Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  “I believe in classic style, myself,” he cooed. “Ring necks and white breasts are for hens and comelatelies.”

  “As if any of us have a choice.”

  “All the same, I think a bird looks best in basic gray with a narrow band of black on the wingtips. Restrained and elegant, with just a touch of iridescence at the throat.”

  “And pink feet.”

  “Yes, of course, pink feet.”

  “And a white butt.”

  “You don’t like my white butt?”

  “I’ll show you what you can do with your white butt.”

  Then he heard billing and cooing. They were a couple, all right. It was something of a mystery to Volos, how mortal couples could make love sound so much like war. Feeling his own solitude, yet intrigued, he listened until they grew aware that he was still there.

  “That human has not moved,” Banana Beak murmured to her mate. “Drop a juicy one on him.”

  “You drop one on him.”

  Before either of them could do so, he moved on. In and out of shadows he walked, sometimes watching a horned moon swimming in the thin clouds. Smelling the sea in the breeze. Keeping away from the places where the youths ganged, the ones with the hard fists and the salty yells. He did not want to deal with fists or knives. Texas had not yet showed him how to stop leading with his chin.

  Texas.

  The way the moon tugged at the tide his thoughts tugged at him until, around two in the morning, he risked the bad section of downtown and went up the narrow stairs to Texas’s room in the Y, knowing he would wake McCardle out of sleep, knowing this was another wrong thing to do, and unable to help it.

  For some reason, though, Texas was still up, sitting in the dark, fully dressed. He glanced at Volos as he entered, then looked away again, out the window.

  “You are angry at me,” Volos said to him. “That is what this hurtful feeling is in me. Your anger.”

  Texas did not move or speak.

  “I want to at least try to explain. Listen. Are you listening?”

  “Sure.” Tonelessly.

  “It is like this. To do what you ask—to find out about your father—I would have to pray. I would have to become obedient to the one on the Throne again. It would be necessary that I should get down on my knees before that tyrant and take back everything I ever said of him, and beg his forgiveness.”

  “Never mind, then,” said Texas.

  His voice sounded quiet, tired, nothing more. Not angry. Volos took two impulsive steps toward him and knelt on the bare floor almost close enough to touch him. His wings trailed, heart-red.

  “You really do see? It is something that—I just cannot do it. He—He made a serving boy of me. Go do this for this human, go do that for that one. It was the humans he loved. I never want to do anything for a human again.”

  Texas turned his head suddenly to stare. Volos winced and looked down. “I keep forgetting,” he muttered.

  Texas said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me that you must understand. He wounded me. Not really, for I was a bodiless thing, but—when I made myself this body I tried to imagine it with scars on the back. Because that is how I feel. Scarred.”

  “Bullshit, kid.” Texas came out of his torpor suddenly, sat up, and glared. Volos heard anger now, but it was a different anger than before, hot and more hurting and mixed with something worse, some kind of despair. “Nasty choirmasters and hurt feelings just don’t cut it compared to real abuse. I should know.”

  “I—”

  “Shut up and listen. My daddy was a junkie. He must have had to put himself out to get hold of the stuff down where we lived, but he managed it. He was a drunk, too. Hit my mother, bruised her face, and she was the sweetest woman ever to marry a no-good rotten bum. The sonuvabitch left her when I was three, and I never saw him again. Except once.” Texas turned to stare out the dark window again. His voice quieted, but it was not a good quietness. “I was ten years old, and I guess I let it be known to some of my friends what I thought of my father for leaving my mother that way. And it turned out he was living with some floozie in a smackhouse only a couple of towns away. He heard it from somebody, what I was saying about him. So he came to see me. Caught me on the road home from school. And he beat me.”

  “He what?”

  “First he told me to look at him, look at what he was. Told me I ought to consider he had done me and Ma a favor by getting out of our lives. And then he beat me. Broke my arm, my nose, my collarbone, tore one ear half off. He beat me sick. Ma had to come find me and carry me home. I was in bed for a week.”

