Metal Angel (14 page)

“Does it hurt less if it is not on purpose?”

“Volos, would you for Chrissake shut up? You're hurting me right this fucking minute.”

Wide-eyed, the kid looked at him, then without a word sat down on a tall stool and began to play. But this time what came out of the black guitar was the music of a white angel of mercy. Volos made the thing sing like bells, like a sweet human voice, a choir of treble voices in golden-hued harmony. Joy, Peace, Love—from its first chord, the melody took Texas into its embrace, cradled him, flooded him in a warm baptism of sound to wash away his aches. He felt easy tears brightening his bruised eyes. “God,” he whispered. It was magical music, heaven's gift. And, he knew, Volos's gift of atonement to him.

Touched to his soul, he looked at the giver, and saw that Volos's face was lowered over the guitar and his wings had gone tar-dark.

Texas got up, went to him and stopped him with a hand on the strings. “All right,” he said, “okay. I hear you. How in God's name can you make that kind of music and still feel the way you feel?”

Without looking up Volos said, “For a long time I had to.”

“You don't have to give me no peace offering if it's that hard on you.”

“I wish—I wish I could be good for you. But nothing's simple, is it? Nothing's pure.”

Texas said gently, “Not in this life, son.”

By the time his band arrived for rehearsal, Volos had his wings back to quiet gray. He watched without saying much as his musicians set up and warmed up and chatted with each other.

It was as Mercedes had said: They were very ordinary-looking people. The keyboard player was going bald above habitual button-down oxford-weave shirts. The drummer was a middle-aged man shaped like a tomtom. The bass guitarist was a stick of a woman who always wore straight skirts and thick glasses; she looked like Buddy Holly in drag. Even the lead guitarist, Red, was no more than a freckled young man who loved music.

Even before he had heard what Texas had to say about loyalty, Volos had mostly made up his mind to go with this nameless band a while longer. Because of musical considerations, he would tell Mercedes, because there was no time to audition and rehearse new people with his busy recording and nightclub schedule. Which was true. But the deeper truth was that he had begun to intuit what a real rock band could be like, what it meant when the backup vocals came and sang at the same mike as the front man, when the singer stood back to arched back with his lead guitarist, so close their heads touched. He had started to want that closeness, like the oneness of music itself, and knew he wasn't going to get it. Brett had explained to him that most music people had worked their way up together, paid dues together, got to be like family, whereas he had come out of nowhere (more literally than Brett knew) and started at the top. His band had a right to resent him. It was enough that they were respectful to him as a professional.

But what he couldn't have, Volos had decided, he was not going to stage with performers. As one who knew no other way to sing than from the heart, Volos held an opinion of performers much like Texas's opinion of whores.

“I have a new song to work out,” he reported. The band quieted at once, too quickly, to hear him. “This is somewhat different. A love ballad, almost. Listen.” What he should have done really was work up a lead sheet, but Volos found it difficult to write. By way of autograph, all he could manage quickly was a sort of vee-bird, the kind of thing small children put in the skies of their crayon pictures. He knew several hundred languages, but he had forgotten to imagine the relays that send language to the hand, so he held a pencil like a first-grader and stabbed holes in paper with it. Necessarily, his band learned his songs by ear.

He and the new guitar sang the ballad for them:

What you call heaven I call hell

It's all shame and blame

So how can I tell

If I love you…
.

“Nice,” opined Jack, the keyboard man, in his buttoned-down way after Volos had finished.

They talked about a heartbeat tempo, dark-honey guitar, a few word changes. “Citadel” struck them as obscure. Volos agreed, and they changed the word to “chapel.” The drummer clicked his sticks to get them going, and after that it was Volos's hot voice that melted them, almost miraculously, into oneness. When the song had come to him a few hours before, he had felt a young woman's desolation as if it were his own. He sang as if for her alone.

