Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  “Name,” she demanded crisply.

  “Volos.”

  No last name. Gimmicky. She made a show of boredom as she wrote it down. “All right, play,” she told him.

  Volos did not obey her, but lifted his hands to his throat and swung off the cloak so that she saw the wings. They did not at first impress her. Just another gimmick. Being a jaded Angeleno, she sighed with exasperation.

  “Play, please.” With edge in her voice.

  The first notes flew up plangent and strange, like tropical birds. A moment later, deeper chords had settled into a jungle drumbeat, a good beat, something people just had to dance to … then Volos leaned into a riff, and Brett blinked: This guy was making a nothing-special Gibson sound like two guitars, like electric coitus. He was cookin’, smokin’, hot, hot, hot; he knew how to move, and then he started to sing and blue blazes he knew how to do that too. And his wings were going rainbow as the song heated up, band after band of luminous color, cyan, magenta, mauve, rippling down them from root to tip. It was, Brett had to admit, very well done. This guy was his own goddamn light show. A gimmick, all right, but it was a good one, it could make him a hot property. Briefly she wondered who he had gotten to make the wings for him, how they were wired and where the control mechanism was hidden.

  She liked his sound: hard rock, almost heavy metal but not quite, with plenty of beat and groove and guitar thrash yet more songline to it than most contemporary music. Melodic—the guy had a fantastic voice—but full of passion, not slick or sticky. Familiar enough that people would like it. Different enough that they would remember it.

  Somewhere far down the list of her priorities Brett listened to the words of Volos’s song:

  This angel’s taking a fall

  This angel’s full of the devil

  This angel ain’t no dead person Daddy

  This angel is alive

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Yah yah yah yah yah

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show this angel where they keep the cookies

  Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show me who to give my heart to.

  Ow ow ow ow wow

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show me how to get you out of those clothes.

  Show me what … oh woman you know what.

  Oh devil lover show me

  Why please show me why

  I want to live I WANT TO LIVE

  Before I die.

  “Okay,” she told him when he was done. “Hang around, I want to talk with you.”

  Luckily it was not too far a step from lute to guitar. Volos had been considered a slow study as heavenly choristers go, but there had been eons for him to acquire skill with stringed instruments. Certainly he could play guitar. And sing—yes, he could sing. Even as a member of the lowest rank of the incorporeal host he had somewhat learned to sing. Any of the countless disembodied voices of the eight higher choirs could have shamed him, but Volos did not care, because they were far away and not even as material as air, whereas he was real, real, feet on the floor, swaying with a guitar as his dancing partner, raptured by the tremor and pulse of the instrument physical as a living body in his arms, the rush of his voice in his throat, the thrust of his diaphragm, the bright-pink ache of his lungs. It was for this that he had come. Even more than for fucking it was for this that he had come: to solo, to sing with his fundament in his voice.

  To be human was to sing, Volos believed. Singing, he would be human, he would be accepted, he would be understood. Perhaps even loved.

  There is a relentless dues-paying logic to the rock-stardom process: Start in the clubs, auditioning on talent night, maybe if you’re any good catch the manager’s interest, maybe get called to fill in for somebody who doesn’t show. Then in the fullness of time maybe open for somebody bigger than you, go on tour to the small venues, learning like an apprentice whore how to sell yourself, learning how to handle yourself onstage when the crowds get ugly. Build a repertoire of songs and moves. Maybe if you’re lucky, find a good booking agent or a pushy manager. Make a tape, take it around, hope it gets heard, hope somehow you catch fire, hope somebody puts out the word that you’re hot and a recording studio hears it. Do this for a while, maybe five years, maybe ten, until finally, somehow, the break comes and you’re the one headlining and you’re a star. Usually it happens, if it happens at all, just about when the wrinkles start taking over your pretty face and all the eyes turn to somebody younger, wide-eyed and sweet-throated and new. This is show biz. Stars rise slowly, fall like stones.

  Brett had managed a few talents in her time and watched them fizzle. If she could find a way to beat the system, she had sometimes thought, if she could sign on a really promising adolescent hunk (her enthusiasm was only for attractive male singers) and find him a shortcut to stardom so he got there while he was still young and gorgeous and could manage to stay aloft for a while, she would make a fortune.

  Those wings were a shortcut if she had ever seen one. They were very lifelike. She had never run across anything like them.

  And the guy wearing them—

  If she had any sense she would make him her client rather than her lover. But just this once, she decided, she was not going to be sensible. This one time she was going to break the rules. Make him both.

  He was standing in the doorway, waiting for her, getting in everybody’s way and seemingly quite unaware of it. With his black cloak on again, he loomed, and unlike many tall men he did not slouch or make a show of awkwardness to diminish his tallness. But neither did he seem to menace. A homeboy loitering on the street corner needs self-consciousness in order to menace. Volos had none. Lounging, blocking traffic, he occupied space as thoughtlessly as a tree.

  “Volos,” Brett summoned, brushing past him.

  He followed her. She loved the way he walked, with forward impetus like that of a raked street rod, with graceful booted vehemence. She led him out of the empty music hall and into the main barroom, the night-spot attraction she had built out of chrome and shadows, neon and mirrors. Selecting a table, she watched Volos struggle with his wings and cloak as he sat with her.

