Volos did not reply.
“Volos? Hey, man, uh, a bunch of us are back at the hotel getting drunk. I mean, really plastered. Seems like the thing to do tonight. Why don’t you come back with me?”
“No, I do not think so. Thank you.” He really did mean the thanks and hoped Red could hear that in his voice.
“You sure, man?”
“Yes, I am certain. I need to walk and think.”
“Yeah? That’s just what the rest of us don’t want to do, is think too much. Okay, so you think for us.” Red had worked on getting drunk already, Volos could tell. Now that the strain on him was less, the liquor was starting to show. “Whatcha thinking?”
“I am thinking there is no need to try to be evil. It seems to happen enough by accident.”
“That’s the goddamn truth, man.”
“And the trouble with evil is—it makes a mess of everything.” Volos knew that had not come out as cogently as he had wanted, but he did not know how to explain what he was just then comprehending, the straight linkage between evil and pain. How “evil” was not just a pose, a stance, an artistic statement, but a name for that which ruined lives. Not just an idea, but something real, the force that was making his chest ache and his wings hang heavy on his back.
Perhaps Red understood somewhat. At least he did not smile.
Volos said, “I am thinking—it is true that Texas shouted at me, but still … I think if I had not gone blackwing at him, none of this would have happened.”
“Hard to tell,” Red hedged. Trying to be nice. Why would humans always and forever try to be nice when it was more important to find truth?
“I am sure of it. And what I mostly think is this, that I must never go blackwing again.”
He had reached the limits of Red’s comprehension. The guitarist was staring at him with the whites of his eyes showing, spooked.
“Why don’t you go back to the hotel,” Volos told him quietly. “I want you to tell the others I will not do it again. That I have made a promise. All right?”
Red swallowed and nodded but said, “I’m supposed to leave you alone out here? Hey, don’t you worry about crazies and death threats and stuff? I hate to tell you, man, but you don’t punch worth a damn.”
Volos laughed, feeling his wings lighten—not just in color, but physically lighten, their burden on his back growing less. “If anybody bothers me,” he told Red, “I will flap him to death.”
Red took a step back.
“It is a joke, Red.”
“Oh.”
“Is the hotel far? Can you walk to it? Go on back.”
He stood and watched the guitarist toddle off, weaving just a little. Waved once when Red waved. Stayed where he was until Red was out of sight.
Like evil itself, his promise was not just an idea or a word, but a force that had acted on him—he sensed that. Imagining himself into being, he had shaped his body, and this thinking, this promise, this renunciation, had felt somewhat the same as that act. It had shaped some part of him, changed him. The direction of his life would go differently because of it.
He turned back the way he had come and kept walking. Saw a skinny kid sleeping on the sidewalk next to a boom box bigger than he was. Saw heat lightning in the sky. Smelled ozone in the air.
Thought of Texas, and sighed, not knowing what to do. Thought of Mercedes, and shrugged. He sensed without much caring how Mercedes hated him now. How on the cobbled street behind his leave-taking back, Mercedes had stood shaking with rage and saying again and again, “Son of a bitch. You hotshot son of a bitch. All the things I’ve done for you, and will you do this one thing for me … You bastard. I’ll clip your wings.”
chapter fifteen
Hours after midnight Angie was not sleeping. In the white teddy Volos had gotten her, sitting on the john with the bathroom door closed so that her light would not disturb the kids, she was trying to write a song.
Devil lover
Stormwind in your hair
Lightning in the touch of your hands
You make me scared
I need to grow my wings
I feel so unprepared
It was not the electric touch of his hands that had frightened her, or even the fight with Texas, though the latter had upset her enough to keep her awake. But her fear had started a few days before that, when in the sleepy morning she had looked in the mirror, brushing her teeth, and had expected to see Volos’s narrow, elegant face looking back at her. She had been surprised, actually surprised, to see her own soft cheeks instead of his hollow ones, her own wide, dark eyes instead of his that changed more often than the weather. And for a moment she had found it hard to remember her own name.
