Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  “Texas. Tell Brett I said give you money for food and stuff, okay?”

  Texas nodded. “Tell Brett I said give you money” was in essence the fiscal arrangement between him and Volos, and he took a rebellious pleasure in being satisfied with it. So who cared about fringe benefits and pension plans and Getting Ahead. It did bother him, though, that the arrangement was much the same for Mercedes.

  “We’re going to have to keep more food in the house with these weanlings around,” Volos added.

  “Birdman make me go up!” commanded Gabriel. Volos swung the kid into a sort of lift and held him there kicking and giggling.

  “Now Mikey.” Volos lowered Gabe and lifted his younger brother, who screamed. “Mikey?” Volos asked anxiously.

  “He’s okay,” Texas said. “They like to screech.”

  Angie padded in, barefoot, still dewy from the shower, wearing her jeans and a shirt Texas had loaned her. Oversized, it made her look narrow-shouldered and frail. Her face rose like a flower from its wide neck. Volos’s face changed when he saw her, Texas noticed with a squeezing feeling in his heart. He saw the red blush start to spread through the angel’s sunrise-colored wings. Volos sent the boys trotting to their mother and sat up amid a difficult readjustment of those appendages to look at her.

  “Have you eaten, Angela?”

  She nodded without thanks. Maybe knowing that Volos was not hinting for thanks. One thing about Volos, Texas reminded himself: The kid might not think of things he ought to say or do, but when he did come through for a person, he did not expect any show of gratitude. Maybe Angie understood that.

  Or maybe she just plain did not like him. She was being careful not to look at him. Not to give him anything of herself, not even a smile.

  “Angela.” Volos tried again. “Can you sew?”

  “Yes, of course.” The surprise in her voice told Texas she had been raised country-style, in a home where every woman had to cook and sew or be called a slut.

  “Would you like to be my wardrobe department?”

  She looked at him then, made a show of scanning his half-naked body, and said with just a hint of a smile, “What wardrobe?”

  Texas laughed, but Volos missed her joke. “Mercy says I need one,” he told her earnestly. “He says for the big stage on tour I will need something more than jeans. Bright colors. Ornaments.”

  Texas, grinning, teased him, “What are you gonna do about the band?”

  “Oh, I give it up.” This time Volos recognized levity and shot Texas a sour look. “You can costume the band, Texas. Go out and buy them each a hat.”

  “I will. I’m gonna do just that.”

  “We’ll be cowboys. I can get chaps with long fringe and silver studding. Mercy wants me to wear things that glitter.”

  Angie was watching him seriously. “Please not rhinestones and sequins,” she said in her abrupt, level way. “They would cheapen you.”

  Texas felt his heart aching with adoration for her. Already she knew, she understood everything, she looked at Volos with eyes that saw truly. She would never love him, Texas, except as a fatherly sort of old fool, and Texas understood that and accepted it immediately. But how could he not love her when she looked at his angel with honest eyes?

  He said to Volos, “She’s right, kid. Don’t let your precious Mercy push you too far. Remember what Elvis started to look like before the end?”

  Volos grimaced at him. “But I do need new clothes,” he complained.

  “I been telling you that for weeks.”

  “Now I really do. I must meet the record company people. Brett says I must wear something on my torso. Show respect.”

  “Shirt and tie?” Texas teased.

  “In the devil’s name, how?”

  “When is this?” Angie asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Christ, Volos!” Texas exploded. “I keep telling you, don’t leave things till the last minute!” The kid had little sense of time or of the limits it put on people who actually had to eat and sleep.

  Angie said merely, “One of you had better take me shopping.”

  Volos took her, in the old Corvair convertible with its custom paint job, black with red flames running back from the hood to the rear wheel wells. Brett had been the one who had convinced Volos he couldn’t afford anything fancier yet. But he had installed the best stereo system on the market. And kept installing it, because it had been stolen out of the car three times so far.

