Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

Her scream was like a karate yell that focused all the force of her passion on the pseudo-Hoot in the leisure suit, willing the real Hoot to come back. Without thinking, she was doppelgangering him.

  “Lark, you’re doing it again!” she heard Shadow warn. She saw Florrie turn her pudgy little body to stare, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t leave Hoot that way. Not her Hoot, not the guy who loathed wearing pajamas, knew sixteen separate and distinct brassiere jokes and occasionally spit his Juicy Fruit into the trash from distances up to ten feet away. God damn her mother anyway. Give her Patrick Swayze, she’d turn him into Pee Wee Herman without the interesting police blotter.

  Well, she was her mother’s daughter, Skylark, and she wasn’t going to let it happen to Hoot.

  Maybe because she knew him so well—maybe because she loved him—she doppelgangered him as never before. She tore him out of her mother’s phony replica within a heartbeat. There he stood in the alley next to the other one, naked, dazed, very attractive, and as solid as she was. And swearing. She felt sure it was him because of the way he was swearing.

  “Jesus sheep-fucking shit!” he exclaimed, covering one of the more attractive portions of his body with his hands.

  Lark’s mother’s mouth fell open in outrage. Her eyes widened, staring at Lark. In an instant she would blink.

  Sky screamed, clinging to Lark’s neck. Lark tried to cover the child with her arms. Somebody gave her a powerful shove. “Inside, stupid!” Shadow yelled, getting between them and Florrie as he propelled both of them through the back door of the Magic Makeover. He reached out to grab the naked Hoot, the more genuine of the two extant Hoots, by the wrist, and dragged him inside the back room, then slammed the door behind all of them. Leaning against it, he stood panting. Lark had not seen him so shaken up since the night of the fag bashing.

  “You come out of there!” Florrie was shrilling from the other side of the door.

  She could yell until doomsday. They were safe in the windowless back room of the Magic Makeover; blessedly, Florrie could not blink them unless she could see them. Nevertheless, Lark felt her skin crawling like ten thousand little lizards. She sank down to sit on the floor with Sky huddled in her arms as Hoot plopped down across the small room from her.

  From outside came the sound of the other Hoot’s voice saying, “You’re quite right, darling. I am a lucky, lucky man to have such a decent, God-fearing woman for my loving wife.”

  Hoot was staring at Lark. “Christ,” he whispered. “What happened? It felt—it felt worse than dying. What did your mom do to me?” He was shaking.

  “She blinked you,” Lark told him. “She rearranged you and made you into what she wanted you to be.”

  Also from outside came a mouselike squeaking noise Lark did not at first recognize, because it had been a long time since she had known Florrie to blow her self-imposed serenity. It was the sound of her mother’s fury.

  “She can do that?” Hoot’s deep voice went up an octave.

  “She’s been doing it to me most of my life.”

  “Jesus, Lark.” His voice softened, and also his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  She had not realized her face was wet with tears, Sky’s and her own. His concern made her throat lump up. She could not speak.

  Shadow gave everybody one of his dark looks, straightened up from his stance against the door, and began moving around his shop’s back room, which was messily full of his paraphernalia—clippers and curlers, magical rinses and cosmetics, sultry glam magazines, movie stills curling on the walls. The alley noises had faded away. Shadow pulled a stack of hand towels and a couple of plastic perm cloaks out of a metal cabinet, slammed its door with an impressive crash, and tossed the things at Hoot. “Put those on,” he ordered.

  The towels were too small to wrap around Hoot’s Germanic midsection. The plastic shawls were translucent. Hoot demanded, “How?”

  Shadow ignored the question, staring fixedly at Lark. “Do you realize,” he said in a tone more piteous than scolding, “that I now have three versions of you plus two of him to deal with? How long do you propose to keep this up?”

  Gazing at Hoot, Lark physically ached with longing but knew what sort of reaction she could expect if she, a boy, tried to touch him. She barely heard Shadow. Sky, however, stiffened to defiant attention and pulled herself out of Lark’s arms to face him.

