Metal Angel (10 page)

But for that first day of her rebellion she had no questions, no doubts, and she felt sublimely calm and quite happy. Once home, knowing she was late starting supper, she delayed the meal yet more by unpackaging her purchase, setting it up and turning it on and glorying in the volume and clarity of its tone. While she cooked she listened for the new song, the one her father had interrupted, the one she wanted to hear again and again. Ennis came home early and found her still waiting for it, so engrossed in her listening that she did not meet him at the door for her kiss. He scooped up Gabe and Mikey instead and stood looking at her.

“Mommy bought a radio!” Gabe informed him in heightened tones. The boys had capered around the radio for hours, delighted by the novelty of having music in the house.

“Yes, I see,” Ennis said to the boys, and then to his wife, “Your father called me at work.”

“My father can go to that place he's so fond of mentioning.”

“Ange, don't talk like that.” He set the boys down. “It's not like you.”

“You don't know me.”

“I know there's something wrong.”

There was no thundering in Ennis, no radio smashing. He did not even attempt to turn the instrument of Satan off. In due time he ate his supper, had his shower, and helped put the boys to bed, and all the while the radio played its siren song, and from time to time Ennis said, “Angie?” Just her name, in a voice so floundering and perplexed and worried that she felt as if she had not two children but three, and the big one was pulling with sticky hands at her skirt. It was hard for her to conquer her irritation enough to hug him.

“Stop fussing, Ennis!”

“I ain't fussing at you.”

That was the truth. There was no anger in him for her, only heavy foreboding, a sense of trouble building. There would be comeuppance. Playing the radio was capital-letter Wrong.

“What are you doing it for, Ange?”

She felt unable to explain in any way he could ever understand. Confound Ennis, he was all patience and obedience. Was there a self-willed bone in his whole bashful body? His goodness made her furious. She pushed him away with her fists and screamed at him, “I hate it all! Let me out of here! Out of this slavehouse!”

If she had showed him the slavehouse song, she thought later, if she had gone to her linen closet and gotten out her small-folded pieces of paper and let him read them, maybe he would have felt, if not her yearnings, at least her desperation:

LET ME OUT

I am a hidden flower

LET ME OUT

I am a shrouded prisoner

Come sweet devil open my petals

Come bee-sting angel probe this blossom

Break open this seraglio

Tear down the walls of this holy jail

Let me out

LET ME OUT

Let me out of this sacred slavehouse
.

But she did not think to do that. And when at his usual time Ennis went to bed, she pulled the hairpins from her bun but stayed up, listening to her radio.

Her song, the one with the singer who made her shiver, came on around midnight, the witching hour. This time, with her new radio turned up in the still of the night, she heard the words:

This angel's full of the devil
.

This angel ain't no dead person daddy

This angel is alive

Alive and looking for lovin'

I WANT TO LIVE

Angie stiffened, listening hard as the singer's voice skidded without effort up the heightening rhythms of the words—words she had written. Changed somewhat, it was true. But nevertheless, hers. Her own.

“What's going on?” she whispered.

A strange coincidence? No. Impossible. On the airwaves she had just heard her creation, her mind child, a piece of her soul written down on a page of tablet paper, her words. How could they have gotten from her to—

“Volos,” the deejay told her. “The hot new kid from L.A., singing ‘Before I Die.' And yes I've heard it's true, he does have wings. Don't ask me how, that's all I know, folks, so you people phoning in, give me a break, huh? Coming up next—”

Angie turned her radio off and sat fingering her lips, thinking not at all of her father and his wrath, quite a bit of the squares of paper hidden in the linen closet upstairs, but most of all of the singer who had somehow stolen her soul from her, and of how she had heard in his voice the warmth of his throat and tongue.

chapter six

Texas had found himself a job at a dry-cleaning establishment, and it was there, in the steam-thick, chemical-scented hell of the back room, in the midst of machinery reminiscent of a medieval torture shop, that Volos one day came to see him. When the tall, black-cloaked figure walked in, all the poplin-clad Mexican women in the place clustered at the other end of the room, as if they were peasants in the presence of the executioner or chickens cowering in the shadow of a huge dark hawk.

