Metal Angel (3 page)

The ice had melted into slop. Texas took the wet towel away. “You want something for the pain?”

“It will not work to just let it hurt and die?”

He was serious. Texas sputtered twice before he barked at him, “Kid, that wing's part of you! Jesus Christ. Sit up there so I can give you some aspirin.”

Volos spilled water down his chin, swallowed the pills with difficulty, lay down again afterward. “To lie down feels better,” he said in a tone of mild surprise.

“Go to sleep if you can.”

“How do I do that?”

“Holy …” Texas felt his patience slipping. “Just lie there! Close your eyes.”

Volos obeyed. Texas turned off the light, found his way around the bed in the dim cityglow of the window, settled in the room's beat-up excuse for an armchair, and tried not to think. He slumped down, propping his long legs on the edge of the bed. Dozed for a while. Became aware that he was effortlessly sleeping, which surprised him so much that he jolted awake. Took a look at his foundling. Volos lay still, but his eyes were open and staring.

“Close your eyes,” Texas reminded him.

“I am not asleep, then?”

“Not hardly. Not if you're talking to me.”

“People do not tell each other things when they are sleeping?”

“Not that I know of.”

Volos said, “Perhaps she is awake, then. She might be awake in the night?”

Texas looked at him. Under the shadow of his brows the kid's eyes seemed large and darker than he remembered. Keeping his voice quiet, he asked, “What are you talking about?”

Volos said, “It is not the usual thing? A young woman far to the east, a silent woman, I can hear her. A shrouded woman. She is thinking, or dreaming, and sending me the dreams.”

chapter two

Far to the east: sitting at a kitchen table in a stolid brick house in Jenkins, Pennsylvania. It was morning there. The dishes were done, the beds made, the laundry churning in its rectilinear machine. Her husband was out of the house, the children playing in the fenced back yard. Therefore she could get out her Bic pen and tablet paper, sit down a minute and write the words.

This angel's taking a fall

This angel's full of the devil

Red rhythms pulsed in her head. Physically, as if addicted, she craved rock and roll, the music that made her feel like dancing naked. But even with the children outside she did not dare to bring out the garage-sale radio she kept hidden in the bottom of her Kotex box. She would have to wait until they were napping. Little Michael and Gabe were only two and three years old. They might need her suddenly, and then someone might hear, however faintly, the low, ominous thudding of drums and bass guitar. Or the boys themselves would hear and blab. One way or another, word would get around fast if people found out that Angie Bradley, Reverend Crawshaw's daughter, listened to the devil's music.

You say die and go to Heaven

Gonna be an angel

But this angel ain't no dead person Daddy

This angel is alive

I WANT TO LIVE

A knock at the back door.

The sound acted on Angie like a cattle prod. With panicky haste she thrust tablet and pen into a kitchen drawer. Her hands checked her hair (innocent of perm, smoothed back and decently bunned beneath a stiff white prayer bonnet) and her skirt (long enough to cover her knees). She knew without looking who was knocking: her father. No one else dropped by without phoning first.

And there, sure enough, on her scrubbed back stoop he stood, Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw in his crow-black suit and bow tie, his head thrust forward slightly for a close look at her. “I been praying for you, daughter,” he told her.

“Good.” She stood back to invite him in.

“I pray for you constantly, Angela.” He passed through the hallway and stepped into the front room, looking around. Light poured in through entirely too many tall windows. The house was as old as her father, precisely square, two-story, built with fearsome symmetry. Across each of its four faces windows marched wherever there was not a door. In the wintertime, coldness poured in like daylight. Angie and Ennis hoped to build a place of their own someday, something cozier, more private, but meanwhile Angela spent most of her life housecleaning. There was no place out of that fierce light to hide anything, nowhere to let the dirt lie. Yet her father glowered around at her hand-me-down furniture as if expecting to find a murdered body. “Have you read your Bible this morning?” he demanded.

“Of course.”

He scrutinized her, and she withstood the scrutiny impassively, keeping her face as smooth and disciplined as her hair. When she was a little girl, he could always see a fib in her face, and as many times as he had caught her he had told her that liars went to hell. A few times since she had grown to adulthood, thinking back, she had understood: He cared about her in his scowling way, he wanted her to be safe, saved. It was the passion of his life, telling people what to do, how to behave, how to be saved.

