Metal Angel (27 page)

“Volie—”

“Go on back to the bar, Mercy.” He lengthened his stride and left Mercedes behind.

He wandered in the night, noticing again as if for the first time how brown brick smells of sunshine even at two in the morning, how electricity hung from its crosses does not weep but sings, how television glows glacier-blue through the venetian blinds of the second-story bedrooms where couples were watching the late-night videos they did not want the kids to see and maybe making love. He felt bereft. He wanted Angie terribly, but knew he must not awaken her. In the morning he would kiss her and talk with her about Texas.

Turning a corner nearby, a taxicab caught him in its headlights, jerked to a stop, backed up, and came barreling toward him. Volos stood, resigned to whatever was happening now. But it was not bad. The cab stopped short of hitting him, and Red got out.

“There you are, man.” Red paid the cabdriver thirty dollars and sent him away, then came to walk by Volos's side. He kept his voice soft and even, but Volos could hear some sort of strain in it. “I been looking all over for you.”

“Why?”

Red hesitated, then came out with what Volos could tell to be truth. “Worried about you! Didn't know where you were, what you were gonna do, the way—” Evidently Red did not want to say it more plainly, that Volos had been hugely fucking up. “The way things been going.”

They walked in silence for a run-down block. Then Red added, “Things ain't as bad as people were saying, Volos. We've got the official word from the police now. Three dead—I mean, that's bad enough, but it could have been a lot worse.”

“How many hurt?” Volos asked.

“A few dozen.”

Speaking of hurt. “How's Bink?”

“Fine! Bink's got a thick skull. You couldn't kill him if you came at him with a ball-peen hammer.”

“Angry at me?”

“He's not gonna quit or anything like that, no.”

“But he is angry.”

“A little.”

“It is all anger today. Has anybody heard from Texas?”

Red looked away, stared down at the pavement. Typical human. “No.”

They walked past an Art Deco gas station with pink tile trim, and a little brick restaurant shaped like a coffeepot, complete with a sheet-metal spout. “Smoke comes out of that metal part in the wintertime,” Red remarked. “They got the furnace venting through it. I remember from the last time I went through here.”

Volos did not reply.

“Volos? Hey, man, uh, a bunch of us are back at the hotel getting drunk. I mean, really plastered. Seems like the thing to do tonight. Why don't you come back with me?”

“No, I do not think so. Thank you.” He really did mean the thanks and hoped Red could hear that in his voice.

“You sure, man?”

“Yes, I am certain. I need to walk and think.”

“Yeah? That's just what the rest of us don't want to do, is think too much. Okay, so you think for us.” Red had worked on getting drunk already, Volos could tell. Now that the strain on him was less, the liquor was starting to show. “Whatcha thinking?”

“I am thinking there is no need to try to be evil. It seems to happen enough by accident.”

“That's the goddamn truth, man.”

“And the trouble with evil is—it makes a mess of everything.” Volos knew that had not come out as cogently as he had wanted, but he did not know how to explain what he was just then comprehending, the straight linkage between evil and pain. How “evil” was not just a pose, a stance, an artistic statement, but a name for that which ruined lives. Not just an idea, but something real, the force that was making his chest ache and his wings hang heavy on his back.

Perhaps Red understood somewhat. At least he did not smile.

Volos said, “I am thinking—it is true that Texas shouted at me, but still … I think if I had not gone blackwing at him, none of this would have happened.”

“Hard to tell,” Red hedged. Trying to be nice. Why would humans always and forever try to be nice when it was more important to find truth?

“I am sure of it. And what I mostly think is this, that I must never go blackwing again.”

He had reached the limits of Red's comprehension. The guitarist was staring at him with the whites of his eyes showing, spooked.

“Why don't you go back to the hotel,” Volos told him quietly. “I want you to tell the others I will not do it again. That I have made a promise. All right?”

Red swallowed and nodded but said, “I'm supposed to leave you alone out here? Hey, don't you worry about crazies and death threats and stuff? I hate to tell you, man, but you don't punch worth a damn.”

