VOLOS: Elvis was a poor man’s son. We called him the King, but he was one of us.
MM: Where are you from, Volos?
VOLOS: What does the bio say?
MM: Mingo County, West Virginia.
VOLOS: Then that’s where.
MM: Anything more you would like to say about your rock religion?
VOLOS: Sha na na shee oooo. Prophecy lives. Rock speaks in tongues.
Even before Texas mentioned it, Angie had been wanting to experiment with makeup. Back in Jenkins, when the packets of coupons had come in the mail she had always looked at the enclosures, at Frederick’s of Hollywood and Lose Weight Overnight and World of Beauty Introductory Offer, before she dutifully threw them away.
At a stopover somewhere between Reno and Phoenix she noticed a big, bright-colored Maybelline Starter Kit in a Valu-Mart where she had gone to buy Luvs for Mikey and also for Gabe, who was coming untrained because of all the mixed-up days and moving around. The price of disposable diapers was outrageous, making the Maybelline kit seem nothing by comparison. She bought it.
“Me want candy,” Gabe said.
“Candy!” shrilled Mikey.
“You don’t need candy, guys.” Texas gave them too much of the sweet stuff already. Angie hugged both boys at once, her whole body fogged by a vague guilt. “You need lots of things, but not candy.” They needed to settle down in one place where they could sleep at night and play in the daytime and eat something besides pizza. That was what they needed to straighten them out, and they weren’t likely to get it as long as Volos was on tour.
Yet she knew she could not leave Volos. Might as well pull out her heart and nail it to a tree. She would die.
Angie left the boys at the hotel with a roadie’s wife, who had been brought along for that purpose. Grabbed a ride to the concert site with Texas, who was driving a little rental Chevette with overinflated tires that made it handle and feel like a farm Jeep. Took along her new toy concealed both in its plastic store bag and in her tote. Once she was done checking over the costumes she would have plenty of time to try it out in front of a dressing room mirror before somebody was ready to give her a ride back. She hoped the kit contained instructions.
It did not.
And nothing was as easy as it looked on TV, she discovered. The Ultra-Lash Mascara globbed her with Ebony Black from eyebrow to cheek the first time she tried it. The Passionflower Bronze lipstick smeared. Looking into the mirror at the splotched face of a stranger, she realized that she should have put on the foundation first.
Volos walked in.
“Paints!” he exclaimed in quick delight. The flat white plastic kit, with its brush slots and its tray of ten garish pressed-powder eyeshadows, did indeed look a lot like a kid’s watercolor box.
“Makeup,” Angie told him faintly, hot with embarrassment. Caught in an essentially private and self-indulgent act, she felt as exposed as if he had barged in and found her naked. Yet his childlike pleasure did not let her feel that way for long.
“So, face paint!” Which was exactly what her poor wan mother, who had never so much as used lipstick on her pale, pursed mouth, would have called it. Eagerly Volos said, “Bitchin’! I love tacky colors. Angie, put some on me.”
He had not blinked at her own clownish appearance. She felt obliged to warn him. “I’m not very good at—”
“I don’t care, Ange! Come on.” He sat down and grinned at her. His guitarists, passing in the hallway, rolled their eyes at each other, smiled, and came in to watch.
“Better put on some powder first,” suggested Red, “or some cream. Make the stuff easier to get off when you’re done.”
Though it had hot troubled Angela in the least that Volos wanted to play with paints, it appalled her that this man, a fairly normal-looking man, should know about makeup. More than she did, anyway. She had not had an idea what the powder was for.
With the minuscule puff provided, she dabbed some on Volos. He had stopped grinning and sat with lidded eyes. The shivering colors of pleasure, pink and peach and sky-yellow, ran down his wings.
She tried the eyeliner pencil first, finding it even more difficult to use on Volos than on herself. The tip dragged at the delicate skin of his eyelids. “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you,” she told him.
“Use the eyebrow pencil instead,” Red suggested. “It’s softer.”
