Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  A bright red, multifaceted bit of broken taillight shone in the gutter. Lark picked it up and walked around a corner into Popular Street.

  There were no cars cruising now. The gawkers, being virtuous people, were home at this unseemly hour. No pickets, either. Hoot didn’t like his wife to go traipsing around at night. Probably the V.W. was snug in bed with him.

  Popular Street had dim, old-fashioned streetlamps, not incandescent white snakes in the sky. Between the scattered lamps, shadows took over. The darkness felt good.

  Walking past, Lark did not even look up at the apartment over the Bareback Rider to see if there was a light on. She did not much like being even this close to Argent and Shadow. Her feeling of confidence that she could handle her love of him had left her, gone with daylight. If she had known where there was another gay bar, she would have ventured there instead. But Araby was the only place she knew where she might get what she wanted, or what she thought she wanted: if she could not have Shadow, then by damn she could at least get some use out of her expensive toy, the new feel-good jack-in-the-box that was going to cost her everything she had.

  The darkness was right for this place in the night. Striding down the dim sidewalks, Lark felt all the glory and defiance of being—whatever she was. A homosexual male? A rebel woman? Same difference. She was Other, and always had been. A gay male is a person with a secret shame if he is silent, a stigma if he speaks out, and a woman is pretty much the same. False to herself if she plays the game. A target otherwise. So it feels good to go out in the shielding night to a place where the secret few meet, the others alone in their otherness, and take the cautious comfort they have to offer.

  Araby was not spilling out into the street tonight. Perhaps the penetrations of the day had made it afraid, causing it to discover modesty and let its skirts down. The music came muted through closed doors.

  But they opened to let Lark in.

  The room glowed with a dim red light full of gray shadows in which men sat. It was not that different from any other bar, really. Gender didn’t matter; in a bar in the night we are all Cinderella trying to stay warm in the ashes, waiting patiently for the prince to come.

  As Lark entered she felt heads turn toward her, eyes scanning the chiseled line of her chin, the hard just-right wedge of her torso, the slim hips, high tush, slight suggestive bulge under her fly. But others had bodies just as hard, shapely, slim. She felt minds finding her desirable mostly because she was new and, therefore, carried hope in with her. If not the prince, she might be a facsimile to believe in for a little while.

  She had no money to order a drink, and not much sense of propriety left anyway. Standing just inside the door like a gunfighter, she scanned the room and chose her man—big, blond, legs like pillars in old blue jeans, thick wrists, slow hands. Not much smile. More substance. She went straight to him as if she knew him and did not bother with some sort of a line, just looked.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Who cares?” she countered.

  “You clean?” He was worried about AIDS.

  “Fresh from Shadow’s hands. You?”

  He gave a single slow nod. “Just wanted to be sure, babe. Been a lot of strange people going through.”

  Probably none stranger than me.

  He led her out the back door to the alley—Christ, there was an alley behind Popular Street, an implication Lark had not known about or dreamed of. Up front, all the brave bright gaiety, but behind, this backside, this dark exciting place of gropings and quickies. The big-tush blond man took Lark by the wrist and led her to a shadowed crevice between two brick buildings. There was no kissing. He went down on his knees first, jerking her pants down around her booted ankles, his big fingers spreading the cheeks of her buttocks as he mouthed her cock, and she found herself caressing his head as if she loved him while she gasped with pleasure.

  There were other people in the alley, other couples. It was a hidden place, yet open—no doors to lock, no roof. Night air felt icy on bare wet skin. In the shadows across the way Lark saw a pale flash of hipbone, heard someone panting in a climax like hers. The man might be looking back at her. God might be looking down from the black sky. Both ideas excited her rather than otherwise. Her thighs shuddered, her body arched so that her head tilted back and she was grinning up at God as she came.

  Her ecstasy had fully roused her partner. She liked what she found inside his faded jeans, but did not have a chance to do much before he was finished.

  “Shit,” he complained, zipping himself.

