Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “I can’t deal with this,” Hoot said.

  Larque stared back at him. “What’s to deal with? I can take this thing off.”

  “I still can’t deal with it.”

  The unfortunate circumstance was, bedtime had caught her with her penis on. She had impatiently waited until the boys were in their rooms before she shut herself in the bathroom to try it out, and her experimentation had gone even better than she expected. Especially with the aid of some hand lotion. Her new toy was so much fun, in fact, that she kept playing far longer than she had planned, and even when Sky had come into the bathroom, right through the locked door, the doppelganger’s presence had not perturbed her for more than a moment. Let the kid watch. The whole thing was after all Sky’s idea, and the child’s interest reminded her fondly of playing doctor with some forgotten neighborhood bad girl, lo these many years ago.

  “Told you it was fun being a boy.” Sky smirked most obnoxiously, savoring victory. Larque didn’t mind.

  “I’m going to start spelling my name Lark,” she announced. “L-A-R-K.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “I have to get myself a cowboy hat.” She wanted a low-slung sporty black one, like Shadow’s.

  “Black,” Sky agreed.

  Lark went on with what she was doing. She had never quite realized, or cognitively grasped as Doris would have it, that men have orgasms every single blasted time. What a bite. Though to be fair she had to remember they had a lot of performance anxiety too. They always had to get it up.

  Which was evidently not going to be a problem for her. When Hoot came upstairs, there she stood in the bedroom naked except for her Calvin Kleins (brand new, courtesy of Shadow) and even though her husband was fully clothed and scowling at her, she was having an erection just from loving him. And it showed. The erection more so than the love. Choosing her penis, Lark had followed the same guidelines as for selecting a diamond ring, going for the most sizable one she felt she could wear without looking tacky. She loved it, and she loved the way it felt right now.

  She loved her new body, too, which she was purposely showing off, which was not only slim and strong but hard and built, with solid pecs, a ridged slab of abs, altogether a torso to die for. She was better-looking than her own teenage son, and had told him so. At which point he had informed her she looked like a butch dyke and had slammed off to his room, nearly sobbing. It had genuinely surprised Lark that Hoot and the boys had raised such a fuss and commotion when she came home. It surprised her that they did not know her, that they needed Sky’s presence at her side to convince them she was who she said she was. She felt like herself all right, only more so than before—what was the problem? But apparently they thought of her being female as if that were more than just a bodily thing; they defined her somehow by the cushy contours of her flesh; they thought that an accidental gender distinction was her somehow, when really, from Lark’s point of view, it didn’t have much to do with who she was at all. They were vastly upset. Even after she grumpily went upstairs and put on her breasts for supper and stored her new penis in her top dresser drawer until later, they did not seem consoled.

  “I don’t care who you say you are,” Hoot was fulminating now, “you look like a queer to me, and you’re not getting in my bed.”

  “It’s my bed too.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Fine. Just for that I’ll keep this on.” Like Madonna gesturing onstage she indicated her crotch, which had gone slack. She no longer felt loving. “Be that way.”

  “You can keep it on and I’ll tell you what else you can do,” Hoot bellowed. “First thing in the morning you can take it back where you got it. And you get yourself put back the way you were, or else don’t expect to live in this house with me. You hear me, Larque?”

  “That’s Lark spelled L-A-R-K. You’re thinking it wrong.”

  “I’ll think it any way I fucking like! I’m thinking a few other things too! You want to hear them?”

  She did not. Felt like she was going to cry—goddammit, cowboys didn’t cry. Managing to glare instead, she grabbed all the blankets off the bed with one swift tug, which felt good; she would not have been able to do it before. Snagging her shirt and jeans in her other hand, she strode out, kicking the door shut with a bang behind her.

  Downstairs, Sky welcomed her with a smile. A reward for her defiance, Lark recognized. She threw the blankets on the sofa and sat beside them, staring down at her own strong-boned feet with a shaky sigh. It was hard to accept that Hoot’s loving tolerance of her peculiarities, on which she had depended so long, had its limits. But facing that, she faced what she had to do. There really was no choice.

