Metal Angel (20 page)

“All right.” In a few minutes Volos was stonily ready, though his wings had gone bruise-blue. “Encore.”

It was “Slavehouse of Power,” and Volos led the band through it like a tornado leading a storm front. This time, when the audience rushed the stage, Texas and a dozen roadies-cum-bodyguards were ready for them and held them off.

Afterward, after Volos had signed a few carefully controlled autographs at the stage door, after the kid had been hustled through a gantlet of reaching hands, once in the bus and on the way to the next venue, the next hotel, Texas let himself close his eyes a moment. There had been a busty young woman at the stage door who had pulled down the neck of her T-shirt and invited Volos to sign her breast. “Over my heart,” she had breathed at him. But even that had not made the kid smile. He was barely speaking to anyone, not speaking to Texas at all, and his wings had gone the color of glare ice on the road. For a moment Texas wished he was back in Persimmon, West Virginia.

“He's not being fair,” said Angie's soft voice next to him. Because he liked her—heck, he more than liked her, even though he knew she was not for him—Texas smiled, but he did not open his eyes.

“Yepper, he's throwing a fit, all right,” he said. “But the hell of it is, I know how he feels. I hate it when people get together like a pack of wolves. Let them catch you off guard and they'll crucify you.”

chapter eleven

The next morning Brett phoned Texas at the hotel, as shaken as he had ever heard her. She had just received a rock-through-the-window message: “Volos the unholy, Prepare to DIE.”

Simpleminded—but Texas knew better than to take it lightly. Even with people too far away to touch his wings, something about Volos always seemed to stir up the best or worst in them. There had been unholy rockers from the start and always would be, but religious-minded people were frightened by Volos as never before, and anti-rock crusades were heating up all over the country, first on TV and then wherever preachers wanted a piece of the action.

Striding in scuffed Laredos down the hallway to talk with the kid, Texas felt somber, because he knew a lot about fanatics in general and their virulent hatred. But he had not yet heard of the most virulent anti-rock movement in the country, a tent-revival phenomenon called the Central Pennsylvania League for Moral Purity, headed by a charismatic pastor with a personal agenda, a holy man who had tragically lost a daughter and two grandsons to the seductions of rock music.

Texas knew nothing of the Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw.

At Volos's room, he knocked. Mercedes opened the door and smirked. Beyond him, Volos sat mostly naked on a rumpled bed. Wings, gray-blue. Eyes, Texas saw as he walked closer, the rainy dark color of river water.

Texas waited until Mercedes (who possessed the perfect insincere manners and sardonic charm of a well-paid gigolo) left the room, then asked, “How are the wings?”

“Shit on the wings.”

Texas hunkered down to look up into his charge's face. “I mean it, kid. I'm worried, I remember what happened before. How are they?”

Volos said more quietly, “They're tender, that is all. Sore. Like my head.”

“Are they gonna be okay?”

“I think so.”

Texas said what he should have the night before. “Volos, I never meant for that to happen. Didn't seem at first like anything was wrong. Looked to me like you wanted those people near you.”

“I know. I did.”

“Then why are you mad at me?”

“I'm not anymore.” This, Texas knew, was as close to an apology as he was likely to get, and that was all right with him. Having to apologize just hurt a man's pride and made him madder inside, which didn't help anything in the long run. Better to just let things go by.

He said quietly, “What is it, then?”

“I'm angry at myself. What are you doing down there? Get up.”

Texas sat next to him on the bed and offered, “Why not just be mad at the fans instead?”

“I am the one who has screwed up, Texas. I have failed from the day I came here. I wanted—”

“A person don't always get what they want.”

“Would you shut up and listen? I came here to be with people. Hang around with them, fix cars, play poker, tell jokes, drink beer with friends. Ride a roller coaster, throw a Frisbee, walk a dog, paint the porch, get caught in the rain with somebody, have a baby.”

Texas smiled, and Volos knew at once what he was thinking.

“Fucking right, I want to do that! You know I've never done it with a woman?”