But most of the time she was not able to understand whether he loved her, or why she loved him, and she had learned to tell her lies to him and not be caught. She had to. Short of leaving outright, the only way for her to keep some selfhood was to sneak and lie her way around his myriad rules. She knew it was no use trying to talk with him. Reverend Crawshaw perceived himself as a soldier of God at war with the devil, and he took no prisoners. He was not the sort of person who would ever in eternity agree to disagree.

He peered. He had narrow eyes that could crinkle and be kind, blast him, when he was pleased with her. She was his only child.

“Have you had your coffee?” she asked.

He unbent enough to come into her kitchen, to sit and chat. No he did not want coffee. Angela could give him a glass of water if she liked. None of that bug juice for him, just plain water. Angie put ice cubes in it, which did not displease him. Rather than drinking it down, he sipped. The children ran in and latched onto their grandpa like Velcro, and he chuckled, letting them climb his black-trousered legs. He held them in his lap, bounced them on his bony knees as Angie watched with a bittersweet taste in her silent mouth. (A virtuous woman kept her head covered and was silent.) She loved how he loved her children. Watching the three of them warmed her heart. But—why was he so much less stern with her sons than she remembered his being with her? Was it because he was their grandfather? Or was it because they were boys and she was a daughter of Eve? Female, prone to evil, and therefore less loved?

At the door, as he left, he said to her in a low voice, “Angela, are you in danger of sin?”

“No, Father.”
It's the truth
, she thought, keeping the dark amusement in her mind from reaching her mouth to make her smile. She was way past just being in danger. She was clear in, thoroughly damned, a fallen woman, a diver in the murky forbidden depths. Not only did she listen to rock music, but at night its lewd rhythms pulsed in her mind. Often it seemed to her that she was most alive when she slept, when in her dreams she moved her body in barbaric ways and sang, sang, sang … In daylight and in fact she could not sing worth a nickel—a thousand church services had shown her that. Her voice when she tried it was reedy and insubstantial, like something in the wind. But when she dreamed, she could sing like Elvis come back from the dead in a woman's breasty hot-throated body.

Just the night before, she had dreamed such a dream, and now even as she faced her father with bland eyes she wrote the words of the song in her mind.

A grownup ain't a child who died

That kid's still kicking strong inside

Making rude noises

Spitting on the floor

Alive and wanting to live some more

Her father said softly to her, “Something is troubling you, Angela. Be careful. Satan is a seducer. Keep your eyes turned toward God. Say your prayers.”

“I do,” she lied. “Every day.”

“The ones I taught you.”

“I do, Father!”

He wanted her to recite the petitions he had written when she was a child, the words he had put into her mouth. Reverend Daniel Crawshaw was like that. He preferred to be in charge. Felt safer that way. His church was entirely his own, unaffiliated with any denomination; he called it the Church of the Holy Virgin and ran it out of a former lingerie shop. His theology oscillated somewhere between sugar-scoop Brethren and total-immersion Baptist, but also threw off sparks of mystic Mariolatry. Under her feet Angela felt the relentless uplifting confines of the pedestal on which he had placed her.

“Call me and I will pray with you.”

“Stop worrying,” she told him. She kissed him on his flat cheek, sent him on his way, and waited patiently, like a rabbit flattened in the grass, until she felt sure he was gone. Once she considered it safe, she scrawled the next verse of her song, then took the half-finished thing and hid it under the old bedsheets at the back of the linen closet. Most of her efforts she flushed down the john like the dregs of Michael's diaper pail, but this one she would keep. It smoked in her, heady and illicit as brandy, while she took laundry downstairs and continued the exquisitely boring routine of her housework.

For an hour while the boys napped she listened to her radio, even though listening was sweet suffering because she had to keep the volume down and the music made her want to do just the opposite, made her feel wild to turn up the fizzy old thing and scandalize the neighbors, tuck a flower in her hair, walk in the rain, kiss a stranger, do
something
. Almost anything.

