Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  That desert night, all the hours of the long ride, they were nearly silent. Overhead, stars tumbled like popcorn. At every gas station the cola machines stood red white and blue, light-up monuments of Americanism, sturdily erect. Angie saw them coming from great distances and watched them pass. She studied the night, and never stopped being aware of the muscles of Volos’s bare torso moving under her bare arms. But mostly she was aware of his back, warm under her head, his wings, flanking her like an embrace, his heart, beating like a drum, all night. Afterward, she remembered mostly how the good smell of his dusky skin had combined with the faintly alien musk of his pinfeathers to keep her constantly dreaming of him.

  Sometime during that night she grew aware, more in her body than in her mind, of what she was going to do.

  Once in Wichita, Texas went straight to bed. It was morning, but it felt like the middle of the night to him. Christ, he hated all this traveling around, he who had never learned to sleep properly in a moving vehicle. The security guards he roomed with considered that sleeping in the bus was enough. They laughed at him a little, then went to bodyguard Volos or hang out in the hotel bar. But Texas needed his nap.

  No sooner had he gotten a good start on it than Volos barged in, wanting to talk.

  “Just because you don’t need to sleep,” Texas griped.

  Volos sailed straight past his complaining, as usual. “Texas. How do I know if I love her?”

  “Cripes, kid.” Texas sat up, noticing how his belly creased above his shorts. Damn, he tried to keep slim and fit, but age was taking him over anyway. There was a young person still there inside him, surprised as hell and plenty pissed off about the way things were going. Cranky, he grumbled, “Do you have to love her?”

  “With Angela, I think yes.”

  For the past few days Texas had been watching the two of them with a smile, noting with satisfaction the happy hues of Volos’s wings, the quiet glow Angie wore like a halo, the scowl on Mercedes’s pretty face. Angie Bradley was so special—if anybody could make a home for his straying angel, she could. This consideration was the reason Texas was not totally pissed about that time when Volos breached security and rode off in the night. More awake now, and therefore more sympathetic, he said to Volos quietly, “Can’t you tell if you’re falling in love with her?”

  “Falling is one thing. I know falling.” As if to illustrate, the kid toppled face down across the bed. “Being is another fish kettle.” His wings sprawled, reminding Texas of lilacs in the rain. The lilacs would be blooming about now, back in West Virginia. The air would be fresh and sweet, with none of this mad-dog desert heat.

  Volos said, “Texas, I sing and sing of love the way heaven’s slaves sing of heaven’s mysteries, without understanding.”

  “It’s not something you gotta understand in your head,” Texas said.

  “What is it, then? I thought a feeling, but feelings come and go like rainbows, so how do people stay together?”

  Texas felt all his muscles go taut as if he were wrestling. For a few moments he struggled with an invisible antagonist so desperately that he was unable to speak.

  Volos asked, “How was it for you and Wyoma?”

  More clearly than he remembered yesterday’s venue Texas remembered that day twenty-one years before, remembered it so vividly that he might as well have been sixteen again, in the July twilight heat, at the Persimmon Borough Volunteer Firemen’s Carnival, and there she was with her girlfriend, who happened to be a cousin of his. Not that he could not have said hello to her anyway. He had known Wyoma to say hello to her most of his life, but that night it was as if something invisible and nameless had placed a strong hand between his shoulder blades and propelled him toward her. He had tagged along with her to the Dunk Willie booth, where the school buddy who was Willie at the time had hooted at him. Trapped, he had laid down money for six softballs and found that his throwing arm had turned to water, he couldn’t hit anything. His neck went hot, friends were jeering, Wyoma gave him a look of utter scorn and walked off. She might as well have been leading him by the nose for all that he could help himself; he had followed. Later that same night he had gotten her into a shadow behind the funnel-cake tent and kissed her and tried to touch her breast, for which she had slapped him. Within a week they had gone all the way and couldn’t stay away from each other. It had felt like having a mental disease, a mania. All day every day he had gone around with his dick on standby for her. They both knew sooner or later he was going to get her pregnant. When it happened, they had married. That was the way people got married, in Texas’s experience.

