Metal Angel Read online

  “Sit,” Texas ordered, pulling a straight chair out from the wall. He handed Volos a wad of Kleenex, pulled down his beat-up old Stetson from the closet shelf—he felt naked without a western hat, wore one indoors as well as out except when Wyoma made him take it off for bed or company. Jammed the ratty white thing on his head, went out into the hallway again, and got ice from the machine, strongly feeling the small-hour blues weighing him down. It was his own mistake, to have stayed up this late. Whenever night found him awake at this hour he felt utterly alone, orphaned, like the last person on earth, even with Wyoma gently snoring at his side. And now there wasn’t even Wyoma. Just a jerk with wings bleeding in his room. Why the hell did he have to go and get involved? He held the cold ice bucket to his hot face. Back in the room, he found Volos seated with tissues in hand but his hands slack in his lap.

  “You want to apply pressure.” Obviously the kid was rowing with one oar out of the water. Accepting this, Texas found it easier to have patience. “Here.” He set the ice down, took Volos’s hand, and guided it. “Do like I tell you. Press.” Only one nostril was bleeding, and it looked ready to stop soon anyway. Texas went into the bathroom, found a washcloth and wrapped it around some ice. Damn cheap hotel had given him only one washcloth. He sopped the corner of a towel and went back to Volos, dabbing at the kid’s mouth with the wet terrycloth, clearing away blood to assess the damage. As he expected, the kid’s lips were swelling. He had taken some hard hits. “You got to stop leading with your chin, Volos,” Texas said. He handed him the cold pack, showing him how to hold it to his mouth and jaw.

  “Leading with my chin?”

  Texas did not answer. He was staring. The kid’s wings (lifted somewhat to fit over the back of the chair, then trailing to the floor) had turned a pale opalescent blue.

  “How do you do that?” Texas blurted.

  “The chin thing?”

  Texas reached out to switch on the table lamp for better light and rounded Volos to have a look at him from the back. The mechanism that operated the wings was not immediately apparent to him, but he saw broken feathers and, halfway up the left wing, a sizable stain of bright red. Blood.

  “Where’d that come from?” Jesus, had the kid been knifed in the back? Was he walking around with a stab wound? Panicked, Texas grabbed the wing, lifted it to look—

  The blood came from the wing itself. Texas knew that as soon as he touched it. Through his hand like an electric charge clear to his heart he felt an odd hot rush, a wordless recognition, and at the same time he heard Volos gasp with pain. Ice clattered to the floor. Volos had dropped it. The kid had gone ashen, and his hands clutched at the air as if it could support him. He looked ready to topple out of the chair. Texas caught him with an arm around the shoulders.

  “I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!”

  Volos trembled. “So this is pain,” he whispered, panting.

  “I’m god-awful sorry. I thought—” Texas gave up. To hell with what he had thought. To hell with anything he had ever thought, especially about this kid. Not a would-be wearing Styrofoam wings for a stunt, this one. Not a half-wit. More like a—a visitant, an innocent, an—God, he couldn’t say it or think it.

  “Maybe it is not that you hurt me so much.” With effort Volos straightened enough to look at him. “Maybe it is that I am not accustomed to pain.”

  “I hurt you,” Texas said.

  Volos went on, intent, not seeming to hear him. “Bodily pain, I mean. The other sort I know well, but this—it fights me, it takes over. It makes me feel thin as water.”

  His eyes were of the same moonstone blue as his wings, startlingly light in his earth-tan face, very direct in their gaze, almost vehement. His hair, brown-black and chopped without finesse halfway down his neck, hung in stringy dark curls over his forehead, making him look boyish, vulnerable. It was peculiar hair. Texas had thought at first that it was twisted in very thin braids or dreadlocks, that the kid had some black blood in him, what with his dusky skin and full lips—but now he saw that Volos’s hair had the texture of pinfeathers.

  Still holding him by the shoulders, Texas whispered, “You’re real.”