  Texas held Gabe and Mikey up to the window so they could watch, so they could see Volos driving with his wings lifted to clear the back of his seat, stretched six feet above his head. Texas hoped Angie would not be frightened. He knew Volos drove the freeways like a plummeting hawk, knew that surrounding cars would veer as the drivers saw him, knew that one way or another the shopping itself would turn into a circus as well. Hoped Volos would make Angie buy clothing for herself and the little boys. Texas would far rather have chauffeured the young woman himself, but weighing the problems of sending her off with Volos against the dangers of leaving Volos to baby-sit the little ones, he saw no choice. Volos would want to play but would be likely to forget that children needed to eat or sleep or breathe.

  “Uncle Texas?” It was the older one, Gabriel.

  “What is it, big guy?”

  “I dood in my pants.”

  Therefore Texas had laundry to do, after which he fed the boys cheese sandwiches and applesauce for lunch and introduced them to the joys of TV until they fell asleep. While they napped, he lay down himself, tilted his hat over his face, and dozed, dreaming that he was young again, about twenty-one. Something made him dream of Wyoma and his daughters, so that in his sleep he was a cowboy coming home from a long day of riding to the ranch house where standing at the door Wyoma smiled at him, and the babies, three or four of them, boys now as well as girls, climbed his long work-jeaned legs as if he were the deep-rooted great tree of life.

  Angie’s quick solution to Volos’s upper-body-nudity problem was a black vest from the leather shop. That evening after the boys were in bed she reworked the back, cutting it away so that it would fit under Volos’s wings, all the while trying to decide how she felt about him. Angry at him, yes, still a little. At one point she had made up her mind to be his efficient and respectful employee, nothing more. It was a stance she thought she could manage, but she had not been able to do so even for a day. Without meaning to (she felt fairly certain of that), he kept her constantly off balance. His hawk-swoop driving thrilled and terrified her, his generosity touched her—he had bought her things, all sorts of things, sundresses, sandals, a jeans jacket. And he had bought rompers and sneakers and Zoom Cars for the boys. But just as she had decided to like him, some sort of thoughtless arrogance, perhaps the snap of his fingers as he summoned a salesperson, would make her detest him all over again.

  Back at the house, he had gotten down on the floor with the boys and played for hours, running the radio-controlled cars. Already Gabe and Mikey regarded him as a huge feathered pet and adored him. Down on all fours, he would let the boys ride him like a Pegasus.

  “Bless the beasts and children,” Texas had remarked, passing through.

  Mixed feelings had made it a long day.

  Working on Volos’s vest, Angie sewed at a portable Sears free-arm machine (bought that afternoon) set up on the table in the erstwhile dining room, now her workroom. (It had probably not been used for dining since Volos had leased the house.) In the next room, the living-room-cum-studio, Volos and his band were rehearsing. Angie listened (the amps were turned up halfway to insanity, so how could she not listen?) as they swung into Ennis’s song. She clenched her teeth, rigid with anger. The nerve! But then she felt herself melt. What Volos had done with the stolen song was beautiful enough to soften anyone.

  As rehearsal broke up she mentally checked herself: niceness in place, like a prayer bonnet? Temper smoothed down, like mussed hair? Inhibitions, a drab skirt, hanging straight, long enough to cov
er everything? This done, she called Volos into her new domain for a fitting. Businesslike, she had him stand facing away from her. “Wings up,” she directed. “Hands back.” She guided them into the armholes, slipped the reshaped vest up his arms, and as she placed it on his shoulders her left wrist brushed the primaries near the base of one wing.

  Afterward, she did not think of it as an accident, because sometime it had to happen, that moment of contact in which her life changed.

