Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  The Yugo backed up, skewed around him, and drove off after the Olds. People were getting out of cars and running toward Volos, their arms outstretched to touch him, clutch at him, get his autograph. He flew. Odd, he must have lost track of everything for a moment. The two cars were already through the next light.

  Mercy. I cannot believe it.

  He caught up to the gray sedan and the brown hatchback as they turned onto the interstate.

  They picked up speed, and he flew above them. He did not know what else to do. Land atop one, block the windshield, make it stop? But then the other one would go on without him. Angie could not help him. He had not heard a thought from her since that first terror-stricken scream. She had to be unconscious—by some drug Mercedes had given her, he hoped, not by a blow.

  God burn you, Mercy. What Texas did to me was lovingkindness compared to this.

  Texas. It was easier for Volos to admit, now that he was in trouble, that it had been a mistake to drive Texas away and even more of a mistake not to try to make it right; why had he not tracked him down, begged him to come back? He had a good idea where Texas had gone. At the very least he could have called him and told him how much he missed him, missed his long-legged stride to walk beside and his soft-spoken advice and his absurdities. Missed his kindness … Texas would have made everything better somehow if he had been there. If he had been at the fairground, he would somehow have kept this nightmare from ever happening.

  Maybe not. Maybe it was time to see truth: Maybe even God could not stop the blackwing side of life.

  Headlights, stabbing around turns, hurt his eyes. Made him blink.

  He followed for an hour, grew tired. These people he was trailing were going sixty along the expressway. It was hard on him to fly so slowly. And all their other offenses aside, he decided, Bradley and Crawshaw were despicable for owning such boring cars, dull cars, difficult to see in the night, instead of something white and sporty.

  Jenkins exit ahead.

  They took the ramp, as he expected and hoped they would. Hoped, because there would be another chance for a rescue, another traffic light, maybe—

  There was none. Overpassing the highway was only a small country road, the kind with domed asphalt and no lines. At the top of the exit ramp the Yugo went one way, the Olds the other. Volos groaned, thought fleetingly of physical dismemberment, for how else was he to follow both boys and Angie? But it seemed he had to choose. Swearing, he hung in the air a moment, then veered after the Olds and the Lady of Angels.

  The road steepened as it wound up Jenkins Mountain, turning to a dark tunnel beneath overhanging trees. Volos flew low, his wingtips brushing the woods on each side, his bare, dangling feet nearly touching the gray sedan’s roof. Feeling very much trapped.

  Halfway up a long hillside the trees ended. Gratefully Volos swooped up into clean night sky and circled, watching from far above as the Olds pulled into some sort of clearing and bumped to a stop.

  There were no houses anywhere nearby. The place was one of those run-down township parks, once meant for family reunions and wienie roasts, now used mostly for illegal camping and illicit activities. Its picnic tables were gone, its pavilion roofless. At some time there had been a nonregulation ball field, with a backstop behind home plate, of which the supports, two twelve-foot sections of telephone pole solidly erected, still stood, as they might do until Stonehenge fell. On one of them were glass reflectors embedded in the gray wood, winking in the night like a three-eyed cat.

  About where the pitcher’s mound might have been, a bonfire blazed. Even after the Olds turned off its headlights, Volos could see the metallic glints of several other cars parked in that place. Near the fire stood men wearing rude black hoods that covered their heads and faces, with slits for the eyes.

  Cowards. No-balls.

  In trees all around, a hundred thousand insects shrilled, the crowd getting worked up in the cheap seats. Overhead the stars watched in ineffable silence.

  They are gutless. Why am I frightened?

  The black-suited, craggy-faced man got out of his car and dragged Angie out of the back seat, the rough movements of his hands showing that he did not care if he hurt her. Her father? How could he call himself her father? He who sat on the Throne seemed kind by comparison.

  Slinging Angie over his shoulder, where her buttocks in their tight jeans appeared both indecent and terribly vulnerable, Crawshaw strode the short distance to the bonfire. Looking up, he grinned like a skull.

  Volos knew then that despite open sky he was trapped still.

