Metal Angel (15 page)

Her shout made Gabe start again to cry, adding his thin, weary clamor to Mikey's. “Shush,” Volos told Angie sourly. “You are frightening the babies.” He reached down and picked up the youngster, slinging him over his shoulder. Gabriel's startled, pudgy hand brushed the angel's wing, and the boy quieted at once, settling his head against Volos's naked neck to sleep. Watching, with Mikey still sobbing in her arms, Angie felt a perverse annoyance that Volos had done something helpful just as she had decided to hate him always.

“You are right that I owe you for the songs,” he said. His voice had gone very quiet.

“
Thank
you.” She was quiet also, but in a different way.

Even in this most inhospitable of downtowns at three in the morning, Volos was a celebrity. A small crowd of street people had gathered around him. The shuffling man with the blue bare feet and the laming toenails reached out and touched one finger to the very tip of a pinion. Tears began to wash his gray face, but when Volos felt the touch he stepped sharply away.

“Come,” he told Angie, striding down the street. The tote bags bounced and dug into her shoulders as she struggled to keep up with him.

“
Where
, O Superstar?”

“To get you a cab.” He slowed down somewhat when he had left the crowd behind.

Later, when she knew him better, she would understand why he had not offered to take the baggage from her or to comfort weeping Mikey with the touch of a wing. It was not that he was evil, though as a fallen angel he tried hard to be evil. It was just that he was incomplete.

At the time, however, she detested everything about him, from his boots to his curling mane of dark hair to the perfect ass swinging between his wings.

He found a cab near the bus station, gave the driver money and the address and, when the man asked, an autograph. “Go in through the garage,” he told Angie. That door, Angie later learned, was kept unlocked because Volos generally forgot to carry a key. “If Texas is there, just tell him I sent you.”

Placed on the taxicab seat, Gabe woke up, grasped the situation, and started to cry again. “Birdman come with us!” he wailed.

“I can't, little one. I do not fit in.” Volos spread his wings partway in illustration. “It is not possible for me to get into a cab. I'll walk.”

“Not fly?” Angie asked, so startled that she spoke to him almost civilly. It had always seemed to her that flying would be wonderful.

“No. I look laughable when I fly.” Volos knew himself to be a dunce among angels. “I cannot keep my legs from dangling like a crane's.”

“But—why did you keep your wings, then?” What were wings for but to fly?

“It was not my idea. I hate my wings. They get in the way of everything.”

“Birdman come too!” Gabe implored.

“Little one, listen, you go to sleep. Wait a minute. Here.” On the inner surface of his left wing he found a small feather that was coming loose and handed it to Gabe. “I will see you when you wake up, yes?”

“You might give one to Michael too,” Angie told Volos crossly.

“Oh.” He did so, then stood balancing on the uneven sidewalk as the cab drove away, watching after it in bewilderment.

By all the little devils, but it was shiversome to see her. There she was, physical, separate, in a very appealing female body, and he had never really thought of her in that way. The songs—they were heart of his heart, soul of his soul. It had always seemed to Volos that anyone listening to those songs should know him utterly, should understand him. Yes, they had come to him from somewhere else; as clear and eerie as a far-side-of-the-world radio signal skipping off the stratosphere they had reached him in the starless L.A. nights, and he had committed them to memory, nothing more, only changing them to suit the shape his guitar gave the music. And yes, he had sensed direction and gender, he had known that his telepathic soulmate was female—what of it? Genderless most of his existence, he might just as readily have incarnated as a woman, except that he selfishly wanted the more privileged life of a male. Women were the lowest choir here, an underclass—no wonder he felt so much at one with them. No wonder there were those who looked at his face and snickered that he should have been a girl.

This woman, he had known about her all along—yet she had seemed so much a part of him that, meeting her, it was as if he had cut his thigh open to look at his body's longest bone.

She had a straight, stark flow of dark hair, a wide brow, very direct eyes. A heart-shaped face, golden skin, and a pointed chin, as if she had stepped out of an old masterpiece, a Botticelli. There was something level and anchored and innocent about her gaze, as if she believed in God. Yet something wise, as if she believed in more gods than one.