  Or not changed exactly. Enlarged, amplified, magnified, manifested so that the changes that had gone before, the liberation of jeans and unbound hair, the hegira, the ordeal of L.A. seemed merest tentative first steps by comparison. In that moment when she touched Volos’s wing, Angela was consummately herself, more so than she had ever been in her life, yet also—him, and therefore nearly infinite. Her rage, huge; her rebellion, huge; her lifelust, huge; her striving desire, immense. She felt as never before aware of, and in love with, her own body, with its beauty, its transience, its doom, and its possibilities. She felt terribly vulnerable, yet at the same time very old, as if she had heard God throatily singing in his shower. She felt time bend like a squeezed string, a single note in a lovely, lonely dissonance, beneath a berserk guitarist’s hand.

  The feeling, though not so physical as to be really a shock, staggered her. Volos felt her fingers clutch for support, turned quickly and caught her. She let herself lean for a moment against his leather-vested chest, and he pressed his hands against her shoulder blades, steadying her there.

  “I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. “My idiot wings, I keep forgetting—”

  Interrupting, she said into the alar curve of his collarbone, “I love your wings.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” She straightened, looking up into his eyes, knowing that she had completely forgiven him for being what he was and not what she had thought he should be. Knowing also that she ought to be frightened of him but was not. “I’m all right now,” she told him, and he took his hands away.

  He asked her quietly, “What did you feel?”

  “I felt …” Impossible to describe it all, but what little she said was deeply true. “I want to make the most incredible music.”

  “You do?” Glad. His eyes and wings were the same warm golden brown. “You are still my lyricist, Angela?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. I need you.” His eyes saddened to gray. “I am what you said, a half-done thing. I failed somehow. I sing but I cannot make the songs.”

  She told him gently, “Not everyone writes songs. Or sings, even.” Certainly she herself could not sing.

  “But—are you sure of this?” His astonishment, childlike, made her wonder how she could ever have been angry at him.

  “I’m certain.”

  “But—but how can that be? To be alive is to dance and sing. How can mortals do otherwise? A fire is not a fire unless it burns.”

  She had no answer, but stood looking at him. He did not grow flustered or restless, as most people would have done, but stood waiting with his wings folded over the back of the new vest. He fingered its soft, rich-smelling leather a moment, then looked back at her and smiled. Did he know how the sweetness of his mouth when he smiled could turn a woman to water?

  She said abruptly, “You need to do more songs about love. It is not the same thing as sex.”

  “It is not?”

  “No. All you have done so far is sex and anger.… What have I been thinking of, Volos? I must write you love songs.”

  Sitting in the Millican Records offices, facing a big man behind a big desk, Volos fingered his leather vest and knew he need not have gone to the trouble of covering his torso. He might have been beef naked for all the man scanning him cared. He might as well be a piece of meat that sang.

  “You get that tax business cleared away?” the man was asking Brett, who nodded fervidly, explaining that yes, sir, it was all taken care of, Social Security, passport, all the necessary numbers and documents and laminated cards identifying Volos as Flaim Carson McCardle.

  “About time,” Big Desk grumbled. “Okay, so now you gonna get on with arranging the fucking tour?”

  “You bet. We got some concerts lined up already. Houston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia—”

  “You got a show for those people? They’re gonna come to see the wings, that’s what you gotta give them, something to look at. Smoke, fireworks, fountains, lasers, the works. Lots of sequins on this guy, lots of outfit changes. Flash, glitter, movement, color. If I was you I’d pick a color scheme each set and go with it, wings and all—”

  “It does not work that way,” Volos said.

  “Say what?” The record company exec peered at him. Had not expected him to speak any more than if he had been a Wonder Wombat.

  Volos said, “It does not work that way. I do not control the color of my wings. Most of the time I do not know even what color they are unless I look.”

  “Well, start looking, sonny!”

  “You do not understand.” The nuisance appendages in question were flushing dull red, Volos could tell that by the dark feeling just below his diaphragm. “They change color with my heart. I cannot—”

  “We’ve got it under control, Mr. Millican,” Brett broke in smoothly. “We’ve got a dynamite young artistic director, Mercedes Kell, and on top of that Volos has a style all his own. He’s a born crowd-pleaser. It’ll be a natural.”