“You're kidding.” Texas was genuinely surprised. “I thought you had all the bases covered.”

“How could I? Mercy would not let me, even if it wasn't that the wings get in the way. I've never even been on a real date. Or dancing. Or to lie on the beach.”

“Some of that stuff you can do,” Texas said. He remembered reading how Elvis did things. You're a rock star or a movie star, you want to go skating, you rent the whole rink. If Volos wanted a woman, Texas imagined he could rent one of those too. A high-class one, with the money he had.

“It is not just to do things.” Volos struggled to explain. “It is—it is that I wanted to be a person, and be with people, but everything keeps me away from them. My wings. This rock star thing.”

“You didn't plan on being a rock star?”

Volos sat silent.

“You never imagined yourself this way?”

Very softly the kid said, “Okay, so I did.”

Texas found that he felt irritated, unable to offer any sympathy. He said, “My mama always told me, watch what you wish for, you may get it.”

“Why, what were you wishing for? Your father?”

“No. I was mostly wishing nosy people would let me alone. Another thing my mama told me—things generally get worse before they get better.”

“What things?”

“Rock star things.” Texas described the death threat, watching the kid as he spoke, and feeling his irritation giving way to something like fatherly pride. Volos might be a prick sometimes, but he was a ballsy prick. At first his face grew very still, but a moment later he straightened, a fighter taking a stance, meeting a challenge.

Texas said, “Do you want to hire a different security man to deal with this? Somebody who really knows what he's doing?”

“Bullcrap, Texas. Nobody is going to watch my backside better than you do. The one who did not know what he was doing was me. I seem to want two things at once.”

“Well, that's human, kid.”

“Is it? Thank you. Then it is stupid of me to sit here moping.”

“That's human too.”

“Everything seems to be human. So what must I do?”

Texas shrugged. “Make up your mind, I guess. Are you going to be Volos the Unholy Head Banger or not?”

“I must choose.”

“Yes.”

He waited, watching the kid's wings, seeing them flare from gray into bonfire-orange, Halloween hard and bright. Sunrise orange, or sunset? Difficult to tell.

Volos stood up, facing himself in the big hotel mirror. Lifted his head to a cocky angle. Smiled, narrow-eyed. In one potent motion pulled the lamp out of the wall above the bed and hurled it, shattering the mirror, as if he did not like what he saw there.

“Jesus!” Texas sat where he was, too startled to move, not so much by the act as by the vehemence with which it was performed. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I am doing what rock stars do. And now I know why they do it.”

“Can't you think of something else rock stars do?”

“Certainly.” Volos began taking apart a desk chair with his hands. “They fuck groupies.”

“Besides that.”

Volos threw pieces of chair at what remained of his mirrored reflection and said, “They give goddamn interviews.”

METAL MAG
: Volos, do you intend your music as an affront to organized religion?

VOLOS
: No, but organized religion is an affront to me. I think it is jealous, like an old man with a young wife.

MM
: Jealous? Of what?

VOLOS
: Everyone knows what I mean, but no one will say it, that rock is its own religion. The preachers know, and are afraid.

MM
: Rock? A religion?

VOLOS
: Yes, very much so. We all know who are the high priests of rock and who are the rock gods. Look at the graffiti: “Elvis lives,” “Jim Morrison will come again.” These are our gods who will come back to save us. We all know the rock mythology. And we all know what are the icons of rock, what is the ancient symbol we worship.

MM
: Symbol?

VOLOS
: They used to set up lingams in India. Now they set them up in dressing rooms.

MM
: Um … so you really think of the rock music community as another religion in competition with …

VOLOS
: It is the most potent of all religions and it will swallow all the rest. And the earnest men in black suits know that. Someone has said “God is dead,” and it is true. Knowing it is true makes the earnest men quite desperate.

MM
: How will your rock religion swallow all the rest?