  Volos stopped shaking, grew still, and smiled. It was a small smile, but enough to show Texas that women could be blinded by this one. “Thanks,” the tall young hunk said, as he had not thanked Texas for saving his ass on the street. “You do not think I have utterly failed?”

  “Better get some ice on the wing,” Texas mumbled.

  He helped Volos to the bed. Only the one double bed in the room. Made you know what kept these sleazy hotels going. He had Volos lie face down, noticed that the hurt wing smeared blood on the bedspread. He would end up paying for the damn thing. Terrific. Maybe they charged double for supernatural blood. Maybe with any sort of luck he would get sane soon and figure out what sort of hallucinogen he had been breathing in along with the yellow, oily-smelling L.A. air. Texas brought his last towel and dumped all the ice he had into it for a cold pack. “Hold on, now,” he told Volos before he touched the injury.

  “That was not as bad as before,” Volos said after a while.

  “I tried to take it easy this time.” Texas sat beside him on the bed, holding the ice pack so that it sandwiched the wounded wing. A few streets away a car security system screamed. Through the wall Texas could hear athletic lovemaking going on in the next room. Why did that not bother him? A while back he had been feeling blue as a Hank Williams ballad, but now … It had to be four in the morning, and he hadn’t slept, yet he did not feel tired. More than that—he did not feel wretched. When had he last faced the night without feeling desolate? He could not remember. But just being around this crazy kid, he felt as if someone had finally taken in his orphaned soul off hell’s cold doorstep.

  Christ. He had to be tired. He was getting sappy.

  “What is your name?” Volos asked him.

  “Bob McCardle. But you can call me Texas.”

  One hollow cheek against the bedspread, Volos nodded. “Yes. Texas. I like your boots.” They were new, top-of-the-line Laredos with real snake-leather feet and tooled-cowskin shafts, so he better like them. “You are a son of the state Texas?”

  McCardle laughed. “Son, I ain’t a son of much of anybody.”

  After a while he judged that the wing was numbed. Easing the ice away, he warned Volos to hang on, then parted the feathers and looked. It was not a large wound, but it was ugly, not a clean cut but more of a tear. Some sort of laceration. Had to hurt like a sonuvabitch. No way to wrap it up that he could figure, either. He put the ice back on it.

  “Shit, kid. Your wing’s a mess. What the devil am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Let it rot and fall off. The other one too. I do not want them.”

  Texas said, “Talk sense, Volos. Is there someplace I can take you?”

  Volos shook his head against the pillow.

  “You got a home address?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody I can phone? Anyplace you’re supposed to be? Anybody worrying about you?”

  Faint smile of bruised lips told Texas McCardle: Here was someone far more alone in the world than he.

  His cop training made him try one more time. “Know anybody who could help? Any more like you around here?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “Damn. Well, at least it’s stopped bleeding.” In a few hours, once the stores were open, he would go get the kid some kind of antiseptic.

  The ice had melted into slop. Texas took the wet towel away. “You want something for the pain?”

  “It will not work to just let it hurt and die?”

  He was serious. Texas sputtered twice before he barked at him, “Kid, that wing’s part of you! Jesus Christ. Sit up there so I can give you some aspirin.”

  Volos spilled water down his chin, swallowed the pills with difficulty, lay down again afterward. “To lie down feels better,” he said in a tone of mild surprise.
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br />   “Go to sleep if you can.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Holy …” Texas felt his patience slipping. “Just lie there! Close your eyes.”

  Volos obeyed. Texas turned off the light, found his way around the bed in the dim cityglow of the window, settled in the room’s beat-up excuse for an armchair, and tried not to think. He slumped down, propping his long legs on the edge of the bed. Dozed for a while. Became aware that he was effortlessly sleeping, which surprised him so much that he jolted awake. Took a look at his foundling. Volos lay still, but his eyes were open and staring.

  “Close your eyes,” Texas reminded him.

  “I am not asleep, then?”