I’m just a wayfaring angel
A traveler frightened of thunder
A child who stayed too late at the park
Scared of the dark
I’m not daring enough for your arms
Devil lover
She was losing herself in him, that was what terrified her. He was as overwhelming as the sea. Or else she had thrown herself into his tides too completely. Or maybe she should not blame it on him, maybe even before she met him she had not known, really, who she was. A wayfarer, yes; a child, sometimes; but an angel? Huh. Hardly.
She crumpled the poem, unsatisfied. “Angie Bradley,” she muttered to herself, “who are you?”
Out in the dim bedroom Mikey wailed.
Though Angie had never been a hovering mother, though Mikey had been pretty much over his cold for several days and she had not been worried while he struggled with the fever and congestion, something about this cry went through her. Any other time, disturbed at her writing, she would have set down pencil and paper with rolling eyes and an expressive sigh. But this time she dropped the things, jumped up, and ran to her child.
She slapped at a light switch on the way. There was nobody to wake up and complain, because she had a room to herself—Volos had taken care of that when Mikey got sick, and she had not needed to ask him. Though maybe Texas had suggested it to him.
Mikey was vomiting violently, yet his hands sprawled weak as mice.
Angie stroked his back, ran for a towel, tried to get him cleaned up. He lay crying thinly, as if he felt tired to death. It was a terrible cry, as if already something had laid claim on his soul; he did not sound like Mikey at all. Yet he still vomited. Though there was nothing left in him, he lay retching as if a machine were making him do it.
Awakened by the noise and light, Gabriel was sitting up in bed and staring at his brother. “He’s really sick,” Gabe declared, awestruck.
“Yes, he really is,” Angie replied, hearing her own voice shake. The sound focused her terror. She cried out loud, “Volos!”
Would it be faster to go pound on the door of the next room? Or get on the phone, call an ambulance? But it was Volos who was her rescuing angel. Volos who loved her. She knew he loved her, though he had not said it. Probably she knew it better than he did.
“Volos! Please hurry!”
She did not understand how much her panic had already hurried him. Before she had finished calling the second time he burst, booted feet first, through the window, wings spread wide, their color as pale as his startled face. He stood amid shattered glass, looked, heard, comprehended at once. “Hospital,” he said.
“Wait.” He was there, he had come to her in an eyeblink, and she had to make him wait while she grabbed Gabe, ran with him to the next room, pounded on the door, thrust him into the groggy arms of the roadie’s wife. Then back, and the roadie’s wife came running after her and made her put on a robe, shrieked something about not stepping barefoot on broken glass, as if it mattered while Volos stood with Michael still convulsively retching in his arms. The next instant he reached for her, lifted her off the floor, and toppled out the window with both of them. Someone screamed. Angela felt sure it was not her.
In the Emergency Room lounge Volos paced, his wings leaden with worry. He hated the place, which
had linoleum flooring that was cold beneath his feet and smelled of disinfectant. Its molded plastic chairs were of ugly colors. Moreover, they were all in lines, shackled together like slaves.
In one chair a cop sat reading Newsweek, waiting for his partner to get stitched up after subduing a drunk who had resisted arrest. In a far corner sat the family of the drunk. Somebody in a white coat came out and beckoned to them: The man was on his way to the operating room. He had been thoroughly subdued.
Volos’s worry was not all for Mikey. Some was for himself. Standing on the flat roof of a high school and watching the lovers in the bushes down below, he had heard Angie writing a poem, he had heard the fear in it, and now he himself felt frightened, terrified, because he did not think he could bear it if she went away. Not after—
No, this was no time to think about Texas, no matter how he missed him. He had to be strong now.
Everything else that was happening, and now this with the child.… He had to be strong for Ange. The alarm in her call had been so sharp it had hurtled him toward her like a slingshot. There had been no time to kiss her, to talk with her, to say, Please, by all the demons of hell, please, Angela, do not leave me.
