Metal Angel (24 page)

The next day Volos did not remember what had been done to him, but merely said, “I saw colors, but they did not feel good. Also, it seems this acid has made me sore all over.”

Mercedes knew better than to ask him to take it again. His own fault, for losing control. He would have to watch himself, remembering to focus on his long-term goals.

“Heroin,” he explained to Volos the next time. “Smack. The ultimate.”

“Mercy, the ultimate experience of life is death.”

“Yes … well, there is a chance of that.”

“And the other chance?”

“Ecstasy.”

Sitting on the bed in yet another beige hotel room, Volos looked steadily into his eyes, like a comrade in some obscure war. Mercedes kneeled in front of him holding the rubber tube and the hypodermic.

“With a needle in my arm,” Volos said slowly.

“Yes.”

“In my blood.”

“Yes, Vo. And then in mine.” Ah, the mystic brotherhood. Mindful of its power, Mercedes invoked it, watched Volos for its effect, saw the singer's gaze fix raptly on him, and knew that he had won him over.

“Make a fist,” he instructed.

It was not difficult to find a vein on that lean, hard arm. Mercy shot Volos nearly the whole fix, leaving little for himself. But the precaution was not necessary. As he pulled the needle out, Volos slumped sideways and rolled off the bed, unconscious.

“Shit!” Probably Volos had not even experienced the rush. It was that fucking unpredictable physique of his that wouldn't respond right to drugs. The sonuvabitch probably hadn't “imagined himself” as a junkie. He would wake up in a few hours as indifferent to smack as he was to marching powder.

Mercedes let him lie on the floor as he washed the rest of his expensive treat down the drain. He really did not want to mess with heroin himself. Cocaine was a much classier addiction. He allowed himself a line of it, then went out and found a stranger willing to sexually relieve him in the men's room of the local bowling alley, then came back and went to bed.

Volos still lay sprawled on the floor when he got up, and he began to worry. If Volos missed the sound check, somebody would come looking for him. Mercedes tried cold water and pinching without any satisfactory result. But an hour later, on his own and without preamble, Volos came to.

“Mercy,” he whispered. He got up, his face red and stippled from contact with the carpet but smiling. “Mercedes! Is it the next day?”

“Yes.”

“I have never felt anything like that! Suddenly I was sleeping. Was I sleeping?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“For all that time?”

“Of course.”

“But—but it felt wonderful. I was—it was as if I was not at all. It was oblivion. Yet here I am. Do you see?”

“Yes, Vo. Certainly.”

What Mercedes actually saw was his future brightening. He began to answer Volos's smile. “So you like being asleep,” he said.

“Yes. It is a wonderful letting go. It is—such freedom.”

Volos could not completely explain why the heroin experience had so deeply excited and delighted him, how Mercy's magic needle had sent him to a shadow-land entirely new to him, how he had wandered, lost as a soul, and sometimes found dreams. Awake, he remembered no more than the edges of the dreams, but he felt hope: to sleep, to experience this facsimile of death, was perhaps to be more human, more a part of the mortal world. To sleep, perchance to dream—it was perchance to belong. Perchance even someday to catch a dream in music and words, to write a song of his own.

Being human was turning out to be not at all as he had envisioned it. This thing of trying drugs, for instance. He had expected that to take place at wild parties, amid chaos and heavy music and maybe clusterfucking, and instead here he was being dosed by Mercedes as if taking instruction at an archon's wing, learning drugs one by one like questions in a catechism. It was so tame. He was so tame. Where were the parties? He was a rock star on tour, it should be all parties and after-concert crumpets, and instead it was all work and Mercy and a soft-spoken sweet-faced woman and her two little boys.

He had come down in order to rebel; he tried and tried to be bad, but those who were truly bad saw through him and scorned him. The true heavy-metal rockers called him a pussy rocker, a wimp in disguise. And they were right; he loved his own body too much. At one point he had thought of having tattoos, he had contemplated entwining a blue-ink serpent around the base of his left wing, or wearing a flaming heart on his chest, or “MERCY” in script on his shoulder. But there had been no guts in him to alter his smooth dun skin. He had contemplated also the holes for ornaments, the piercing of ears or nose or lips or nipples, and he had not been able to make himself do these small mutilations either, not even so much as one hole in one ear to take a silver swinging devil. Some rockers destroyed themselves with alcohol or drugs or sorrows, and Volos had not given up on those ideas. He was trying the Jack Daniels, the smack. But he suspected himself of being a craven wearing wolf's clothing, because in his heart he knew liquor and drugs would not affect him much. Sorrow would affect him more. He had not yet made occasion to try sorrow.