  “I was not born,” Volos said.

  The boss man, used to temperamental artists but by no means happy with them, gave him a bored, uncomprehending look. Brett scowled at him. SHUT UP, her glare commanded.

  “It better be under control,” Big Desk complained to her. “I don’t like risks. Best to go for the sure thing. Lights, glitz, color. Another thing, if I was you I’d get rid of that dowdy band. Get some fresh people up there, and give them a catchy name. Black Angel and the Electric Devils, something like that.”

  “No,” Volos said.

  Brett cringed. The mighty man behind the big desk barked at Volos, “What you mean, NO?”

  “I mean no, do not call me an angel. I mean no, I will not change my band. They are good musicians. I will have them wear hats. I will talk with them and we will choose a name.”

  “It better be a fucking good name!” Big Desk, huffy, cut the appointment short.

  “Jesus shit,” Brett swore at Volos afterward. “You imbecile, you could have blown the whole deal. From now on, you shut your mouth and let me handle things. The only time I want you to open it is when you’re singing a song.”

  More than her anger, her incomprehension silenced him. Who had made him a walking lie, he himself or these others? Why could they not know him? But day after day they said to him, How do your wings work? How do you make them change colors the way you do? What are they made of? Don’t you take them off even to sleep?

  They thought he was human.

  Was that not what he wanted? To be human?

  Volos did not let Brett take him home, but walked for miles through his own lonesome valley, cloak thrown back, wanting someone, anyone, to see him truly and tell him who he was.

  Texas had told him he was real—but what did that mean? And Mercedes—he had performed every conceivable homoerotic act with Mercedes, but still he felt hollow. Now there was Angela …

  The thought of her comforted him. But he was a fool to feel that way, for he had wronged her, and now she would never love him. He would not ask it of her. It was enough that she would stay in the house with him, fix his clothes, write his songs. It was more than enough for a half-finished thing like him. More than he deserved.

  chapter nine

  Christmas in California with Volos—Angie knew it would be so different from any other Christmas she had ever experienced that she would have to reinvent it. No churchgoing, no gift-wrapped piety from her father, no martyrdom served up by her mother along with candied yams, no lump-of-coal guilt in her seasonal stocking. She was glad these things we
re gone, but they left a space that had to be filled. What was she to replace them with?

  On Thanksgiving Day, clearing away in the kitchen after the meal, she was thinking somewhat along these lines. While it was true that boxes were easy to dispose of, she did not feel quite soul-satisfied with take-out pizza as a Thanksgiving dinner. She did not want to end up cooking a turkey for Christmas, but she did want—she was not sure what she wanted. She asked Volos, “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  He was at the table crayoning coloring books along with Gabe and Mikey. At first he had colored as clumsily as either of them, but he was getting better—not to win gold stars, but because he loved the bright sticks of wax. “Nothing. I am not a Christian,” he told her without looking up from the page he was working on.

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “I will not do Christmas. I will not celebrate that Jesus was sent to the world to be killed.”

  Wiping red smears off the countertops, she looked at him. He was keeping his voice level because of the children, but she could hear the edge in it and see the darkness flowing into his wings. Quietly she said, “I don’t think that’s what Christmas is really about for most people.”

  “What is it about, then?”

  “I don’t know …” She did of course know the stock answer: it was the season of capital-letter Love. But what did that mean? “God Is Love,” the Sunday School paper hearts proclaimed, and in invisible ink on the flip side was written, “Go to Hell.” Angie was not sure she knew what Love was. Anyway, she was not going to say “Love” to Volos. Even the thought made her face go hot. She said, “It’s just a good time, I guess. Gifts, good things to eat, decorations.”

  “Christmas tree,” put in Gabe, who had not appeared to be listening. “Candy.”

  “Santa!” Mikey shouted. Zapped by his excitement, his hands flew out, scattering crayons. He clambered down from his chair, went to his mother and tugged at her jeans, suddenly anxious. “Santa bring me, Mommy?”