Metal Angel Read online

  She had fed Gabe and Mikey their dinner but had saved her own hunger for Ennis. She had given the children their baths and their bedtime story, cuddling them one in each arm in a hundred-year-old rocking chair, their small heads and wispy hair warm against her neck. After tucking them in amid kisses and hugs and teddy bears, she had settled down to wait for her husband, her belly growling. Now she put out the cold chicken, the apple salad, the sweet-and-sour pepper slaw.

  Ennis sat at his place. Even across the kitchen she could whiff the good workingman smell of him. If he had touched her, even sweaty as he was, she would not have pulled away … He waited until she sat, then steepled his big hands and said a quick grace. He was a member of the Church of the Holy Virgin, of course, like his parents before him. Angie had known him all her life, and looking at him across the table she could not say for certain whether he was handsome. Her eyes were so accustomed to him that she could not tell. And the loose-fitting Sears work pants and work shirt he wore did not help her. But certainly he was not ugly … and she was no beauty, she reminded herself, certainly not attractive in any fashionable sense, sitting there in her round-collared blouse and scrubbed face and bunned hair and prayer bonnet. She had never been able to feel sure he desired her.

  They ate in near-silence. Ennis asked how her day had been, then looked at the mail. It was mostly junk, but it served to occupy him. He had never been one to talk much. Even less during the past year, since his dad had died.

  An hour later, after he had showered and Angie had done the dishes, she undressed in the bathroom, taking off with relief the prayer bonnet with its irksome hairpins—at least her father and his God did not require strings that tied under the chin! Taking off with supreme relief the chastely sheathing pantyhose, the white, constricting bra. She rubbed at the red marks under her breasts, the furrows on her shoulders, then shook her hair free of its bun, feeling it sway silkily against her bare back down to her waist. It had never been cut, not since she was a baby, and this one stricture of her father’s do-it-yourself religion she did not mind. She loved her long, seal-brown hair and wished she could let it swing down her back all the time, instead of for just a few minutes in the evening.

  She put on her nightgown but did not plait her hair in its customary bedtime braids. All day, even more so than usual, she had felt pregnant with desperation. She had decided to take a risk. In the bed Ennis was waiting, and though the nightgown was a cotton sack not fit to excite anyone, her unbound hair would serve as a signal for him.

  In the glow of the hallway night-light she saw his face a moment before she closed the bedroom door. Yes, it was a nice enough face, a farm boy’s face, quiet and rugged and tawny, like winter fields … Her closing the door also was a signal. For sleeping, they kept it open so she could hear if the children cried. But for the other thing they closed it.

  She felt her way to the bed in the dark, found Ennis and kissed him. And yes, yes, this time it was going to be all right. She could tell. He wanted her.

  But afterward, after he had gotten up and found his pajamas in the dark and put them on again, after he had washed himself and come back to bed and settled down to sleep, Angie (once more decently gowned) found that her unrest had increased rather than abated. What she and Ennis had done—it had felt good, it always did, but she wished it had lasted longer.… Want, want, there was always more to want, and what was the use of it? But still she wanted. She wished he would let her leave a light on, just a little light, so that she could see him. She had never seen him with his clothes off, not even on their wedding night, he was too shy, and she wanted to know what he looked like, she wanted to love him that way, she wanted him to look at her and love her—but he would not look at her, and he had never let her so much as see him without his shirt. Even swimming, even in the heat of summer, he wore a shirt. When she was dating him she had dreamed that once they were married Ennis would change, that he would unpin her hair and kiss her, unbutton her prim white blouse and pull off her bra and caress her breasts. She still dreamed that same dream. But it was not going to happen.

  She said softly into the darkness, “Ennis. Don’t you ever feel like you just want to bust loose?”

  “From what?”

  “Church and things.”

  He considered so long that she thought he had gone to sleep. When finally he rendered his opinion, it came without censure but also utterly without comprehension. “No. Don’t think so. Nope.”