  Until he had come to L.A. she was the love of his life. The only woman he had ever done it with.

  “Texas?”

  With some difficulty he focused back to Volos. He said, “Son, it’s like a fate.”

  “This fate thing, it is from the Greeks. I do not understand it.”

  “I didn’t mean it any Greek way. I’m trying to say—you’re asking about love—it’s mostly a matter of just giving in.”

  “Giving up free will?” The way the kid sounded, a person would think his freedom was real, something he could hold in his hand like a red guitar. Real and made of solid gold.

  Texas said, “Sometimes you gotta take a risk. Get off my bed, would you, son? I’m going back to sleep.”

  Volos stood up, but he asked again, “How do I know?”

  “Huh?”

  “How do I know when to risk?”

  “Kid.” Texas puffed his lips in exasperation, then took his own advice and surrendered to love. God knew it had been a while since he had loved anybody or anything the way he loved this strange angel. He said, “Okay. If I was you, I would think like this: If you went and left her today and never saw her again, would you forget about her? Or when you got old would you lay there and look back and think, Goddamn it, Volos, look what you went and threw away?”

  Volos stood with a far-seeing look, his wings the color of mist.

  “Now would you get the hell out of here?”

  “Okay. Texas—thanks.” The kid drifted out like a sleepwalker, closing the door behind him.

  Texas threw a pillow against the headboard and leaned on it, knowing he would not go back to sleep, considering he would be doing okay if he did not cry. He had left Wyoma, walked out of her life. Was never going to see her again. And his mind was telling him over and over again, Goddamn it, Texas, you fool, you dickheaded fool, look what you went and threw away.

  At two in the morning Angela awoke as if she had set an alarm, knew the concert had to be over, quietly got up and put on her clothes. In the bed she had left, Mikey and Gabe slept on. Probably they would sleep through the night, but if they woke up, her roommate, the roadie’s wife, would take care of them. The roadie himself was not back yet, was probably still working. The equipment had to be gotten out of the arena, even though Burning Earth was not moving on until day after tomorrow.

  Angie slipped out of the Travelodge into the springtime Kansas night. The crew was staying on the outskirts of town, near the expressway. Once she had walked a few blocks she was almost in country, and the sky looked huge.

  “Volos,” she said aloud to the night, but softly.

  It did not concern her that he might be with Mercedes. She was more aware than most people thought of what he and Mercedes were to each other, but it did not trouble her. Volos had once been made of ether, or starfire, or some nameless substance more rarefied than air; he was beyond the rules she had been raised by, and she had accepted him so deeply that she was unaware of having sacrificed.

  “Volos.” Very gently. “It’s me.”

  She had to get him out of the hotel, away from all those bodyguards, the band, all those people.

  “Volos?”

  She had not called him this way since that night near the L.A. bus depot. Until then she had not understood how he had spent millennia answering the prayers of generations of the faithful: Be my protector, my comforter, my hand-holder,
nose-wiper, crying towel, my tour guide through life; find my lost purse, destroy my enemies, multiply my seed, carry me on your back, lay ye down as a bridge over troubled water. And ten thousand demands more, plus the commands of his superiors. Being a mother, having been a wife, she could understand how he had felt. No wonder he had rebelled. No wonder he had hated her summoning him. She hoped he would sense that this time was different.

  “Volos. I love you.”

  She had wandered a few blocks farther on her random way, into a scrubby neighborhood of gas stations and warehouses, before he roared up to her on the Harley. He wore a cloak she had made him for the colder nights outside of California, a magnificent half-circle thing that billowed in dark velvet folds and closed with metal clasps across his chest. So she could not look at his wings to read his mood. But his face, shadowy in the starlight, was beautiful and still. Without a word he parked his cycle behind a pile of skids, came to her and took her hand.

