Metal Angel (23 page)

A prickly feeling at the nape of his neck kept Volos aware of the stars at his back, and when physical ecstasy gave him time he felt a dark sense of triumph.
Eat your hearts out, watchers, if you have any
. From time to time throughout human history, though rarely, certain favored princes among angels had been allowed to take on manly flesh in order to do errands that involved mortal participation—but it had been flesh robed in white, and never had they been allowed to doff the swaddling cloth, never had they been allowed to enjoy the flesh this way, finding the delight so sweet and keen it was almost pain. Only fallen angels knew this ecstasy.

Or did they? Had anyone in all of history, had anyone else ever felt this way? So deep, so lost in the wonders of his soulmate, it was—

Was it truly love?

He wanted to give and give to her. It was the first time he had ever given so much, yet he wanted to give more. “Ange,” he whispered against her face. “Angela.”

A movement of her lips answered him.

“Would you like to fly?”

Her eyes looked up into his, wide as skies. “But you—”

“Shhh. I know what I said. If you want to, I would like to do it for you.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

Her sigh told him
Yes
.

His arms gathered her close, close. They were one flesh. A single downbeat of his great wings shielded them and carried them above the citylight into darkness velvety as a womb, and Wichita floated starrily below them.

Afterward, when they lay close together in their nest again, he knew himself to be strong, mighty as thunder.

Not one to do any job halfway, Ennis used all he could spare of his pay (after food, utilities, and tithes) to buy rock music magazines with paper like inked sawdust and titles like
Sex Metal
and
Fusion
. Looking at photo after photo of young men with far more sneer and hair than he had ever seen on human males before, of young women in tighter clothing than he had believed possible, reading interview after interview of these misguided people, Ennis found himself growing fascinated as well as aghast. Learning about the rock world was like traveling to a different planet, trying to understand an alien species.

“They call the guitars axes,” he reported to his father-in-law.

“Weapons of destruction. How apt.”

But an ax could also be used to shape and build. Ennis, a carpenter, admired the axwork of the pioneers and also, though to a small and grudging extent, the axwork he heard in some rock music. He said, “I believe they think of them more as symbols of power.”

“Power to destroy everything that is right and good.”

Ennis did not quibble further. He had indeed read much in the heavy-metal publications and heard much on his radio that he found horrifying, berserk and bizarre. And blasphemous.

“Here is what I have so far.” He gave Reverend Crawshaw a list of songs that mentioned angels. Quite a few rock lyrics mentioned angels. Almost as many as mentioned devils or demons of various sorts. The context in which these beings were invoked was sometimes innocuous, sometimes outrageous, but irrelevant in either event. The League for Moral Purity was not interested in context. No matter what use it made of the Bible, secular music had no business opening that sacred book with its dirty hands.

“Some of the men wear makeup,” Ennis mentioned tangentially.

“I have heard that. How sickening. Cheapening the temple of the body with paint is just as evil as mutilating it with tattoos.”

Ennis, who had seen Grecian Formula in his father-in-law's bathroom, wondered if hair was not a part of the body, and if it was not, why were women supposed to cover theirs? And why did a nice fresh coat of white paint not cheapen the temple of the church? Then he mentally rebuked himself. His duty to his minister, his church, and his God did not include questioning, only obedience.

“What about this devil Volos?” Reverend Crawshaw asked him. “Does he paint himself?”

“He likes many colors of eyeshadow, yes.”

“Then he is a degenerate. Is he also an apostate?”

“He has never publicly claimed to be an angel. In fact, he dislikes it when anyone calls him that. But observers who write for the magazines say that his wearing of wings must be taken as a statement.”

“In other words he wears wings to call himself an angel, then lives the life of Satan—is he a fornicator?”

“A sodomizer, some say.”

Reverend Crawshaw gasped as if he had been struck, and his eyes bugged. But then he smiled.

“Wears wings and is a sodomizer—”

“That is hearsay.”