It had not occurred to her that she could use something labeled Brow Shaper on eyelids. Freedom was a strange and wonderful thing; with her hand touching his face, she knew that as never before. She put on the pencil, then the mascara. Carefully, carefully, terrified of violating the immaculate tissues of his eyes; they gazed at her yet past her, immense, and she saw that his irises had turned the sweet fugitive blue of windflowers. Maybelline eyeshadow, no matter what color, would look like caked mud on him by comparison.
But it was all just for fun. She read off the colors to him: “Turquoise, Topaz, Violet, Mauve, Maize, Sand, Sky, Jade, Jasper Brown, Lapis.”
“You choose, Angie.”
There was something yielding, almost shy, in his voice. She rubbed the foam-tipped applicator on the purple square and shaded the creases above his closed eyes. Because she was uncertain of her technique and concerned about jabbing him, her strokes were soft and slow. He sighed with pleasure as if she were caressing him.
“You need the creamy kind for onstage. The glossy stuff with sparkles. Metallic,” Red remarked. Then he and Bink drifted away, shutting the dressing room door after them.
Halfway through Turquoise, Volos put a hand on the point of Angie’s hip and signaled her closer. Intent on her job, she did not find it disturbing that she sat on his lap. She steadied her elbow against his bare shoulder and applied Lapis in focused silence.
Finished to her satisfaction, she said, “Have a look.” There was a mirror in the lid of her box. She held it up to him, and he studied his image as if he had never seen himself before.
“Candy dandy,” he remarked at last, then glanced down at the cosmetics in the tray. “What about all those other things? Blush? Lipstick?”
“I don’t know how to use the blush. Which lipstick do you want?”
He handed her a tube of gloss, closed his eyes again and presented his mouth to her. She used the thing like a giant crayon, coloring him slick and wet and the deep off-red of black cherries—it was the fragrance that made her think of cherries. Volos’s tongue tasted his lips as soon as she was done. “Good,” he said.
It was flavored lipstick. She glanced at the tube. “Kissing Potion,” she read aloud, then felt a blush flood her from her hairline to her breasts. All too aware of her breasts, and of his hand on her hip.
“Let’s try it out,” he whispered, and he slid his lips onto hers so that black cherry mixed with Passionflower.
A bizarre way to start, perhaps. But to her all things about Volos were holy. Not always right—rectitude was a deadening concept, fit for her father to use. Not always pure or true. But holy in the oldest sense: immense, puissant, deeply alive. Brett had once kissed Volos, and experienced only a young hunk, a walking wet dream, an embodied phallus. Mercedes kissed Volos often, embracing an angel, thinking of him more and more as a rival to be wrestled, an intimate enemy. But Angela kissed a god.
Since his wife had run away Ennis had kept himself going with work and church, work and church, more and more the work of the church. He missed her and his children with a mute constant pain, regarding her defection as a punishment to be silently borne. Obviously he had loved her too much, so that a jealous God had taken her away from him; he had been too softhearted about her, and he had cherished his children more than he cherished Christ. If he had been more serious about his religion before, perhaps God would not have taken his family away from him. But if he could appease God now, perhaps somehow he could get wife and children back.
His conduct immediately after they disappeared had showed him to be a worldly sinner. Rather than resorting first to prayer, he
had called the police. When Angela had been gone a few days without sending word, he had hired a private detective as well. The man, he realized later, was incompetent, but had kept him on the hook for a while with requests for more money to follow up vague clues. By the time he fired the P.I. two weeks had passed, and he had to face facts: it would now be nearly impossible to find Angie. Where would she have gone? She knew no one outside of Jenkins, and the whole world out there seemed full of people who could hurt her. Night harrowed Ennis with thoughts that she was dead, or in the hands of white slavers or the makers of pornographic films. She and his children. They did not spare the children either, in the films. At a Christian lecture once Ennis had learned about snuff films, and the mere whisper of that fear in his mind was enough to jolt him out of his solitary bed and send him pacing in the dead of night.