  She kissed him, seeing how his eyelids fluttered shut as her lips touched his mouth. That was one of the things she loved about him, that when she kissed him his face changed, his breath quickened, she could see him wanting her. Ennis had always stiffened as if bracing himself against her, afraid. Trying not to show anything. But she could make Volos moan with desire for her, and because he had the courage to be so unguarded, she was ready to pin her heart on him like a medal.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered to her when she finished the kiss.

  “I don’t know.”

  They walked. The night was full of enigmatic things, power boxes and strange storage tanks and derelict drive-in theaters. After a while they wandered down a dirt access lane and into a starlit back-lot hilltop devoted to concrete products: manhole tubes, sewer arches, septic tanks stacked fifteen feet high. For acres the things loomed, monolithic, moon-gray and silent, a New World Stonehenge. It was a place that called them in as an old barn calls children in, as a cave calls foxes in, as a silent mine seduces the miner. They wandered until they were entirely surrounded by pale blocks and piles and pillars that drew the eye upward.

  “My God,” Angie said, “the stars.”

  They sat at the bottom of a long flight of concrete stairs to nowhere, gazing up.

  “One thing I liked about L.A. was that I could hardly ever see the stars,” Volos said. “I do not like to look at them.”

  “But they are beautiful.”

  “Beautiful prisoners. Beautiful slaves. My former comrades in slavery.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, looking at him now instead of at the sky. The dim light made his swarthy skin seem fair, his shadowed eyes, immense. His face had gone so hard that the muscles near his jaw rippled as he spoke.

  “Yes, it is ironic, is it not? People call me a star. But I do not want that. A star is what I was before. One little spark in the Milky Way, one of trillions.”

  “But here you are not little.” How could he be, when so many people adored him?

  “No? I am a superstar, you mean? So now I am one among thousands. Make me a god, and I will be the same. Call me what you like, I am still a speck in the eye of the almighty. If he blinks, I will be gone. I am dust.”

  She said, “Not to me.”

  Volos looked at her, then slipped off his cloak and put an arm around her. From the refuge of his shoulder she watched his wings glimmer deep purple, more sad now than vehement. It must have been hard for him, heaven’s rebel. She asked, “Do you miss the others? The ones you left behind?”

  “No … I don’t know. Never mind, Ange.”

  “But I do mind. They should have all fallen from their places to come with you. Every one of them.”

  He laughed; she was glad to have made him laugh. His wings glowed lighter as he let go of bitterness. He said, “Why would they follow me? I was a dunce. I could never obey.”

  She teased gently, “And are you still a dunce?”

  “No, I think I am learning.” He answered her teasing seriously. He looked into her eyes and she felt herself stop breathing. The whole night seemed to grow still.

  He said, “Love is submission. And I am here, Angela, am I not?”

  Looking back at him she felt her lips part but could not speak. Her heart was drumming. It was time.

  They got up and wandered on to the brow of the slow hill of concrete monoliths, where they found a squat hollow cylinder the size of a cheap swimming pool. Volos climbed into it, laid his cloak on the ground, lifted Angie over its low wall. Lying down within that circle, they could see nothing but the stony moon-white stuff that ringed them, and sky, and stars.

  And each other. They could see each other. And Volos’s wings were shining like fire.

  It was the way a virginal girl named Angela Crawshaw had once dreamed it would be with someone, someday. It was the way a married woman named Angie Bradley had wished lovemaking would be. That night there was nothing left for her to wish for, nothing this lover would not do for her, nothing she could not see and caress and explore with hands and mouth and body. And he was more than any mortal lover had ever been to anyone, anywhere, his kisses explored her soul, he was everything, all-encompassing. They made love under his wings, and as he came to her his wings arched over her and defined her world; he was her dusky earth, her heart-red sky.

  With Ennis, lovemaking had been a struggling thing, an act of need or valor, an attempt to make contact with another being across a distance as of planets. But with Volos—there was after all one thing left for Angela to desire, in those ecstatic moments when their bodies had joined; she wanted their hot souls to melt together, to blend, to become one. She wanted to merge with Volos, to occupy the same space as he did, the way bodiless beings might do, two angels dancing.