  “You first next time,” she told him.

  “You’re on, darlin’.” He patted the portion of her body that most pointedly defined her as male and desirable to him, then went back into the bar, leaving her there.

  Lark looked around. Street light defined the ends of the alley, shadows its belly. All along its length she could see movement, the glimmer of naked skin, men coupling with one another. And she had been one of them a moment before. The taste of her partner was still in her mouth, the good steamy smell of him in her nostrils. Why, then, did she now feel desolate, as if she were standing in the middle of a desert all alone?

  She could go in, she could go back into Araby and be with him again.

  No. It would not be valid. She had chosen him because he resembled Hoot, she now realized for the first time.

  Fine. She could go back in and try again with another.

  But she did not move.

  A couple, fully clothed, stepped out of the shadows, but lingered in the white-lighted rectangle of the alley’s far end as if on the stage of their own private passion play. This, or a place like this, might have been where it all began for them. One man, all in white, his pearly Stetson in his hand. The other, a slash of black in a leather hat worthy of an outlaw. Argent and Shadow.

  They faced one another. They embraced. Long and deeply, they kissed.

  Watching, Lark felt circuit breakers blowing in her mind. Zzzzaaapp. Kapow. Now it all seemed to make a heartbreaking sort of sense.

  It was not just that Shadow and Argent were back together tonight, leaving her stranded on the far corner of the love triangle. It was more because the position felt very familiar. She had been assuming it ever since she was a little girl. It was the stance of any female in a male world—or rather, outside that world, looking in. There they stood lip-locked, her father and his lover, a metaphor for all the men she knew. They kissed themselves. Women were meant to worship and adore; as far as Lark could see that night, there was no real love in any man for a woman, whether or not she wore a dong.

  Who loves ya, baby? Skylark had wanted to be a cowboy. But the limitation of that concept was “boy.”

  And it was a pretty damn stupid concept anyway, when you thought about it. Which Lark did; she thought about it for a moment, and in that moment a third figure stood with Shadow and Argent, a doppelganger figure, naked, plump, cherubic, about three feet high, with a teeny weenie—undeniably, a boy—and cow horns. Cow ears. A cow tail. Cow hooves for hands.

  Still kissing, Shadow and Argent had not noticed. The cow boy doppelganger pawed at their pressed-together thighs to get their attention.

  It was satisfying to see them jump apart, yet some heavy and desperate feeling in Lark would not let her laugh. She turned her back and walked toward the other end of the alley, barely noticing as she passed a couple deep in fellatio. Turning the corner, she tossed her bright chip of plastic back into the gutter. Suddenly wild with urgency, she broke stride, ran to the Toyota, pushed its speed parameters all the way back to Doris’s house.

  “A cow boy,” Argent grumbled. “Cute.” The thing was gone now, after having startled the crap out of him, almost literally. “Very funny,” he said, but he was not laughing.

  Shadow, who hardly ever laughed, was doing so, shouting with reckless throaty laughter.

  “What was she doing here? I hope she gets herpes,” Argent complained, angry, but at the same time his heart warmed be
cause Shadow was laughing. It was like listening to a downpour of deep-voiced summer rain after dry weather. He loved this man.

  Shadow finished laughing and smiled like a rainbow. “Admit it, Argent,” he said, “Larque’s a by-damn get-down-and-kiss-my-grits pistol. Who else can rumple you up the way she does? You’re proud of her.”

  Argent was not ready to admit any such thing. He walked toward home, and Shadow walked beside him. Argent looked sometimes at his lover, sometimes up at the stars.

  “You’re crazy about her,” Shadow told him. “You’re going to leave her your fortune someday.”

  Argent studied the darkness in the dome of the sky.

  Very quietly Shadow said, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to accept that you love her.”

  “Who are you crazy about?” Argent shot back at him. “Who do you love?”

  Now Shadow looked up at the darkness between the stars.