In the daytime, he was more reasonable. She had not been kidnapped—though the idea that she had been kidnapped, carried away from him against her will, made her absence in some ways easier to bear. But no, she had left a note. She had run away and was aimlessly wandering. In his constant thoughts of her, he envisioned her as a fugitive in bunned hair and a ragged skirt, her legs cold and blue, sleeping under doorsteps, with Gabe and Mikey huddled at her breasts.
“I should have tried to find her myself,” he told his father-in-law at the Crawshaw house one evening. He visited the Crawshaws often in the evening, having supper with them to fill the empty hour or two between work and sleep. After his father had died, his mother had picked up and moved to Arizona. He seldom saw her now, and never had been any good at talking to people on the phone. These days he felt closer to the Crawshaws than he did to his own family.
“Don’t blame yourself, Ennis.” Reverend Crawshaw’s voice was very gentle.
Ennis did blame himself, for everything, and it did not occur to him until years later that the same man who spoke to him so softly had trained him to think that way. He said, “Maybe I should go now. Take the same bus she took—”
“Ennis, no. You were born and raised here in Jenkins. Here you have your friends and family and church around you to help you and support you. But if you leave, you’ll be another sheep who wandered out of the fold, you’ll be in danger of the wolves of Satan. Do you want that?”
“But Angie—”
“She is lost.”
“I ought to go find her.”
“Ennis.” The older man’s voice took on a note of preacherly authority. “It is important that you should learn to accept the will of God.”
“How do I know what’s the will of God and what’s the doing of the devil?”
Patiently the Reverend explained it to him, that everything, even the existence of the devil, was part of God’s plan. Even Angela’s downfall had to be part of God’s plan somehow. God did not sleep, even if people could not always see his plan in what happened to them.
“Oh.” Ennis considered. He found Reverend Crawshaw’s words comforting. Also, in his secret heart he really did not want to leave home. The house seemed to need his presence. Leaving it would feel like severing his last link to Angela and the life they had shared. Moreover, the world was dangerous, and he feared it. He had been ashamed of his fear, but if the Reverend said he was to stay home, then staying must be all right.
He asked, “If I pray, will I start to understand God’s plan for me?”
“Maybe. But it is more important just to accept.”
Accept the Almighty’s plan, but pray to change his mind: to one who had been raised with this logic, it made sense enough. “If I pray hard, will God send Angela back to me?”
“It would be better to pray for Angela herself, that she will repent. As a minister of God, I must consider her damned, I must shake her dust off my sandals. But you may pray for her.”
“I don’t know how to pray very well.”
“It doesn’t matter, Ennis. God will listen to you. And I need you to help me with your prayers. It is a wicked world.”
Ennis went home from that conversation feeling better than he had in weeks. In fact, feeling humbly honored. All his life he had admired Reverend Crawshaw and been in awe of him. His respect for the man had added to his dizzy joy in marrying the Reverend’s daughter. But it was only after Angela left that they had started to become close because of their shared grief.
God could bring good out of evil. Perhaps this was what was meant to happen, this closeness, this—discipleship?
Weeks stretched slowly into months. By the time construction lulled for the winter, Ennis’s coworkers were looking at him sideways and not speaking to him if they could avoid it. His face had gone flat. He scowled at jokes. He had taken to wearing black clothing and muttering Bible verses under his breath as he worked. In that autumn’s annual congregational meeting of the Holy Virgin Church he had been elected to office, and thereafter he preferred to be addressed as Deacon Bradley.
Around Christmastime his mother began calling him weekly, worried about him because of what she had been hearing. Why did he not come see her over the holiday and spend some time in the Arizona warmth? But he told her his duty lay in Jenkins.
Indeed there was no lack of work for him to do there. During the slack of winter he consumed himself with church concerns, leaving himself no idle time in which he might weaken and weep and entertain the doubts the devil wanted to put into his head. Work numbed his pain—and there was urgent work to be done. The evangelical Christian world was becoming more and more aware of the iniquities of rock music, and particularly of a West Coast viper of evil named Volos. Ennis Bradley, now indisputably Reverend Crawshaw’s right-hand man, was instrumental in the organization of the Central Pennsylvania League for Moral Purity.