  Surrender, surrender to me, cried a hundred rock tunes meant for the male voice, meant to play on the car radio when the guy had the girl in the back seat and she was saying No, I’m not that kind, I’m saving myself for marriage. But women were not the only ones who surrendered, Volos knew, submitting himself in his nakedness to this one who could put a leash on him from miles away, submitting that most precious part of his body to hers, to that strait and dark and potentially entrapping place—to that warm and yielding and pleasure-giving place, like nothing Mercedes could offer him, nothing, no matter how he lubed or how much of the white powder he gave him beforehand.

  A prickly feeling at the nape of his neck kept Volos aware of the stars at his back, and when physical ecstasy gave him time he felt a dark sense of triumph. Eat your hearts out, watchers, if you have any. From time to time throughout human history, though rarely, certain favored princes among angels had been allowed to take on manly flesh in order to do errands that involved mortal participation—but it had been flesh robed in white, and never had they been allowed to doff the swaddling cloth, never had they been allowed to enjoy the flesh this way, finding the delight so sweet and keen it was almost pain. Only fallen angels knew this ecstasy.

  Or did they? Had anyone in all of history, had anyone else ever felt this way? So deep, so lost in the wonders of his soulmate, it was—

  Was it truly love?

  He wanted to give and give to her. It was the first time he had ever given so much, yet he wanted to give more. “Ange,” he whispered against her face. “Angela.”

  A movement of her lips answered him.

  “Would you like to fly?”

  Her eyes looked up into his, wide as skies. “But you—”

  “Shhh. I know what I said. If you want to, I would like to do it for you.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Her sigh told him Yes.

  His arms gathered her close, close. They were one flesh. A single downbeat of his great wings shielded them and carried them above the citylight into darkness velvety as a womb, and Wichita floated starrily below them.

  Afterward, when they lay close together in their nest again, he knew himself to be strong, mighty as thunder.

  Not one to do any job hal
fway, Ennis used all he could spare of his pay (after food, utilities, and tithes) to buy rock music magazines with paper like inked sawdust and titles like Sex Metal and Fusion. Looking at photo after photo of young men with far more sneer and hair than he had ever seen on human males before, of young women in tighter clothing than he had believed possible, reading interview after interview of these misguided people, Ennis found himself growing fascinated as well as aghast. Learning about the rock world was like traveling to a different planet, trying to understand an alien species.

  “They call the guitars axes,” he reported to his father-in-law.

  “Weapons of destruction. How apt.”

  But an ax could also be used to shape and build. Ennis, a carpenter, admired the axwork of the pioneers and also, though to a small and grudging extent, the axwork he heard in some rock music. He said, “I believe they think of them more as symbols of power.”

  “Power to destroy everything that is right and good.”

  Ennis did not quibble further. He had indeed read much in the heavy-metal publications and heard much on his radio that he found horrifying, berserk and bizarre. And blasphemous.

  “Here is what I have so far.” He gave Reverend Crawshaw a list of songs that mentioned angels. Quite a few rock lyrics mentioned angels. Almost as many as mentioned devils or demons of various sorts. The context in which these beings were invoked was sometimes innocuous, sometimes outrageous, but irrelevant in either event. The League for Moral Purity was not interested in context. No matter what use it made of the Bible, secular music had no business opening that sacred book with its dirty hands.

  “Some of the men wear makeup,” Ennis mentioned tangentially.

  “I have heard that. How sickening. Cheapening the temple of the body with paint is just as evil as mutilating it with tattoos.”

  Ennis, who had seen Grecian Formula in his father-in-law’s bathroom, wondered if hair was not a part of the body, and if it was not, why were women supposed to cover theirs? And why did a nice fresh coat of white paint not cheapen the temple of the church? Then he mentally rebuked himself. His duty to his minister, his church, and his God did not include questioning, only obedience.