  She slept restlessly and had a dream so stark with longing that it made her moan and awoke her. In her sleep there had been a man, and it had not been Ennis—he was utterly not Ennis. She knew this to her bones, even though she had seen only his back, naked and powerful, his bare, broad, dun-colored shoulders, his scars—on his back were scars as if he had been wounded or tortured, sizable marks harshly pallid on the tan skin. She could not see his face. When would she see his face? His hair hung dark and long; he tossed his head, flinging the hair back from his eyes, and turned—and then in her dream she cried out and hid her eyes with her hands, for it was like meeting a god or an angel.

  When she looked again, he stood on a rooftop, and above him in the sky galloped a white-hat cowboy on a mustang, and the man in the sky stared past her with dead-eyed indifference, but the half-naked god-man on the rooftop looked down at her intently. She saw his face, narrow and strong and beautiful and very strange, saw his deep eyes and dark brows and the dangerous sweetness of his mouth, lips dusky pink amid his dun skin. But when she awoke (softly panting, feeling the heat between her legs) she thought first of how he had stood spraddle-legged in blue jeans that bulged at the crotch. A—an erection? Or his—equipment, maybe it was bigger than other men’s? And how the bloody blazes would she ever know? Fiercely she hated her life, she wanted to know these things, to see—she had never seen the penis of any man. Ennis would not let her even feel his with her hands. She knew it only as a blunt, springy thing entering her in the dark. But the man in her dream had looked as if …

  Had he seen her?

  It had been more than just a dream. As she became less aroused and more lucidly awake, she felt quite sure it had been much more. A holy visitation? Hardly. More like a—a demon standing over her as she lay vulnerable in dreams, an incubus. This nighttime vision was satanic; the tingle between her thighs told her that. She should pray.

  Instead, with a feeling of restless urgency, she left the bed where Ennis lay soundly sleeping, went with soft barefoot steps to the linen closet in the hallway, and pulled her pad of tablet paper out from its back corner. In the bathroom, behind a locked door, sitting on the hard toilet lid, she finished her song.

  Yah yah yah yah yah

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show this angel where they keep the cookies.

  Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show me who to give my candy bar to.

  Ow ow ow ow wow

  I WANT TO LIVE

  Show me how to get your trousers down

  Show me what oh devil lover show me

  Why please show me why

  I want to live I WANT TO LIVE

  Before I die.

  She recopied the finished lyric and sat looking at it awhile. Tore her rough draft into tiny shreds and flushed it down the john. Waited to make sure she hadn’t woken anyone. Then took her finished song, folded it in and in on itself and gave it back to the linen closet, to an envelope containing perhaps a dozen others she thought worth keeping. Worth hiding. And maybe the devil knew what she would ever do with them.

  She seldom left the marriage bed, no matter how cramped and smothered she felt, no matter how much Ennis breathed in her face. It seemed to her that if she got up and prowled the dark, even within the confines of her own house, she would be somehow endangering the marital bond, betraying the wedding vows. Thoughts of a peril vague as the nighttime shadows always kept her lying still—but on this night other thoughts were stronger. For the first time ever at night she took h
er radio out of its hiding place and carried it softly down the stairs, down to the basement, where until nearly dawn she sat shivering in her nightgown on the chilly concrete steps and listening to the forbidden music, trying to draw in stations from farther and farther away, maybe even from California.

  In a bar in the Boystown area of West Hollywood, fruit-flavored vodka at his fingertips, Mercedes Kell sat waiting for a long-expected annunciation and listening to a drunk claiming he had seen an angel.

  The drunk was vehement. “Publicity stunt,” the bartender tried to soothe him.

  “Who the hell wants publicity at three in the morning? A warm squeeze is whatcha want at three in the morning. Doncha? Ain’t that what you want?”

  The bartender ignored the latter questions in favor of the first one. “Some wannabe, I mean, trying to get seen. Going around the hot spots.”

  “On Sunset?”

  “Dorkhead,” another drinker put in patronizingly, moving over next to him, “people with halos don’t go to Sunset after dark. People in favor of safe sex don’t go to Sunset after dark. What the hell would an angel be doing on Sunset?”

