Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  “Welcome to the human race, son,” Texas said.

  chapter eighteen

  After he got Volos settled down to sleep again, after sitting with the kid awhile to be sure he was resting quietly, Texas left the hospital and headed toward Jenkins. He drove his old Chevy pickup hard, thinking of what he wanted to do, which was to find the Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw and acquaint the man with intense pain. Being a cop—or rather, an ex-cop, for his attempts to get his old job back had failed—being a man who had seen a few things, Texas had long since concluded that in some cases swift justice had to supersede the slow workings of the law. And he was likely never to believe this more strongly than he did for Volos’s sake.

  The people of his West Virginia hills had a name for such swift justice: blood right, meaning among other things that vengeance belonged to kin. But Volos was a lonely stranger in the world, with no hometown, no family, and no better friend than Texas knew himself to be, even though as a friend he had screwed up pretty bad. Time to make up for that now. In Volos’s case Texas figured the blood right was his.

  That young fellow Ennis had wanted to help. Or maybe he had wanted to come back to Jenkins for reasons of his own, to face things that scared him. The guy had good instincts if that was the case. But there was Angie to be thought of, and for her sake Texas had made Ennis see the sense of laying low for the time being. Ennis had agreed to stay with his wife and kids.

  Hands curled tight around the knobby old steering wheel, Texas sighed. It sure looked to him as if Ennis and Angie were getting back together. They had a lot of rough spots to smooth out, of course, but if they loved each other they’d do it, just like he and Wyoma were determined to do it. And it was a damn good thing for the Bradleys, he could see that in the way Gabe and Mikey hung on to their daddy and the way Angie looked at him. Good for all of them, but it was going to be goddamn hard on Volos. After what the kid had been through already, which was demonstrably enough to make a grown man cry.

  Jenkins ahead.

  It was a miserable place, Texas decided as he drove in and looked around. He guessed a lot of people would have said the same about good ol’ Persimmon, West Virginia, with its sagging porches and scraggly lawns, but at least Persimmon had life. Marigolds in white-painted tire planters. Coon hounds doing ballet stands by fire hydrants. Men loafing, teenagers in patched-together Mustangs scattering gravel, bare-ass kids running around, women yelling at all of them. But this place, with its prim concrete porches, its shuttered windows, it looked like nothing was allowed to really live there. It seemed all buttoned up like a preacher’s fly.

  Angie had given him the address, and Jenkins was a small enough place so that he found the house without much trouble. He parked in front. A sort of a washed-out skinny woman answered the door. Yes, she was Mrs. Crawshaw. No, her husband wasn’t home. She didn’t seem to care who Texas was. Answered his questions with no more expression on her than a fish.

  “When d’you think he’s gonna get back?”

  “Never.”

  Make that a baked fish, gutted and laid out on a plate. Texas recognized those dead eyes now, that flattened face. This woman had been through too much. Something had made her cold-out crazy.

  He gentled his voice, tried approaching from a different angle. “Where d’you suppose he is right now?”

  The question appeared to cause the woman some sort of difficulty. Disorientation, even. Her head wobbled for a moment, and then she started in a squeaky, unaccustomed way to laugh. “What do you want with him?” she asked Texas.

  He saw no reason to lie to her. There is a basic honesty due to people who are drowning. Also, there was no telling how she would react to anything. Whatever he said to her, she could go either way. Quietly he laid it on the line: “I want to beat the tar out of him.”

  She did not so much as blink, but remarked, “Oh, is that what made him go up like that? Tar?”

  One of the things being a cop had taught Texas was when to listen. Standing there on her clean-swept concrete doorstep, he just looked at her, and she kept talking.

  “Well, I guess it might have been tar. Nice and black. But does tar go up in smoke if you make it hot enough?”

  Cautiously Texas said, “It might.”

  “Well, that must have been it, then. Because they tell me when Ennis knocked him into the fire he turned all black first, and then he was like a tar cloud, and then he was gone. All black, and gone. And stunk horrible, they said.”

