Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

“Get real, woman,” Lark told her. “We’re talking about men here. They wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Stand—for—it!” Doris bent over the sink laughing.

  “Face it,” Lark grumbled, “only women are sheep-shitty enough to voluntarily go and put themselves through this sort of crap and pay a hundred fifty dollars for it.”

  “Well, if dickogramming ever does happen, I’m going to get a new job.” Doris straightened up, as bright-eyed as if she had eaten two pounds of carrots.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lark said.

  Doris eyed her brightly. The woman sure did know how to enjoy her neuroses, get fun out of her own hostilities. “You taking it personally? Still wearing that pop-on phallus of yours?”

  “Of course. All the time.”

  She got Doris to drop off Sky and her near Soudersburg on her way to work. The sun was shining like crazy, global warming was going to make it a midsummer day in April, and sometime while conversing with her orange-tinted friend Lark had felt her brain sputter and quit. Obviously for a person like her, a cunt with a dick, life was meant to be lived, not thought about. So forget thinking anymore. The future would just have to take care of itself. Lark hugged Sky around the shoulders, and the two of them headed off toward Cowshit Creek.

  She rolled up her jeans and left her boots on the shore, and Sky left her ugly oxford shoes, and they spent the morning in the creek. At first there were alligators in there, so they teetered from rock to rock. Once they had slipped in often enough they waded on the mucky bottom and caught crayfish. Downstream they found a dam of sorts, and they added rocks to deepen the pool behind it, and of course they both managed to fall in. They took off their clothes, spread them on the bank to dry, and went in some more. Sky now smelled more like creek than sweat, and her hair was as stringy and green as waterweed. Lark didn’t care. What could anybody expect? The kid was a barbarian.

  “We’ve got to get you something to eat,” Lark told her when the sun and her stomach agreed it was lunchtime.

  “Crayfish would have been nice,” Sky pointed out. “We could have built a fire and cooked them.” Lark had refused to put crayfish in her boots, and there had been nothing else to keep them in.

  The crayfish had been small and brown and looked to Lark about as appetizing as earthworms. But she just smiled and shrugged. “Let’s head over to the carnival,” she said. “People drop french fries and things.”

  Back in their clothes and footwear, feeling good and looking disreputable, they walked through the outskirts of Soudersburg. In the gutter Sky found a fat red rubber band, a bottle cap with a picture of a buffalo head on it, and a flattened safety pin—not because she wanted to get into Popular Street, but just because. Lark found a sheet metal screw and a pair of nuts. Maybe life really was a matter of what you were looking for.

  The carnival was just starting up when they got there. Nobody had dropped any french fries yet, but on the midway they ran into Gypsy Davy.

  “Yo, hey!” He crouched down to greet Sky hat brim to hat brim, eye to eye. “You’re on your feet again, little one!”

  “She’s golden,” Lark said. “She walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk. Thank you.”

  He looked up at her with a smile as curly as his hair. “You did it,” he chided. “Ain’t you got it figured out yet?”

  “Your hat helped somehow.”

  “I’m hungry,” Sky said.

  Lark reached out one arm and gave her a sidelong hug. From under her outlaw-black hat brim the kid shot a killer look at her. “Really hungry,” she clarified.

  “Hey, my treat.” Gypsy Davy headed them toward a hot dog stand, looking happy and expansive. “The hat just kept her going a little longer,” he told Lark over his shoulder. “Gave her good dreams. Took her mind off her misery.” He ordered them corn dogs, vinegar fries, Cokes, and Dixie Cup ice creams, then stood with them and watched as they ate. Lark could not figure out why he was being so avuncular. Was that affection turning his wide face pink, or was it a reflection off his magenta headgear? She hoped he didn’t lust for her body. “Listen, thanks,” she said, trying to make it sound like a clean break.

  It wasn’t. “Come back to the booth,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Uh, like what?”

  It was free passes. “Take the kid on the rides,” Gypsy Davy instructed. Then he reached up and seemingly at random slapped a hat on her head, a flattopped, broad-brimmed felt one just like Sky’s except it was vanilla white. “Keep it,” he said. “Good luck.”