  As if in response to a pressing invitation, he spiraled down the updraft of the—bane-fire, bone-fire, either way it spelled death. He did not want to die. He had not imagined himself to die until he had done much, much more living. Where was the blackwing power now that he needed it? But he knew it would not come to him. He had renounced it, he had imagined it out of himself. And in a way he could not say he was sorry. Blind anger was fit only for zealots such as these.

  Ten feet above the flames he swooped away and landed atop the three-eyed telephone pole, teetering there, staring down at all of them. Careful, though, not to look at the small man who leaned against the passenger door of the Olds.

  “Come closer, renegade,” Crawshaw challenged him.

  Clinging to splintery wood with his bare feet, Volos did not speak. It seemed to him as if the sound of his own voice would make what was happening more real than he could bear.

  “You want to save this slut, unholy one? Then come here.”

  Texas, where are you? You never did teach me how to do the chin thing.

  “Come down, you who like to wallow in perversion.” As if slapping butcher meat onto a countertop, Crawshaw swung Angie down from his shoulder into the grasp of his hard hands, dangling her nearer the fire.

  Volos felt his breath coming fast, his heart straining with a pain he could only dimly comprehend. Rescue, he thought, yearning to do it. But rescuer, savior, guardian angel—these were roles against which he had rebelled, for which he had not equipped himself. There were many strong men at the fire. He could not hope to fight them all.

  “Pay the price of your sinning. Someone must pay. Choose! Will it be you or this fallen woman?”

  Then Volos momentarily could not breathe at all, and the summery September night went cold, and insect chatter was a roar that engulfed him, the roar of the mob rushing the sacrificial hill, the roar of the congregation as the knife poised over the scapegoat. It was not a fistfight that was required of him. It was not wrath, a rebel’s black rage, no better than the ranting of a fanatic. It was instead the one stance he had sworn he would never take: It was submission.

  He looked at Angela. In her father’s steely grip she hung unconscious and helpless, limp as a broken wing.

  “Blasphemer. Profaner. Come accept your punishment, or your Jezebel will.”

  “No,” Volos whispered.

  With his eyes shining like a wolf’s eyes in the night Crawshaw looked up, then swung Angela so near to the blaze that her long hair hung scorching and sparking in the flames.

  “Stop,” Volos said.

  The man with wolf eyes moved Angela perhaps an inch away from danger. “Are you coming?”

  Volos said, “Yes.”

  He kicked with his wings, let them carry him toward the fire and the black-hooded men around it, down to the ground. His feet when they hit felt like lead. He tried to look only at Angie, not at anything else. Tried to think only of her. If he could feel sure she would live, it would not be so hard to do this thing.

  So this is love.

  His legs moved stiffly, carrying him forward, toward her. He stretched out a hand, wanting to touch her, to push her away from the flames, but his enemies seized him. Two of them gripped each of his arms. More grasped his wings. It was no joke, that he could have beaten them to death with the power of those wings, and they knew it. Through the feathers he could feel the sting of their hatred.

  Crawsh
aw spat in his face. Staring despite himself, Volos saw that the man’s eyes were fixed and soulless, like glass balls.

  “Were you human once?” Volos asked him, afraid not for himself but for everyone with a future, everyone mortal, if things like this could happen. “Did you love her once? She is your daughter.”

  The man glared, then turned away long enough to carry Angela the few steps to his car. He dumped her into it, reached into a suit pocket with bony fingers and handed Mercedes his keys. Smirking at Volos across the night, Mercy started the car and drove away.

  “Blasphemer.” Crawshaw stood in front of Volos again. But Volos did not hear him. He was listening to the sound of love being taken farther and farther away, down the mountainside into the darkness.

  Crawshaw backhanded him across the face. “Viper! Unrepentant slave to sin! Do you know how to pray?”

  Softly Volos said to him, “I have sung ten thousand times ‘Gloria, Gloria, Gloria’ before the Throne.”