VOLOS
: It is already happening. In rock and roll the self is encompassing, we are all infinite. We are all made of fire and Stardust. We are in the universe and it is in us. Nothing transcends. Therefore there can be no God, God is dead, and we all dance for joy that we are alive. The old gods danced before sourmouth Yahweh was thought of, and new gods dance now that Yahweh is gone. We are all gods, and we dance.

MM
: But some gods, certain singers for instance, are more exalted than others?

VOLOS
: Elvis was a poor man's son. We called him the King, but he was one of us.

MM
: Where are you from, Volos?

VOLOS
: What does the bio say?

MM
: Mingo County, West Virginia.

VOLOS
: Then that's where.

MM
: Anything more you would like to say about your rock religion?

VOLOS
: Sha na na shee oooo. Prophecy lives. Rock speaks in tongues.

Even before Texas mentioned it, Angie had been wanting to experiment with makeup. Back in Jenkins, when the packets of coupons had come in the mail she had always looked at the enclosures, at Frederick's of Hollywood and Lose Weight Overnight and World of Beauty Introductory Offer, before she dutifully threw them away.

At a stopover somewhere between Reno and Phoenix she noticed a big, bright-colored Maybelline Starter Kit in a Valu-Mart where she had gone to buy Luvs for Mikey and also for Gabe, who was coming untrained because of all the mixed-up days and moving around. The price of disposable diapers was outrageous, making the Maybelline kit seem nothing by comparison. She bought it.

“Me want candy,” Gabe said.

“Candy!” shrilled Mikey.

“You don't need candy, guys.” Texas gave them too much of the sweet stuff already. Angie hugged both boys at once, her whole body fogged by a vague guilt. “You need lots of things, but not candy.” They needed to settle down in one place where they could sleep at night and play in the daytime and eat something besides pizza. That was what they needed to straighten them out, and they weren't likely to get it as long as Volos was on tour.

Yet she knew she could not leave Volos. Might as well pull out her heart and nail it to a tree. She would die.

Angie left the boys at the hotel with a roadie's wife, who had been brought along for that purpose. Grabbed a ride to the concert site with Texas, who was driving a little rental Chevette with overinflated tires that made it handle and feel like a farm Jeep. Took along her new toy concealed both in its plastic store bag and in her tote. Once she was done checking over the costumes she would have plenty of time to try it out in front of a dressing room mirror before somebody was ready to give her a ride back. She hoped the kit contained instructions.

It did not.

And nothing was as easy as it looked on TV, she discovered. The Ultra-Lash Mascara globbed her with Ebony Black from eyebrow to cheek the first time she tried it. The Passionflower Bronze lipstick smeared. Looking into the mirror at the splotched face of a stranger, she realized that she should have put on the foundation first.

Volos walked in.

“Paints!” he exclaimed in quick delight. The flat white plastic kit, with its brush slots and its tray of ten garish pressed-powder eyeshadows, did indeed look a lot like a kid's watercolor box.

“Makeup,” Angie told him faintly, hot with embarrassment. Caught in an essentially private and self-indulgent act, she felt as exposed as if he had barged in and found her naked. Yet his childlike pleasure did not let her feel that way for long.

“So, face paint!” Which was exactly what her poor wan mother, who had never so much as used lipstick on her pale, pursed mouth, would have called it. Eagerly Volos said, “Bitchin'! I love tacky colors. Angie, put some on me.”

He had not blinked at her own clownish appearance. She felt obliged to warn him. “I'm not very good at—”

“I don't care, Ange! Come on.” He sat down and grinned at her. His guitarists, passing in the hallway, rolled their eyes at each other, smiled, and came in to watch.

“Better put on some powder first,” suggested Red, “or some cream. Make the stuff easier to get off when you're done.”

Though it had hot troubled Angela in the least that Volos wanted to play with paints, it appalled her that this man, a fairly normal-looking man, should know about makeup. More than she did, anyway. She had not had an idea what the powder was for.

With the minuscule puff provided, she dabbed some on Volos. He had stopped grinning and sat with lidded eyes. The shivering colors of pleasure, pink and peach and sky-yellow, ran down his wings.