Metal Angel (37 page)

Outside, the weather had settled into a steady, warm early-autumn rain. In Texas' headlights the world shone slick as black leather with silver studs. Around the hospital, vacant expanses of parking lot lay wet and gleaming under security lights. The place was pretty quiet for a change. Some of the groupies had given up and gone home after the first day or two, and it looked like the rain had driven the others away. The reporters were mostly not around in the middle of the night, though they would be back at dawn.

Striding across the parking lot, Texas smiled, because he had just figured out how to sneak Volos past them when it was time for the kid to leave the hospital. Use a wheelchair—but for the kid to lean on, not for him to sit in. If Volos wore blue jeans and the western shirt and snub-toed Dingos Texas had bought him, and tucked his hair up under a Stetson, and pulled the brim down over his face a bit, he would be just another good ol' boy pushing Pa to the truck. Texas, hatless and blanketed and maybe drooling a little in the wheelchair, would be Pa. The news ghouls would be looking for a rock star in a wheelchair, not an old mountaineer.

Maybe pretty soon it would get so the kid could go down to the corner and shoot pool like a normal human being. Texas hoped so. He wanted Volos to be able to go see pig races and hill climbs and powder puff baseball. He wanted to take the kid snowmobiling and skeet shooting and coon hunting on muleback. He wanted the kid to raise hell at least once and need to be bailed out of the pokey. He had wishes for Volos.

Texas ducked past the nurses' station, walked down the hall as softly as he could in his hard-heeled boots, slipped into Volos's room without turning on a light just in case the kid really was asleep—

He wasn't. Against the sheen of rain outside, Texas could see him standing at the window, staring out, leaning close to the water-streaked glass.

Texas left the light off—no use bringing a nurse in, and anyway he had a feeling the kid didn't want a lot of light. Went and stood beside Volos at the window's other corner. “So you're up to your old tricks, buddy,” he greeted him softly. “Going around with your shirt off.” The kid stood there naked except for his bandaging and his briefs. “Not sleeping. Hound-dogging in the night.”

Volos gave a faint smile but did not look at him. In the shadowy light from outside, the kid's face was as wet as the pavement, streaked like the glass. Silently and without moving he was crying.

“Oh, shit, son.” Texas gave up on teasing, went into the bathroom and got a washcloth. Came back and tried to wipe Volos's face with it. “Dammit. Kid, how long you been like this?”

Volos roused enough to push the washcloth away.

Texas said, “I wish you would've called me.”

“I am all right.” Volos's voice sounded steady but desperately tired. “I think it is just that my eyes are practicing.”

“Give me a break, Volos! You're so down, down looks like up.” The kid was walking that lonesome valley, all right. If Volos had been playing a guitar, his fingers would have been skating over the frets like chalk on a slate, bending the strings stony-blue.

Silence. Volos leaned his forehead against the cool glass.

“Okay, so I am down,” he said after a while. “Is this the way it used to be for you, Texas, at night when you were missing Wyoma?”

Texas nodded, wishing he could take the kid into his arms, hold him, and hug the pain away. But Volos wasn't letting himself be babied those days. Trying to get back on his feet, trying to be a man, he was full of his damn suffering pride.

“And when you wanted to find your father,” he said, still staring out into the rain. “Texas, I wish I had done it for you.”

“So I could beat him up?”

“But you would not have done that. You thought it, but—I know you, you would have tried—you would have wanted to love him.”

It took Texas a moment to admit to himself that the kid was right. Only to himself. He had his pride too.

“You asked me to help,” Volos was saying, “and I told you no. I cannot believe I did that.”

“For God's sake, Volos, forget it! It was a bad idea.”

Volos seemed hardly to hear him. Wet-cheeked, he was staring, and he said, “I would do it now in a minute, Texas. I would kneel in front of that Throne and say, ‘I have been a wrongheaded fool,' because it is true, I am an ass. But—now that I could do it—the wings are—gone, and the sky is—so far away—”

“Whoa.” Texas allowed himself to come a step nearer, and gentled his voice, keeping it very low. “You telling me you want to go talk with your Pa?”