Volos sighed, knowing that here was another mortal who could hurt him.

He started walking, not toward the Hokey Hacienda or toward where he had left the motorcycle, but toward West Hollywood. It would be dawn when he knocked at the apartment door, and he hoped Mercedes would not mind being awakened. Suddenly he needed the ease of that bed and the bliss that clever body could offer him and the comfort of Mercy's kiss.

Looking back later, Texas saw how Volos, supernatural being and fallen angel, had happenstanced into his life, backed in almost, just another chance encounter in the big city—but Angela, mortal woman, had dawned on him like an epiphany, turning to him from the first the face of someone holy. A goddess. No, a madonna. That was what he thought the first moment he saw her standing proud and dirty in the doorway, with a sleeping child in one arm and a stumbling toddler clinging to the other hand and her hair flowing off her brow long and smooth as the Virgin Mary's headcloth: a quiet-faced pietà, a brave mother. He thanked whatever power was intermittently looking after him that he had not brought a floozie home with him that night.

As long as Angie lived in that house, he did not bring one home again.

His hands remembered what it was like to be a father. He took Gabe from her, got the child halfway fed and approximately bathed and put down behind a barrier of chair backs to keep him from rolling off the bed onto the floor. She laid Michael in the same bed and rewarded Texas with a tired smile. It dizzied him. He had forgotten how a mother's smile could do that, made up as it was of tenderness and weary cynicism and the bone-deep surrender that goes with loving a baby. There was not much need for talk between Texas and Angela. She saw him for what he was, and in her eyes he saw himself: more in danger than Volos. Not a clumsy fighter who always led with his chin, but a blundering country boy who led with his heart.

He went back to bed, and found to his amazement when he awoke that the exhausted children were up before him. The sound of their birdlike voices filled the house. Texas had forgotten how tired or overburdened children got to be like self-winding tops, moving louder and faster by the moment until something stopped them. He went out to the equipment-filled living room and found Volos there, flat on the floor, wings outspread, with both little boys bobbing atop his broad chest.

“Texas. Tell Brett I said give you money for food and stuff, okay?”

Texas nodded. “Tell Brett I said give you money” was in essence the fiscal arrangement between him and Volos, and he took a rebellious pleasure in being satisfied with it. So who cared about fringe benefits and pension plans and Getting Ahead. It did bother him, though, that the arrangement was much the same for Mercedes.

“We're going to have to keep more food in the house with these weanlings around,” Volos added.

“Birdman make me go
up
!” commanded Gabriel. Volos swung the kid into a sort of lift and held him there kicking and giggling.

“Now Mikey.” Volos lowered Gabe and lifted his younger brother, who screamed. “Mikey?” Volos asked anxiously.

“He's okay,” Texas said. “They like to screech.”

Angie padded in, barefoot, still dewy from the shower, wearing her jeans and a shirt Texas had loaned her. Oversized, it made her look narrow-shouldered and frail. Her face rose like a flower from its wide neck. Volos's face changed when he saw her, Texas noticed with a squeezing feeling in his heart. He saw the red blush start to spread through the angel's sunrise-colored wings. Volos sent the boys trotting to their mother and sat up amid a difficult readjustment of those appendages to look at her.

“Have you eaten, Angela?”

She nodded without thanks. Maybe knowing that Volos was not hinting for thanks. One thing about Volos, Texas reminded himself: The kid might not think of things he ought to say or do, but when he did come through for a person, he did not expect any show of gratitude. Maybe Angie understood that.

Or maybe she just plain did not like him. She was being careful not to look at him. Not to give him anything of herself, not even a smile.

“Angela.” Volos tried again. “Can you sew?”

“Yes, of course.” The surprise in her voice told Texas she had been raised country-style, in a home where every woman had to cook and sew or be called a slut.

“Would you like to be my wardrobe department?”

She looked at him then, made a show of scanning his half-naked body, and said with just a hint of a smile, “What wardrobe?”