  When Lark got back, Sky was still lying on the sofa with Doris’s front-lawn security light shining in the picture window on her like an invitation to heaven. Standing less than a foot away, Lark watched the little girl’s thin, slack face, far too pale. She listened until she felt sure of Sky’s shallow breathing. Then her own relief made her recognize her dread. She had been afraid she would find Sky either dead or gone.

  “Sky?” she whispered.

  The little girl did not open her eyes, but sobbed in her sleep.

  “Sky.” Gently Lark lifted the doppelganger’s head and shoulders, then eased herself under them so that she was sitting on the sofa and holding Sky in her arms. The little girl sobbed again with a dry, frail sound, but did not wake. She seemed to have no body heat at all. One of her hands rested against Lark’s chest, random and weightless, like a sere leaf some winter wind had blown there.

  “Please don’t die, honey,” Lark whispered, hugging her, cradling her. “Don’t go away. My God, you’re all I’ve got.”

  It was too damn true. Sky had been with her longer than anybody, since day one. Sky knew about the times she had looked at her own pudenda with the hand mirror. Sky remembered not being allowed to snack between meals, and stealing honey by the grimy fingerload from the jars in the basement storage room. Sky remembered asking for the big box of sixty-four crayons with the built-in sharpener, and having to settle for the box of forty-eight instead. Sky had been made to recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by heart. Sky understood what it meant to want to be a cowboy. Clear-eyed, Sky understood her completely, better than Hoot ever would, better even than Shadow did. Tears stung Lark’s eyes, because if this little one, her second self, couldn’t love her and stay with her, then who the hell could? She had done everything Sky wanted. If Sky didn’t love her now—

  Wait a screwy moment. Sky was her. Part of her, dying.

  And who cared? Who loved Sky?

  Who loved this child in her arms? The one she had carried forgotten inside her for so many years?

  “I’m with you, baby,” Lark whispered. “We’re both in this together.” The words tore at her voice. Tears slid down over her handsome cheekbones and dropped onto Sky’s pale face. With a thin, peevish wail of protest, Sky tried to move her head away from the wetness, but Lark tightened her hold on the little girl’s bony shoulders.

  “Wake up,” she said huskily. “You’ve slept enough, dammit.” So what if it was two o’clock in the morning? That was when most babies got born anyway, wasn’t it? “Sky, come alive.”

  She looked down to see the little girl staring back at her coldly. In the dim light those steely eyes resembled the business end of a double-barreled shotgun aimed by a steady hand. “Why?” Sky inquired.

  “Because I …” It would have been hard for Lark to get the words out even if she wasn’t crying. “Look,” she managed finally, “if somebody has to care about you, I guess I could do it.”

  “Thank you ever so much.” Sky squirmed out of her embrace and sat up, glaring at her. “But don’t bother. Obviously it’s too—”

  “Listen, you twerp,” Lark interrupted with her voice shaking wildly, “if I don’t love you, who the hell will?”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you love me?”

  Everything seemed to stop for a moment. Lark’s tears stopped, and her breathing, and maybe her heart, because she recognized the look of dry-eyed longing on the little girl’s face. Her own face, thirty years ago.

  She couldn’t answer. She just stared.

  Sky reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out something small and shining: the token of a truthteller, a star off the tip of Gypsy Davy’s boot. Without speaking she passed it to Lark. Then still with that awful not-crying look on her face she waited.

  Lark held the star up between her thumb and forefinger so that it caught the light. She could breathe now. Staring past the shining thing into Sky’s eyes she vowed, “I promise to love you.”

  “You don’t love me now.”

  “I respect you now. I care about you now. Love will come.”

  “Soon?”

  “Let me see.” Lark reached out and gathered Sky against her hard young chest again. The little girl nestled there quietly, her boniness somehow softened to accommodate the embrace, and seemingly on its own Lark’s head tilted down so that her cheek rested against Sky’s hair. It was stringy, and smelled sour. The kid badly needed a bath, but Lark didn’t say that. She said, “Yeah, I think so. Soon.”