  Damn, I wanted black, Lark thought. Then, Good luck with what?

  “Horses!” Sky shrilled, pulling at Lark and hopping around on her skinny legs.

  “What? Where?”

  She tugged Lark toward the carousel, and Lark began to understand: the hat made everything look brighter, more significant, more alive than it might really be. The plastic merry-go-round figures were real horses to Sky. Bucking broncs, maybe. Galloping mustangs. Cayuses done up in war paint.

  “Trade you hats,” Lark offered Sky.

  “No way!”

  The black-hat cowboy, Sky, chose a white mount with eagle feathers in its mane. Resigned to her white hat, Lark took the red-eyed black bronc by the kid’s side. It was a wide prairie. They rode for a long time, until all their passes were used up.

  During the ride Lark glanced from time to time at the mirrors on the carousel’s hub, bending the brim of the white hat down in front, denting the crown and rolling the back into a sportier shape. Maybe she could dye it black. Even as was, it looked good over her handsome young-man face, her True-Blue eyes and strong jawline.

  Something inside it was scratching her, though. Between go-rounds she took it off and looked at the band.

  “Indians coming,” Sky was saying. “Comanches.”

  “Hold them off a minute, would you, buddy?” No wonder the hat scratched. There was a piece of paper stuck inside it. Lark pulled it out; it came away easily in her hand. Heavy, rough pink paper, it turned out to be a note from Gypsy Davy.

  “When you get yourself together,” it said, “come see me. There are things for you to do. You are one of my people.”

  Shadow was there waiting for them when they got off the carousel. Gypsy Davy must have called him, Lark decided afterward. Stalled Sky and her with the free passes and then—phoned? There had to be some kind of phone that hooked up to Popular Street, sort of a transdimensional hot line. Or maybe there were other means of communication that hooked up Shadow to his boss.

  Christ, he was so beautiful it almost hurt to look at him.

  Lark stood looking at him anyway, uncertain how things lay between them.

  “You promised you would not do that again,” Shadow said, sans greeting.

  Trying to doppelganger him, he meant. Her burst of temper in the night—now that Sky was better, she had almost forgotten it, though the angry, desolate feeling was coming back at the sight of him. “It was kind of a scattershot,” she defended herself. “Not aimed at you.”

  “I felt it anyway.”

  “Sorry.” She didn’t mean it. Let him feel some pain.

  Uninterested in this sort of talk, Sky went back to pat the horses, which all stood still and let her stroke them.

  “Look,” Shadow said, very low, “why are you angry at me if I care for Argent? You have found a way to use that shiny new equipment of yours, evidently.”

  That stung badly enough to make her wince. “Damn you!” she shouted. “I wish I’d never met you.”

  She meant it only for the moment. And it affected him only to make him more serious and sad. “Look,” he said softly, “I never intended to hurt you. Let me put my hand on your head and take the pain away.”

  “No!” She did not want him touching her. Yet there was something so honorable about him—in his way—that she lowered her voice. “I’ll keep my pain, thank you.”

  “Lark—”

  “Forget it. Forget me. What do you want
, coming here?”

  The carousel had started up again. With no painted ponies to caress, Sky came wandering over to stand by Lark, and Lark hunkered down and hugged the little girl. It was not meant selfishly, yet it made her feel better, especially as Sky hugged her back.

  “Whoa!” It was a sound of happy surprise, from Shadow. Looking up, Lark saw that she and Sky had startled out of him the widest smile she had yet seen on his ever-still face. She stood up, hoisting Sky in her arms. Her back to Shadow, the little girl giggled and jiggled and kicked.

  “C’mon, Shad. Spit it out.” Lark found suddenly that she had forgiven him for disappointing her. What the hell, she could still be crazy about him, and who cared if anything ever came of it. “What’s on your agenda?”

  His face still softened by astonishment, he said simply, “Argent.”

  “Huh.” Lark held Sky tighter, feeling the pain start to gather again in her hard young chest.

