Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  Ennis saw him, touched Reverend Daniel Crawshaw’s arm, and moved to the target’s side. Mercedes stepped back quickly, but Reverend Crawshaw stood in the way. Both men were taller than Mercedes. Both wore white shirt, cross-of-Christ tie, black suit.

  “We want to talk with you about Volos,” Ennis said.

  Reverend Crawshaw had made the will of God quite clear to Ennis. But it felt odd, even so, even though he understood his duty, to know that a few hundred feet away his wife was swaying her body to primal music, that in a hotel room within a few blocks his children were sleeping, and there he stood saying to a man he detested, “We want to talk with you about Volos.” But there were priorities. Getting Angie back (if he wanted her back) was third priority. Getting the boys back was second. Making Volos burn in hell was first.

  “He is a blasphemer,” said Reverend Crawshaw. “We want him to die.”

  Ennis felt his shoulders wince, hoping that his face, like Reverend Crawshaw’s, was hidden in the shadow of his hat. Reverend Crawshaw was outspoken. Even in daylight, Ennis felt sure, Reverend Crawshaw would have said the same thing. The man was a fearless soldier in the army of his God.

  The sodomizer Mercedes looked very frightened, yet he was starting to smile.

  “How?” he asked.

  “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword. He who—”

  Ennis, who knew what Reverend Crawshaw had in mind for Volos, but did not think it should be shared, said quickly, “We want to get him away from those crowds who adore him. Away from his bodyguards. Off by himself. Alone. After that we will take care of everything. We know you will help us. You despise him.”

  Mercedes began to titter, then giggled, then broke into high-pitched laughter. Like a mechanical toy jarred into action by his own noise, he walked. Ennis and Crawshaw flanked him, keeping pace with him. The street was empty, black and slick; it had started to rain, a shower strangely chill for the late-summer night. Perhaps another deluge was coming.

  Mercedes said, “What’s in it for me?”

  “Satisfaction,” Reverend Crawshaw boomed. “Salvation.”

  “Keep your voice down,” said Mercedes, though there was no one in sight. “Not good enough. I want thirty pieces of silver. And don’t expect me to hang myself afterward. You’ll have to come string me up yourselves.”

  Reverend Crawshaw said icily, “We will do no such thing. We are not murderers.”

  “No?”

  “No. We are executioners for the Lord.”

  “The Lord likes to keep his hands clean? Well, that’s good. It doesn’t bother you two that I could incriminate you?”

  “God will take care of us.”

  Ennis said, keeping his voice very low indeed, “You will help us?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  They were passing through the red-light district. A young woman in fishnet stockings and a very short leather skirt beckoned from a doorway. Ennis shuddered, yet at the same time felt the devil take charge of the most private and depraved part of his body. He hated the devil, the never-sleeping devil, always waiting to catch him and make him unworthy of the trust Reverend Crawshaw had placed in him. But, in a few regards at least, he felt certain of himself and safe from the devil. No trick of Satan could make him fail to do God’s will concerning Volos. Of that he felt certain. He hated Volos worse than he did the devil. The man had stolen his sweetheart and his poem.

  “Yes,” said Mercedes, “ ‘despise’ is a very precise word for what I feel.”

  Ennis knew it was not; it was only a euphemism to dignify feelings far more savage. He knew this because he knew what he himself felt.

  He asked, “Will it be hard to get to him?”

  “No. Oh, no, quite easy. I have been thinking along the same lines myself. All that needs to be done is to take the woman. You know, Angie Bradley.”

  Both of them did know and showed no surprise. Ennis had briefed his father-in-law.

  “And contact Volos,” Mercedes continued, “and he will follow. He will do anything you say if you have her. He is besotted with her, can’t stay away from her.”

  “Tell us how you would do it.”

  “I will give you a time,” Mercedes said, “and a place. And I will meet you there and point her out to you if you like. But when it comes to dealing with him, do not expect me to walk up to him and kiss him for you. I am through with kissing him.”

  Time: Sundown.

  Place: The fairgrounds, York, Pennsylvania.