  Volos felt sick just hearing about it. Watching Texas’ face as Texas told about it made him feel weak and queasy. He had never experienced how a kind man can hide a long shadow. He whispered, “Texas, please stop.”

  “I’m done.”

  “You wanted me to find this—this monster for you? In all hell’s name, why?”

  “So I could do him the way he done me.” Texas faced Volos without a smile. “So I could beat the shit out of him and walk away and leave him laying on the ground, the way he done to me. All right?”

  “No,” Volos said, “not all right. Not for you, Texas.”

  “Why not?”

  “You are—you are good.”

  “And you’re not? Would you for Chrissake get up off the floor?”

  Something dark in Texas’ voice puzzled Volos. He stayed where he was, on one knee. “You are still angry with me.”

  “No. No, I’m not. Honest to God, kid, I’m not. Get up, you asshole.” Texas reached down and tugged at him. His hand was warm, and Volos submitted to its touch, standing up, then sitting on the bed.

  “None of it matters anymore, anyways,” Texas said.

  Then for the first time Volos took a long enough glimpse outside self to realize that his friend’s desperation might have nothing to do with him. He sat rigidly. He whispered, “What has happened?”

  There was a considerable pause before Texas answered.

  “I called Wyoma,” he said at last. He gestured at the letter still lying on his windowsill. “I figured, why send that when I could spare a couple bucks and phone. Took a yen to hear her voice.”

  “She was not there?”

  “Oh, she was there all right.” Texas took a deep breath, or gave a sigh—it was hard to tell which in the darkened room. “But it looks like I’ll have to get your birth certificate from the state, kid.”

  “She would not send it?”

  “She told me to go to hell. Don’t call her again. Don’t write. And don’t bother coming back.”

  Volos found that he could not speak, that there was nothing right to say, that pain tightened his chest and made it hard to talk anyway.

  So this is what it is to feel for someone.

  He wanted to do something, and all that seemed permissible was to lift one hand and lay it on Texas’ shoulder.

  “I’m glad you’re here, kid,” said Texas to the window’s black glass. “I feel like I been walked on.”

  Never mind what was permissible. Volos reached over with both arms and hugged him, this man forty years old, more than halfway to the end of it all. A man in a cowboy hat—which fell off—and the sandy-haired head lay against Volos’s collarbone, the sagging shoulders accepted his embrace, and the work-dried hands reached around him and under his wings to their warm, downy axillae, finding comfort.

  chapter seven

  Angie became obsessed with this secret soulmate, this singer of the songs she had written and hidden, this Volos. It was not enough for her to listen to her radio through the October days in case the deejays might have something to say about him. She ventured to the drugstore and bought the shockingly secular magazines, full of bright, slick photographs and exclamation points, that interviewed him and showed his picture above boldface captions: “Strange Rock Angel!” and “Oh, Sexy Volos!”

  INTERVIEWER: You wear wings. Many people say this is to show that you a
re a rock god, a divine being. Are they right?

  VOLOS: Quite the contrary. I am a carnal being. If the wings show anything, it must be that I am flesh, I am half animal. A bird is an animal, is it not?

  INTERVIEWER: I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it makes sense. You know what the historians are saying, that never before has anyone sung with such presence, such physicality.

  VOLOS: They might as well go ahead and say it, that I am horny as a meadowlark. Has no one noticed how it is with birds?

  The magazines could be concealed, but Angie made no attempt to do so. She bought them openly and read them openly, and she did more: Taking the children with her, she caught a shuttle bus to that modern-day Babylon, the shopping mall, where for the first time in her life she deliberately watched a television screen, on which was playing again and again a videotape of Volos singing his profane hit song, his bare shoulders working as he fingered the guitar slung at his hips.