He was always finding the limits of his own wickedness. Aside from loving his own dusky flesh, he perhaps loved Angie. And, in a different way, he loved the very world she moved in. He loved the people he met, all of them, the girl lifting her crop-top to flash her breasts at him, the old poodle-haired woman scowling at him out a tour-bus window, the young man driving a Porsche with one hand at his crotch, the worried middle-aged storekeeper chasing skateboarders off his parking lot, the mouth-breathing kids on the boards, the gum-chewing cashiers, all of them, all. The do-gooders picketing his shows, and the booing kids mobbing the pickets. And he loved the towns they all lived in, with the Movie Shak and the B-Tan Tanning Salon and the old factory turned into apartments or mini-storage, the Cut-Rate Food Mart and the Foursquare Gospel Church and an unmarked house in some back street where women named Bambi and Crystal and Lou Beth were available. He liked Lou Beth, though she did not like him and wanted nothing to do with a queer in wings. He liked the movies he rented at the Shak. He even liked church bells. He no longer really wanted to insult or appall anyone.

Except Yahweh, Jehovah, Elohim, Tetragrammaton. Except God. But that holy name alone was enough to keep him trying: the liquor, the drugs. Perhaps soon the sorrow.

Texas had never abused controlled substances in his life. But even though he drank little and used no drugs, the road trip between Wichita and Toledo was largely a blur to him. All the towns, all the hotels, all the interstates began to look alike to him, and he hated them all. There was too much work: set up, work the concert, strike the set, move on, do it all again. Never enough sleep for anyone.

He worried about Angie. Especially for her there had not been enough sleep. Mikey had a cold with fever high enough to keep him peevish but not high enough to bother calling a doctor for. He kept her up most nights. Volos was no help. It bothered Texas that the kid seemed so oblivious to people's problems. He pestered Angie for kisses between sets, got puppy-eyed when she lost her temper at him, didn't seem to understand, didn't stay around long enough for her to explain. Was spending his nights with Mercedes again. Texas felt as if he had about had it with Volos.

Though, to be fair, it wasn't just Volos, Texas had to admit. Whatever was eating at him had a lot to do with geography. As the states became day by day smaller, more eastern, more crowded together, he grew as cranky as Angie's ailing child. Burning Earth was scheduled to make no stop in West Virginia, was only to cut through the state's knife-blade tip on the way to Pittsburgh, but the closer Texas got to his home the more something seemed to tug at him like a fishhook caught under his heart. On the bus he paced the aisles until the roadies swore at him, yelling that they were trying to sleep. Even in a hotel bed he lay with eyes wide burning open.

To sleep. God. To sleep, perchance to dream.

He was lying in his room outside Toledo trying to do just that when Volos barged in. Texas heard him coming. He had heard Angie's voice in the hallway as she chased Volos out of her room so that she could put her little boys and herself down for naps. He knew Mercedes had gone off to have a massage and manicure, for God's sake. He knew he was what was left. Good old Texas. Third choice.

And sure enough, here came Volos in the door, his battery charged, as usual, and color pulsing in his wings. Bright-eyed. Wanting somebody to talk with.

“Texas, I have heard a joke. Why did the chicken cross the road? To show the opossum it could be done.”

In another mood and at another time Texas probably would have appreciated this down-home offering. But at this time and in this funk he growled, “Kid, for Chrissake, I'm trying to sleep.” God, he hated insomnia. He hated everything.

Volos stopped where he was and looked at him wide-eyed. “It takes trying? I thought sleeping was something humans did like breathing.”

“Jesus. Where you been?”

The kid took this literally. “With Mercy. Texas, listen.” Volos came forward and inflicted himself on the edge of the bed. “That reminds me. About sleeping. Do you remember that first time we met? When my wing gave me suffering?”

