left wing and the sleek coverts of the right. The wings were ice-blue—Volos had been depressed at the time of the shoot. The album was hot, the band was cookin’, Volos himself was a hot property, yet he was depressed a lot lately, his heart leadened by a sense of foreboding, of pain on the way.

  For no perceptible reason he titled the album Scars.

  The Burning Earth Scars tour opened at Shoreside Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.

  For this venue—Volos’s first in anything larger than a music hall—Angie had costumed him virtually the opposite of the way Mercedes wanted him. No beaded velvets or sequined satins, no glamour, no glitz. For the first set Volos went out in bare feet and a pair of jeans Angie had carefully destroyed for him so that they showed a webwork of angel-white cotton and earth-dark flesh nearly to his waist. From backstage Angie watched with her heart aflame. It had been she who had suggested the mutilated jeans, and Volos had embraced the concept at once, as she had known he must from knowing his music. Volos could sing angel pure, milk white and honey sweet when he wanted to. But to him it was not the clean tone that was truly beautiful; it was the sweating, distressed tone—warped, tormented, distorted, dirtied—that he loved. Music as gritty as a day laborer, wide open like a wise old whore, music that had been through something. Likewise the jeans.

  Angie had laid open one pair of her own jeans to the thigh, and wore them that night, and gazed with deerlike eyes as Volos rocked, swayed, sang. Those in the front rows could tell he wore no Calvin Kleins under those Wrangler slims with the button fly, under those half-concealing wings. And already they were going wild, but it was she, she, who had arranged the torn cloth over that body and who sometimes touched those wings.

  And who had written the songs … but somehow it seemed more important that she had touched the body, the wings.

  The music throbbed around her and through her, it was alive, a huge thing, a heartbeat, and she floated in its shadowy womb with an angel whispering in her ear, and she was wise, innocent, preverbal, her whole world was light and color and the strange brilliant butterfly shapes of electric guitars. Volos carried a blood-red one whose double-cutaway design made it seem horned like a demon. Or not so much carried it as wore it, a huge red pendant hanging at his crotch. Angie knew, without any need to think why, that seeing the guitar on Volos excited her, gave her intimations of potency, of power and strength. She had lifted his guitar once and found the thing unbelievably heavy even with the neck strap in place. But Volos bore it like a part of himself, an appendage slung from his broad brawny shoulders then jutting from his underbelly as those great wings jutted from his back.

  Wings lifted in strata of light, pulsing as electric-pink as a remembered radio, the boogie box somebody had stolen from her on her trip west. Amid that neon-rose glow Volos turned a tone knob all the way from steely to mellow and eased into a new song she had written for him.

  You can fly

  You’d rather walk by my side

  You could live

  Someday you’ll have to die

  You’re not afraid.

  There is sunrise in your eyes

  Get out your black bike

  Let’s take the long ride

  Let me put my arms around you

  For the long ride.

  You are so very beautiful

  Half animal

  Half god

  Your heart is a wild stallion

  Your thoughts are clouds in the wind

  And I am weak with love of you

  I turn to you like a child

  Get out your black bike

  Let’s take the long ride.

  Let me put my arms around you

  Let me lay my head between your wings

  For the long ride.

  It seemed not to trouble the audience that in singing this tender ballad Volos was declaring love to himself. Nor did it trouble Angela. To her he walked on water. Even in his self-absorption (of which she knew as much as anyone), to her he could do no wrong. The exaltation she felt when she touched his wings was like worship, a sharp striving joy untinged with the resentment she had always felt in the presence of her father’s God.

  Someone came and stood beside her. It took her a moment to gather herself out of the music enough to glance over and see a Hoss Cartwright hat shadowing anxious eyes: Texas. He bent to speak directly into her ear, though standing as they were near the PA stacks, way over their heads in sound, drowning in the stuff, he could probably have shouted without disturbing anyone.