  Texas made an involuntary noise as comprehension knocked the breath out of him. This was evidently encouragement enough to keep Mrs. Crawshaw going.

  “Nothing left,” she confided. “No body. No way to have a funeral. See?” She began to titter again, squeaking rhythmically and horribly, like a harrowed mouse. “No body, no funeral. Nothing to bury. See?”

  Texas saw well enough, but could not believe. “Excuse me,” he begged, backing down her front steps, stumbling, nearly braining himself before he made his escape.

  Once in his truck and on the move he realized where he was going, where he had been heading all the time. The Christian makes pilgrimage to a hill outside Jerusalem, the Jew to Auschwitz, and some people weep over a grave in Graceland. The cop visits the scene of the crime. In this case there was not much difference between the Christian, the Jew, the cop, the weeper—they were all Texas. He had to go see for himself, and he had respects to pay.

  Driving up the mountain road, he felt chilled, as if facing something bigger than he could handle. It seemed odd to him, arriving, that there was no granite marker, no marble statue, no shrine to mark the site of an atrocity, the place where an angel had died.

  But it was perhaps the place where a devil had died as well.

  The park looked smaller than he had expected, and sleepy in the late-summer sunshine, yet warmly alive with grasshoppers and butterflies. Birds flew overhead, goldfinches, meadowlarks. Texas stared for a while, then got out of his car as if moving underwater. It was all wrong. Sky should have gone black. Earth should be screaming.

  The ashes of the bonfire still lay in a sizable gray-black pile. Standing by it, Texas saw no sign that anyone had tried to clean anything up. Nobody felt any need, probably, because Jenkins looked like one of those places where nobody in their right mind was going to tell anything to cops or outsiders. And for once Texas was willing to go along with that kind of small-town cover-up. Glad the doctors at the hospital were keeping very quiet about the strange bone stubs they had removed from Volos’s back. Grateful for any kind of tacit conspiracy that would make things easier on the kid, keep him out of court, help the smoke blow over more quickly, and let him get on with life.

  Some kind of life. God knew what.

  Nope, nobody had messed with the evidence. Because if they had, they would have removed the charred bone segments the fire had left behind, and there some were, right on top—

  Texas looked again, and swallowed hard, and folded to his knees at the edge of the black circle. They were not Crawshaw’s bones, as he had at first thought. No way had that sonuvabitch ever possessed these two long, frail-looking, gently articulated limbs. Texas knew himself to be looking at relics, holy remains, at all that was left of Volos’s wings.

  Somewhere back in the dense, heavy, dark-green trees that pressed around the clearing, birds and bugs were singing as if nothing had happened.

  After a while Texas got up, pushed his way to his pickup through air that seemed far too thick for him, and opened the door. He had a suitcase stuck behind the seats, untouched. When he had heard about Volos he would have been on his way to the kid in half a minute, without even a toothbrush, except that Wyoma had made him throw a few things into this thing she called an overnight bag and take it along. Trying to take care of him. He was starting to understand her better, to know how much she really loved him, though sometimes she had strange ways of showing it.

  The suitcase was going to come in handy now, anyway. Texas pulled it out, dumped its conte
nts where it had been and carried it to the dead fire. Carefully, with hands that shook as if he were starving, he placed the pieces of wing bone into its padded bed. Closed it. Set it on the passenger seat, where it would ride like an old friend and he could keep an eye on it.

  After a few minutes he came back and started sifting through the ashes with his fingers. Methodically he searched through everything the fire had left behind, spreading its circle three feet wider than it had been before, making a mess of himself. The grime left by that fire seemed to crawl into his clothing and the creases of his skin, making its way everywhere, like sin. But he found nothing more, not even a button from an evil old man’s black suit coat.

  Damn, the fucker must be still alive somewhere. It was not possible that Crawshaw had burned to nothing at all.

  Yet there had been something about the way his wife had laughed.… And there was so much that seemed not possible about Volos, about all the events that surrounded him, that it wasn’t a big problem to believe a few things more. Just suppose the kid had more by way of kin than Texas had thought? A father, for instance, who could make a man go up in a puff of black smoke, with nothing left? Who could annihilate him?