  Angie and the band had been planning this visit to the York Interstate Fair for weeks, since before Mikey got sick, since before Texas went away. They wanted to make it a treat for Volos. He had been to an amusement park once, where he had loved the roller coaster, but never to a real down-home firemen’s carnival or county fair. And this was one of the biggest ones in the country, featuring Volos as Saturday night’s grandstand attraction. So before the show, Angie and the others had decided, no matter how much of a security force it required, they were going to take him on the midway, let him ride the Screamer, get him to bet on a spin of the wheel, see if he liked the bumper cars.

  Sundown, Saturday evening, with the sky streaked purple and the golden Ferris wheel lights just coming on—very beautiful, Angie noticed. And the mechanical music and the barkers blaring everywhere. With a small, excited son’s hand straining at each of hers she walked on grass trampled into dust, smiling, feeling happy because there were friends all around her—except for Mercedes, of course, but no one minded Mercedes—and Volos was enjoying everything, with wings as bright as the sky and the lights. Every day Angie struggled to understand her feelings for him, unsure of what to do even though she carried his child inside her—but she had let all that go for the moment. There he was, walking beside her, a marvel, a delight, she wanted never to hurt him, and tonight especially he warmed her heart. He was as wound up as the kids.

  “What am I to do here?” he exclaimed.

  “Throw darts at the balloons,” Bink told him. Bink had turned out to be the decent kind of person, not one to hold a grudge. It did not matter that he was none too bright. He and Volos had been getting along nicely since the fight. “Win a prize,” he amplified. “It’s a gyp, they all are, but what the hell. Try it.”

  “No, wait! What are those? Frogs?”

  Whack the launcher with the mallet and see if you can get the big rubber frog to land on the lily pad rather than splash into the pond. Laughing, they all tried it, Gabe and Mikey too. Then it was test your aim, throw the ball, win a stuffed unicorn. Toss a dime into a goldfish bowl. Cisco, brawny-shouldered from years behind the drums, swung a sledgehammer and rang the bell to earn himself a cigar.

  “Very phallic,” volos remarked. He aimed a water pistol at a hole and won a painted mirror featuring a truly astonishing bimbo on a motorcycle.

  “What am I to do with this? I don’t like Hondas.”

  “Give it to Mercedes,” said Jack, the keyboard man. Everybody laughed and looked for Mercedes, but he had gone off somewhere. Wet blanket. Who cared.

  “I’ll take it,” Red offered. “Hey! Ice cream on waffles. You got to taste this.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Aren’t you hungry, man?”

  “No. Why would I be?”

  “But you haven’t eaten.” Red stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. He said slowly, “Don’t you ever get hungry?”

  “No. What is in that building over there?”

  It was the poultry hall. Inside was all bird noise and the sinus-tickling smell of feathers and droppings. The birds were displayed in small cages stacked six feet high, aisle after aisle of them. Pigeons—pouters, carriers, fantails. Golden pheasants. Placid ducks. Chickens—Volos gazed intently at the chickens. Japanese long-tails. Frizzles. Silkies, with purple skin and feathers like fur. The bearded South American chicken that laid a blue egg. Squat hens, Leghorn, Plymouth Rock, Wyandotte, their feathers stippled, spangled, mottled, barred, laced. Strutting roosters wit
h sickleform tails, black, gold, red. Fighting cocks, lean and tall and long-spurred, fierce and defiant in their captivity.

  They circled their cages and their cries echoed under the rafters, yet they grew still and spoke softly when Volos came near. His feathers had gone muted, his eyes dark. He said, “Their wings are of no use to them?”

  “No,” Angie told him.

  “But they should be flying things. They are so beautiful, but they are in cages. So many winged things in cages.”

  Angie asked him softly, “What is it, Volos?”

  “I just—I just want things to be free.”

  “Can’t always have that,” Red said.

  “Birdman, it’s okay.” Gabe tugged at Volos’s hand. “Come on, Iwanna pony ride.”

  Soon it would be time to get back to the grandstand, where a group called Bad Friday was opening. They all let the kids lead them out of the poultry house into the glaring, garish, noisy night. Behind a line of sweating security men, fans shrieked louder than Bad Friday, the barkers, and the rides combined. Mercedes wasn’t back yet. Angie didn’t care. Nobody cared.