  “Why don’t you take those wings off now,” she told him.

  “No, I cannot.” There was something faintly foreign in the way he spoke. That accent pleased her, because it took a low-pitched, vibrant, very sexy voice and made it even better, made it exotic, distinctive. But she was not pleased that he had not done what she had said concerning his wings.

  “They’ll just get in the way,” she said.

  “Because the rooms are so small,” he agreed. “Yes, it is a nuisance.”

  Something in his voice distanced him from her and made her wonder if he and she were speaking the same language. The cloak was perhaps meant for concealment, but it drew stares. Brett heard a woman passing by say something about the new extreme padded-shoulder look.

  The bartender hovered at her elbow. “Shot of tequila with salt on the side,” she told him.

  Volos seemed not to know what to order at all. He had to be even younger than she thought. Good. She liked them young.

  “Try a margarita,” she suggested.

  “That will be good, yes.”

  He sounded questioning. Men, they were all the same. Like children. Had to be managed. While the drinks were coming Brett tried to make arrangements with Volos. She wanted him to open for the Friday night act she had already booked for Club Decimo, wanted to see what sort of repertoire he had, how he handled a crowd, whether the audience liked him. But it was difficult to talk with the strobes rapid-firing and the dance-floor music vibrating their bones.

  She jolted her mouth with a fistful of salt, followed up with her tequila. “Something wrong with your drink?” she shouted at Volos when she could speak. He had not touched it.

  “Wrong?”

  She teased, “I’m going to think you don’t like me.”

  “Like you?”

  “Just drink the bo
oze,” she said.

  He raised his salt-rimmed glass and downed his drink all at once, choking on it a little. Watching him, Brett felt surprise and warm anticipation—he had done just as he had been told. She could get things started sooner than she had thought. There was no need to play games with this boy. No more plying with liquor would be necessary. No seduction. No subtlety.

  “Come on,” she ordered Volos when he set down the empty glass, and he followed her obediently out of the place, like a large dog. It was just as well that they could leave. He would have been an embarrassment on the crowded dance floor, with those tacky wings—he could barely get through the door. Brett led him to her candy-apple-red Corvette, and instead of sitting beside her he perched atop the seat back.

  “It is a nice thing you have a convertible,” he remarked. Because of the wings, she intuited. He would not have been able to fit into her car at all with the top up.

  She demanded, “Can’t you take those damn things off?”

  “No.”

  Why was he so stubborn about this one thing? She was annoyed, but not enough to make her stop wanting him. Driving home with him, even though his booted feet were marring her upholstery, she felt so turned on at the thought of him that she could barely talk or look at him. He was exquisite.

  Over the eons Volos had often watched humans in coitus. How many angels can crowd onto the head of a pin, and how many can hover in any given bedroom? But that had been in his ethereal time. Then, his interest had been that of a bodiless voyeur. It was different now, feeling the demands of his own warm, rousing flesh. He felt no special attraction to Brett just because she was blond and thin—he had seen many generations of mortal beauty, and this bumpy-fronted modern type, all ribs and erectile breasts, appealed to him no more than the seallike sleekness of the Venus de Milo might, or a soulful Renaissance courtesan made mostly of dark eyes and a sweet face. But he went with Brett. How could he not go with Brett? His body was clamoring.

  Once in her apartment he took off his cloak. He had found it advisable to wear the thing over his wings in public places—but this was not a public place. Not quite, Volos thought, dropping the garment to her pussywillow-gray carpet, standing in her living room and looking around at black tables and white chairs, at pink calla lily lamps in front of beveled-glass mirrors. “Deco,” he remarked to show that he kept track of human transience, “very Art Deco.” Hearing his own voice he knew at once that he should have kept silent. The words had slopped, and his torso felt watery and warm. What she had given him, that drink, whatever it was, that margarita, it had made itself a oneness with the ebb and flow of his blood, it had gone straight to his body. The mirrored walls were sea deep, the lamps pink phosphorescent kelp swaying in the room’s dim private currents, in the sex-scented wash of the world. Drunk, Volos thought, so this is drunk. He did not dislike it.

  Brett had taken off some of her clothes, and suddenly he was seeing her, really seeing her with the attention he usually reserved for himself. Pale, moon-like curves above satin and lace—her breasts. Yes, he wanted to touch them.… Why had she not taken off her shoes? Was she not going to do this thing with him after all? Surely … yes. Volos understood that the absurd heeled shoes worn by modern women were designed to increase their sexual appeal. He had heard this, but now for the first time he comprehended. To his bones he comprehended. His whole body saw how her tiptoe stance made her breasts tilt toward him, her back arch, her hips swing as she stepped nearer. Moreover, the shoes were of functional use, giving her the height she needed as she kissed him.

  She is kissing me—

  Lips, she was moving her lips against his lips, and sweet demons of hell, he had seen this thing done how many times yet never known how lips could tickle like feathertouch and tingle like fire and how the effect was not limited to mouth; he felt it lifting his hands to the curve of her back, felt it quicken the tempo of his breathing, felt it amplify his shoulders, his chest, his buttocks. His body, responding to hers. Lips moving in response. Tongue moving in response.