  “Are you in charge?” she challenged.

  “Somebody better be,” Shadow complained. “The whole fucking thing is falling apart.” He nodded toward the front of the store.

  Sky went to see, and Lark followed. In the street a passel of no-nonsense women and a few balding white-shirt men—Baptist ministers, Lark decided, or if they were not, they ought to be—a group of virtuous persons were marching. “Clean up Soudersburg!” they chanted, their voices strong because their hearts were pure. “Clean up Soudersburg!”

  Holding hand towels over portions of himself fore and aft, Hoot also came to see. “God pushers,” he said, not without malice.

  Lark evaluated the tone of his voice and the look on his face, then grinned, anticipating. There had always been a devilish potential in Hoot, and apparently living with the Virtuous Woman even for a few days had brought it out. Or maybe it was because the civilized, inhibiting part of him had gone off bleating, “Sorry, dear” that he was getting a demon gleam in his baby blue eyes.

  “Shadow,” he remarked without looking around at the beautiful man standing behind him, “I think I know how to wrap things up now. Sky, don’t look.” Hoot lifted the hand towels that minimally covered his crotch.

  Sky didn’t just look. She gawked. Lark did not prevent her, because she was pretty busy not just looking herself.

  The “thing” Hoot was wrapping up was his head. He threw one white terry cloth fashion accessory over his hair, then tied the other so that it hid his face. Completely and modestly covered from the neck up, big and golden and bare from the neck down, he blundered out the door and into the street.

  From the screaming you would have thought he was carrying an Uzi.

  Shadow came to the window to watch. “I like this dude,” he averred, studying Hoot’s ample, cream-colored buttocks as the big guy walked.

  “Mine,” Lark warned.

  “And just how does he feel about that?”

  “Shut up.”

  Unable to see where he was going, Hoot gave up trying to walk and stood midstreet, hooded in white, blind as love. Lark watched with her heart and her dick swelling with love of him. Apparently the marching individuals were not similarly affected by the sight of his blond-furred body. Popular Street emptied of intruders within a moment.

  A few Popular Street regulars ventured onto the sidewalks and cheered, Argent among them. Without glancing right or left Shadow crossed the street to talk with his lover. Hoot stood where he was, struggling out of his head covering. Lark went and helped him with the terry cloth knots while Sky danced circles around both of them.

  “Dickie dickie counterfeit, kissed the girls in arithmetic!” Sky sang.

  “Calm down,” Shadow told the youngster sourly, coming over. “It’s only a temporary solution.”

  Story of my life, Lark thought. But all her solutions seemed to be getting more and more temporary, day-by-day falling apart faster. Something had to be done.

  Late that night, in the apartment over the Bareback Rider, after everyone was cleaned up and fed, with Sky bedded down on the living room floor and Hoot sleeping on the sofa, Lark sat at the kitchen table in emergency council with Argent and Shadow.

  All three of them had gotten past being sleepy and were very calm, experiencing the sense of distance and perspective that sometimes comes to people late at night. All of them were able to look one another straight in the eye.

  “I know you don’t mean us any harm,” Argent was saying to Lark. “Even after being deliberately doppelgangered twice I have gotten back to knowing that.”

  “I don’t mean to hurt Popular Street,” La
rk told him. “But sometimes I have been angry enough at you to want to hurt you.”

  “At times the desire was mutual.”

  “Right now I am sitting here thinking that you care more about the street than you do about me.”

  “I do. Nevertheless, I also care about you to some extent.”

  Lark sighed and found herself grudgingly willing to accept this. “Okay,” she said. “I give up. Fuck the whole you-me thing and let it sit. What do we do now?”

  She looked to Shadow, sitting back darkly as if pinned on the point of a triangle between the two of them. Shadow shrugged.

  “It’s simple, though not easy,” he said. “We have to make the porcelain-assed yutz-face, as Hoot calls her, stop her crusade. She is an aspect of you and, therefore, has the power to see her way into Popular Street. Without her, I think the other ones will not be able to find it.”