  “Well, kiddo,” she told Sky once she had her voice under control, “it was nice while it lasted.”

  Silence. Lark looked up. Sky’s smile was gone—the little girl’s face had closed over like a frozen lake. At once Lark realized she had blown it. Cripes, she shouldn’t have said anything, not when she needed the doppelganger’s cooperation.

  She showed those great straight teeth of hers in a boyish grin. Purposely turning her voice bright she said, “Hey, it ain’t over yet. It’s still nice.” She said, “Hey, Sky. Whatever became of that little star?”

  Sky did not fall for it. “What little star?” she mumbled.

  “You know. That little metal star you borrowed from me.” The little metal star that let her find Popular Street. Once might have been a coincidence, but two times looked more like cause and effect. Lark had a feeling she was going to need the thing to get back to the Magic Makeover.

  Sky was smiling again, like icicles this time.

  “You still have it?” Lark could tell she did. She knew that look. “Give it here.”

  Sky shook her head.

  “Sky, give it!”

  The little girl sneered in fear and edged away. Her frail-looking body shook. But at the same time she challenged, “So you can go ruin everything? You promised you’d do what I said!”

  “That was just for then.”

  “No, it wasn’t! It’s for always!”

  “No, it’s not. Sky, I can’t. You heard Hoot.” Probably the whole neighborhood had heard Hoot. “My marriage is gonna go splat down the john if I don’t get put back the way I was.”

  “So you’ll do what he says, but you won’t do what I say!”

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  Being a boy, or at least a physical approximation of a boy, let Lark take quick action when Larque would probably have sat on her overweight ass and argued and coaxed. Shooting off the sofa, Lark grabbed the brat. Sky jumped up at the same time, and although Lark’s hands caught her by the arms, they then slid right through her. Damn. She’s a spirit. I keep forgetting. Should have expected that. What was surprising was the half an instant of first contact, when for just an eyeblink it had felt almost as if Sky were solid and could be held.

  Sky danced away and between two insubstantial fingers held up a glinting thing—the star. “You want it, you come and get it!” she sang and, as if lifted on wings of her own daring, she darted out the front door, into the night.

  Lark swore. Shadow must have put some new vocabulary into her—she swore more effectively than ever before, and the swearing did not slow her down as she reached to pull on her jeans and shirt. No boobs, no bra, thank Shadow. No socks, no boots either, dammit. They were up in the bedroom with Hoot, who was probably lying there wide-awake and hulking and skulking, blanketless and too cussed to go to the cedar hutch and find himself any covers. No way in cold old hell was Lark going back into that bedroom where she would be reminded of wanting Hoot.

  The nights were not very chilly now, in April. Not hesitating even to grab her wallet, Lark ran out barefoot after the doppelganger.

  Far down the street she could see the small white-bloused back receding. She ran after it. Her legs felt different than before, tireless, springy. It did not take her long to catch up with a runaway t
en-year-old.

  Or maybe Sky wanted her to catch up. Because by the time she reached the infuriating kid, with her anger blown away by running and the pavement cool under her feet and the stars all around her weightless head, Lark had half forgotten Hoot and half remembered a few details from a time long before she had known Hoot. She remembered she had always wanted to walk on cool dewy bare feet, in weather no one else had considered suitable. She remembered she had always wanted to run outside without her coat or hat or mittens or purse or keys. She remembered she had always wanted to go out and wander in the night. First she had been too young, under Mommy’s orders to go to bed and stay there. And later she had been afraid. Women who went out into the night, who unwisely let themselves be in the wrong place at the wrong time, could be raped.

  Well, she wasn’t a woman anymore. She was a cocksure, strong-fisted, hard-ass certified pistol-toting young prick, strutting by Sky’s side, and being one of those felt almost as good as what she’d been doing in the locked bathroom.