  So this is a kiss …

  It startled his heart, it filled him, it ran like electric shock straight from his mouth to his groin. He felt her nipples against him, heads up beneath thin cloth. He felt—himself, that important forbidden part of himself, hot and rebellious and ecstatic, straining against the zipper of his Levi’s. The feeling and the realization excited him so that he broke the kiss and blurted aloud, “It’s—all right!”

  “You like, baby?” she murmured against his face.

  “My God, yes!”

  Desire, it burned like fire, she rocked her hips against him and pleasure tore him like pain, he wanted to scream.… Hard-on, big dick, crotch rocket, trouser snake—the well-researched expressions skidded across his mind. He wanted to sing them, all of them, every word he knew for penis, cock, phallus, willy, wedding tackle, boner, dong, tool. He felt heat in his wings and knew they had to be flashing like neon in Vegas. He wanted to shout an announcement, he wanted to dance, and most of all he wanted to get out of his pants and into her.

  “Soon?” he whispered. “Please.”

  “Now be good.” She backed off; she was a tease. Smiling into his eyes, lifting both arms so that her breasts swelled above her camisole, she traced the top line of his shoulders with her fingertips. Said, “Just you wait.” Said, “We’ve got all night. Take off those Hollywood wings first.”

  “I can’t.”

  “They’ll get in the way, baby.”

  “I can’t! They’re part of me.” How could she look straight at him and not see? Yet she did. Most people did. There was something in humans that could not face the truth. So far only Texas knew him truly.

  “Hey, it’s them or me, lover.” Lightly Brett tugged at his left shoulder, urging him to turn his back; he resisted her. “Come on. I’ll help you. How do you get them off?” She reached past his neck to find the Velcro, the clasp, the catch, and found the crisp overlapping smoothness of his covert feathers instead. For just a moment she lightly touched before she jerked her hand away as if something had stung her.

  She backed away, off balance, teetering on her high heels, her face spooked, yet uncertain. How could she be frightened without comprehending what it was she feared? Yet she managed it. Humans had always managed these seemingly impossible contradictions. It was quite possible, apparently, for this woman to decide about him without even trying to understand. Watching her, Volos felt all his desire sag into despair, the fire in him turn to a smoldering anger.

  She said, “I think maybe I’m too tired tonight after all.”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  “It is of no importance.” He said this as a matter of ontological truth, though his body, and therefore his mortal being, did not believe it. He picked up his cloak, fastened it on. It would protect him from some of the gawking, some of the foolish questions to which people never believed the answers.

  Seemingly out of nowhere Brett said, “It’s just as well not to be intimate if we have to work together. You’ll be seeing a lot of me, Volos. I’m going to make you a star.” She told him this with the utter certainty of one who has looked destiny in the eye and touched its wide wings.

  Yet she had said none of this before. Volos was bemused. “You are what?”

  “I am going to make you big, Volos. Very, very big.”

  “Big,” Volos said. “Yes.” For a small while—all too small—she had already done so. He felt the sticky place bigness had left inside his jeans. A few moments later, out on the street, he stepped into an alley and unzipped and used his fingers to smell it.

  All smells were new to him. His first bodily memory of this world was that of the smell of the ocean in the air, salty as his sweat. Since then he had smelled oleander and McDonald’s, vagrants and Brett’s perfume, sun-baked concrete and a wet poodle and the tar pits at La Brea and the reek of perm outside a beauty salon. All smells were exciting to him—but this one, the fetor
of his own sexual arousal, raised his neck hairs and shivered down his spine, so brutal was it and so much unlike anything he had ever experienced.

  Dawn air in the city smelled like petroleum, Texas noticed. He discovered this because he hadn’t slept, had given up on sleep and was sitting in his open window, stony lonesome, watching the rockers head home for their lofts pale as if they never saw daylight, wondering what Volos was doing and trying to write a letter to Wyoma: “Dear Wyoma,

  Sorry I haven’t written. It’s been a strange week, and not the way you’re thinking.”

  He was working himself up to tell her about Volos, but how the hell was he supposed to do that? He couldn’t. There was no way on earth she was ever going to understand. When when was the last time he had looked at her and seen understanding? He couldn’t remember. That attempt got crumpled into a ball and tossed. He tried again: “Dear Wyoma,

  Please notice the new address. I am staying at the Y near the bus station and am looking for some kind of job.”

  He tossed that one as well. Too much like a business letter. It was not as if he were writing her to conduct business or out of a sense of duty. The truth was he really wanted to connect with her. But God, he felt farther from her than miles could tell.

  Dear Wy,

  I have not cheated on you or gone drinking or gambled or made a fool of myself much of anyhow since I’ve been here except that I wasted money on a new hat and boots. The hat got ruined already and the boots are scuffed. You are probably wondering what the hell I am doing here then and so am I. All I can say is it feels like I am looking for something. Maybe my mind which it appears I have lost. I think I better stick it out awhile longer and see. Please note new address.