  That was the autumn of Volos, not only for her but for young people everywhere that rock and roll played. Taking her children out to walk in the warm Indian summer days that came like a drollery before the bitter Pennsylvania winter, she would hear his music in the smoke-blue air, winging to her through the flame-colored falling leaves. But she did not know the people who played his music in their sports cars and in their apartments with the windows open. There was no one she could tell about a strange thing that was often in her mind: that once, before she had known he existed, she had seen Volos in a vivid dream. He had stood on a rooftop and looked straight at her. His back had been scarred. He had no wings.

  Those days she sighed often and wore certain pages of her magazines soft with looking at them. Even in a conventional family her behavior might have been considered eccentric, compulsive, cause for concern, but in her family and her church it was far more: It was perversion and blasphemy and devil-possession and sin. It was shocking, offensive, as frightening as if she had defected to Cuba.

  The Sunday after he had smashed her radio, Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw preached his hour-long sermon on the evils of “ROCK and ROLL music! Even the name refers to a lewd physical act, brothers and sisters, and is derived from the oversexed barbarianism of the honky-tonks. This SO-CALLED music knows no language but the vocabulary of FILTH. It glorifies the lowest instinct of the BODY. Its gods are named OBSCENITY and VULGARITY and always have been. From the very first, ROCK MUSIC has promoted JUVENILE DELINQUENCY and sown the seeds of ATHEISM in America’s youth.” Afterward, he called on his daughter to make public confession of her wickedness before the congregation. Angela kept sullen silence, refusing. When he exhorted her to repent, she turned her back on him.

  That night in the marriage bed Ennis did not immediately lapse into a laborer’s exhausted sleep, as he would usually have done, but reached for her angry body and hugged it. He did not try to make love to her, but held her against his chest for close to an hour, until finally she relaxed and felt warm for the first time in days. “Ange,” he kept whispering to her. “Ange, hon.” Calling her back as if she had already left him.

  “What?” she asked when she felt able to keep her voice as gentle as he was. Yes, all right, he clutched at her like a child. But she loved her children.

  “What’s happening to you, honey?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not hurting anyone.”

  “You’re—hurting yourself.” He spoke with difficulty, and she began to feel loved, for he did not usually talk about such things; she had to be important to him, to make him talk this way. “You’re—putting yourself in danger.”

  “Music makes me happy. What can be wrong with that?”

  “If it—kills your soul.…”

  “I don’t feel dead inside. I did before, but not anymore. Stop worrying about me, Ennis. I’m not worried about myself.”

  “Worry about—the kids.…”

  “Music makes them happy, too.” It did. They liked what they heard on her radio. Sometimes the beat made them prance like a pair of young goats.

  “It’s bad for them. Ange, what are you trying to do?”

  The question was half protest but also a real request for an explanation. And she wanted him to understand. But she herself understood only a little of what was happening to her.

  She said, “Did you ever think maybe my father is wrong? Maybe there’s nothing so bad about rock music?”

  “But he’s the pastor, Ange!” In Ennis’s lexicon there were no words for disagreement with the minister of God.

  She said nothing more, because already she had tacitly lied to him. She did not really believe that rock music was anything other than bad, wicked, depraved. Its very depravity made it her salvation. Its badness was what made her feel alive when she played it.

  “Ange,” Ennis said, “please stop.”

  Silence.

  “For me. Please. Just stop. Go back to being the way you were.”

  He loved her, she knew now that he loved her, and he was asking her in the name of love to do something for him, and if she loved him she would do it, she would make the sacrifice. That was what women were for. It was beautiful, what women could do, what women could give and what they could give up. Love’s name was womanhood.

  He loved her. He loved—the obedient woman, meek in bonnet and bun …

  She thrust her hands against his chest and tore herself out of his arms, flinging herself out of the bed, into the cold. “I’m not Christ,” she told him in a shaking voice. “I’m not going to crucify myself for you.” She left the room, going barefoot to the kitchen to listen to her radio.