  His wings felt different than they ever had before, far lighter, filled and uplifted by some passion that was ardent and fiery yet soft and yielding as cloudstuff. Puzzled, Volos glanced over his shoulder to see what might have happened. There he saw a refulgence that did not come from the bonfire. For the first time ever in his incarnate life, his wing feathers shone a pure, lambent white.

  chapter seventeen

  The night of the League for Moral Purity bonfire, after helping lure Volos as far as the Jenkins overpass, Ennis took Gabriel and Michael to be baby-sat by their Grandmother Crawshaw. Though she had not seen the boys in nearly a year, she greeted them without much change of expression. She had been like that for as long as Ennis had known her: passionless, dutiful, supremely accepting of God’s will. Years past, he had thought there was something wrong with her, something important missing, and had wondered how she got that way. But he no longer had such foolish thoughts. He understood now that what he had perceived as an emptiness in his mother-in-law was rather a spaciousness, a blessed purgation, the absence of sin. Hers was a life of obedience, an exemplar he tried to follow as day by day he grew more like her.

  From her house he drove fast, reaching the park just as that treacherous sodomizer Mercedes was pulling out. Good. He had not missed much, it was just starting. By the fire he could see Volos, a tall sinner with white wings. Saw his father-in-law hit him. Saw how Volos stood on spraddled legs, like a gunfighter, and did not flinch.

  His mind swerved at once away from grudging admiration. Reverend Crawshaw was the one to be admired, taking a strong stance against sin and sinners. Though Reverend Crawshaw, in his constant pity for human frailty, had allowed his followers to wear masks while performing this difficult task for the Lord, he himself wore none. Striving, as always, to emulate his spiritual leader, Ennis had decided to do likewise.

  He parked the Yugo, got out, and opened its hatchback. He had some things in there that his father-in-law had asked him to bring from the house. Rope clothesline. An ax.

  Hefting them, he walked up to the bonfire.

  “Son!” His father-in-law greeted him warmly, then took the ax from him and turned back to the prisoner, displaying it horizontally on both hands. He spoke, chill now as a stone where no sun shines.

  “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword,” he averred. His voice grew terrible. “And he who lives by the ax of rock and roll music shall die by the ax of God’s wrath.”

  Watching Volos, this lowlife who had stolen his wife and taken happiness away from him, Ennis saw him sway a little, as if he had been struck a strong-fisted blow. Saw how he did not struggle or cry out or speak. His face looked pale even in the ruddy firelight, and in their sockets of shadow his eyes seemed huge, like a bewildered child’s.

  They took him over to where the two stubs of telephone pole stood and put a rope tight around each wrist and stretched him between them, cruciform, with his back to the fire.

  This was a serious event, a culmination for the Crusade, and Reverend Crawshaw was treating it with befitting ceremony. “Show him what is going to feed the flames, men of God,” he declaimed. Ennis was ready. Like an usher passing out Sunday morning bulletins he distributed the things: record albums, cassette tapes, compact discs, several hundred of them, all with the explicit lyrics advisory label, all with Volos’s blue-winged back on the cover. All copies of Scars.

  “So many. Thank you,” Volos quipped, his voice struggling for the poise that would put him above what was happening. “I hope you got a discount.”

  “Fool!” Reverend Crawshaw’s voice lashed like a whip. “You are going to die. Be silent and pray.”

  “Sacre silentio? No, thank you. The dead lie silent in their graves.” Volos stood erect, Ennis noted, not hanging against the ropes that bound him. “I came here to live. To sing and love and speak and live.” His dark eyes caught on Ennis a moment, then slipped past.

  “Do not listen to him,” Reverend Crawshaw told his sheep. “His is the voice of Satan. Go on about the Lord’s work.”

  They circled, clockwise, from the prisoner to the fire, throwing his music on the flames. There had been stars before, but now the night went black with the smoke and fetor of burning vinyl.

  Volos began to sing.

  You want to fly

  But you have walked by my side

  You taught me to live

  But now I have to die.

  His voice—the voice that Ennis heard sometimes, despite everything, in his dreams—it defied darkness, it rose to the stars, quavering only a little.

  I’m not afraid

  I’ve seen the sunrise in your eyes

  So what’s a night ride.

  It’s just another road.

  I feel your arms around me

  For the night ride.