“Man, how do you
do
that?” Red begged him. The freckled guitarist's frequent ardor made him seem younger than he was. He was, in fact, a longtime sessions player, and it showed when he said, “I've worked with pros who did worse on the tenth try than you do on the first.” They were all, even Jack, looking at Volos with something like awe. But awe is made of distance and fear. He did not want that. What was he to say to them? He turned away.

“Hey, man, something wrong?”

“No,” he said to the wall. “Let us do it again.”

What you call heaven I call hell

It's all shame and blame
…

Then—he could no longer sing, or even hear the song, or move. It was the shock of his incarnate life to date. Taking on flesh, he had thought he would never suffer it again, but—it was happening, the familiar intrusion, the invasion, the rape of his mind they called prayer. Volos stood rigidly, with taut face and wings clenched into the shape of a long, quivering heart, violated by a distant summons:

Volos

Volos

Angel of anarchy

His band faltered to silence and looked at him curiously.

Volos

Volos

Come rescue me

“What's the matter, man?” the drummer asked.

He managed to move his mouth, to speak. “Nothing,” he whispered.

Volos

Volos

God, he could feel it inching closer. “Shut up!” he begged between clenched teeth.

“Hey, man, are you okay?” Red looked worried. They all did. Their concern impinged on Volos like the prayer. He turned and lunged blindly out of the house, cloakless. In his benighted garage his black Hawg awaited him like a prize stallion sulking in an oversized stall. Once he was on the Harley and moving, no one would bother him.

Volos

Volos

Come to me

Not even Her. Whoever She was.

Volos roared off into the starless city night, running away, drowning out her still-distant voice. His wings caught the wind and spread, translucent, gradually lightening from angry red to fire-orange in the streetlamp light. Speed slapped his face, lifted his hair. Black bike, black night, dark hair flying—he loved these things. Even She could not take them away from him.

In part he knew who she was. It was her, the one whose songs spoke straight to his mind, and somehow she knew him better than he knew her, she called him angel and she was summoning him by name. And he owed her something, he knew that. But loyalty had its limits. No matter who she was, no matter what she said or did, he would not go back to the role of servant, of guardian angel, of comer-when-called. Not even for Texas could he do that. He would scald in her tears first. He would fry in hell.

chapter eight

Gabe, the fussed-over firstborn, had always been the one who was wired too tight, while little two-year-old Mikey was more easygoing. Therefore it was Gabe whom Angela had to carry in her arms as she tried to find shelter her first dark night in the worst streets of downtown L.A. He was too heavy for her, but the fatigue of the long journey and the sight of a hydrocephalic beggar had combined to send him out of control. He would not or could not walk. Lugging the tote bags and the screaming child, with Mikey trailing at her side through the filthy bus station and out to the even filthier streets, Angie felt beyond screaming herself. She had gone numb. The sight of men selling stolen jewelry and the come-ons of rip-off artists could not make her more frightened than she already was.

Her money was all but gone. The long days on the road, even on a nearly constant diet of hot dogs, had been more expensive than she had previously imagined possible. And she had never expected to be on her own for so long, had not thought that Volos, her soulmate, could fail to come to her. It all seemed crazy now, the way she had run to him. Her notion of a linkage, a bond with him was nothing more than a sexually repressed neurotic's delusion, and that made her a nut case, and she had acted like one. Now she had to find a charity somewhere to take her in, or else spend the night on the street. She didn't want that… but once around the first corner she could carry Gabe no farther. She sank down on the sidewalk, leaning back against a cinder-block wall. Gabe sprawled on her, weeping more quietly, with his face hidden between her breasts. Mikey sat down and pressed himself against her, far too quiet. A ravaged old man shuffled past on bare feet the gray color of a bloated tick, his toenails so long they curled down under his toes, making him limp. Gabe needed a Kleenex. Mikey began to hiccup. Poor kids, even being taken away from her by their hellfire grandpa might have been better for them than this. She had gone and proved everybody right, she was a worthless mother—

Hellfire. She would show them worthless.