  All that week her husband pleaded with her, until to her ear his importunities colored themselves the same murky purple as her father’s fulminations. Sunday morning she told Ennis she was not going to church. “You have to,” he said. He believed this so devoutly and so literally that he shouted at her. But she had made up her mind: Short of physically forcing her he was not going to get her there. They quarreled until it was time to leave, when he gave her a long, wretched look before he took Michael and Gabriel and went without her.

  Oddly, while they were gone and she had the house to herself she listened not to the Weekly Top Forty but to a radio evangelist. Her entire body ached, as if she had been beaten.

  Home for Sunday dinner, the children came in the door waving construction-paper “Jesus Loves You” sunbursts in their pawlike hands. Running up to her, little Gabe sang, “Mommy, you’re shunned! Grandpap said so!”

  She looked at Ennis, who would not meet her eyes.

  With great, cheerful confidence, Gabe continued, “Me’n Mikey don’t got to do it, because we ain’t saved yet. But everybody that’s saved got to shun you till you repent.”

  “I see.” She hugged him and little Michael, and admired their Sunday School projects, then straightened and spoke directly to Ennis. “It’s roast chicken for dinner. Which would you rather have with it, wild rice or Betty Crocker potatoes?”

  He did not look at her or answer her.

  “Ennis,” she said, bleated rather, much as he had been bleating “Ange” at her all week. He looked at her then, a quick, heartsick glance, before he turned away and went upstairs to take off his tie.

  She gave him noodles and butter with dinner because she knew he did not like them. He ate them without a word. That afternoon she listened to rock music and looked at the pictures of Volos in her magazines, feeling more guilt and defiance than pleasure this time, for she knew her love of this stranger’s face and body were what the Bible called lusting in her soul. This was a form of infidelity to Ennis. And she hoped he noticed it, she hoped it scorched his heart, because she considered that what he was doing was a form of infidelity to her.

  She could tell he was miserable by the way he blundered through the day. Still, he obeyed his church and its strictures regarding this punishment called shunning. He did not say a word to her. If he had to, he was allowed to write notes to her concerning matters of household business, but as far as poss
ible he was to ignore her. She had been declared an unclean person, and as such she did not exist except as a shadow in his home and life. He was not to kiss her or speak to her. He was not even to look at her as he passed by. And above all he was not to have sexual converse with her. According to the rules he could have made her sleep on the floor like a dog, but that night when she came to bed he got out the other side and went to sleep on the sofa, leaving the wide marriage nest to her.

  In the morning her father phoned her. Without a greeting, “Repent,” he commanded her, the one word. She hung up.

  Walking along the leaf-strewn street with the children in their wagon that week, down to the corner grocery for a gallon of milk, over to the drugstore for her magazines, she greeted lifelong friends and watched them turn their backs on her in a way that was hard to read: discomfort or disapproval? Gabe and Mikey’s Sunday School teacher chatted with the children but snubbed their mother. A thrift shop clerk offered her no service, pretending not to see her standing at the counter.

  “Lady shunned Mommy,” Mikey declaimed. To the children shunning was constant fun, a game grownups played, even more different and exciting than rock music. Life had been full of surprises since Mommy had started listening to the devil’s music.

  Not everyone in Jenkins belonged to the Church of the Holy Virgin, not by any means, but those who were not members knew those who were. Depending on their alliances or whom they wished not to offend, their intermarriages or their dislike of Reverend Crawshaw, they either avoided Angie or made a point of greeting her with extra warmth. Some actually stopped her on the street and offered their support. This did not comfort her. It was Ennis’s support she wanted.

  “Did you marry my father or me?” she asked him one night as he sat in the living room after the kids were in bed.

  Silence.

  “I know you’re trying to please God. But does God cook your supper for you? Does God wash your shirts?”

  He stared past her. She could see the pain in his eyes and did not care. There was too much pain everywhere.

  “They tell you God loves you. Well, he better. Get him to keep you warm at night next winter, why don’t you.”