  This all seemed pretty obvious. Lark forged on. “Make her stop how?”

  “I have considered killing her,” Shadow admitted. “But she is a doppelganger, an aspect of you. Probably she could not be killed while you remain alive. Or killing her would take you with her.”

  It took Lark most of the time he was saying this to realize he was not joking. Killing was a reasonable and viable option to him.

  Yet, why should she be surprised? Argent kept telling her and telling her: Shadow was different. Shadow moved outside the rules.

  “Good thing I’m Argent’s daughter,” she muttered, “and he cares about me. To some extent.”

  Shadow’s ghostly smile flickered across his face. He said gently, “Despite what you have been thinking—I also like you somewhat on my own account.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” She grimaced at him. “So what do we do? It’s not like we can just go to the Virtous Woman and tell her to stop being a pain in the ass.”

  Shadow shrugged again. But Argent spoke. “I think we need to explore this ability of yours,” he said.

  “Huh? Doppelgangering?”

  “Yes.”

  “Insights made manifest,” Shadow put in. “As I tried to tell you once before, it is the same thing as what I do.”

  “Hardly!”

  “Well, in a different way. But we both pull the hidden aspects out of people. If you can learn some control—”

  Lark shook her head vehemently. “I just want to stop doing it! I don’t want to monkey around with the kind of power you and Gypsy Davy seem to have. Look what kind of a mess just a little power got me into.”

  “We have not called it power,” Shadow said in his level way. “You have. ‘Power’ is a word favored by men who wish to subdue or destroy. Women are afraid when men start talking of power.”

  His dispassionate tone, even more carefully dispassionate when he spoke of women, angered her, though the stillness of night kept her in her seat and kept her from shouting. “I don’t care what you call it! It is power, isn’t it, no matter what you call it?”

  “All of life is power,” Shadow said. “You have had children. You are the mother of three individuals. This gives you an enormous power over their lives, far more than I will ever have over anyone. You have married. You have tremendous power over your husband.”

  Argent said, “Different ways of seeing give everyone power to shape the world.”

  The way he was looking at her right then, she could almost glimpse her father peeking through his eyes. She gazed at him, and he looked just as steadily back at her.

  “Lark,” he told her gently, “if you’re afraid of being like your mother, don’t worry. You’re very different from her.”

  He was right, of course; she was terrified. She felt her mouth dry out, and had to move her lips three times before she could say, “Just tell me one thing. Gypsy Davy left me this note, that I was one of you—”

  “You are,” Shadow said. Argent nodded.

  “Is my mother also one of you?”

  Argent said flatly, “No. She denies insight. She manifests falsehood.”

  “But she has power.”

  “Yes. And there is no malice in her, none at all, yet look what happens because she does not want to understand.”

  Lark sighed through her lips, reluctantly accepting that she was going to have to learn more about doppelgangering. What else could she do, really? It was the same old predicament, a woman’s lifelong choice: be sweetly feminine and let somebody else screw up your life, or take charge and screw it up yourself.

  “Okay,” she said, mostly to the tabletop.

  Silence. She didn’t look up.

  “Define ‘okay,’ please,” Shadow asked softly.

  “Okay, as in, I’ll try. Do you two have any idea what sort of insights I am supposed to manifest?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Then how does it work?”

  “That’s what we have to find out. First thing in the morning.”

  Even later, after Argent and Shadow had gone to their water bed, Lark sockfooted to the living room, paused by Sky a moment to stroke the sleeping girl’s wispy Breckshampooed hair—feeding her in the way that Sky most needed to be fed—and then went to Hoot.

  He was lying on his stomach, snorting and mumbling into a sofa pillow. “Hey.” She joggled his shoulder. “Wake up.”

  He rolled halfway over. The light of the hallway lamp showed his big face reddened and striped and stippled from the nubbly fabric. His eyes did not open.

  “Hoot.” Lark sat down on the edge of the sofa in the space next to his belly. She joggled him again. “Hoot, we gotta talk.”