Texas laughed, but Volos missed her joke. “Mercy says I need one,” he told her earnestly. “He says for the big stage on tour I will need something more than jeans. Bright colors. Ornaments.”

Texas, grinning, teased him, “What are you gonna do about the band?”

“Oh, I give it up.” This time Volos recognized levity and shot Texas a sour look. “You can costume the band, Texas. Go out and buy them each a hat.”

“I will. I'm gonna do just that.”

“We'll be cowboys. I can get chaps with long fringe and silver studding. Mercy wants me to wear things that glitter.”

Angie was watching him seriously. “Please not rhinestones and sequins,” she said in her abrupt, level way. “They would cheapen you.”

Texas felt his heart aching with adoration for her. Already she knew, she understood everything, she looked at Volos with eyes that saw truly. She would never love him, Texas, except as a fatherly sort of old fool, and Texas understood that and accepted it immediately. But how could he not love her when she looked at his angel with honest eyes?

He said to Volos, “She's right, kid. Don't let your precious Mercy push you too far. Remember what Elvis started to look like before the end?”

Volos grimaced at him. “But I do need new clothes,” he complained.

“I been telling you that for weeks.”

“Now I really do. I must meet the record company people. Brett says I must wear something on my torso. Show respect.”

“Shirt and tie?” Texas teased.

“In the devil's name, how?”

“When is this?” Angie asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Christ, Volos!” Texas exploded. “I keep telling you, don't leave things till the last minute!” The kid had little sense of time or of the limits it put on people who actually had to eat and sleep.

Angie said merely, “One of you had better take me shopping.”

Volos took her, in the old Corvair convertible with its custom paint job, black with red flames running back from the hood to the rear wheel wells. Brett had been the one who had convinced Volos he couldn't afford anything fancier yet. But he had installed the best stereo system on the market. And kept installing it, because it had been stolen out of the car three times so far.

Texas held Gabe and Mikey up to the window so they could watch, so they could see Volos driving with his wings lifted to clear the back of his seat, stretched six feet above his head. Texas hoped Angie would not be frightened. He knew Volos drove the freeways like a plummeting hawk, knew that surrounding cars would veer as the drivers saw him, knew that one way or another the shopping itself would turn into a circus as well. Hoped Volos would make Angie buy clothing for herself and the little boys. Texas would far rather have chauffeured the young woman himself, but weighing the problems of sending her off with Volos against the dangers of leaving Volos to baby-sit the little ones, he saw no choice. Volos would want to play but would be likely to forget that children needed to eat or sleep or breathe.

“Uncle Texas?” It was the older one, Gabriel.

“What is it, big guy?”

“I dood in my pants.”

Therefore Texas had laundry to do, after which he fed the boys cheese sandwiches and applesauce for lunch and introduced them to the joys of TV until they fell asleep. While they napped, he lay down himself, tilted his hat over his face, and dozed, dreaming that he was young again, about twenty-one. Something made him dream of Wyoma and his daughters, so that in his sleep he was a cowboy coming home from a long day of riding to the ranch house where standing at the door Wyoma smiled at him, and the babies, three or four of them, boys now as well as girls, climbed his long work-jeaned legs as if he were the deep-rooted great tree of life.

Angie's quick solution to Volos's upper-body-nudity problem was a black vest from the leather shop. That evening after the boys were in bed she reworked the back, cutting it away so that it would fit under Volos's wings, all the while trying to decide how she felt about him. Angry at him, yes, still a little. At one point she had made up her mind to be his efficient and respectful employee, nothing more. It was a stance she thought she could manage, but she had not been able to do so even for a day. Without meaning to (she felt fairly certain of that), he kept her constantly off balance. His hawk-swoop driving thrilled and terrified her, his generosity touched her—he had bought her things, all sorts of things, sundresses, sandals, a jeans jacket. And he had bought rompers and sneakers and Zoom Cars for the boys. But just as she had decided to like him, some sort of thoughtless arrogance, perhaps the snap of his fingers as he summoned a salesperson, would make her detest him all over again.