Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  Pigs, what were they thinking of? Of course Volos knew how to sing. What angel would not know how to sing? But if these barnyard animals had come to see a winged oddity and had instead witnessed the nascence of a star, it was because of something more. He was a profligate, a prodigal, a huge spender, this Volos. The faces in front of his stage were precious gold to him, and expensive. They were costing him everything he had, and he was giving it unstintingly.

  LET ME IN

  Tell me where they hid all the flowers

  LET ME IN

  Where they put the shrouded women

  I’ll pull those petals open to the stem

  I’ll probe those blossoms

  With a hummingbird tongue

  I’ll bust wide open that golden cage

  Tear down the walls of that holy bower

  Let me in

  LET ME IN

  Let me in to that slavehouse of sin.

  He sang songs of aggressive sex, songs of rage and rebellion and yearning and desire. It was an odd mix: no let’s-dance songs, no love songs except a few covers of rock classics. But it worked for Volos. He did not seem to know how to handle himself between numbers, how to talk and joke with his audience or his band, but despite his seriousness—or perhaps because of it—the rowdy crowd warmed to him. For two Dionysian hours the songs pumped hot, one after the other, and by the time he closed with “Before I Die” he had them standing on their chairs, swaying, chanting, with their hands upraised and reaching toward him.

  After the encores, after Volos had gone off for good, the four members of the backup band stayed and jammed, seeming far more relaxed with each other than they had been with their lead singer. The crowd mostly either headed toward the bar and the dance floor or left. Timing his move for when Security’s massive head was turned, Mercedes slipped backstage.

  He found Volos in a dressing room not much larger than a broom closet. There were a chair and a sink and mirror and clothes tree in there, but Volos was using none of those things. He was merely standing between them, in the exact geometric center of the cramped space, looking stunned. Or too tired to move. Or lost, with nowhere to go. His wings hung dusky blue. Already Mercedes was beginning to be able to interpret the wing colors; he had seen them changing while Volos sang, going blood blazing red for passion or rage, sunrise shades for gladness, purple for poetry. Now they were, as the old song said, indigo. The gig was over and the singer had the blues. Volos had crashed.

  “What is the matter?” Mercedes asked, to give the appearance of caring, to show that he understood. It was necessary that Volos should see that he, Mercedes, understood.

  That eerily beautiful face turned, swerved rather, to look at him with eyes deep and distant as space. Volos did not answer.

  Mercedes tried again. “You are far from home. The others are too stupid to perceive or believe, but I know. You are an angel.”

  Volos did not display the gratitude Mercedes expected. Instead he said hotly, “I do not like that word. You Christians and Jews and Muslims think of angels only as messengers, servants, tattletales, and spies.”

  “But?” asked Mercedes softly.

  “But to the Babylonians we were the genii. To the Hindus, the spirits of air. To the Persians, the mighty Kerubim. To the Greeks, the very gods themselves.”

  “You were feared,” Mercedes said.

  “We were powerful.” Volos’s gaze on him had focused, intent yet gentler than before. “Fear without understanding is useless … you at least try to understand. But you are not afraid.”

  Mercedes allowed himself a small shrug and a puckish smile. “He who was once powerful has fallen.”

  “It was not a matter of falling. I dove.” Volos mirrored the shrug, the smile. He had been alone, at his own mercy, torn open like a road kill after his singing, and now there was someone with him, someone who returned him to himself, who understood him; Mercedes had counted on all this and saw it working. Already Volos’s wings had lightened, passing through lavender toward the color of a dayspring sky. The angel asked him, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Mercedes.” It was not his given name, of course. But what Hollywood name is? And who was to say what was more real, the birth name or the stage one.

  “That is a type of car.” (As if I don’t know, thought Mercedes.) “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  Mercedes said, “Everything.”

  Volos gazed, and Mercedes steadily met his gaze, certain without knowing why—or caring why—that the angel understood him utterly. He saw how Volos’s eyes had lightened to copper brown. He saw the angel take a moment to think, to question, then physically ready himself, rustling his wings like a rousing hawk, gathering courage.