After the infamous Metal Mag Volos interview appeared, Reverend Crawshaw came one evening to his son-in-law’s house.
Ennis let him in uneasily because he had been busy and had not tidied the house. He liked to keep the place just as Angie would have, with everything in place, awaiting her return—though even at its best the house still did not seem right, not when there were no yelling little boys in it, not with all the toys put away.
Right now there were four days’ worth of dishes in the sink. Pastor Crawshaw, however, did not go into the kitchen and therefore did not see them. He headed for the living room and sat there, a sign that this visit was of serious and formal substance.
“Ennis. You and I of all the faithful know firsthand what the seductions of rock music can do to a Christian family.”
“Amen.” Ennis remained standing, like a soldier being briefed.
“Therefore, I feel that I can rely on you. Others are faithful and eager, but they have not felt God’s rod. You have, and therefore you will be cautious.”
Ennis nodded and waited, wondering if he ought to subdue his feeling of pride. Reverend Crawshaw trusted him, and this fact caused him to have a good feeling that partially filled the hollowness in his chest. It was all right, he decided, to feel this way.
“I have a mission for you.” Reverend Crawshaw wearily inclined his head, passing a hand across his eyes. “I wish I could do it myself, Ennis, because it is dangerous, but I simply do not have the time.”
Knowing how hard his father-in-law worked, Ennis felt a prickling of sympathy. “Whatever it is,” he said, “I will be happy to do it.”
“It is this. I want you to be my spy in the war against the evils of rock music. Get yourself a radio, Ennis. Listen to it, but privately, so as not to lead others astray. Report to me on what you hear. I need weapons. There are those people even within our own community who claim that rock music is harmless entertainment. I need to be able to say to them and to all scoffers, listen to such-and-such a line from such-and-such a song.”
Ennis’s mouth had gaped in a manner he knew to be uncouth, “catching flies.” He forced himself to close it and nod. Any other response eluded him.
“Get a cassette player also, and as you find certain songs or singers more evil than the oth
ers, buy tapes. Listen to them and report on them in the normal manner, then—you will have to get a special machine, but we need to do this—play them backwards. Listen for hidden satanic messages.”
“Yes, sir,” Ennis whispered, feeling chilled.
“And pray constantly, Ennis.” The older man prayed with him before leaving.
There was still time before the stores closed. Ennis went to a place where he was not known and bought, after some confusion, an appropriate radio/cassette player, and also Bic pens and a tablet of cheap paper. When he got home he drew the blinds before he pulled the toy of Satan out of its shopping bag and packaging, set it up, and turned it on. Music of a sort poured out.
Between then and midnight he filled several pages of his tablet with lyrics, especially rap music lyrics, that appalled him. Nevertheless, Ennis felt the silence when he turned the radio off and went to his bed. The house seemed very quiet, the bed seemed very empty without Angela. Empty as his arms, empty as his heart. He missed her.
chapter twelve
A convoy of eighteen-wheelers lumbered across New Mexico, and from cactus fingers and fence posts the little hard-nosed elf owls stared, unimpressed. The trucks’ sides were painted with scenes of a strange and naked world in which mountains and ocean waves mutated into aspiring humans with wings of flame rising from their shoulders, their ankles, their wrists and heads. No good for flying, the owls muttered, to themselves only, for they were solitary birds and did not consult with one another. What is the point? What do these humans purport to be?
On one of the rented trucks, along with the rented stage equipment, Volos had stored his Hawg. Strict security arrangements were in effect, yet at the Albuquerque concert site Volos got the motorcycle out, and from there to Wichita he and Angie took the long ride through the desert night, on their own, defiant, unhelmeted, she with her arms around his waist and her head resting between his wings, nestled in a warm hollow that was half feathered, half flesh. So far, she and Volos had done little more than press together like this, like fledglings thrown from their tree by a storm, stranded on dangerous ground. They kissed sometimes, and once, alone in the bus with her, Volos had touched her left breast. But mostly they were hesitant with each other, shy, like children.
Metal Angel Page 16