  “Looking for a fifty-dollar fuck,” Mercedes suggested down the length of the bar.

  Three heads turned to look at him, but only the drunk who had sighted the angel seemed really to hear. “Don’t talk like that!” The man, who was as young and thin and overbred as Mercedes himself, started to flush and moisten at the eyes. “He was beautiful, you hear what I’m saying? Beautiful.”

  “Sure. Nice buns, huh?”

  “It wasn’t like that!”

  The little slut looked ready to attack. The man sitting next to him placed a hand on his arm, and the bartender said gently, “Hey, buddy, don’t go getting yourself upset. It ain’t worth it. If it was an angel, why would he be walking? He had big wings, why didn’t he fly?”

  “Come on, chill out,” said the other drinker. “Hey, what’re you having? I’ll buy you one.”

  Mercedes got up and headed toward the ladies’ room, where he used the john lid to inhale a line of low-grade cocaine. He doubted the ladies’ was ever used for much else. Women never came into this place, not even dykes. They knew they weren’t welcome.

  When Mercedes came back, the drunk had capitulated. “Okay, okay,” he was saying tearfully to the bar, “maybe it was just a nice ass in fake wings. Okay.” The other barsitter had his arm around him, and the bartender stood by with his brow wrinkled like a spaniel’s. Mercedes put his back to the three of them and watched the door, waiting, the way some people waited for their prince to come, though in his case he knew things were different. He was the prince. He awaited a disciple who would recognize him.

  Mercedes’s ambitions were simple and mystic: He wanted to be God. Translated into secular terms that meant being big, very big, in Hollywood, because he who is glorified in Hollywood is deified all over the world. He would be colossal, and it didn’t much matter how, whether in movies, on TV, in music, maybe playing kickass guitar or fronting the ultimate band—Mercedes embraced all these possibilities, and knew one of them would open itself to him, because he believed in himself. It did not trouble him that his talents were mediocre. In fact he did not think in terms of talent at all. What was necessary, he knew, was to meet the right person, his own anointed John the Baptist, someone to prepare the way for him. Therefore he risked humiliation, going to exclusive parties where he was sometimes stopped at the door, careful to wear the right clothes, careful (if he got in) to look mildly amused at everything and appear ready to leave at any moment, careful to seem bored and interesting. So far only unimportant people had paid attention to him, but someday (to this article of faith he adhered with apostolic fervor) he would be a star.

  More than a star. A sun. The sun. It would happen, Mercedes knew, because his motives were pure: To hell with fame and money; he wanted to be a media messiah. He wanted to found a religion of himself. He wanted to be worshiped.

  From time to time there had been friends and lovers who seemed to like him for a while but did not take him seriously enough. They were not offering him devotion the way they were supposed to. A prophet hath no honor in his own country. And L.A. was, he knew, Mercedes Kell country. Back in Kickapoo, Illinois, where his parents had adored him until they found out he was gay, where he had always taken the lead in the school plays and everyone had known he was special, he had nevertheless felt like a stranger, as if he had happened there by mistake, stolen from some more distinguished cradle. But arriving in L.A., leaving behind forever his family and his lower-class given name, he had felt himself coming home. Yet so far nobody had made his apotheosis happen.

  The inebriate who had seen the angel and the man who had bought him a drink were going out together. Mercedes watched, warming himself by imagining where they would go, what they would do and in what sequence. He thought of picking up someone himself, then dismissed the thought. Sometimes he settled for what he got. But most times, like tonight, he waited for Him, his own personal Voice Crying in the Wilderness, the One who never came.

  He wished he had seen the angel.

  He hadn’t been writing much lately. Back in Kickapoo he had written all the time, songs, screenplays, and the stuff was good, he knew it was … but out here it was hard, with the smell of jasmine in the air all summer long like some sexy after-shave hanging in a vast men’s room. Mercedes belonged to the Guild, he knew how little good work got done or screened, he heard the other writers sighing about the state of the art. Where has the holy fire gone? they lamented. How long has it been since we experienced the angel’s kiss?