Texas, however, merely nodded hello, unsurprised. Volos had been visiting him every few days to announce with equal delight his first live performance, his first recording session, his first ejaculation. Texas started laying bets with himself as to what was on the kid's mind this time.

He called to the boss that he was taking his break, lifted his Stetson from a hook near the door and led Volos into the more breathable air outside. It was early fall. The Santa Anas had dispersed the city's layer of smog, but also the aroma of jasmine. Now L.A. was dry and hot.

“How's it going, kid?”

“Good.” They sat on a concrete retaining wall spray-painted with graffiti: “Love Stinks,” “Izzy Sucks Donkey Dick,” “God is Dead.” Volos fingered the varicolored lettering as he said, “They are starting to want to give me money.”

Texas had thought Volos's manager was taking care of the money end of things for him. He exclaimed, “You mean Brett ain't given you some already?”

“A little. Under the table, she said. I saw no table. But now there are problems.”

It was as Texas had bet himself, the kid wanted something, wanted advice or at least wanted to talk. Volos always wanted something whenever he came to him. That was all right, Texas guessed. What else was an old cowboy like him good for? Though he sometimes wondered: If other people had wings, if Texas had wings and Volos touched them, what would Volos feel? Anything? Was there anything in him to manifest, would anything ever change him at all? Or would he stay just the same, as if all he ever touched was himself?

Texas asked, as he was expected to ask, “What kind of problems?”

“There is a great deal of talk about a Social Security number and a birth certificate and a bank account.”

“Ouch.”

Volos swung his feet, kicking his booted heels against the wall and its spray paint, against an anarchy symbol done in runny orange. He said, “I would rather go on as I have been doing. But they say also that I will need a citizenship and a passport to go on tour. And this touring, it seems it is something I must do. Also, I have decided there are things I want, possessions, that require money.”

“Possessions? You?” Texas teased. “Like what?”

The angel did not respond to his light tone. He replied soberly, “A Harley-Davidson motorcycle.”

“A Hawg! You gonna be a Hell's Angel?”

This time Volos comprehended the joke, and smiled. “Am I not already?”

“Guess so.”

Volos said, “Also, I want a convertible like Brett's. Only mine will have a better stereo, and be black. But you see, there it is again, the problem. In order to drive any of these things I need a license. And to get the license I need the certificate of having been born and all the rest of it.”

“I see.”

“Your world is nuts for licenses and papers, Texas.”

“Don't sweat the cattle in the heat of the day. Just hold your horses.” Texas was thinking. Like most cops, he felt little compunction about breaking the law if it seemed the thing to do at the time. There were laws, and then there was the right thing to do, and he had been around long enough to know the two were often not the same. Also, his state of limbo in L.A. made him feel ready to be reckless. What had he run away for except to be reckless? Though the risk he was contemplating was not about the law so much. More about giving away a secret part of himself.

He decided to do it. Said, “Volos. I had a son once, would have been about twenty years old now if he'd lived. You can use his birth certificate if you like.”

Volos looked at him with blue eyes as blank as an infant's. “You had a son?”

“Only lived a couple days. Born in the hospital, so he got the birth certificate all right, but he died in his sleep the first night we took him home. Things were rocky for me and Wyoma, we didn't have no money, we was far from our families, they mostly weren't speaking to us—see, I was a McCardle, got a no-good for a father, and she was a Catholic when she should have been a Methodist—it's hard to explain.” Texas frowned at the ground and his scuffed boots, trying. “They didn't mind us getting in trouble, but they didn't like us getting married. So we went away for a while. And then when the little guy died, we just moved on. It's not that we done anything wrong to the baby. But he was young, our hearts was broke, and if we buried him ourselves and didn't get no death certificate it was like he was still alive, see?”