“I am sure it is true. God tells me in my heart that it is true. Therefore our duty is made plain to us. This Volos, who wears the wings of an angel and drags them in filth and sings the songs of Beelzebub—this Volos is too evil to be merely another sinful man. Perhaps the end days are at hand. Perhaps he is the Antichrist, or an incarnation of the Evil One himself. Ennis. My son.” The minister laid a hand on his shoulder. “We must destroy him if we can.”

Ennis went home in a daze of doubt and joy. Reverend Crawshaw had called him his son! Of course, he was legally the man's son-in-law, but that had never made the holy man speak to him as a real son before. Reverend Crawshaw had said the word warmly, solemnly, seeming to adopt him with it—making Ennis his heir? His spiritual inheritor? His anointed?

But—destroy Volos? The strange winged rocker was reputed to be the very best axwhacker ever. And he sang like—well, like an angel.

Perhaps by “destroy” Reverend Crawshaw meant something along the lines of making Volos take back some of the things he had said. Ennis promised himself that he would clarify the matter with his father-in-law the next time he saw him. Almost certainly he would be reassured.

Just that day Ennis had bought the cassette tape of
Scars
. Once home, tablet and Bic pen in hand to record offensive lyrics, he put it in his tape player and settled back to listen.

Halfway through Side One he began to feel guilt lashing him because he was enjoying the music. In fact he loved it, no matter how many questionable or disrespectful or plainly obscene lyrics he jotted down. Something in the strong, supple vocals and the wild excess of the guitars called to him. To think that after he finished this assignment he would never be allowed to listen to such music again—and he would never be allowed to admit to anyone how much he liked it—to think these things was to know life for what it was: denial, a long and difficult denial. Obedience was very hard sometimes.

The last song on Side One, a song not released as a single, was called “One Feather.”

What you call heaven I call hell

It's all shame and blame

So how can I tell

If I love you?

Ennis jolted upright, not able to believe what he was hearing.

Then he turned off the tape player, got up, and went to his bedroom, where he kept a piece of paper carefully put away in a cuff-link box in the top drawer of his dresser. He got out the penciled sheet and read it yet again, for maybe the hundredth time, with a lump in his throat not so much because of what it said as because she had written such a thing, a poem, for him. Just for him. To ease the pain. When he had not known she ever wrote poetry at all.

With Angela's leave-taking message in hand he went back downstairs, started the Volos tape again, and listened.

If
what I do is so hard on you

Then maybe we were wrong from the start…

The record was just released. In no way could Angela have heard it before she wrote her poem.

Ennis listened through the rest of the song, then looked down at the frail thing in his hand and tore it to bits.

It sounded to him like a good idea, now, to destroy Volos.

Angela … would she be with the winged freak? Odd, that it should cause him so little joy to learn how he might find … Ennis discovered that he was no longer inclined to think of her by name. She was just Her. The Fallen Woman. His wife who had betrayed him and sold his poem to a foul-mouthed rock star. Who had left him with a careless farewell and taken away his two little boys.

Gabe and Mikey …

Longing for his sons flooded him, so overwhelming it made him feel physically weak and sick. He would never get over losing them, never. Yesterday would not have been soon enough for him to be with them again.

Where were they? That city of sin, L.A.? Or wandering? A trashy stop along the road somewhere?

They were in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Wichita, and Mikey was coughing in his sleep. Congestion disturbed his breathing so that he sputtered and woke up. Children never accept illness with much grace; it insults them. More because of such insult than because of physical discomfort, Mikey began to howl.

The roadie, who had no more than just fallen asleep after working almost until dawn, elbowed his wife and groaned. “Dammit! Can'tcha shut that kid up?”

Eyes closed, the woman mumbled, “She'll take care of it.” Unglued her non-pillowed eye enough to see if Angie was moving. Absorbed the input for a moment. Angie was not there.

“Where the hell does she get off …”

Sighing, the roadie's wife heaved herself up and went to Mikey. “Okay, okay.” She picked him up, and because he knew her and considered that he was being attended to, he quieted. “You need changed? No. Blow your nose.” He blew. His face felt feverish under her hand. “You're coming down with something, little fella.”