  It bothered her that Volos, like life, could dip so quickly from joy into sadness.

  From behind the security cordon that encircled Burning Earth, faces shrieked like guinea hens. Volos went over to the edge of safety, touched straining hands, signed a few autographs. All the guineas scuttled toward him, so that his side of the circle sagged, heavily pressed, but all other parts of it bulged like a helium balloon. Angie found herself breathing more deeply, noticing that she could see out. Idly she looked at an Italian Sausage Sub stand, at a place that sold pastries called Elephant Ears, at the people milling between them, at a man walking toward her, a rugged sort of brown-haired man who looked startlingly familiar but did not meet her eyes—

  He squatted a few feet outside the cordon, near the canvas side of a Vinegar Fry tent. “Gabe,” he called. “Mikey.”

  “Daddy!”

  They tore their hands away from her and ran to him, straight between the legs of the security men, who were instructed, after all, to keep fans out, not to keep small children in.… Even if she had wanted to, Angie could not have held the boys back, but she did not try hard. It was right, fair, that they should run to their father.

  More slowly, she followed, slipping between the guards. Though she did not look back, she felt Volos’s eyes on her. And he stood still and let her go. She knew he had meant what he had said about freedom. He would not cage anything.

  She walked to Ennis. He tilted back his head to stare up at her, and his face might as well have been the face of a stranger for all the sense she could make of the look on it.

  From behind the Vinegar Fry stand a man in a black suit lunged out and seized her.

  His big hand had her hard by the arm, and the glare of his yellow eyes froze her. They were eyes she remembered all too well. Eyes no more forgiving than a snake’s.

  Ennis had stood up, carrying Gabe in one arm and Mikey in the other. “Say hello to your Grandpa,” he told them. But they were silent, because something about Grandpa frightened them.

  Angie’s scream as they took her away was lost in the screaming of Volos’s adoring fans.

  Red did not realize at first what had happened. Nobody did. It was as if lightning had struck without even the warning of rising wind ahead of time. One minute he was looking at funny chickens and laughing, and the next minute the air had turned to knives. There was something wrong with Volos, the big guy with wings was standing like in front of a firing squad, and where the hell was Angie going?

  Somebody had hold of her kids. Somebody had grabbed her.

  Volos was on the move, heading toward her—

  And then the security line broke, and the whole world was nothing but panting bodies and clutching hands and pleading mynah-bird cries.

  They never did quite piece it together afterward, whether some of the security men had left their places to try to help Angie or whether one or more of them had been bribed to foul up. Whether disaster was allowed to happen from a good impulse or a bad. What the hell did it matter anyway, the result was the same. Red could hear Volos shouting at people to let him through, the winged front man sounded half insane, there were probably a hundred hands tearing at him, but Red couldn’t move to help. He was entirely pressed in by breasty bodies, which was not nearly as much fun as it should have been. There were hands clawing at his face, somebody was trying to suck his mouth off, and he felt sweaty afraid.

  “God burn all of you!” Volos screamed in a voice fit to stop the world. Red had heard at a party once that people frying at the stake used to cry out, “End, world! End!” And it never would. But this time for a moment it was as if the turning Earth stood still. The reaching hands hovered in the air. The imploring cries hung there.

  Volos was flying.

  It took him a few seconds to tear away from them all. He rose slowly, like a faulty prayer, his great wings beating heart-tempo only a little distance above a thousand upturned heads. Then he recovered and was gone within another breath. But memory remained with Red like a soul lingering after a body is gone. Memory of long legs in ripped jeans. Bare brown shoulders. Wings, pale as a jilted lover’s face and beautiful in that carnival sunset’s many-colored lights. Angel wings.

  The fans had surged after him, stampeding between the food stands. Security had regrouped somewhat, so that Red stood in a small island of tranquility amid a sea of human trouble, looking up at the sky behind the fun house, Screamer, Bullet, Black Widow. Beyond the glare of the carnival rides he could see nothing else, not even a star.

