Metal Angel (11 page)

He missed the mountains, and the one all his memories gathered round. He missed Wyoma.

During those hot, dry Santa Ana days, Mercedes moved in air so electrically charged it seemed to crackle. He noticed sunsets, saw some that were worth weeping over—though he did not weep, he never wept, had not done so since the childhood day of his first time with his first love, a boy he had not seen since eighth grade. He was twenty-eight now, and in L.A., and beloved of Volos, and filled to the point of giddiness with a sense of his own godlike well-being. The ionized air, the light shows in the sky, and angel Volos himself, all were uniquely for him, Mercedes Kell. California was unzipping itself, opening its penetralia to him. His career was on the climb. He would yet be recognized as great.

Already through Volos he had met Brett Decimo.

Actually he had introduced himself. Volos had no tact, no manners, and refused to play most of the social-pecking-order games. But it was Volos who had taken him to the private party at Club Decimo. No way would he have gotten in otherwise. Some of the most powerful people in the industry were there. And having intuited that he was Volos's lover, Brett Decimo shook his hand with evident interest.

“Tell me,” she asked him, “does he do
everything
with his wings on?”

“Absolutely,” Mercedes responded with his most charming and mysterious smile. He had adopted Volos's unspoken policy of neither affirming nor denying the presence and provenance of the angel's wings, but letting people function on the basis of their assumptions that those interesting appendages were clever fakes. Mercedes, believing himself to be the only individual on earth sufficiently anointed by the hand of God to know Volos, was to be painfully disillusioned and bitterly jealous some time later, when he finally met Texas.

“Well,” Brett Decimo remarked to him, “I've met guys who wear their glasses to bed. But not
my
bed.” She showed Mercedes her very straight, very white teeth. “You know he likes women too?”

“Of course.” Mercedes had accepted even before he met Volos, as part of his theology of power, that the angel would be a bisexual. This ability, this virility, was potency. Mercedes had always found real men, the ones who could get it up with women as well as with him, far more attractive and exciting than the faggoty-looking ones the world identified as homosexuals. His ideal, like Plato's, was the androgyne. He believed that this ideal had been Yahweh's as well, as he created Adam from clay. It had all been there in Adam. That business with the rib afterward, the division of humans into two sexes, had been an afterthought, a tragic mistake, the beginning of the Fall and of alienation.

The blond and important woman to whom he was speaking, however, would not understand or care about much of this. She would want to keep things light. Mercedes quipped at her, “Like Mae West said, why cut yourself off from half the population?”

Brett's Hollywood smile softened, became fairly genuine. One of the odd ironies of Mercedes's life, as he knew well, was that women seemed to like him even though he did not particularly like them. With Brett, however, things were different. She could like him if she wanted to, because it was not his exposed chest or his bared homosexuality that attracted her to him—it was his ambition. Bright, hard, and calculating, their eyes met, and they recognized each other across the gender barrier: They were two of a kind. They understood each other. Brett nodded.

“Come have a drink with me next time you're free,” she invited before she turned away to greet other guests.

It was all he could have asked for at the moment—though, of course, soon enough he would ask for more. And so would she. That was what it was all about, this matter of grabbing a comet by the tail and hanging on. When Volos burned to ash, suicided in the sunblaze of his own fame, she would be there, as high in the Hollywood hotshot rankings as Volos's wings could lift her. And so would Mercedes be there, right by her side.

At the buffet he got himself a mushroom stuffed with snow crab and langostino, which he ate with slow delectation. He licked bits of seafood from his lips with the supple tip of his tongue. Caught Volos's eye across the room, and Volos smiled at him, the sunrise smile of a child in love. Mercedes was doing just what he had said he would: He was making an angel very happy.

Yes, things were going very well for Mercedes Kell. And it was not just a matter of riding to immortality on Volos's broad shoulders. The sexual liaison gratified him too. Everything about Volos turned him on, even the touch of his wings. Especially the quivering touch of his wings on naked skin. … Quite simply, Volos was the best lover he had ever experienced. He would have wonderful memories to savor when he moved on to even more pleasurable things.