  Shadow said, “Between the two of us, we’ve hurt him pretty thoroughly.”

  “We didn’t do anything. I wish we had. I wanted to hurt him.” Lark said this without heat but without remorse either. Her father was another one who didn’t care about her. “Lay your hands on him if you want to heal somebody.”

  “I already did.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Yes. Well enough.”

  “Damn,” she said, only half joking. Then she sighed. “Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

  “Come back where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Why? You don’t seem to give a flying shit about me.”

  “I give several shits about Argent. I need to find a way to save Popular Street.”

  “Ah.” Everything Shadow had said had of course been the truth, but this was the bottommost truth. Shadow and Argent needed her to somehow get the Virtuous Woman off their backs.

  Draped comfortably over Lark’s chest and digging her chin into Lark’s shoulder, her legs kicking in a contented way, Sky seemed to have settled in for the duration. Lark tucked her chin and pulled her head back to look at the kid.

  “Please,” Shadow said.

  Lark did not raise her eyes, but put the matter to her doppelganger. “Sky. There’s something I haven’t been telling you. I know where Daddy is.”

  The little girl jerked upright in her arms and stared at her wild-eyed.

  “He’s inside Argent,” Lark told her gently. “The trouble is, he doesn’t particularly want to come out.”

  They looked at each other a moment, and then Sky laid her head down on Lark’s shoulder again. Her feet had gone still.

  “He doesn’t love us?” she asked.

  For a moment Lark couldn’t speak. Shadow answered. “It depends what you mean by love,” he said. “He does care in his way. More than you know.”

  “Lark,” Sky insisted.

  Lark muttered, “Not as far as I can tell.”

  Sky lay silent, hanging on tight.

  “So what do you think?” Lark asked her. “Should we go see him?”

  “Fuck him,” Sky said to Lark’s shoulders.

  Where had the kid learned that kind of language? Jeez. But Lark found herself in agreement with the sentiment, if not the literal interpretation thereof.

  She looked up. “There you have it,” she told Shadow. Behind her, with its shrill music blaring, the carousel went round and round.

  “Please,” Shadow said. “Think.”

  “If I was any good at thinking, I wouldn’t be wearing a dick.”

  “Please come back with me.”

  “No.”

  His perfect face had not changed. Her refusal had not affected him, and in a moment she knew why. He wasn’t finished yet. He was holding an ace.

  “You might want to reconsider,” he said. “I have a feeling you are going to need my help. Somebody came into the Magic Makeover this morning looking for you.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Big guy,” Shadow said. “Very Germanic, but personable in a blunt way. Peasantlike. I believe you are related to him by marriage. Name’s Geoffrey Harootunian.”

  THIRTEEN

  ON HER WAY BACK TO POPULAR STREET, LARK WONDERED how the truth, which was supposed to set her free, could feel so much like coercion.

  The truth was, she needed Shadow at least as much as he needed her. She needed his coaching. At this point he knew more about who she was than she did.

  The other truth was, her heart was pounding and she felt shaky all over at the thought of seeing Hoot and the boys again.

  Skipping along beside her, Sky squeezed her hand.

  “How did Hoot know about me?” Lark asked Shadow, who was striding along black-booted and silent at her other side.

  “Ask him when you see him.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Ask him.”

  “I can’t! What am I supposed to do, just walk up to the house and knock on the door? What if the V.W. is there? She’s too fucking much like Mom. What if she blinks? Do you know for sure she doesn’t blink?”

  Shadow sighed. “Being around you makes me feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “What did you tell Hoot about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not even that I would try to find you.”

  “Well, shit! Why not?”

  Shadow gave Lark a sideward look that was fairly expressive for him, but remained silent.

  “Where the hell are we going?” They had already passed several corners that could have served as entries to Popular Street.

  Shadow said, “We need to go in the back way.”

  “Back way?”

  “Yes. Your alter ego has brought reinforcements. The street is full of hyperventilating women carrying placards.” Lark did not much like his disgusted tone as he said the w-word. “Most of the stores are closed.”