  Walking in the black-hooded circle, Ennis felt himself slowing to listen. Of all Volos’s songs, this was his favorite, this tender love ballad, and Volos was singing it with all his heart to Angela, Angela—unrepentant sinner though he was, he truly loved her, he was willing to die to save her—

  There was an eerie power in the prisoner’s singing. Several men had lagged or even stopped, listening. “Keep moving!” Reverend Crawshaw barked, and Ennis hastened his steps in quick obedience.

  You are so very beautiful

  Half angel

  Half goddess

  Your heart is a flying dove

  Your thoughts are fire in the wind

  And I am weak with love of you

  I turn to you like a child

  Please be with me.

  Volos stopped, but without faltering. He had said Amen, that was all. The song had been his prayer, albeit to the wrong deity.

  “Pagan,” Reverend Crawshaw accused, and rightly so. A pagan was anyone who worshiped something other than what Jesus had called God; Ennis could not argue. Yet he felt—but it was not his job to feel. Feelings always hurt him. It was far better simply to obey.

  He stood with the others at his leader’s back. The Reverend faced Volos, only inches away, eye challenging eye, hefting the ax in his strong, long hands. Ennis shuddered, then made himself stop it, ashamed.

  “Heathen,” Reverend Crawshaw said venomously to Volos. “Worldling. No, it will not soon be over, O ye self-proclaimed rock idol. You have offended God, and you must suffer. Your hands will go, and maybe that sexual organ you are so fond of flaunting, before I am done with you.”

  Ennis saw Volos reach the limits of his courage, saw his eyes go wild, watched him start to tremble and strain against the ropes that bound him helpless to the posts.

  “But first to go,” Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw said, “will be those mockeries with which you blaspheme the holy hosts of Heaven.” He turned to his troops. “Son.”

  Ennis nodded and moved to take his place. As the Crusade leader’s second-in-command it was his privilege to immobilize the condemned enemy’s left wing. The assignment was coveted, and at one time he had felt honored by it. Now he just felt numb.
/>
  He placed himself behind Volos. A stocky man in a black hood, chosen to deal with the other wing, took position beside him. Reverend Crawshaw stood with raised ax behind Volos’s shaking, straining right arm.

  “Scream, Satan-lover,” he said to Volos. “Now!” he told his assistants.

  Ennis grabbed. He had expected that his task would be harder, that the prisoner would thrash and struggle, but Volos had more defiance in him than he would have thought possible. Defiance, or innate dignity, or mistaken faith—for whatever reason, the blasphemer did not fight. Ennis got hold of the wing easily—

  And with a jolt as if the world had stopped turning, he found himself holding his own soul in his fingers. White feathers tingled in his grip, they were everything warm, kind, gentle, good that he had ever known in his life; they were his mother’s hug, his father’s last words before he died, his children’s first steps, they were Angela—dear God have mercy, how could he ever have forgotten how he loved Angie? She meant more to him than—than anything. There was nothing he could not forgive her. Yesterday was not soon enough for him to be with her again. He felt his leathery armor of obedience split like a swollen wound. He cried out, feeling all the pain he had ever suppressed, all the anger, all the ardor.

  Volos screamed.

  Sweet Jesus suffering on the cross, no! It was all wrong, wrong, wrong, Ennis knew that to the fundament of his heart, and Crawshaw was a demon, and Volos was staggering and screaming out his agony as blood spurted and the ax lifted to strike again—

  “No!”

  Ennis lunged for the weapon. But the black-hooded man holding the severed wing stood in his way, he could not get to Crawshaw quickly enough, and he saw the flash of the heavy metal axhead, heard the sounds he would never be able to forget: the impact, and the snap of shattering bone, and the scream again.

  Then he had hold of the ax, wrenching it away. His charge had surprised Crawshaw enough to let him do that.

  “Ennis!”

  “Shut up!” he shouted. “You are horrible!” He wanted to use the ax on the terrible old man, but he knew himself now, knew that he could not kill anyone. He swung, but not at Crawshaw, aiming instead at the rope snaking around the nearest post. It was a cramped, one-handed blow, but God must have been with him. The rope parted with one whack, and Volos did not fall, for Ennis had caught hold of his arm.