  “Not hardly. Not if you’re talking to me.”

  “People do not tell each other things when they are sleeping?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Volos said, “Perhaps she is awake, then. She might be awake in the night?”

  Texas looked at him. Under the shadow of his brows the kid’s eyes seemed large and darker than he remembered. Keeping his voice quiet, he asked, “What are you talking about?”

  Volos said, “It is not the usual thing? A young woman far to the east, a silent woman, I can hear her. A shrouded woman. She is thinking, or dreaming, and sending me the dreams.”

  chapter two

  Far to the east: sitting at a kitchen table in a stolid brick house in Jenkins, Pennsylvania. It was morning there. The dishes were done, the beds made, the laundry churning in its rectilinear machine. Her husband was out of the house, the children playing in the fenced back yard. Therefore she could get out her Bic pen and tablet paper, sit down a minute and write the words.

  This angel’s taking a fall

  This angel’s full of the devil

  Red rhythms pulsed in her head. Physically, as if addicted, she craved rock and roll, the music that made her feel like dancing naked. But even with the children outside she did not dare to bring out the garage-sale radio she kept hidden in the bottom of her Kotex box. She would have to wait until they were napping. Little Michael and Gabe were only two and three years old. They might need her suddenly, and then someone might hear, however faintly, the low, ominous thudding of drums and bass guitar. Or the boys themselves would hear and blab. One way or another, word would get around fast if people found out that Angie Bradley, Reverend Crawshaw’s daughter, listened to the devil’s music.

  You say die and go to Heaven

  Gonna be an angel

  But this angel ain’t no dead person Daddy

  This angel is alive

  I WANT TO LIVE

  A knock at the back door.

  The sound acted on Angie like a cattle prod. With panicky haste she thrust tablet and pen into a kitchen drawer. Her hands checked her hair (innocent of perm, smoothed back and decently bunned beneath a stiff white prayer bonnet) and her skirt (long enough to cover her knees). She knew without looking who was knocking: her father. No one else dropped by without phoning first.

  And there, sure enough, on her scrubbed back stoop he stood, Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw in his crow-black suit and bow tie, his head thrust forward slightly for a close look at her. “I been praying for you, daughter,” he told her.

  “Good.” She stood back to invite him in.

  “I pray for you constantly, Angela.” He passed through the hallway and stepped into the front room, looking around. Light poured in through entirely too many tall windows. The house was as old as her father, precisely square, two-story, built with fearsome symmetry. Across each of its four faces windows marched wherever there was not a door. In the wintertime, coldness poured in like daylight. Angie and Ennis hoped to build a place of their own someday, something cozier, more private, but meanwhile Angela spent most of her life housecleaning. There was no place out of that fierce light to hide anything, nowhere to let the dirt lie. Yet her father glowered around at her hand-me-down furniture as if expecting to find a murdered body. “Have you read your Bible this morning?” he demanded.

  “Of course.”

  He scrutinized her, and she withstood the scrutiny impassively, keeping her face as smooth and disciplined as her hair. When she was a little girl, he could always see a fib in her face, and as many times as he had caught her he had told her that liars went to hell. A few times since she had grown to adulthood, thinking back, she had understood: He cared about her in his scowling way, he wanted her to be safe, saved. It was the passion of his life, telling people what to do, how to behave, how to be saved.

  But most of the time she was not able to understand whether he loved her, or why she loved him, and she had learned to tell her lies to him and not be caught. She had to. Short of leaving outright, the only way for her to keep some selfhood was to sneak and lie her way around his myriad rules. She knew it was no use trying to talk with him. Reverend Crawshaw perceived himself as a soldier of God at war with the devil, and he took no prisoners. He was not the sort of person who would ever in eternity agree to disagree.

  He peered. He had narrow eyes that could crinkle and be kind, blast him, when he was pleased with her. She was his only child.

  “Have you had your coffee?” she asked.