Texas found that he did not entirely hate everything after all. His voice grew quieter. “ 'Course I remember, kid.”

“You were good to me.” Volos smiled the half-smile of a pensive child. Later, Texas would remember that smile, knowing he was not to see it again.

“I tried to be.”

“You were so—you were so mothering. You held me and stroked my back, remember? To help me go to sleep. It took a long time. Do you remember?”

“Yeah, son.” Very softly. He remembered, all right, but he hadn't thought Volos did. He felt his tired heart inflame with love for him.

Volos said, “Why did you not just give me what Mercy gives me to make me sleep?”

It was as if a knife had come out of nowhere to stab that swollen heart. Texas lunged up on his hands and sat straight, staring with hard red-lidded eyes. Found it necessary to remind himself of the importance of control. Very quietly he asked, “Mercedes been giving you some kind of pills?”

“Is it possible to do it with pills too? That would be easier. Mercy does it with a needle in my arm.”

Texas grabbed him by the shoulder, hard. Startled, Volos pulled back from him, but Texas kept hold. The fingers would bruise. In a day there would be five black marks on the smooth dun skin. Texas did not care.

He barely managed the word. “Heroin?”

Keeping a wide-eyed gaze on him, Volos nodded.

“Jesus Christ!” To hell with control. Texas thrust with both arms, sending the kid thumping off his bed onto the floor. Fists clenched, he stood over him. Who cared that he was barefoot, bare-bellied, dressed only in Stetson and baggy boxer shorts, he could still punish the hell out of this winged punk. “Jesus buggering Christ! Are you out of your mind? You let that faggot shoot you up with smack?”

Without answering, Volos got to his feet, eyes narrow now, wings flooding crimson. Angry? Hurt? Texas hoped so. He wanted somebody besides himself to be angry and in pain. The memories of his dope addict father were beating at him, and he was raging.

“A junkie! Christ, you want to be a junkie? You might as well go flush yourself down the john, Volos. Now I know why they pitched you out of where you were. You're sewage. You're a piece of shit. Get away from me.”

Volos did not move. “I am not a junkie,” he said. He kept the words low, but they came out tight from between compressed lips.

Texas did not keep his voice down; he was screaming. Everyone on the floor could hear him. “What the devil you call it? You're done, Volos. You get that crap in you, you're gone, shot to hell. You're no better than—”

“No, that is not true. For you, yes, maybe, but not for me.”

“I don't care! Fuck it! You're not human, then. And you're never going to be human. You're—”

“Texas. Stop.” Volos's voice was shaking, and so was the rest of him, and his wings had gone thunder-dark, like his eyes. “You're hurting me.”

“I want to hurt you! You selfish prick, I'd like to take you and beat the shit out of you!”

“You said you never wanted to hurt me.” Very softly, but there was no tremor any more in Volos. His voice had gone cat smooth and black as thin ice. “You have been my friend, and now you are betraying me.”

“So run to Mercy. He'll make it all better.”

“Snake,” Volos whispered. “Judas.”

“You should talk. Get out of my face. I don't want to look at you.” Done shouting, Texas felt dead tired and half sick. He turned away, wanting only to be left alone to—yes, lick his wounds. It hurt him like fire, what the kid had gone and done. Heroin. Christ have mercy.

He heard no door close. Turned back again. Volos was still there.

“Get out of here!” Once he had had a few hours to calm down, Texas knew, then he would want to talk with the kid. He would do everything he could to help him get off the junk. But right now he couldn't stand the sight of him.

In a voice hard as bone Volos said to him, “You don't tell me what to do, McCardle.”

Texas looked again. It was a black angel of wrath that stood there.

Wrath of God, wrath of the devil, it hardly mattered; anger was anger and power was power, and this tall rebel out of heaven had both. Lightning flickering under his dark brows. Thunder in his black, lifted wings. No one had ever before seen those wings truly black, but they were black now, as black as night when no stars shine. Texas took a step back.

The angel said softly, “It is you who will leave, McCardle.”

Texas knew by the feel of his backbone that he was getting old, dammit. Wasn't about to get into a pissing contest with a skunk. Had better sense.