  Mercedes scorned them. Straight old farts, most of them. Angel’s kiss, hell. If he had an angel …

  “Bring you another?” the bartender asked.

  “Okay. Hey, Otto, whadaya think? Would you know an angel if you met one on the street?” Reversing, as he often did for modesty’s sake, his actual thought: Would the angel know him?

  The bartender laughed with no more than necessary politeness. “Sure. Wouldn’t you?”

  Mercedes said rather tangentially, “If I had an angel I would make him very happy.”

  The kiss. No chaste and worshipful meeting of lips for him. He craved the probe of the angel’s tongue, and he would probe that hot mouth with his own. He was not afraid of being burned. Why should a star be afraid of fire? Or of air, wind, wings, or of falling? Fire, flight, fall, they were all … desire, danger, he craved it all, the feathery caress of the wing, the body hot as flame, the searing conjunction somewhere amid the clouds … How to bring off an angel, what there might be to work with, what to do and in what sequence he did not yet know, but it didn’t matter much. He was good at these things. And what mattered more was what the angel could do for him.

  chapter three

  Texas knew that buying Volos antiseptic would take miles of walking through this city all spread out like a buckwheat cake with only sin for sweetening. Not that he minded walking. But it surprised him how much he minded the flatness. It was still almost a physical shock to him, how there were no mountains, how Los Angeles kept him six thousand feet farther away from the sky than he was used to.

  In the morning light the smog looked platinum, almost beautiful. But, like any other beauty, it was a betrayer. It would be bad today. Already he could feel it stinging his nose and throat.

  L.A. was a place where the world’s swankiest cars glided past and no one with any pride ever seemed to use the sidewalks at all. Shows you what I am, Texas thought, trudging along, his old dirty-white flattop Stetson pulled down over his eyes. It was this feeling of being nothing, of being less than dust in the world’s wind, that would not let him rest at home. Yet it let him feel sourly at home in this urban hell. It was what had made him leave his wife and his Chevy truck behind and come here, to this mythic mecca of decadence, on a Greyhound bus, counting on the station to be in the sleaziest part of downtown. It was what made him wander the gray dangerous streets at three o’clock in the mo
rning. Texas walked L.A. because he wanted to dive into darkness and come up again. He needed to descend to some nameless fundament, and survive it, and come home with some treasure pulled from its murky depths.

  His father was just his excuse. There was no reason at all to think that the man was in L.A. He could be dead, or anywhere. All the time Bobby McCardle was growing up he had dreamed of becoming a detective and finding his father, but being a cop had showed him mostly that it was impossible to trace a man long gone. Over a period of years he had tried. No go. Any one of the junkies passed out in the alleys could be his father, and he would walk by without knowing.

  And his father, supposing he knew it was happening, would not care. That was the hell of it.

  So okay. Instead of his father the city had offered him a kid with wings. Even drunk or crazy, how many people ever got—

  He had to be going crazy.

  Feeling a need to relax and clear his head, Texas took his time finding a drugstore that suited him, one with a lunch counter where he got himself coffee and a greasy two-egg breakfast before he bought a spray can of antibiotic and a tube of ointment for Volos. At the cash register he counted his change twice, suffering mild disbelief. Everything in California was so god-awful expensive, his money was going fast. That worried him a little, but not much. There were worse things in life than being without money.

  He got back to the room late in the morning, half afraid that Volos would be gone and half hoping it would be that way so he could stop being crazy and just get on with normal misery. He had told the kid to stay put, and he had meant it, but finding the youngster gone sure would solve a lot of problems. Nevertheless, when he entered the room Texas felt a smile take charge of his face. The kid was still there, on his feet, leaning toward the window like a sapling toward sunlight.

  His smile faded when Volos turned toward him. The youngster was staggering.

  “So small!” Volos gestured wildly. “How can you humans live in rooms so small?” It was true that his wings, if he had spread them, would have touched the walls on either side. No wonder his eyes had gone wide as a spooked colt’s and he sounded half-panicked. “I want to go out of here. But my legs seem not to work right.”