Volos laughed, feeling his wings lighten—not just in color, but physically lighten, their burden on his back growing less. “If anybody bothers me,” he told Red, “I will flap him to death.”

Red took a step back.

“It is a joke, Red.”

“Oh.”

“Is the hotel far? Can you walk to it? Go on back.”

He stood and watched the guitarist toddle off, weaving just a little. Waved once when Red waved. Stayed where he was until Red was out of sight.

Like evil itself, his promise was not just an idea or a word, but a force that had acted on him—he sensed that. Imagining himself into being, he had shaped his body, and this thinking, this promise, this renunciation, had felt somewhat the same as that act. It had shaped some part of him, changed him. The direction of his life would go differently because of it.

He turned back the way he had come and kept walking. Saw a skinny kid sleeping on the sidewalk next to a boom box bigger than he was. Saw heat lightning in the sky. Smelled ozone in the air.

Thought of Texas, and sighed, not knowing what to do. Thought of Mercedes, and shrugged. He sensed without much caring how Mercedes hated him now. How on the cobbled street behind his leave-taking back, Mercedes had stood shaking with rage and saying again and again, “Son of a bitch. You hotshot son of a bitch. All the things I've done for you, and will you do this one thing for me … You bastard. I'll clip your wings.”

chapter fifteen

Hours after midnight Angie was not sleeping. In the white teddy Volos had gotten her, sitting on the john with the bathroom door closed so that her light would not disturb the kids, she was trying to write a song.

Devil lover

Stormwind in your hair

Lightning in the touch of your hands

You make me scared

I need to grow my wings

I feel so unprepared

It was not the electric touch of his hands that had frightened her, or even the fight with Texas, though the latter had upset her enough to keep her awake. But her fear had started a few days before that, when in the sleepy morning she had looked in the mirror, brushing her teeth, and had expected to see Volos's narrow, elegant face looking back at her. She had been surprised, actually surprised, to see her own soft cheeks instead of his hollow ones, her own wide, dark eyes instead of his that changed more often than the weather. And for a moment she had found it hard to remember her own name.

I'm just a wayfaring angel

A traveler frightened of thunder

A child who stayed too late at the park

Scared of the dark

I'm not daring enough for your arms

Devil lover

She was losing herself in him, that was what terrified her. He was as overwhelming as the sea. Or else she had thrown herself into his tides too completely. Or maybe she should not blame it on him, maybe even before she met him she had not known, really, who she was. A wayfarer, yes; a child, sometimes; but an angel? Huh. Hardly.

She crumpled the poem, unsatisfied. “Angie Bradley,” she muttered to herself, “who are you?”

Out in the dim bedroom Mikey wailed.

Though Angie had never been a hovering mother, though Mikey had been pretty much over his cold for several days and she had not been worried while he struggled with the fever and congestion, something about this cry went through her. Any other time, disturbed at her writing, she would have set down pencil and paper with rolling eyes and an expressive sigh. But this time she dropped the things, jumped up, and ran to her child.

She slapped at a light switch on the way. There was nobody to wake up and complain, because she had a room to herself—Volos had taken care of that when Mikey got sick, and she had not needed to ask him. Though maybe Texas had suggested it to him.

Mikey was vomiting violently, yet his hands sprawled weak as mice.

Angie stroked his back, ran for a towel, tried to get him cleaned up. He lay crying thinly, as if he felt tired to death. It was a terrible cry, as if already something had laid claim on his soul; he did not sound like Mikey at all. Yet he still vomited. Though there was nothing left in him, he lay retching as if a machine were making him do it.

Awakened by the noise and light, Gabriel was sitting up in bed and staring at his brother. “He's really
sick,”
Gabe declared, awestruck.

“Yes, he really is,” Angie replied, hearing her own voice shake. The sound focused her terror. She cried out loud, “Volos!”