The question snapped Volos's head up. “No. I hate him. But—I don't know. I should tell him—it is not fair that I blame everything on him. The wings—I thought they were his doing, but now I see—”

At least Volos was looking at him now. Texas nodded at him to go on.

“When I incarnated, I thought I wanted to be a mortal, but really I wanted everything at once, to be human and yet—not hungry, not weary, not weeping. To be—to be still a star.” The kid's voice started to shake. “That is why I—had—wings, I gave them to myself, not knowing. And I cursed God, and hated them. But now—they are gone, but I—I keep feeling them hurting on my shoulders, like ghosts—”

“Whoa. Hush.” No way could Texas let him tough it out any longer. He took the necessary two steps to gather him in, but Volos stepped back. Didn't want to be hugged right now. Wet-faced, but didn't want to sob on his shoulder. Pride. That was all right. Texas knew a lot about pride. Just now learning, now that he was past forty, when it was time to get past pride.

“You're no more a fool than any human,” Texas told him softly. “Volos.” The kid was gazing back at him with dusky-blue eyes, the same color as his. Maybe the God the youngster had always resented so was to thank for that.

“Son …” Texas felt his voice start to slip, tried again. This was it. Scarier than anything else he'd ever had to ask anybody. “Volos—I'm one of the luckiest people alive, I've got a wife and daughters who love me, and when I went looking for trouble I came up with you instead …” His voice went husky. “Kid, you might have noticed how I feel about you, and I wish there was some way I could make it official, but I guess all I can do is just say it: Would you let me take you home? Will you be my son?”

So there went pride for both of them. The question broke Volos down and wide open. But that was okay. A kid's entitled to do some messy crying in his daddy's arms sometimes. Texas held him, gentle, careful of the wounded back, and felt the hands clinging to him—hands that could make the music of an angel—and swallowed hard, and stroked the youngster's long, coarse hair, and dared to turn his lips to the side of that dark head close to his, dared to kiss. A father's entitled to kiss his son.

“But it's all I—all I ever wanted,” Volos blurted when he could speak. “Just—a father—who loves me.”

“Son, you got it.”

Maybe more of it than he reckoned. Maybe more fathers than one. Back home, Texas had squirreled away something he had redeemed once upon a crazy time from an L.A. pawnshop, something he would give to Volos when he figured the kid was ready: a sort of four-petaled flower made of solid gold. Texas had a hunch the sky would not always seem so far away to Volos. Seemed to him he had heard someplace that once in a while even God wept. And outside, warm rain was falling.

epilogue

Volos sprawled on his bed, replete. He had been a month in the McCardle house, and to celebrate, Wyoma had invited the whole family, Starr, Merrilee, their husbands and their new babies, and had made Volos a devil's-food cake, which was so far his favorite, especially with double-chocolate icing. Usually he and Texas did most of the cooking (often with bizarre results) because Wyoma worked. But Wyoma had wanted to make the cake. She mothered him, in her way. That first day, within the first hour, they had understood each other. He had staggered in the door, and she had looked up at him with eyes that assessed the task before her.

“How long since you shampooed your hair?” she had demanded.

“Shampoo?” He had not imagined his hair to need such care. But since the incident which had caused the loss of his wings, his body was acting differently. Texas had needed to teach him to use deodorant. And his hair was growing in finer, less like feathers, more like Texas' hair. And oilier, more in need of washing.

“Didn't nobody never teach you how to take care of yourself?” Wyoma had grumbled, not unkindly. Then she had led him upstairs, and scrubbed his head for him at the bathroom sink, and towel-dried it, and helped him totter to bed in the room she had prepared for him.

The bed, an old wooden thing with a wire spring, was the same little bed that had belonged to Texas as a boy. Volos had spent a lot of time in it those first few days, looking at the block letters Texas had scratched in the headboard with a penknife once when he was being very bad. RBM—Robert Balfour McCardle. At an awkward angle. Being mortal was an odd thing. In a way the boy who had carved those letters was as dead as Volos's wings, and in another way he would live on through generations.