  Maybe the blood right had not been Texas’ after all.

  He got up, wandered into the sweet-smelling, sun-warmed grass and cleaned himself on it as best he could. With slow steps he walked the short distance to the stubs of telephone pole, the monuments that had been making the back of his neck shiver since he had seen them.

  He went over there although he was not sure what he wanted or expected to find near them. Maybe he just needed to face—

  Blood.

  There, in a dark and random pattern on the ground. Texas knew it was blood. He had seen a victim’s mark often enough to know it when he saw it. Knew how innocence left as much of a stain as sin did, soaking into the ground. Wildflowers would grow thickest in that place next year.

  He stared. Circled around. Kneeled to touch for no reason. Got up, sighed, and turned to go away, to keep muddling along, trying to hold things together, aware that it was just a year to the day since he had first met Volos, aware that every year of his life he survived the unknown anniversary of his own death—

  Like the breath of God, a warm breeze moved. Deep in the tall grass it stirred something that made a flutter of white, like a butterfly maybe, but too large.

  It was probably just a piece of trash. But Texas stooped over, and parted the grass, and looked. And saw. Once he had found it he understood why he had come, what he had been looking for, and he felt his eyes sting as if from a black night’s bonfire smoke, but all the heaviness seemed gone from the air.

  Something had escaped that night, that fire. There at his dirty feet in their old roach stompers, there on the bloodied ground, shining white, lay a single perfect feather from an angel’s wing.

  Outside the hospital, news ghouls and Burning Earth groupies camped on the lawns or prowled around the building, looking for a way past Security. From atop a brightly marked TV van, men took footage of the exterior of the building. Several girls in unauthorized Volos T-shirts, immodest garments with rainbow satin cherub wings sewn into the shoulder seams, had gathered on the front sidewalk and were crying as if at a concert, screaming whenever they saw movement at a window, a shadow that might be their idol.

  The hospital security staff guarded the place with efficiency verging on paranoia. Apparently some doctor had impressed them with the seriousness of the threat on Volos’s life. Red had to show three forms of I.D., wave a magazine with his picture on the cover, and do some impassioned talking before they would let him in. Even then, a nurse’s aide stood at the doorway of Volos’s room and kept an eye on him while he visited.

  It was not a visit he really wanted to make. At first he just stood at the foot of Volos’s hospital bed, not knowing what to say to him. The star was sitting up against pillows, looking out his third-story window at blackbirds flying past. Not watching TV or listening to music or anything. Just sitting. Not even noticing Red was there.

  “Yo, dude,” Red tried.

  “Hey, man!” Turning, Volos smiled, and Red had to swallow hard, seeing the brutal bruise on his face, seeing his haunted eyes. Volos, the hotshot, the superstar—Volos looked pale and fragile and flattened.

  They talked awhile, awkwardly. Shop, mostly. Chitchat. Volos was so obviously and wholeheartedly glad to see him that Red found it very hard to say what he had come for.

  “Things will work out, I think,” Volos was telling him. “My doctors are sensible. My surgeon in particular, she is a woman, she does not want other doctors at other places to say she is crazy. So she will keep her mouth shut, she has told me so already. And Texas says that in the news I will pass over quickly, I am just a publicity stunt, a hoax.”

  Red blurted, “The assholes. Why can’t people understand you’re for real?”

  Volos’s smile softened. “Once I would have wanted that,” he said.

  “Goddamn it.” Impulsively Red moved nearer, touching a hand that had once belonged to an angel. “I know, I’m so shit-for-brains dense, I could never get it. Just like the rest of them. But I finally got it through my head, and then they go and do what they did—it makes me so goddamn mad.”

  Sad, really. Heartsick. And wishing he had the guts to say that, and knowing he never would. Hoping Volos understood.

  Maybe Volos did. “It is all right,” Volos told him.

  “It’s not all right. It sucks.”

  “Okay, it was hell. But I will be all right someday. It has made me real in a different way, Red. I cry now.”