  “I think I finally got the security nailed down,” he told her. Not that security was any part of her job. It was his problem. But Texas was a sweet old guy, he worried about Volos, he worried about her and her kids, and now he was worried about crowd management and needed her to tell him she was sure everything would be all right. She smiled vaguely at him and turned back to watch Volos just as he reached a climax, arching his body, flinging his head back so that his dark hair coiled down between his shivering wings. Not aware that she did so, Angie sighed.

  “Ange.” The voice sounded so much like Ennis’s that she jumped, jolted by the same kind of sudden reflexive guilt that sometimes hit her when she thought she saw Ennis on the street or in a store. At first glance every sturdy, brown-haired young man was Ennis to her. Some days she seemed to run into him everywhere. But she was getting used to it now, and anyway the man beside her was just Texas again, peering at her.

  “Angie, you know he probably don’t have no idea of the way you feel about him.”

  Volos, he meant. It did not surprise her that Texas had noticed. Sometimes it seemed to her that Texas didn’t have much to do except hang around and watch a person. He was kind of useless. But never mind that, because he was a nice guy, maybe her best friend in L.A. He was sweet with her kids, and he took care of them for her whenever she couldn’t find a sitter.

  She shrugged her shoulders at him. Shoulders blessedly uncut by bra straps, blessedly comfortable in T-shirt and nothing more. Sometimes in public she had to restrain herself from lifting her hands to her delighted, wayward breasts. Sometimes she walked stiffly. Her new freedom was made half of euphoria, half of terror—of her own body, its new self-consciousness, its passions, its unexplored abilities, its power. Nothing in her upbringing helped her know how to make her body send signals to a man.

  “No reason why he should,” she told Texas.

  “You kidding? You don’t give yourself enough credit. What you want to do is get yourself a little makeup, maybe a hair ribbon, a pretty dress—”

  “It’s all right with me if he doesn’t notice me,” Angie said.

  “For crying out loud, Angie, you mean you’re just going to go on like you been?”

  She said softly, “Sure. Isn’t it enough?”

  Coming offstage after the first set, Volos walked past her, all gleaming with sweat, and smiled. It was enough.

  From a platform atop the gantries with the lighting man, Mercedes waited for the second set, still seething over the costuming of the first. Destroyed denim. Jesus
Christ, how déclassé. Volos listened far too much to his little chippie of a seamstress.

  The lighting man’s intercom crackled, and he spoke softly into it, then pushed the big switch. The stage went dark, but spots lashed the crowd, and under their stimulation it screamed like a single huge primitive animal and lifted a hundred thousand cirri into the tides of the night. The arms held T-shirts, hand-lettered banners, homemade Styrofoam wings. It irked Mercedes that Volos would not let Brett franchise somebody to sell light-up wings. It irked him that the angel insisted on these Stone Age staging arrangements and was not interested in a laser show, computerization, a dance troupe, anything programmed or choreographed or state-of-the-art. Lots of things about Volos irked Mercedes these days.

  He waited, not totally immune to the excitement. Somewhere backstage, roadies with faint red flashlights were leading the rock god back to the stage.… No telling for sure what color Volos’s wings would be when the spot shone on him, but Mercedes, who was as good as anyone at reading the singer’s moods, decided that anything in the blue to orange range would be safe.

  “Magenta,” he directed the lighting man.

  “Right, boss.”

  The intercom crackled again, a bank of fresnel lenses blazed, and there was Volos, his back turned, his wings slowly spreading—and great balls of fire, they could really spread on this stage, they made his presence immense, huge, even the people in the cheap seats knew they were seeing something—poised on the edge of the drum riser he flamed the color of a wild rose, and then came the hammering downbeat, the turn and leap and the dancing advance to the mikes, flanked by his two ax men in their outlaw hats. And Mercedes had to admit Volos was right, he looked good in chaps. They outlined that incredible crotch, visible when he lifted his guitar. Their long fringes and rawhide thongs flowed with him. But Mercedes was not entirely happy, because the Navaho headband and silver-spurred roach stompers were courtesy of Texas, and Mercedes did not care for Texas’ influence on Volos any more than he did for Angie’s.