“Yes.”

Nobody else Texas knew would have said it so cleanly, the simple “Yes.” He liked that in Volos, the kid's no-frills honesty. Being around Volos always did something good for him, even when it drove him crazy. He smiled, feeling the new warmth in his voice as he said, “So you can be him if you want.”

“Be a dead person? But yes, I suppose it is the only way.”

“Don't thank me,” Texas hinted.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.” Texas didn't know why, but he damn near loved this guy. “Okay, then. I'll write Wyoma and tell her to send me the birth certificate. From now on you're him.” Sliding off the wall, Texas stood on asphalt, making a small, awkward ceremony of saying the name. “You're Flaim Carson McCardle. ‘Course you'll still want to call yourself Volos, but it'll be like a stage name.”

Volos stood also and shook his hand. The angel seemed to understand that no small thing was happening. “Flaim,” he said softly. “It is a beautiful name.”

“I thought so. I chose it. I like that kind of name that's simple and means something.”

“An old Greek once said that men are flames and the world is a fire. Always the same, yet always changing.”

“He really said that?” Texas was astonished that someone else so long ago had thought the same things he thought, almost in the same words.

“Yes.”

“That's what you are, then. A flame.”

The two of them stood for a moment in understanding so close it was almost union, like the union of two flames wavering momentarily into one, before Texas spoiled it. It was so good he had to spoil it. So good it made him, like a child on Christmas, want more. Not content just to give and be any longer.

“Volos. I'm doing something for you, now I want you to do something for me. I want you to help me—” He fumbled it slightly. “Help me find my father.”

“He is missing?”

“Been gone a long time now.”

“But how can I find him if you cannot?”

“I thought—you being what you are—or were—there might be a way.”

Volos said, “No.”

“No, there's not a way?”

“No, I will not do it.”

That blunt honesty again. This time Texas did not appreciate it at all.

You bastard
. “Why not?”

“I came here to be human, Texas.”

“And I saved your goddamn human ass,” Texas said between his teeth, keeping his voice down almost to a whisper, “and took you in, and busted my butt nursing you, and spent damn near my last dime on you—and now there's something you could do for me—”

“Texas, I can't!” The kid was being human, all right. Sounded as human as Texas had ever heard him. Whining. Getting his own way, as usual. Something about Volos made Texas so panting mad-dog furious that his mother's Methodist strictures took automatic hold on him, keeping his voice low, controlled.

“You can't, or you won't?”

“Texas—”

“Never mind. Forget it.” Texas came from a family that knew how to do these things, how to speak softly and turn a big knife of guilt. “I got to get back to work. Just forget I asked.” Stalking into the back of Keller's Kleaners, into the hot, clanking hell where he spent his days, he did not glance at Volos to see him go.

That evening, though still angry fit to spit, he wrote the promised letter to Wyoma—because he had said he would do it, and also because it was a nearly surefire way of getting a reply out of her at last.

After he had sealed the letter he thought of Flaim, the baby he had seldom remembered for years, and of his two daughters, Starr and Merrilee, both already married. Even when he was home he had not seen as much of them as he would have liked. He missed them. Hell, he had been missing them already before he left them behind.

It was peculiar, the way he'd always been, feeling like a stranger in his own home place. Always turning his daydreaming to somewhere else. He'd never in his whole life realized how much he was
from
the hills he was born in. But now that he was far away, he knew: He was a mountaineer at heart, he came from West Virginia. The Indian legends said West Virginia was the spine of the world, the place where human beings were first created, and now Bob McCardle could believe it. He missed almost everything about the place: the hogbacks, and the trees—old people from his hills said West Virginia trees talked to God. He missed the Indian mounds. And he missed the way a man could look up at night and see the stars floating in the black sky big as water lilies.