Would it be faster to go pound on the door of the next room? Or get on the phone, call an ambulance? But it was Volos who was her rescuing angel. Volos who loved her. She knew he loved her, though he had not said it. Probably she knew it better than he did.

“Volos! Please hurry!”

She did not understand how much her panic had already hurried him. Before she had finished calling the second time he burst, booted feet first, through the window, wings spread wide, their color as pale as his startled face. He stood amid shattered glass, looked, heard, comprehended at once. “Hospital,” he said.

“Wait.” He was there, he had come to her in an eyeblink, and she had to make him wait while she grabbed Gabe, ran with him to the next room, pounded on the door, thrust him into the groggy arms of the roadie's wife. Then back, and the roadie's wife came running after her and made her put on a robe, shrieked something about not stepping barefoot on broken glass, as if it mattered while Volos stood with Michael still convulsively retching in his arms. The next instant he reached for her, lifted her off the floor, and toppled out the window with both of them. Someone screamed. Angela felt sure it was not her.

In the Emergency Room lounge Volos paced, his wings leaden with worry. He hated the place, which had linoleum flooring that was cold beneath his feet and smelled of disinfectant. Its molded plastic chairs were of ugly colors. Moreover, they were all in lines, shackled together like slaves.

In one chair a cop sat reading
Newsweek
, waiting for his partner to get stitched up after subduing a drunk who had resisted arrest. In a far corner sat the family of the drunk. Somebody in a white coat came out and beckoned to them: The man was on his way to the operating room. He had been thoroughly subdued.

Volos's worry was not all for Mikey. Some was for himself. Standing on the flat roof of a high school and watching the lovers in the bushes down below, he had heard Angie writing a poem, he had heard the fear in it, and now he himself felt frightened, terrified, because he did not think he could bear it if she went away. Not after—

No, this was no time to think about Texas, no matter how he missed him. He had to be strong now.

Everything else that was happening, and now this with the child.… He had to be strong for Ange. The alarm in her call had been so sharp it had hurtled him toward her like a slingshot. There had been no time to kiss her, to talk with her, to say,
Please, by all the demons of hell, please, Angela, do not leave me
.

It was the first time, he realized, that he had been in a hospital. He did not like the chemical odor of the place. It chilled him. It made him feel as if he might someday die.

The cop glanced up at him out of a hard, scarred face. Muttered something that might have been “cocksucker.” Looked back to his magazine. Volos paced.

Angela came out of the Emergency Room and walked toward him, her steps short, unsteady. He went to her and wrapped himself around her, arms and wings, like an inverted flower.

“They chased me out,” she said into the hollow of his neck. “He doesn't need me right now. He doesn't know me.”

“Michael doesn't know you?”

“He went into convulsions. Thrashing around. Now he's unconscious. They wanted me out of the way.”

Volos had only a distant understanding of the human body in crisis, of its symptoms, its never-expected rebellions, its betrayals. Unconsciousness to him was a drug-induced novelty, a dreamy sleep. But he could tell that to Angela life had gone very wrong very quickly. She was stunned, as if a great snake had struck. He could feel her shaking against him.

“What is it?”

His worry was all for her now, but she thought he was asking about Mikey. She said, “They're not sure till they see the blood tests. Some sort of syndrome, they think.”

“What is a syndrome?”

She shook her head. He could feel her chin hard against his collarbone. “I'd better call Ennis,” she said, lifting her head away from him.

“But why?”

“Mikey's—his child too, Volos.” Her voice trembled like her body. “Do you have a quarter?”

In his jeans pocket he found several coins. He gave them all to her and watched as she walked away. Fear lay in his gut like ice that would not melt.

The cop put down his magazine and got up. His partner had come out of the E.R. with seven stitches closing a laceration over his cheekbone. The uninjured officer swatted the other on the butt, jock style. They ambled out.

“There's no answer.” Angela came back from the phone. “He's not home.”

Volos felt his fear dissolve because she was near him and her husband had not taken her away from him yet. He warmed her in his arms again. “It's four in the morning,” she said to his shoulder. “Where in God's name could he be?”