Lying in the satin-and-polyester nest of the waterbed with his lover the night after his quarrel with Texas, Volos found himself for the first time indifferent to the skilled touch of Mercy's lips and hands. Out of sync with the rhythms of lovemaking, bone-weary, unaroused, he felt his chest heave and knew that he had done something deeply wrong.

What of it? Had he not become flesh in order to do wrong?

Yet he had thought it would be a matter of free choice, of a head-tossing defiance, and now he was finding—it had not been that way at all, he had wanted to do the favor for Texas, he would have done it if … if … Was this the almighty joke, was this what it meant to be human—to want to do right, yet do wrong and wrong and wrong?

He struggled out of the bed's clinging touch. “Some other time,” he told Mercedes.

His lover was not angry. “Thinking of a song?”

“Something like that, yes.” Which was a lie, and another way in which he did evil, by letting it be thought that he wrote his own songs. He had told himself he did not care that it was wrong. That night, though, he knew he did care, and he knew why. He wanted to do this thing, he wanted to create music out of himself the way he made sperm. Being unable to write songs was like being impotent. There were things about himself he had failed to fully imagine. He lacked memories, he lacked a childhood, he lacked parents and a hometown to love and hate. He could not have been Volos the rocker at all if it were not for the young woman somewhere far to the east, whose name and provenance he did not know.

Some important aspect of him was missing.

He pulled on his jeans and his boots, kissed Mercedes, and went out in the night to wander the streets.

He loved the night. There was peace in it, and loneliness, and danger. The peril—that of ravaged people who roamed, as he did, in the night—the danger only made the peace more lovely, and the peace made danger's knife glint more bright.

Black-cloaked, black-jeaned, black-booted, he strode under the broad black shadow of a freeway overpass. There he could see nothing and thought at first that nothing could see him until he heard the pigeons murmuring from their roost somewhere above his head.

“Look at him. Humans don't know how to dress. He could put on anything he wants, and he's all one color, like a wretched crow.”

“At least he has those nice shiny toenails. See? Like tin foil.”

“Oooo, tacky. You have bad taste, Banana Beak.”

“I like a little something different, White Ass. Trendy. Daring. New wave.”

“Just what I should expect of a variant. Never trust a hen in speckled feathers.”

“I like high fashion.”

“Low class is what you mean.”

There were, Volos decided, two of them. The female, she of the impugned beak, gave her soft utterances edge by means of that hard nasal protuberance. The male, he of the white rump-patch, had a bitchy charm that reminded Volos of Brett or Mercedes.

“I believe in classic style, myself,” he cooed. “Ring necks and white breasts are for hens and comelatelies.”

“As if any of us have a choice.”

“All the same, I think a bird looks best in basic gray with a narrow band of black on the wingtips. Restrained and elegant, with just a touch of iridescence at the throat.”

“And pink feet.”

“Yes, of course, pink feet.”

“And a white butt.”

“You don't like my white butt?”

“I'll show you what you can do with your white butt.”

Then he heard billing and cooing. They were a couple, all right. It was something of a mystery to Volos, how mortal couples could make love sound so much like war. Feeling his own solitude, yet intrigued, he listened until they grew aware that he was still there.

“That human has not moved,” Banana Beak murmured to her mate. “Drop a juicy one on him.”

“You drop one on him.”

Before either of them could do so, he moved on. In and out of shadows he walked, sometimes watching a horned moon swimming in the thin clouds. Smelling the sea in the breeze. Keeping away from the places where the youths ganged, the ones with the hard fists and the salty yells. He did not want to deal with fists or knives. Texas had not yet showed him how to stop leading with his chin.

Texas.

The way the moon tugged at the tide his thoughts tugged at him until, around two in the morning, he risked the bad section of downtown and went up the narrow stairs to Texas's room in the Y, knowing he would wake McCardle out of sleep, knowing this was another wrong thing to do, and unable to help it.