Volos felt almost human now. He walked strongly, and the haunting pain was gone from his back. On the floor by his bed lay a big all-paws mutt puppy—Texas had taken him to the pound to adopt it, he had named it Raphael, and most days he and Raph wrestled in the grass and ran through the yellow leaves, out across the fields, past the family cemetery where his charred wing bones lay, then through the woods, down to the river and back.

In his room besides the dog were many good things: his guitar, and a radio shaped like a jukebox (a gift from Ennis and Angie), and baseball hats marked Agway and Persimmon Volunteer Fire Department and Mingo County Courier. And piles of magazines,
Metal Mag
and
Motorcycle Women
and
Bimboy
. And the balsa-wood airplanes and model cars Texas kept getting him, the silly oversized Teddy bear Wyoma had bought him, and a Corvette-shaped decorator bottle of Avon aftershave (not yet used, though the day seemed to be coming when he would need to shave) from the girl down the road. The room, like the house, was not large, and his things crowded it, but when he was in it Volos did not feel boxed in. Instead, he felt snug, as if the house itself, like the family under its roof, embraced him.

Soon, Volos knew, he would have to decide what to do with the life he had claimed for himself. He still did not seem able to think about money, about making a living, in the same way that other people did, and he knew this—but he also knew that a man could not be a boy forever and let his father and mother take care of him. Sometime he must leave home.

Texas and Wyoma kept telling him not to feel that way, that there was no hurry about anything, and he knew they meant it. Those two, they astonished him daily with their love, for each other and for him. Waking up every morning, he felt himself being born, blinking into the sunrise.

He knew only one thing about his life, really: He wanted to make music.

So sometime he would go back to L.A., maybe. Get together with Red again and maybe the others, see if they could become a band. Just to live and sing and dance in the night and sometimes do a little fucking, that was all he wanted. Maybe find a sexy guy to take his mind off Angie. Stay away from the junk, since he knew it could hurt him now. Stay away from record producers. The worst thing that could happen would be if he became a star again, but that did not need to happen. People probably would not recognize him. There was hair on his chest now, and his voice had deepened, there was grit in it these days, and his face had subtly changed. Like the rest of him, it spoke less of starfire and ether now and more of earth. It was a good face with soul in it, still his own but also somewhat like Texas'. Weathered, a little, by life and West Virginia. When he went back to L.A. he would call himself Flaim, and he would know where he was from, and who loved him, and who he loved. As if there were a compass in his heart, he would always know which way lay home.

From the kitchen down below he could hear Wyoma and her girls chattering. Texas was downstairs taking a nap with the TV on. As if he could see him, Volos imagined Texas stretched out in the armchair with his Stetson over his face and his booted feet propped on the coffee table. Atop the TV, standing in its frame, was a recent studio photo of Texas, Wyoma, Starr, Merrilee—and Volos.

He yawned and stretched, fingering initials freshly carved in his bed's headboard—VFCM. Volos Flaim Carson McCardle. Texas had loaned him the penknife to do it.

He stretched some more, then rolled over and patted Raphael's head. Reached over the dog for tablet paper and pencil. Chewed at the fingers of his left hand. It was still hard for him to write. He remembered three dozen languages—though not the languages of birds—but he still held a pencil like a firstgrader. Use a tape recorder, Texas had suggested. But Volos wished to make songs as Angie would have done, and write them down.

So far none of his had felt like hers—but this time was different. Something within him had settled into place like a cowboy into a saddle, like a mountaineer back in the mountains, and now he could be whole, he could make music, really make it, like making a baby, from the fundament of his body and the penetralia of his soul. He sensed the song coming. Felt it snapping and clicking in him, electric. Could feel its heartbeat rhythm. Could almost hear the guitars.

Volos wrote:

Now I am made of fire

I blaze

through my numbered days

and all around me I see

the mothers the fathers the lovers

like candles aglow

with each other

one haloed in the other

melting in one another

above their shoulders rising

their invisible wings

of flame
.