It was the first time, he realized, that he had been in a hospital. He did not like the chemical odor of the place. It chilled him. It made him feel as if he might someday die.
The cop glanced up at him out of a hard, scarred face. Muttered something that might have been “cocksucker.” Looked back to his magazine. Volos paced.
Angela came out of the Emergency Room and walked toward him, her steps short, unsteady. He went to her and wrapped himself around her, arms and wings, like an inverted flower.
“They chased me out,” she said into the hollow of his neck. “He doesn’t need me right now. He doesn’t know me.”
“Michael doesn’t know you?”
“He went into convulsions. Thrashing around. Now he’s unconscious. They wanted me out of the way.”
Volos had only a distant understanding of the human body in crisis, of its symptoms, its never-expected rebellions, its betrayals. Unconsciousness to him was a drug-induced novelty, a dreamy sleep. But he could tell that to Angela life had gone very wrong very quickly. She was stunned, as if a great snake had struck. He could feel her shaking against him.
“What is it?”
His worry was all for her now, but she thought he was asking about Mikey. She said, “They’re not sure till they see the blood tests. Some sort of syndrome, they think.”
“What is a syndrome?”
She shook her head. He could feel her chin hard against his collarbone. “I’d better call Ennis,” she said, lifting her head away from him.
“But why?”
“Mikey’s—his child too, Volos.” Her voice trembled like her body. “Do you have a quarter?”
In his jeans pocket he found several coins. He gave them all to her and watched as she walked away. Fear lay in his gut like ice that would not melt.
The cop put down his magazine and got up. His partner had come out of the E.R. with seven stitches closing a laceration over his cheekbone. The uninjured officer swatted the other on the butt, jock style. They ambled out.
“There’s no answer.” Angela came back from the phone. “He’s not home.”
Volos felt his fear dissolve because she was near him and her husband had not taken her away from him yet. He warmed her in his arms again. “It’s four in the morning,” she said to his shoulder. “Where in God’s name could he be?”
Ange. Please don’t leave me.
Others from the Burning Earth tour came in: the roadie’s wife, Mercedes, the bus driver, the lighting man. They brought Angie clothing and coffee and made her sit down and talked with her while Volos stood nearby, feeling somehow apart, as if he were invisibly hovering, as if he were a bodiless being again, an ethereal eavesdropper, ineffably of a different substance than their sturdy flesh. He noticed that no one spoke of the concert and its carnage; they would not bring that up with Angela now. Unless she read the morning paper she would hear about it only later. Truth was of less importance to them than most other things. But these humans with their hot drinks and their comradeship and their laughter, they had something that he with all his thinking did not comprehend.
Trying to come in from the cold, to feel floor under his feet again, he said, “Mercedes. You had better cancel the next venue.”
Mercy looked at him with an expression he had never seen on that silken face before. “We can’t do that,” he said.
“I cannot be two places at once, is what I cannot do. And I am staying here.”
“Listen to me, Volos. Since I’ve known you I’ve just been trying to look out for what’s best for you—”
“Hellshit!” Volos felt suddenly angry with the same high-voltage wrath that McCardle had sparked in him. I must never go blackwing again. Mercedes was not worth it anyway. Texas had hurt him, but Mercedes merely disgusted him. So it was not very hard to combat merely with words, to say, “You think I am stupid? I know you don’t care a quick fuck about me. You want what you can get, that is all. You look out for what is best for Mercedes Kell.”
“You—” With difficulty Mercedes swallowed an epithet. “Volos. Do you get some sort of kick out of just throwing it all away?”
“I have thrown nothing worth keeping!” Yet it is all falling apart.
“You don’t know shit about what’s worth what. It’s no use talking with you. I’m going back to the hotel. I’m—”
“Just do what I told you. Cancel Pittsburgh. We are not going anywhere.”
“You may not be,” Mercedes said, and he swished out. Roadie’s wife, bus driver, lighting man, and two guitarists—when had they come in?—all watched his exit with muted satisfaction. Someone, not Volos, said with dark amusement, “There goes Mercy out the door.”