As if her desperation had made her into nothing but a torch waiting to be lit, as if a match had struck, Angela Bradley blazed into incandescent fury.

“Volos!”

She shrieked the name aloud, startling her children—but her rage was not at them, or even at the two God-fearing men, her father and her husband, who had driven her to this place where already she had seen an old woman squatting and defecating in a dumpster. Rather, like the wrath of the mob on Calvary day, her anger was all for the savior, the rescuer who had failed.

“Volos, you wretch, I am calling you!”

Except for her frightened sons, no one actually within earshot paid any attention to her. It was not the sort of place where a woman's screaming meant much. In a nearby alley a hooker administered a stand-up quickie and collected her fee, already on the lookout for the next john. Across the street teenagers peddled crack.

“You half-finished excuse for a human being! Volos! You come to me now, or I swear I'll tell the world everything I know about you!”

She raged with no effect whatsoever on the whores and pimps and dealers or the drifters lying stoned in stairwells. But miles away, on his Hawg for the seventh night in a row and roaring far up the Hollywood hills, Volos felt her white-hot summons go through him like a barbed spear through a river carp, like a lightning strike through a yellow pine, and there was nothing he could do but obey her. Against his will, but at once.

Instantly. So hastily that he left his beloved Harley lying by the roadside and used his wings for the first time in his incarnate life, flying to her at a speed that far exceeded anything his bike could do. Just as she had ranted herself out and leaned back silent and panting against the chill wall, arms around her two frightened little boys, a booted apparition landed with a thump in front of her. A tall visitant with glaring eyes and wings the color of dried blood. Volos.

“Where have you
been
?” she snapped at him. Because she had given up on him, had forgotten she was ever in love with his picture in
Metal Mag
, no longer remembered how she had once kissed a centerfold poster of his perfect full-lipped face, the sight of him made her angry all over again. There was much more she could have said to him if she had not been so tired.

“You—called—me.” He seemed to be having difficulty speaking. Out of breath, she thought. Served him right.

“I've
been
calling you.” She heaved herself to her feet, graceless with fatigue, conscious of how her jeaned legs spraddled and her hair hung in strings and the fact that she smelled. Never mind all that. Rebellious. To hell with being attractive, especially for this hugging-himself hotshot of an angel. Tote bags hunching her shoulders, a child hanging from each hand, she stood weary and proud.

“You—made me—fly.”

“Well, about time, isn't it?”

“No! By the devil, no! I am never in eternal suffering going to be a servant again!” He took a step toward her, wings half-lifted and rustling, head forward like that of a charging stallion, and she saw that his choked speech was due not to breathlessness but to anger that maybe matched hers. The realization did not trouble her. She had reached a point where she was not afraid of anything.

He raged, “I am no one's guardian, no one's rescuer, and no one is going to make a carrier pigeon of me! Or a savior. I don't care how much you recognize me. You don't get to put my head on a plate or nail me to a tree.”

None of this impressed Angie, but little Mikey started to cry. Lifting him, she said automatically to Volos, “Shush. You're scaring the babies.”

“Babies.” His gaze shifted, and even in the shadowy street the whites of his eyes showed. “Babies yet!”

Angela commanded, “We need a place to stay and something to eat and a bath.”

“I have told you, I am not an errand boy anymore! Why should I—”

“I AM YOUR LYRICIST.” She did not raise her voice, but more than she knew, Angela Bradley was her father's daughter; the statement crackled with her righteous wrath. “You have taken my words and called them your own. Have you forgotten?”

Volos stood silent, his wings folded and still.

“And if that's not enough,” Angie added, “you have destroyed my marriage.” She believed this at the time, with the unaccustomed anger in her—more anger than she would have previously thought possible.

Volos blurted, “I have done that? But you said it was all shame and blame, that you could not tell if you loved him.”

“You used—you used Ennis's song? You swine!”