Metal Angel (2 page)

“Whassis, a new kind of faggot?”

“Looks like a no-ball to me.”

“Cocksucker.”

“Hey, I used to fuck guys like him in prison!”

“Guys with pink wings?”

“Pink all over, motherfuckers.”

There were three homeboys, and they blocked the kid's way. Texas stayed where he was. He had left his badge and gun in a dresser drawer in West Virginia, running away from them as well as the rest of his life there. He was on vacation from caring about anything. Anyway, the youngster with wings was half a head taller than any of the street punks and did not seem afraid. It would be a real luxury to stand around and watch what happened and not give a shit.

In a voice so correct it seemed accented the kid said, “You are strange people. You do fucking with men you do not like?”

All three at once they hit him, and Texas was halfway across the street within an eyeblink, losing his brand-new hat in his hurry, the luxury of not caring forgotten, because fast as the punches had fallen something had changed. He could see it. Every whore on the street could feel it and scuttled for cover. The air screamed with it. Somebody was gonna get killed.

After the first blow, no longer were the homeboys fighting out of boredom of territoriality or to score points with girls or each other. As soon as they had touched the winged stranger they virulently hated him. One pulled a knife. They wanted to butcher him.

And he was no match for them. He stood his ground, tried to connect, but he swung wide and didn't know how to move, didn't circle or put his back toward the wall; he let them get behind him, where they savaged his offending wings and the back of his head. Any one of them could have pulped him, and there were three. Already he was beaten down to his knees—

Texas used the force of his cross-street charge to gut-ram the knife fighter with his head. He stomped a hand as the homeboy sprawled, kicked the weapon into the darkness. After that it was all reflex work. He had broken up enough tavern brawls to know he had to move quickly, and find something to use like a baton, and make a lot of noise. The moves and the weapon were only to survive until the noise took effect. Once enough time and noise had passed the bad guys would run. It was a psychological warfare thing. They would get afraid, even though they knew nobody would really call the cops. All they knew was hit and run. They would run.

“Cretins!” he bellowed, bruising his knuckles on one of them. “No-neck motor-ass pinheads!” He regretted the upbringing his gentle Methodist mother had given him, which all his life—despite his best efforts—had kept him from cursing really well. But what the hell, it was volume that counted. Texas kept the volume high-decibel enough to buzz his skull as he ducked a flung chunk of concrete, kicked a knee, scooped up a beer bottle to thrust with. The kid with wings learned fast. He was on his feet again, he had picked up his own weapon. “Back up toward the wall!” Texas called to him.

A few streets away, like a mother shrilling for her children at suppertime, a siren yodeled. The homeboys indulged in one last hard assault. Texas felt a hand clawing his face, fingers digging for his eyes. He kneed the attacker, doubling him so that his two buddies had to support him as they ran, the three of them looking like a six-legged thing, an oversized cockroach scuttling back into the shadows of the alley.

Texas panted. The siren rolled over to bleep mode, dopplered past at the gay hustlers' end of the street.

When he had caught his breath a little, Texas said to the youngster with wings, “You gotta learn to fight if you're gonna wear that kind of getup, kid.”

The kid stood shakily on his long legs—being tall is unfair that way; if a tall person gets the least bit shaky everybody sees it. Blood on the young man's face—just a nosebleed. Scanning him for injuries, Texas saw a shallow knife scratch across his bare chest and some lacerations, some bruises. Nothing to worry about. Also he noticed with muted surprise that he had somehow been mistaken about the color of the wings. They were much darker than he had thought. Brick-red, in fact.

“You all right?” he asked, his throat raw from shouting, his face smarting from the mauling it had gotten, his wrists aching. This would be a good time for the kid to thank him. But the kid stood fingering the blood trickling from his nose.

“Hot,” he murmured. He licked his bloodied lips, and his face grew rapt. “I can taste it. I can taste myself.”

There was something odd about the way he spoke besides its precision. His voice sounded strangely intense and penetrating, so that even at its quietest it had been vibrant enough to be heard across the street. Yet now that he stood right next to him, Texas found it eerily distant.

Shadowy eyes turned. The stranger asked, “Will all this blood coming out of me hurt me?”