  Volos said, “Touch my wing.”

  Mercedes did not hesitate. It would have happened soon in any event; he wanted it to happen. But because he could see this was a serious moment to Volos, he held the angel’s stare a moment longer and nodded before he stepped forward to lay his left hand on the shining feathers.

  He felt a sort of jolt, deeply startling but not painful, and suddenly he was even hungrier and bolder than ever before, so much so that his ambitious appetite would not wait a moment longer. His mouth lurched toward Volos’s. His right hand swung forward, found the part of this stranger that mainly interested him, felt it respond beneath the zipper, the denim.

  “Aaah!”

  He had taken Volos by surprise, but the angel’s face had softened into the stupid look people get when they’re making love, his gasp seemed made mostly of pleasure … and too bad if it was not. Mercedes could not wait, could not help himself. He went down on his knees, a suppliant at the shrine of Priapus, he opened Volos’s fly rapidly but with trembling hands. No underwear, by God, and no padding in this rocker’s crotch, just—Christ, everything he had heard was true. More. He had not guessed it would be the phallus of a savage, uncircumcised, dusky, long, so fearsomely exciting that even the familiar musky aroma seemed magnificently strange.

  Only afterward did he notice, or rather remember, that the dark curls that grew around that superlative cock were tiny feathers, like a black eagle’s down.

  Since coming to this hot, rocking city Volos had seen many things that made him think of hard metal music. He had spent a night at the Watts Towers, watching the moon swim behind the filigree spires. He had seen skateboarders wash like surf through a parking lot, shouting their seagull cries. He had scanned the strange yellow L.A. sky, and then looked downward and watched the tar of the streets shine and bubble like sin in the midday heat. He had seen a stoned kid with his head out a car window gulping air like a dog. He had seen a garbageman unzip and send a stream of pungent urine into the back of his even more pungent truck. He had seen Mercedes naked.

  Many of these things made him feel an erection coming, not just Mercedes naked.

  But undeniably, none of them gave him such pleasure as Mercedes did. The apartment in West Hollywood, it was small and in a noisy neighborhood, but it had a waterbed, and mirrors. It was there that Mercedes had taken him the first time and taught him things that even in all his eons of watching he had never thought of.

  This, then, was fucking. Mercedes had assured him it was so, and made him look in the mirror, and told him he was beautiful.

  He could see that this was true. And Mercedes also was beautiful. He wore silk shirts unbuttoned halfway to his waist, showing his faintly furred chest. He had a still, smooth face, closed in on itself like a mysterious woman’s face. He had a Mona Lisa smile. Dressed, he stood slender yet walked tall. Naked, he was small and lay waiting on the bed, a boy, a woman, a white bird of desire. Dreaming of him sometimes, Volos forgot to remember he was a man. His dreams of Mercedes grew out of womanhood, like those other dreams that came to him from far to the shrouded east.

  God, he makes me feel like I’m having sex.

  It was one of Angie’s least admissible thoughts yet, and its sinfulness thrilled her almost as much as the ne
w hit tune, the one she felt tingling in her like foreplay. Never had a song affected her so strongly. Amid its rock rhythms she heard little of the words, but they didn’t matter. It was the singer’s voice that went through her. Even on her ancient little radio, even with the volume turned as low as she had to keep it when the children were napping, the man sounded supernatural—like the deejays said, like an angel in heat. His voice was a raptor, a bird of prey, ravening among drums and bass, rising on dark wings to—to somewhere sky-high and glassy pure, and amid throbbing guitar he held the pitch for perhaps seven heartbeats past impossible before he roughened it into a banshee scream and plunged, a diver, a suicide—Angie shivered and turned up the volume anxiously even though she risked waking the boys. The song was ending, and it had called to her; God, she didn’t want it to end, and who was the singer? No one she had ever heard before, she felt sure of that. No one alive had ever had that cerulean range combined with such earthiness, so that in the voice she could hear both a god’s chill, hawklike soaring and a man’s body, strong and hot.