She had married straight out of high school, at age seventeen. She was only twenty.

Ennis, her husband, did not get home until late. In the summertime he worked until dark, hammering, fitting homes together, earnest, steady, sober. He wanted to have his own construction company someday. Angie felt no doubt that he would, and that when he did he would work even harder and leave her even more alone.

“ 'Lo, hon.” He kissed her because he knew she wanted it, but awkwardly, with closed lips. Kissing did not come easily to Ennis. Even a Dagwood peck at the door made him faintly blush.

“Have you eaten?”

“Nope. I worked straight through. I'm starved.”

She had fed Gabe and Mikey their dinner but had saved her own hunger for Ennis. She had given the children their baths and their bedtime story, cuddling them one in each arm in a hundred-year-old rocking chair, their small heads and wispy hair warm against her neck. After tucking them in amid kisses and hugs and teddy bears, she had settled down to wait for her husband, her belly growling. Now she put out the cold chicken, the apple salad, the sweet-and-sour pepper slaw.

Ennis sat at his place. Even across the kitchen she could whiff the good workingman smell of him. If he had touched her, even sweaty as he was, she would not have pulled away … He waited until she sat, then steepled his big hands and said a quick grace. He was a member of the Church of the Holy Virgin, of course, like his parents before him. Angie had known him all her life, and looking at him across the table she could not say for certain whether he was handsome. Her eyes were so accustomed to him that she could not tell. And the loose-fitting Sears work pants and work shirt he wore did not help her. But certainly he was not ugly … and she was no beauty, she reminded herself, certainly not attractive in any fashionable sense, sitting there in her round-collared blouse and scrubbed face and bunned hair and prayer bonnet. She had never been able to feel sure he desired her.

They ate in near-silence. Ennis asked how her day had been, then looked at the mail. It was mostly junk, but it served to occupy him. He had never been one to talk much. Even less during the past year, since his dad had died.

An hour later, after he had showered and Angie had done the dishes, she undressed in the bathroom, taking off with relief the prayer bonnet with its irksome hairpins—at least her father and his God did not require strings that tied under the chin! Taking off with supreme relief the chastely sheathing pantyhose, the white, constricting bra. She rubbed at the red marks under her breasts, the furrows on her shoulders, then shook her hair free of its bun, feeling it sway silkily against her bare back down to her waist. It had never been cut, not since she was a baby, and this one stricture of her father's do-it-yourself religion she did not mind. She loved her long, seal-brown hair and wished she could let it swing down her back all the time, instead of for just a few minutes in the evening.

She put on her nightgown but did not plait her hair in its customary bedtime braids. All day, even more so than usual, she had felt pregnant with desperation. She had decided to take a risk. In the bed Ennis was waiting, and though the nightgown was a cotton sack not fit to excite anyone, her unbound hair would serve as a signal for him.

In the glow of the hallway night-light she saw his face a moment before she closed the bedroom door. Yes, it was a nice enough face, a farm boy's face, quiet and rugged and tawny, like winter fields … Her closing the door also was a signal. For sleeping, they kept it open so she could hear if the children cried. But for the other thing they closed it.

She felt her way to the bed in the dark, found Ennis and kissed him. And yes, yes, this time it was going to be all right. She could tell. He wanted her.

But afterward, after he had gotten up and found his pajamas in the dark and put them on again, after he had washed himself and come back to bed and settled down to sleep, Angie (once more decently gowned) found that her unrest had increased rather than abated. What she and Ennis had done—it had felt good, it always did, but she wished it had lasted longer.… Want, want, there was always more to want, and what was the use of it? But still she wanted. She wished he would let her leave a light on, just a little light, so that she could see him. She had never seen him with his clothes off, not even on their wedding night, he was too shy, and she wanted to know what he looked like, she wanted to love him that way, she wanted him to look at her and love her—but he would not look at her, and he had never let her so much as see him without his shirt. Even swimming, even in the heat of summer, he wore a shirt. When she was dating him she had dreamed that once they were married Ennis would change, that he would unpin her hair and kiss her, unbutton her prim white blouse and pull off her bra and caress her breasts. She still dreamed that same dream. But it was not going to happen.