Shit, was the kid simpleminded? Texas answered only with a shrug, wishing, now it was over, that he hadn't gotten involved, suddenly wanting very much to turn his back on everything, get back to his own room, tend to his own wounds … but he couldn't leave a hurt retard standing on the street. Had to see him home. Dammit. He asked, “What's your name?”

“Volos.”

“Volos what?”

“Just Volos. I am of low degree. It is not considered necessary for me to have more names than one.” The stranger subjected Texas to a dark-eyed scrutiny from below frowning brows. “You are bleeding also.”

“I know that.” Texas kept most of the annoyance out of his voice. What bothered him more than this problem youngster or his scratches, anyway, was the spectacle of his new eighty-dollar black Resistol cowboy hat lying flattened in the middle of the street. “Where do you live?”

“Here. The city.”

“But where?”

“Wherever I am standing.” Volos was studying the blood drying on his fingers. “Sticky,” he remarked.

“Oh, for Chrissake.” Texas grabbed him not very gently by the elbow and urged him across the street, into the Palace Hotel and through its shabby lobby, glaring at the desk attendant to shut her up about blood on the carpet—as if winos enough haven't puked on the carpet before now, lady. In the elevator Volos stood stiffly, hanging on to the walls, looking pale under his tea-colored skin. Shaken up more than Texas had thought. Texas led him down the third-floor hall, unlocked his room, flicked the light switch, and towed the kid in. Once released, Volos stood looking around him blankly.

“Sit,” Texas ordered, pulling a straight chair out from the wall. He handed Volos a wad of Kleenex, pulled down his beat-up old Stetson from the closet shelf—he felt naked without a western hat, wore one indoors as well as out except when Wyoma made him take it off for bed or company. Jammed the ratty white thing on his head, went out into the hallway again, and got ice from the machine, strongly feeling the small-hour blues weighing him down. It was his own mistake, to have stayed up this late. Whenever night found him awake at this hour he felt utterly alone, orphaned, like the last person on earth, even with Wyoma gently snoring at his side. And now there wasn't even Wyoma. Just a jerk with wings bleeding in his room. Why the hell did he have to go and get involved? He held the cold ice bucket to his hot face. Back in the room, he found Volos seated with tissues in hand but his hands slack in his lap.

“You want to apply pressure.” Obviously the kid was rowing with one oar out of the water. Accepting this, Texas found it easier to have patience. “Here.” He set the ice down, took Volos's hand, and guided it. “Do like I tell you. Press.” Only one nostril was bleeding, and it looked ready to stop soon anyway. Texas went into the bathroom, found a washcloth and wrapped it around some ice. Damn cheap hotel had given him only one washcloth. He sopped the corner of a towel and went back to Volos, dabbing at the kid's mouth with the wet terrycloth, clearing away blood to assess the damage. As he expected, the kid's lips were swelling. He had taken some hard hits. “You got to stop leading with your chin, Volos,” Texas said. He handed him the cold pack, showing him how to hold it to his mouth and jaw.

“Leading with my chin?”

Texas did not answer. He was staring. The kid's wings (lifted somewhat to fit over the back of the chair, then trailing to the floor) had turned a pale opalescent blue.

“How do you do that?” Texas blurted.

“The chin thing?”

Texas reached out to switch on the table lamp for better light and rounded Volos to have a look at him from the back. The mechanism that operated the wings was not immediately apparent to him, but he saw broken feathers and, halfway up the left wing, a sizable stain of bright red. Blood.

“Where'd that come from?” Jesus, had the kid been knifed in the back? Was he walking around with a stab wound? Panicked, Texas grabbed the wing, lifted it to look—

The blood came from the wing itself. Texas knew that as soon as he touched it. Through his hand like an electric charge clear to his heart he felt an odd hot rush, a wordless recognition, and at the same time he heard Volos gasp with pain. Ice clattered to the floor. Volos had dropped it. The kid had gone ashen, and his hands clutched at the air as if it could support him. He looked ready to topple out of the chair. Texas caught him with an arm around the shoulders.

“I'm sorry!” he exclaimed. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you!”

