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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 …
    â€œBring you another?” the bartender asked.
    â€œOkay. 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 morning. 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