  Beside him Cisco said in morose tones, “There went our front man.”

  Red averred at the black sky, “He’s—he’s real.”

  “Cripes, what did you think? He fucks and sucks same as the rest of us.”

  “No, but I mean—that thing about him flying in the hotel window, I thought it was just drunk roadie talk, and the way the kid got better, I just wrote it all off, I never—” Red gave up. Cisco wasn’t paying attention anyway.

  “There goes the show,” the bass guitarist said. Dourly impassioned, he reached for the supreme expletive. “Goddamn motherfucking shit of a whore-bastard, there goes the whole fucking band.”

  “You don’t think he’ll be back?” There was no reason to assume that more than one concert would be missed. Yet having seen an angel, Red himself had an unreasoning feeling that something huge had changed, that nothing would ever again be the same.

  “Didn’cha ever stop to think things were going too damn good for a bunch of rejects like us?”

  They stood looking silently at the darkness into which their lead singer had disappeared. The keyboard man joined them, his panic buttoned down the way his shirt collars used to be.

  “Somebody has to talk to the office,” he said. “Where is Mercedes?”

  Nobody knew. Nobody had seen him for a while.

  “To hell with him anyway,” said Red with an anger he didn’t know the source of.

  Nearby, some fans were fighting over Volos’s boots, which they had pulled off him as he rose, leaving him barefoot. They shrieked at one another like harpies. Leather still warm from his body heat was tearing apart in their hands.

  Volos fought free and took to the air just in time to follow the kidnappers. Two cars. In the first, a brown Yugo, he saw two small faces at the back window. Gabe and Mikey were on their knees, fingers to their mouths, looking up at him. In the second, a gray Oldsmobile sedan, he could see two silhouetted heads in the front, and in the back, Angie lying across the seat, very still. Her knees were bent upward in a way that had to be uncomfortable, and her long hair hung down on the floor, but she did not move.

  The York Fair was held on the outskirts of that city, along a modern highway on which taillights streamed like blood. Though cars honked, swerved, slowed, or even stopped as the drivers spotted Volos, this did him no good. The four-lane gave the Yugo and the Olds room to maneuver th
rough the chaos. Two traffic lights and they would be on the interstate.

  Red light. Please, Volos begged the air or the deities of electricity or perhaps even the one to whom such petitions are usually addressed, for suddenly he felt not too proud and angry to pray.

  He could not say for sure that he was answered, but the light turned red. With the Olds behind it, the Yugo rolled to a stop, and Volos thumped down in front of it, making his body and wings a wall. If these people were going to take Angie and her children away from him, they would have to drive through him to do it.

  The highway’s sodium vapor lamps threw an orange glare by which Volos could see as clearly as if by fires of hell. Behind the Yugo’s windshield a brown-haired, rugged-faced young man stared back at him with a look so dead, so wooden it made his skin prickle. It was as if someone had taken the insides out of Angie’s husband and replaced them with circuitry. It was like seeing a mechanical man.

  Gabe scrambled into the front of the Yugo and stuck his head out the passenger-side window. “Birdman!” he called. “Daddy’s gonna take us home.”

  “Bye-bye, Birdman,” Mikey sang from the shadows of the back seat.

  People in the next lane and the approaching lanes were exclaiming and pointing and calling to him out of their car windows, “Volos!” As if they owned him. As if his life was a performance for them to watch. Showtime.

  The light had changed. Behind Volos cars had pulled away, though the ones he confronted stayed where they were, blocking traffic. He had long ago learned of his ability to stop traffic … good, but what next? If he moved from where he was, the driver—what was his name—Ennis would just step on the gas and take off.

  As he thought it, from behind the Yugo the Oldsmobile pulled onto the road’s ample shoulder and accelerated past. Little more than arm’s length away, Volos saw the two men in the front seat, the craggy face of the driver, fierce-eyed, glaring eternal torments at him, and—

  Mercedes.

  Mercedes!

  Mercy, staring straight at him with a smile like a dog’s snarl and lifting a hand to tell him Fuck You. The same hand that had once …