Volos trembled. “So this is pain,” he whispered, panting.

“I'm god-awful sorry. I thought—” Texas gave up. To hell with what he had thought. To hell with anything he had ever thought, especially about this kid. Not a would-be wearing Styrofoam wings for a stunt, this one. Not a half-wit. More like a—a visitant, an innocent, an—God, he couldn't say it or think it.

“Maybe it is not that you hurt me so much.” With effort Volos straightened enough to look at him. “Maybe it is that I am not accustomed to pain.”

“I hurt you,” Texas said.

Volos went on, intent, not seeming to hear him. “Bodily pain, I mean. The other sort I know well, but this—it fights me, it takes over. It makes me feel thin as water.”

His eyes were of the same moonstone blue as his wings, startlingly light in his earth-tan face, very direct in their gaze, almost vehement. His hair, brown-black and chopped without finesse halfway down his neck, hung in stringy dark curls over his forehead, making him look boyish, vulnerable. It was peculiar hair. Texas had thought at first that it was twisted in very thin braids or dreadlocks, that the kid had some black blood in him, what with his dusky skin and full lips—but now he saw that Volos's hair had the texture of pinfeathers.

Still holding him by the shoulders, Texas whispered, “You're real.”

Volos stopped shaking, grew still, and smiled. It was a small smile, but enough to show Texas that women could be blinded by this one. “Thanks,” the tall young hunk said, as he had not thanked Texas for saving his ass on the street. “You do not think I have utterly failed?”

“Better get some ice on the wing,” Texas mumbled.

He helped Volos to the bed. Only the one double bed in the room. Made you know what kept these sleazy hotels going. He had Volos lie face down, noticed that the hurt wing smeared blood on the bedspread. He would end up paying for the damn thing. Terrific. Maybe they charged double for supernatural blood. Maybe with any sort of luck he would get sane soon and figure out what sort of hallucinogen he had been breathing in along with the yellow, oily-smelling L.A. air. Texas brought his last towel and dumped all the ice he had into it for a cold pack. “Hold on, now,” he told Volos before he touched the injury.

“That was not as bad as before,” Volos said after a while.

“I tried to take it easy this time.” Texas sat beside him on the bed, holding the ice pack so that it sandwiched the wounded wing. A few streets away a car security system screamed. Through the wall Texas could hear athletic lovemaking going on in the next room. Why did that not bother him? A while back he had been feeling blue as a Hank Williams ballad, but now … It had to be four in the morning, and he hadn't slept, yet he did not feel tired. More than that—he did not feel wretched. When had he last faced the night without feeling desolate? He could not remember. But just being around this crazy kid, he felt as if someone had finally taken in his orphaned soul off hell's cold doorstep.

Christ. He had to be tired. He was getting sappy.

“What is your name?” Volos asked him.

“Bob McCardle. But you can call me Texas.”

One hollow cheek against the bedspread, Volos nodded. “Yes. Texas. I like your boots.” They were new, top-of-the-line Laredos with real snake-leather feet and tooled-cowskin shafts, so he better like them. “You are a son of the state Texas?”

McCardle laughed. “Son, I ain't a son of much of anybody.”

After a while he judged that the wing was numbed. Easing the ice away, he warned Volos to hang on, then parted the feathers and looked. It was not a large wound, but it was ugly, not a clean cut but more of a tear. Some sort of laceration. Had to hurt like a sonuvabitch. No way to wrap it up that he could figure, either. He put the ice back on it.

“Shit, kid. Your wing's a mess. What the devil am I supposed to do with it?”

“Let it rot and fall off. The other one too. I do not want them.”

Texas said, “Talk sense, Volos. Is there someplace I can take you?”

Volos shook his head against the pillow.

“You got a home address?”

“No.”

“Somebody I can phone? Anyplace you're supposed to be? Anybody worrying about you?”

Faint smile of bruised lips told Texas McCardle: Here was someone far more alone in the world than he.

His cop training made him try one more time. “Know anybody who could help? Any more like you around here?”

“No. Just me.”

“Damn. Well, at least it's stopped bleeding.” In a few hours, once the stores were open, he would go get the kid some kind of antiseptic.