By mashing it into Gerber's applesauce and then spooning it down him she gave him her cure-all: half a tablet of aspirin.

chapter thirteen

Mercedes was no fool. He had known before Wichita, before Volos knew it himself, that the angel was not going to be coming to him for sex much longer. He felt some rage, not so much the jealous rage of a lover as the spleen of one stopped at yet another traffic light on the road to The Top. But also, for the first time in his life, he felt a cold-fingered fear: What if there was to be no Top for him? What if he simply did not have what it took? Being intimate with Volos, he had begun to see that there was some quality in the star that he, Mercedes, lacked and did not comprehend. What if his moment came, and he stood on the stage and no one—no one loved him?

He did not analyze the fear and anger or waste time on them. Instead, he had began working on new ways to keep Volos attached to him. “Attached” in its primal sense: unable to get away.

“It will make you feel bigger,” he had said the first time he offered the white powder. “It will make you feel like a thunderhead, full of electricity. Like you could reach out your hand and say, ‘Let there be fire,' and there would be.”

Volos had accepted, but remarked, “To be like God, is this what you want?” and Mercedes had stared at him.

“Don't you?”

“No. I do not think very highly of God. Why would I want to be like him?”

Mercedes bit down on fury, feeling spurned or soon to be spurned. First body and now soul. Offering deification via drug, he had in a sense been offering his soul: Of all drugs, cocaine was his favorite for that very reason, because it made him sense self expanding into incandescent godhead. And now finally he could afford the really good stuff with the money Volos would give him, and Volos did not want to be God? Mercedes decided right then and there that Volos was a no-class jerk-off who did not deserve anything the world was giving him, not wealth or fame or love. Mercedes could know this categorically, because among classy people wanting to be God was a tacit given, like masturbation. Everyone who was anyone did it, though it was gauche to say so.

Rather sniffily, Mercedes said, “I just mean it makes you feel
up
. As if you are made of energy. Plugged in.”

Volos shrugged. “Music gives me that.” He looked at Mercedes and added, “But of course I will do this if you want me to. You say in my nose?”

The disbelief in his voice annoyed Mercedes more than the knowledge that he was losing him to Angie Bradley.

They took the drug, listened to Alice Cooper awhile, made love for what Mercedes knew might be the last time. The cocaine did not seem to affect Volos much, but Mercedes did not allow himself to feel discouraged. There were other drugs.

He begged a meeting with Volos a few days later, saying he had some tour business to discuss. In fact he had acquired some acid.

“Want a hit, Volie?” he offered. “It will make you see colors you have never imagined.”

“New colors?” This time Volos was intrigued. “How can there be more colors than those I already know?”

“You'll see. Try it.” In a retro-sixties mood, Mercedes lit incense and served the hallucinogen ceremoniously. Because his aesthetic sense could not stomach paper squares with unicorns printed on them, he had opted for liquid in a small brown bottle complete with bulb and dropper. For himself, he would put it in his eyes. For Volos, however, he placed four drops on a sugar cube.

“Like that?” The angel sounded as intrigued by the many ways of taking drugs as he was by anything else about them. “Why not up my nose? Or in a cigarette, like the marijuana? Or in a bottle, like beer?”

“Because beer is for bottle babies and pot is for lollysuckers. You get sweets for the sweet. Come on, Vo.”

“You, too.”

“No, with this stuff we take turns.”

He half hoped the angel would have a bad trip. Also, he had plans. Once the acid began to work, he took advantage of Volos's disorientation to get him out of his jeans. He had thought he wanted to blow him; in fact he did want that, badly, and why did he not do it then? Yet he shoved his drugged lover onto the bed instead, and held him down and tickled him, all parts of him, for a long time. Volos did not resist—he could never have done it if Volos had put up a fight—but lay gasping and trying to get away and laughing himself hoarse, finally whimpering like a puppy before Mercedes grew bored with the torment and screwed him instead.