For some reason, though, Texas was still up, sitting in the dark, fully dressed. He glanced at Volos as he entered, then looked away again, out the window.

“You are angry at me,” Volos said to him. “That is what this hurtful feeling is in me. Your anger.”

Texas did not move or speak.

“I want to at least try to explain. Listen. Are you listening?”

“Sure.” Tonelessly.

“It is like this. To do what you ask—to find out about your father—I would have to pray. I would have to become obedient to the one on the Throne again. It would be necessary that I should get down on my knees before that tyrant and take back everything I ever said of him, and beg his forgiveness.”

“Never mind, then,” said Texas.

His voice sounded quiet, tired, nothing more. Not angry. Volos took two impulsive steps toward him and knelt on the bare floor almost close enough to touch him. His wings trailed, heart-red.

“You really do see? It is something that—I just cannot do it. He—He made a serving boy of me. Go do this for this human, go do that for that one. It was the humans he loved. I never want to do anything for a human again.”

Texas turned his head suddenly to stare. Volos winced and looked down. “I keep forgetting,” he muttered.

Texas said, “It doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me that you must understand. He wounded me. Not really, for I was a bodiless thing, but—when I made myself this body I tried to imagine it with scars on the back. Because that is how I feel. Scarred.”

“Bullshit, kid.” Texas came out of his torpor suddenly, sat up, and glared. Volos heard anger now, but it was a different anger than before, hot and more hurting and mixed with something worse, some kind of despair. “Nasty choirmasters and hurt feelings just don't cut it compared to real abuse. I should know.”

“I—”

“Shut up and listen. My daddy was a junkie. He must have had to put himself out to get hold of the stuff down where we lived, but he managed it. He was a drunk, too. Hit my mother, bruised her face, and she was the sweetest woman ever to marry a no-good rotten bum. The sonuvabitch left her when I was three, and I never saw him again. Except once.” Texas turned to stare out the dark window again. His voice quieted, but it was not a good quietness. “I was ten years old, and I guess I let it be known to some of my friends what I thought of my father for leaving my mother that way. And it turned out he was living with some floozie in a smackhouse only a couple of towns away. He heard it from somebody, what I was saying about him. So he came to see me. Caught me on the road home from school. And he beat me.”

“He
what?
”

“First he told me to look at him, look at what he was. Told me I ought to consider he had done me and Ma a favor by getting out of our lives. And then he beat me. Broke my arm, my nose, my collarbone, tore one ear half off. He beat me sick. Ma had to come find me and carry me home. I was in bed for a week.”

Volos felt sick just hearing about it. Watching Texas' face as Texas told about it made him feel weak and queasy. He had never experienced how a kind man can hide a long shadow. He whispered, “Texas, please stop.”

“I'm done.”

“You wanted me to find this—this monster for you? In all hell's name, why?”

“So I could do him the way he done me.” Texas faced Volos without a smile. “So I could beat the shit out of him and walk away and leave him laying on the ground, the way he done to me. All right?”

“No,” Volos said, “not all right. Not for you, Texas.”

“Why not?”

“You are—you are good.”

“And you're not? Would you for Chrissake get up off the floor?”

Something dark in Texas' voice puzzled Volos. He stayed where he was, on one knee. “You are still angry with me.”

“No. No, I'm not. Honest to God, kid, I'm not. Get up, you asshole.” Texas reached down and tugged at him. His hand was warm, and Volos submitted to its touch, standing up, then sitting on the bed.

“None of it matters anymore, anyways,” Texas said.

Then for the first time Volos took a long enough glimpse outside self to realize that his friend's desperation might have nothing to do with him. He sat rigidly. He whispered, “What has happened?”

There was a considerable pause before Texas answered.

“I called Wyoma,” he said at last. He gestured at the letter still lying on his windowsill. “I figured, why send that when I could spare a couple bucks and phone. Took a yen to hear her voice.”

“She was not there?”