Angela seemed to have noticed none of this. She was in a daze made up solely of Mikey.
The night wore on. Volos watched, feeling separate and uneasy, as Angela tried again and again to reach her husband. As finally she phoned a neighbor. Ennis was away for the week, a sleepy woman told her. He and Reverend Crawshaw had gone to a revival somewhere, a rally against the evils of rock music.
He stood by her at dawn when the doctor made his report: it seemed to be Reye’s syndrome, Michael had been admitted to Intensive Care, diuretics were being administered, intracranial devices would be used to monitor the pressure on the brain.
He walked with her as she went to look at the little body lying very still on the white slab of a bed, the pug-nosed face nearly obscured by oxygen apparatus, the wispy brown hair shaved to accommodate a cone of white plastic strung with a black lacework of wires.
Only when she turned to him and wept did he begin to comprehend that bittersweet brotherhood of mankind, that common bond called mortality. Then he could distance himself no longer, and knew to the marrow of his hard, ephemeral bones: flesh was frail. People had been trampled in the night. Mikey might die.
“Birdman will make Mikey get better,” Gabe said to his mother. He had been saying it for a solid day, ever since Birdman had taken Mikey off to the hospital. Before that he had been saying, “Where’s Uncle Texas?” But nobody had paid any attention to him then either.
“Mommy.” She was sitting on the hotel bed as if he didn’t matter. He tugged at her shirt to make her look at him. “Tell Birdman to help Mikey.”
“He can’t, honey,” she said faintly. She pulled him up into her lap and held him hard, as if that would make things any better.
She didn’t understand. None of them understood how real Birdman was. Gabe could tell they didn’t, because they always said Volos, and Volos was just a rock star, a voice on the radio, a body in a video, a picture on a magazine page. But Birdman had flown to the Horsehead Nebula and back once on a bet. When he was bad, he was whipped with lashes of fire. He remembered when Adam and Eve were still alive, when angels came down and married human women
and taught them how to make themselves beautiful and taught their children secrets. He remembered when people used to go up on top of the Tower of Babel and shoot arrows into the sky, trying to wing an angel, and it was good luck if the arrow came down red with blood. He had watched the archangels killing people in Jerusalem and Sodom. He understood every language anyone could talk in, even the language of birds. Once when he was baby-sitting Gabe and Michael and nobody else was around, he had called a bunch of pigeons in through the window and made them fly stunts. He liked pigeons because they were dandified and womanly like Mercedes, he said.
He knew some of the Princes of the Sefiroth to say hi to them. He could help Mikey.
“Make Birdman help!” Gabriel insisted to his mother.
He would have spoken to Birdman himself, but Birdman was pacing the floor and he couldn’t get him to stop and listen. And it was no use trying to talk to him when his wings were that old-asphalt color anyway. The others were just sitting like his mother—Red and the rest of the band and the roadie lady and some of the roadies, just about everybody except Uncle Texas and grouchy old Mercedes.
“Mommy—”
“Hey, big guy,” Red called softly to him. “C’mere.”
He went to where Red was sitting in the squeaky hotel chair because he liked Red, though maybe not quite as much as he had liked Uncle Texas. Gabe missed Texas.
Red took him by the shoulders, gently. “Hey,” Red said, keeping his voice way down, “take it easy on your mother. You heard what happened. The doctors say there’s nothing anybody can do now.”
From across the room Birdman said, “Gabe is right.”
“Huh?” Red looked up in a dumb-cow way. So did most of the others. And Birdman was standing there with his wings flashing like coals afire.
“The boy is right. I must help. I am a coward if I do not try.” Birdman crossed the room in two big strides and got down on his knees, right down on the floor, in front of Mother. “Ange,” he said, begging, and she did an odd thing. She parted his hair with her fingers and kissed him on the forehead, and then she laid her hands on him, like Grandpa giving a blessing.
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