  He pulled his cat’s-eye marble out of his pocket and led the way into an alley that looked like any other alley: dirt, dumpsters, poison ivy. The faded lettering on the delivery doors, however, announced the Penis Place, Beauty and the Beast, the Cop Shop, the New You Tattoo.

  Lark wondered briefly if there was poison ivy growing in the alley on the other side too, the one behind Araby. If so, that might explain the rash she was getting on her firm young male buttocks.

  “Magic Makeover,” Sky read, bouncing with excitement, as they reached the back door at the alley’s far end.

  Just at that moment a redoubtably skirted, placard-toting duo strode into the alley from the other direction: the Virtuous Woman and Florence Lawrence. Taken by surprise, Lark and Sky and Shadow found themselves facing the enemy at close range.

  “There, honeybunch, see?” Florrie said to her doppelganger daughter affectionately. “I told you there would be perverts skulking back here.”

  Sky was hanging on hard to Lark’s hand with both her little twiggy paws. Shadow was shoving in front of Lark and Sky to shield them with his body. Lark found herself looking at her own mother in terror, because where Florrie expected to find perverts then perverts were what Florrie would find, and once she blinked, they would all three become drooling pederasts or something.

  The next few minutes got very confusing. Only approximately in this sequence:

  Shadow pulled a key like pulling a gun and reached for the Magic Makeover’s back door.

  Florrie said, “Hold it right there.”

  The V.W. scanned Lark and Sky utterly without recognition.

  Tall, blond, and placardless, Hoot Harootunian came around the corner, happening upon the scene of the fray. He double-took, then yelled at Lark, “You!”

  “Begone, perverts,” the V.W. intoned to Lark, Sky, and Shadow. “We are closing this Sodom down.”

  Sky began to cry.

  Lowering her placard like a weapon, Florrie barred Shadow’s way.

  Somebody farted. Lark hoped it wasn’t her.

  Standing by the V.W., Hoot
ignored that woman whose worth was as rubies but said furiously to Lark, “Just how stupid do you think I am? You really thought I’d believe this stainless steel no-kinks porcelain-assed yutz-face is you?”

  Lark put her arms around Sky.

  Shadow told Florrie, “Step aside, witch.”

  Hoot yelled at Lark, “What the hell are you trying to prove? Saddling me with this dead fish on ice while you go running off?”

  Florrie did not move. Shadow’s cold tone perturbed her. She blinked him.

  The V.W. said to Hoot, “You are disgusting.”

  Unaffected, Shadow told Florrie, “Move your fat ass.” She gasped, eyes wide with shock, then blinked him again. He was still there.

  Hoot complained to Lark, “You been having fun? Tell me how much fun it is being a guy. Give me lessons. I’d sure like to find out.”

  The V.W. said to Hoot, “No self-respecting woman would do those things, especially not with her husband. You are sick and lewd.”

  Sky ascended Lark as if climbing a tree and clung to her strong young chest and shoulders like a monkey.

  Hoot could ignore the Virtuous Woman no longer and told her, “You are a classic tight ass.”

  Florrie heard this, swiveled like a door knob, drew herself up to her full height of four-foot-ten and commanded, terrible in wrath, “Don’t talk to my daughter that way.”

  Lark saw Florrie turning on Hoot and yelled, “No! NO!” But her mother did not listen any better than she ever had.

  God, no, not Hoot …

  Time stood still.

  Florrie blinked him.

  Hanging onto Sky as if the kid riding on her chest could somehow hold her up, Lark saw it happen: one moment Hoot stood there glowering, and the next moment Lark was looking at a blond, Hoot-shaped nincompoop in a powder blue polyester leisure suit and three-tone tassel loafers. “Goodness, I do apologize,” he said to Florrie. “Sorry, dear,” he told his wife. “How very rude of me.”

  Lark screamed.

  It was the hoarse scream of a young man driven beyond her limits. Seeing Hoot being blinked was even worse than having it done to her. She wanted to annihilate her now-smiling mother for what she had done to him. But even worse she wanted Hoot to be himself again.