  “Whoo-ee,” the deejay declared, yammering over the final notes; she hated it when they did that! “A brand new talent, kids, and I bet we’ll be hearing a lot more from him! That was—”

  The doorbell buzzed, making Angie miss the name. And suddenly wildly, rebelliously angry, she left the radio on, volume and all, let it sit on her kitchen table while she went to see who had cut short her pleasure. Halfway across the living room she realized she had been neglecting to sweep the doorstep, and the thought redoubled her annoyance. Nobody but the mailman and the Avon lady used the front, anyway, and let them talk all they liked, about her untidiness, about her listening to forbidden music. She didn’t care. She just didn’t care what anybody said anymore.

  Without even scouting through a window first she jerked open the door, and there stood her father, his brows gathering like thunder.

  “Angela! A radio! A temptation of the devil!”

  He sounded aghast, hurt and appalled as much as wroth. He was not a bad man, really. He just wanted what was best for her, goodness and a heavenly reward such as his own. Angie knew that in his harsh way he loved her, that if she gibbered and wept the storm would pass after a suitable penance and a public apology to the congregation. But she did not weep. Something had gone heavy and stubborn in her and refused any longer to pacify her father. If God Almighty himself had stood on her besmirched doorstep, she might have refused to pacify him.

  Her father rebuked, “You might as well open your door and let Satan himself into your house, girl!”

  “Well, for the matter of that,” she snapped, “are you coming in or not?”

  Storm broke. The Right Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw blew in like a gale. Door crashed shut behind him. Lightning crackled in his voice: “Repent! Down on your knees, young woman.”

  She remained standing, lumpen, stolid.

  “On your knees! Or you’ll burn in hell!”

  “You’ve sent me to hell a thousand times. How often do you think I can go there? I’ll only die once.”

  “Angela!” Her father’s voice rose high, shrilling along with a tormented and lamenting guitar from her radio. “Put your faith in the mercy of God! He can save you from sin and death!”

  “Oh, I see. You send me to hell, and God is supposed to save me. What does that make you?”

  She had never spoken to him this way, so hard-faced, so coldly furious, and she saw it stagger him. He softened his voice. “Daughter,” he said, “daughter.” She should have felt touched, for he was giving in to her somewhat, and he never gave in so much as an inch, not to Mammon or the devil or anyone. But she did not in fact feel touched. She felt angrier. Why had he not spoken to her so gently years ago, and years since, when she wanted it?

  “Daughter,” he said softly, kindly, “you are possessed, in need of healing. Let us pray together. Let me lay my hands on you and ask God to take the devil away from you.”

  She shook her head vehemently and stepped back. He stared at her a moment, then took six long-legged strides to her kitchen, picked up her baby-wailing radio, hurled it to the floor and smashed it like a cricket under one heavy black heel, silencing its tinny voice.

  “You are a vandal,” Angie told him. “You have destroyed my personal property. I should call the police.” She had heard people described enraged people as “beside themselves” but had not understood the accuracy of the expression until now. Hearing herself with amazement, she felt sure the real Angie was cowering upstairs somewhere, listening through the floorboards and weeping with terror.

  “Daughter, I have done it to save you.” Listen to the man. He was pleading with her. Pleading! Her father! “Please. You must open your ears, you must hear me. Satan is a seducer, and so is his music. It smiles, it is provocative, suggestive, it beckons with honeyed words and a jungle beat. It stuns the mind and numbs the nervous system and leaves the body weak and exhausted, susceptible to the demons of obscene desire. It promises happiness and fun and joy, but it delivers only a ticket to hellfire. The only true joy is in the Lord. Angela, please. Read your Bible and pray. No more rock music.”