  For a moment Red felt like doing likewise. He could not speak. Finally he managed to say, “Cripes, Volos. You call that an improvement?”

  “You do not see? I get thirsty now, and drink Coca Cola. I get hungry, and eat.”

  Red was starting to get the picture, though not sure he liked it. “Huh,” he complained. “Too goddamn bad you had to start with hospital food.”

  “This is what everyone tells me, yes. But Texas brings me Kentucky Fried Chicken. And soon I will be out of here. Red, there is this, too—I will be able to wear shirts. With slogans and brand names and things. I want to get myself a black leather jacket with gold chains.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Red said.

  “But why?”

  “I want to give you something. Volos, you can say what you like, you’re never going to be just another shithead human. You are the most special goddamn dude I’ve ever met in my whole fucking life.”

  There, he’d spilled his guts, and now probably Volos thought he was queer. Hot-faced, Red turned to go. Said, finally, what he had come for.

  “I’ll get it to you somehow,” he told Volos. “But I dunno when I’ll see you again. Me’n the band, we’re all running low on cash. Got just about enough to head back to L.A. and line up a few gigs, maybe hook up with somebody else until you get your strength back and decide what you want to do.”

  “Wait.” Volos looked bewildered. “You don’t have to go away. If you need money—”

  “No, man.” Goddamn it, nobody had told him. Just what Red was afraid of. “I know you’d give it to us, but you don’t have any left. Mercedes and Brett took your wad and split. They’re probably out of the country by now, bitching at the servants in some villa somewhere.”

  Volos stared, blinked, then looked out the window again. “Red,” he said after a while, “you are right. I must not be all the way human. For crying out loud, I cannot understand why Mercy has done these things to me.”

  “But that’s part of it too,” Red told him. “Not understanding things.”

  “Then I am very exceedingly human, yes? Because I scarcely understand anything.”

  When the phone rang, Angie was the handy one to pick it up. It was Texas, reporting in, as he did every night. “I’ll get Wyoma,” she told him.

  “Just let me quick fill you in on your father. There’s still no sign of him. No body ha
s been found. No John Does in any of the morgues. I checked with the state police and the FBI and all the hospitals in five counties, and nobody knows anything. The sonuvabitch has disappeared.”

  “If my mother says he is dead, then it is probably true.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want him showing up someday when he’s not expected. And I hope this whole thing will just lay still the way it is right now. I don’t want Volos to suffer no more on account of it. Don’t want Ennis mixed up in it either.”

  Ennis was upstairs reading The Cat in the Hat to Mikey and Gabe. Before, such a dangerously imaginative picture book would have been on the long list of things forbidden. Now it seemed that the only thing forbidden was bitterness about the past. Angie could tell that Ennis felt very much lost in his new life, but hour by hour, piece by piece, in that patient, carpentering way of his he was putting it together for himself and her. Those days Angela saw Ennis as she had only dreamed of him before.

  She asked Texas, “How is Volos?”

  “A lot stronger. Eating pretty good.” Texas hesitated, then added, “You should come see him, Angie. You and Ennis.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, meaning it. She knew this was something they had to face soon.

  She handed the phone over to Wyoma and drifted upstairs, knowing there was one more thing she had to do for Volos before she told him good-bye, but not sure whether she dared.

  Yet there was no choice but to dare. She owed him some daring.

  “Ennis,” she said softly at the bedroom doorway.

  He had Mikey settled in a borrowed crib, sound asleep, and was rocking Gabe. Over the child’s nestling head he glanced up at Angela with a lover’s wide eyes.

  “I’m going for a walk back in the woods,” she told him.

  It was nightfall, not a sensible time for taking a walk by any ordinary standards, but he said only, “Come with you?”

  If she had said yes, he would have walked along with her and embraced her in the darkness under the trees. Let his hands explore her, lifted her T-shirt to find her waiting breasts. Maybe let her find something of his. Maybe made love with her right there in the backwoods darkness, though he no longer required darkness for lovemaking.