  This was true, for she still held the star.

  Voice muffled against her chest, Sky asked, “Do you like me now?”

  “In a weird sort of way, yes. I do.”

  “You don’t just want your art back?”

  “Art?” Lark blinked down at the child’s steady gaze. Her paints and studio seemed very far away and far down on the list of priorities. She said, “Who’s Art?”

  Sky actually smiled. Lark leaned back against the corner of the sofa, and Sky rested against her shoulder. “Sing to me,” the kid demanded.

  “Give me a break! I sing like a moose.”

  “I’ll tickle you.” Sky’s twiggy fingers threatened in the vicinity of Lark’s navel.

  “Go right ahead.” Lark tightened the nice hard abs Shadow had given her.

  The kid’s hand dived like an eagle. Abs were no match for those little scrawny claws. It was stomach-muscle hell. Lark laughed, squealed, and curled up, trying to protect her midsection.

  “All right! Stop it!” She tried to push Sky’s hand away without hurting her. Sky eluded her and kept tickling.

  “I surrender!”

  “Sing!” Sky commanded.

  “Okay, okay!” Lark sat panting. “Christ, give me a minute.”

  “That’s long enough.” Sky’s eagle-claw hand menaced again.

  “All right!” With abject obedience Lark sang,

  “Gypsy Davy roams the four-lane,

  Gypsy Davy plays the blues.

  Gypsy Davy sings the only

  Song this cowboy ever knew.

  I’m going a little crazy—

  Just stay with me, stinky baby,

  Say bye-bye Gypsy Davy,

  Say bye-bye Gypsy Dave.”

  Against her shoulder Sky lay going to sleep again, breathing more deeply and steadily than before.

  “Oh, she’s feeling better!” Doris burbled when she saw Sky in the morning.

  Indeed, sitting at the kitchen bar with her black hombre hat jammed on her head, chowing down a bowl of frosted flakes and coldly eyeing the world over the rim, Sky seemed to be feeling much better. The kid completely and spiritedly refused to bathe. If Lark was going to feed Sky with affection, she was apparently going to have to do it body odor and all.

  “You, however, look like hell,” Doris said to Lark just as cheerily. “Didn’t you sleep?”

  Slouched on another bar stool, nursing a glass of orange juice, Lark gave her a gunfighter glare. “I’m thinking.”

  “Well, God knows that’s difficult if you�
��re not used to it.”

  Defending her honor, Lark emptied six quick slugs into Doris with her forefinger. As Doris did not then fall down and bleed on the floor, this made her feel no better. For an hour or more she had been trying to figure out what to do, come up with some sort of a plan for her screwed-up life or even for the next day or two, but the aspect of her that made decisions of that sort seemed to have gone with the Virtuous Woman. Lark had no idea how she would spend the day or even where she would spend the next night.

  “Thinking about what?” Sky said to her mushily around an enormous mouthful of cereal.

  “What to do. Me. You.”

  Sky shrugged. Doris suggested, “You can go take my mammogram for me.”

  “Sorry. My breasts are home in the top dresser drawer. At least I think that’s where I left them.”

  “Well, get a dickogram,” Doris said.

  The idea surprised Lark into laughing. “That’ll be the day,” she said.

  “Fair’s fair. You guys ought to have the pleasure too.” Bitchy before her morning fix of carrots, Doris warmed to the idea. “Wouldn’t that be great if every guy in the country had to go in once a year and slap his dong onto a metal slab and watch the other slab come down and squish it flat?”

  “Bend over, honey,” Lark mimicked the voice of the technician who had most recently made sandwich meat of her breasts.

  “God, yes!”

  “Spread your legs, dearie.”

  “Jesus, oh yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful if they had to get ballograms too?”

  “It’ll never happen. They wouldn’t go.”

  Sky was eating her second bowl of cereal and ignoring both of them. Doris just stood there, probably thinking about her ex, laughing, with the carrot peeler in her hand.