  He unbent enough to come into her kitchen, to sit and chat. No he did not want coffee. Angela could give him a glass of water if she liked. None of that bug juice for him, just plain water. Angie put ice cubes in it, which did not displease him. Rather than drinking it down, he sipped. The children ran in and latched onto their grandpa like Velcro, and he chuckled, letting them climb his black-trousered legs. He held them in his lap, bounced them on his bony knees as Angie watched with a bittersweet taste in her silent mouth. (A virtuous woman kept her head covered and was silent.) She loved how he loved her children. Watching the three of them warmed her heart. But—why was he so much less stern with her sons than she remembered his being with her? Was it because he was their grandfather? Or was it because they were boys and she was a daughter of Eve? Female, prone to evil, and therefore less loved?

  At the door, as he left, he said to her in a low voice, “Angela, are you in danger of sin?”

  “No, Father.” It’s the truth, she thought, keeping the dark amusement in her mind from reaching her mouth to make her smile. She was way past just being in danger. She was clear in, thoroughly damned, a fallen woman, a diver in the murky forbidden depths. Not only did she listen to rock music, but at night its lewd rhythms pulsed in her mind. Often it seemed to her that she was most alive when she slept, when in her dreams she moved her body in barbaric ways and sang, sang, sang … In daylight and in fact she could not sing worth a nickel—a thousand church services had shown her that. Her voice when she tried it was reedy and insubstantial, like something in the wind. But when she dreamed, she could sing like Elvis come back from the dead in a woman’s breasty hot-throated body.

  Just the night before, she had dreamed such a dream, and now even as she faced her father with bland eyes she wrote the words of the song in her mind.

  A grownup ain’t a child who died

  That kid’s still kicking strong inside

  Making rude noises

  Spitting on the floor

  Alive and wanting to live some more

  Her father said softly to her, “Something is troubling you, Angela. Be careful. Satan is a seducer. Keep your eyes turned toward God. Say your prayers.”

  “I do,” she lied. “Every day.”

  “The ones I taught you.”

  “I do, Father!”

  He wanted her to recite the petitions he had written when she was a child, the words he had put into her mouth. Reverend Daniel Crawshaw was like that. He preferred to be in charge. Felt safer that way. His church was entirely his own, unaffiliated with any denomination; he called it the Church of the Holy Virgin and ran it out of a former lingerie shop. His theology oscillated somewhere between sugar-scoop Brethren and total-immersion Baptist, but also threw off sparks of mystic Mariolatry. Under her feet Angela felt t
he relentless uplifting confines of the pedestal on which he had placed her.

  “Call me and I will pray with you.”

  “Stop worrying,” she told him. She kissed him on his flat cheek, sent him on his way, and waited patiently, like a rabbit flattened in the grass, until she felt sure he was gone. Once she considered it safe, she scrawled the next verse of her song, then took the half-finished thing and hid it under the old bedsheets at the back of the linen closet. Most of her efforts she flushed down the john like the dregs of Michael’s diaper pail, but this one she would keep. It smoked in her, heady and illicit as brandy, while she took laundry downstairs and continued the exquisitely boring routine of her housework.

  For an hour while the boys napped she listened to her radio, even though listening was sweet suffering because she had to keep the volume down and the music made her want to do just the opposite, made her feel wild to turn up the fizzy old thing and scandalize the neighbors, tuck a flower in her hair, walk in the rain, kiss a stranger, do something. Almost anything.

  She had married straight out of high school, at age seventeen. She was only twenty.

  Ennis, her husband, did not get home until late. In the summertime he worked until dark, hammering, fitting homes together, earnest, steady, sober. He wanted to have his own construction company someday. Angie felt no doubt that he would, and that when he did he would work even harder and leave her even more alone.

  “ ’Lo, hon.” He kissed her because he knew she wanted it, but awkwardly, with closed lips. Kissing did not come easily to Ennis. Even a Dagwood peck at the door made him faintly blush.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Nope. I worked straight through. I’m starved.”