  It was, after all, more a sermonette than a plea. And Angela knew just how to respond, how she had always wanted to respond to such a homily. She shrugged, as if she had been practicing it for years she managed the cool, sexy shrug of a sophisticated woman, and she bared her teeth at him, giving him the smile she and her schoolmates used to give their teachers, the one that, giggling among themselves, they had called a “snake grin.” She said, “On the other hand, I should thank you for breaking that so-called radio. I’ve been wanting to get myself a better one.”

  For a moment she thought he would strike her. She winced, though he had never struck her, and by the backwards logic of her family it would have been a victory for her if he had. It would have given her a weapon of guilt to use against him. But he did not strike. Instead, with windmilling gestures he slammed out.

  The thunderclap of the door woke the boys, and Angie was glad. She kissed them and promised them a treat. Leaving plastic shards and metal parts scattered on the kitchen floor, she took her sons outside and put them in the heavy old Mercury Messenger wagon that used to be Ennis’s. Along the cracked sidewalks she pulled them all the way to the McCrory’s store, where she used her grocery money to buy them candy bars and herself an AM-FM cord-or-battery boogie box, two feet long and electric pink.

  Afterward, days later when tears finally came, she wondered what had brought her father to the house that day and to the front door. She never found out. By then, things had gone too far for such questions. Much too far for turning back.

  But for that first day of her rebellion she had no questions, no doubts, and she felt sublimely calm and quite happy. Once home, knowing she was late starting supper, she delayed the meal yet more by unpackaging her purchase, setting it up and turning it on and glorying in the volume and clarity of its tone. While she cooked she listened for the new song, the one her father had interrupted, the one she wanted to hear again and again. Ennis came home early and found her still waiting for it, so engrossed in her listening that she did not meet him at the door for her kiss. He scooped up Gabe and Mikey instead and stood looking at her.

  “Mommy bought a radio!” Gabe informed him in heightened tones. The boys had capered around the radio for hours, delighted by the novelty of having music in the house.

  “Yes, I see,” Ennis said to the boys, and then to his wife, “Your father called me at work.”

  “My father can go to that place he’s so fond of mentioning.”

  “Ange, don’t talk like that.” He set the boys down. “It’s not like you.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know there’s something wrong.”

  There was no thundering in Ennis, no radio smashing. He did not even attempt to turn the instrument of Satan off. In due time he ate his supper, had his shower, and helped put the boys to bed, and all the while t
he radio played its siren song, and from time to time Ennis said, “Angie?” Just her name, in a voice so floundering and perplexed and worried that she felt as if she had not two children but three, and the big one was pulling with sticky hands at her skirt. It was hard for her to conquer her irritation enough to hug him.

  “Stop fussing, Ennis!”

  “I ain’t fussing at you.”

  That was the truth. There was no anger in him for her, only heavy foreboding, a sense of trouble building. There would be comeuppance. Playing the radio was capital-letter Wrong.

  “What are you doing it for, Ange?”

  She felt unable to explain in any way he could ever understand. Confound Ennis, he was all patience and obedience. Was there a self-willed bone in his whole bashful body? His goodness made her furious. She pushed him away with her fists and screamed at him, “I hate it all! Let me out of here! Out of this slavehouse!”

  If she had showed him the slavehouse song, she thought later, if she had gone to her linen closet and gotten out her small-folded pieces of paper and let him read them, maybe he would have felt, if not her yearnings, at least her desperation:

  LET ME OUT

  I am a hidden flower

  LET ME OUT

  I am a shrouded prisoner

  Come sweet devil open my petals

  Come bee-sting angel probe this blossom

  Break open this seraglio

  Tear down the walls of this holy jail

  Let me out

  LET ME OUT

  Let me out of this sacred slavehouse.

  But she did not think to do that. And when at his usual time Ennis went to bed, she pulled the hairpins from her bun but stayed up, listening to her radio.

  Her song, the one with the singer who made her shiver, came on around midnight, the witching hour. This time, with her new radio turned up in the still of the night, she heard the words:

  This angel’s full of the devil.

  This angel ain’t no dead person daddy

  This angel is alive

  Alive and looking for lovin’

  I WANT TO LIVE