  For a moment she felt profoundly grateful to Sky for being a pain in the butt: It would have been really stupid, really a waste, to stay inside and sleep on the sofa this night, this probably-one-and-only night when she was a guy.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Sky glanced over at her with a pixie grin that plainly commented So you ’re finally getting it. “I just want to see what goes on,” she said.

  “What goes on at night.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Lark remembered: bedtime had always been early, no matter what, leaving plenty of time for a small girl to lie awake and wonder. There had been manifestations of night seen by day: black-rubber graphics left by tires on gray pavement, bullet stars in speed-limit signs, beer cans, graffiti. Smashed mailboxes. Toppled tombstones. Once, a strange small object her mother would not explain, lying at the edge of the roadway in the chill morning light. Dark and immense things moved at night. The police cars were out there in the parking lots, nose to tail like horses, talking. Immense trucks rolled sidewalk to sidewalk when the streets were empty. Sirens blew. Wind blew the moon around. Shoutings flew through the dark. Milk appeared on the porch, people died, babies happened somehow. Something vast and adult and mysterious happened at night.

  Sky started walking stiff-legged on her toes, then hop-scotched a few steps, then began to skip. Briefly Lark thought of asking her if she was cold. Dumb. Spirits don’t get cold. The kid was happy, high on adventure, that was all. Her whole body lilted with skipping. She flung out her skinny arms as if the starlight were sunshine.

  Lark noticed that she herself was not cold either.

  There were no people on the sidewalks, few cars on the streets. Television shone ice blue through the shut-out-the-world slats of somebody’s Venetian blinds. A mile away on the main highway a truck jake-braked like thunder. No bullets flew, but somewhere in the dark sky sounded cries that always tugged at Lark’s heart: wild geese were flying. Even though she thought she would not be able to see them in the night, Lark looked up, and there they were, startlingly so, their vee gliding huge across the sky like a visitant, angel white in the citylight.

  “Sky,” she whispered.

  The little girl glanced up and shrugged, unimpressed. “Nothing’s happening,” she complained.

  The geese were moving fast, gone within a moment. In silence Lark and Sky walked on. Okay, we’re in the tree streets, Lark noted. They passed Pine, Elm, Cherry. Bucolic names, but not one actual tree stood anywhere—these streets were stony valleys between row houses that crowded them like canyon walls, shadowed them like cliffs.

  At the far end of a block were voices, men moving, the ruddy glow of a Budweiser sign.

  “Let’s go see!” Sky urged.

  Lark already saw, between her and the neon light, a magnificent ass in motion, slim shoulders, a desperado hat—she’d know them anywhere, even in silhouette at midnight. Shadow was walking down there.

  Striding, rather. Like a gunfighter heading toward the showdown. And as Lark opened her mouth to tell Sky who it was, somebody lunged out of somewhere and hit him hard enough to fold him over.

  A fight! There was a real fight happening.

  Well-hung young pricks can be afraid too, Lark discovered. She was in fact scared right down to her long strong bones, because what was happening to Shadow could happen to her, too, no matter how male she got. Yet some sort of trumpet call in her heart sent her running toward the danger rather than away.

  She rushed forward as they hit him again—there were four of them, men in bruise-colored clothing, blue jeans, black boots, black jackets. Shadow could not do squat against all four of them. Two were holding him by the arms, and the other two were systematically beating him up.

  Lark piled full tilt into striking fists. Afterward, looking back, what impressed her most was not the pain but the stench. She had not known hatred possessed an odor, a smell like a darker form of fear, so choking it made her scream—but the scream came out a fierce shout. Her body seemed to know things about fighting despite the commotion going on in her head. Evidently magic makeovers really worked. Her fists were striking as hard as anybody’s—and then when the faces threatened her, the hating faces twisted way out of shape, she struck at them not with her hard-knuckled hands but with her bare upkicking feet. At the same time she cried out again, this time in delight, because she did really really know how to dance; it was all a dance, a dance of hatred, and Shadow had seen to it that she could dance so hard and so high it felt like flying. And they had let go of Shadow to attack her, he was on his feet and punching—not very well—and Sky was there, getting in the way—no, maybe not in the way after all. Maybe of some use, because the first time one of the bruise-colored men tried to whack her aside, his hand passed right through her, his face turned pale, he froze where he was, and Lark nailed him.

  “Boogerhead,” Sky told him, and she launched herself at another one, soaring up—Lark hadn’t known the doppelganger could do that. The man’s face passed through the small girl’s skirted belly, and he screamed like a steam whistle.

  After that it was over quickly. They cleared out, all four of them, and the street lay empty except for Lark and Sky and Shadow, who was leaning against the bar’s brick wall, hugging himself and softly groaning.

  “You all right?” Lark asked him. Stupid question. Of course he was not all right. He couldn’t even look at her. “We’d better get you to the hospital,” she said.

  Shadow shook his head. “Change the sign,” he whispered.

  “Huh?”

  With great effort he lifted his head, tilting it toward the corner. “Change—the sign,” he told her, forcing out the words past pain. “Chalk—in my pocket.”

  She stared at him, realized there was no time to stand there staring at him, and moved to do what he said without yet understanding how or why. Slipping her hand into the jeans pocket he indicated with a stiff motion of his fingers, she found a cat’s-eye marble, a wooden ring, a penny, and then the chalk. She started to feel shaky in reaction to the fight. Fought the feeling off and headed toward the corner, thinking, What sign? Change it how?

  “Do you know what he means?” she called to Sky.

  The little girl had picked up Shadow’s hat, which had been stepped on, shook the dirt off it and stuck it on her own head, prancing around. She gave no sign of having heard, but just looking at her, Lark grinned. Making contact with the kid, now she knew. The green street sign said in white letters POPLAR STREET. She chalked in a single simple stroke, a U.

  An odd twinge, a sort of atom-by-atom dislocation, flowed through her body as everything changed. The whole street was a different place now, bright-colored and full of life and lit up like Christmas. New Wave music poured out the open door of Araby, near which Shadow leaned. In the middle of the street, Sky danced, a goblin in broad-brim hat and oversized oxfords. With the chalk still in her hand Lark was standing by the corner shop, the Bareback Rider.

  Pr
opping himself upright with one hand against the wall, Shadow tottered toward her. Lark ran to help him, slinging his other arm over her shoulders.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

  “Home,” he panted.

  “Where’s that?”

  He didn’t answer. No need. Popular Street had people on it even in the night, and they knew him, and somebody had already run to knock and shout at the door. Hurrying toward them came the tall man in pearl and silver, the white-hat cowboy, calling out, “Baby, what happened?”

  “Gay bashers,” Shadow told him in a tight voice.

  “Fuck it, how many times have I told you to go around, use the sign at the other end?” Supporting Shadow on the other side from Lark, he sounded more distressed than angry. “But nooo, you’ve got to strut right past them. Proud bitch. No fucking sense. How bad is it?”

  “Just—shut up and help me.…”

  They were already helping him, up a stairway to the apartment over the Bareback Rider shop. Inside, Lark got an impression of track lighting and lots of good-quality Western art—some early Doolittle prints, maybe even a Lougheed or two. Something about the art and the scrupulously dust-free feather-and-silk-flower arrangements raised an odd clamor in Lark’s heart, an ache she could not account for. But there was no time to stop and examine the art or the feeling; Shadow was leaning heavily on her shoulder. She supported him the few necessary steps farther to the bedroom and its king-size water bed, where she and the white-hat cowboy eased him down on top of what looked like an expensive Navaho blanket. White Hat did not seem to care if it got bloodstained. He seemed half-panicked. “Get some ice!” he ordered Lark.

  She found some in the clean, clean kitchen and made up two packs in plastic bags. When she brought them to White Hat he took one without looking at her, intent on Shadow.

  “What hurts the worst?” He had unbuttoned the injured man’s shirt and was running his hands gently over his ribs, looking for damage.