  His eyes blinked and peered at her without comprehension. Feeling a tender sort of mischief take her over, she contorted her teen-idol face to give him a Nancy Reagan flutter-eyed adoring smile. “Hello, good-looking,” she said.

  The shock of the concept—this person as his lover and wife—jolted him wide awake. He stiffened, pulling away from her. She watched it happen and understood that in one way or another it happened every time he saw her in her young male body.

  She sighed and said, “We haven’t had a chance to really talk.” The evening had been mostly taken up by persuading Sky, finally, into the shower, and by finding Hoot something to wear, and explaining to him a few basic things such as the fact that Argent was his father-in-law.

  Hoot struggled to sit up and get farther from her. Dressed (with greatest growling Dutch reluctance) in silk pajamas borrowed from Argent, he was uncomfortable to start with, and her starry-eyed masculine presence on his bed clearly flustered him. “Give me some space,” he mumbled.

  She, however, liked the way he looked in silk peejays. Their dusky rose color complemented his golden hair and peachy cheeks beautifully. “Chill, baby,” she told him in sultry tones.

  “You want to talk, you’re not helping.”

  “That’s true.” She sighed again and tried to act approximately normal. Tried to start the conversation over again with a safe topic. “Anything good in the mail since I’ve been gone?”

  “Not really.” Hoot said this without thinking, out of two A.M. blue negativity, but then added, “Letter from your brother.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s putting together a book of penis jokes for sale in Spencer’s gift shops. Wants to know if you can contribute any, or do the illustrations for the visuals.”

  This was not a request that had to be taken seriously, just another of Byron’s brain farts. In fact, speaking of farts, it was Byron who had suggested marketing a colorant, something to be taken internally, maybe including perfume, hued to go with the latest fashions from Paris and Milan, so that the upwardly mobile could trail clouds of glory on their way. The way Byron told it, it almost sounded like a good idea, but he had never gotten around to implementing it.

  “I’m just a walking penis joke myself,” Lark grumped. “What else did he say?”

  “His wife is leaving him.”

  “Ow!” Lark was astonished. Nice Carolyn, leaving Byron? “Why would she do that?”


  Why did wives leave their men? Hoot just looked at her. It was, Lark decided, a stupid question and a dangerous one.

  “Anything else in the mail?”

  “Hard to say. Harold gets it these days. Chews it all to a soggy mess before anybody comes home. Pukes it onto the rug.”

  “Well, lock him in the bathroom!”

  “Then he claws the door.”

  “This is true.”

  Silence.

  “How are the boys?” Lark asked.

  “How do you think? With Yutz Face for a mother and now Candy Ass for a dad?”

  “Don’t call her Yutz Face. She looks just like me.”

  “Like hell she does.”

  “When I was female.”

  “No way.” Vehement, Hoot leaned forward—the change of position brought him closer to her. “Your heart always showed in your face, and she doesn’t have any. You think I can’t tell the difference between you and a self-lubricating inflatable? Give me some credit, Lark.”

  Obviously the way he had perceived Larque as woman and wife differed from the way she had perceived herself. Might have been more true than the way she perceived herself. Even through his anger, something in his words felt deeply right to her. Misty, she reached out her hand to him.

  He hesitated.

  “I won’t ask for anything more,” Lark managed to say.

  He let her lay her palm against his. Fingers clasped. They sat that way a while.

  “Better not,” Hoot said gruffly. “I feel pretty damn silly.”

  “I can go take my dong off.”

  “It won’t help.” He was looking down at his own bare square-toed feet languishing on the carpet. “That reminds me. Yutz Face threw away your boobs. She found them in the drawer and threw them in the garbage. I had been saving them.”

  “It’s okay. I can get more.”

  Hoot said, “I had been—you know, kind of cuddling them sometimes. Thinking of you.”

  Lark sat speechless, hearing what he was saying, hearing what she herself had just said. She really intended to put breasts on again? She really—was it possible to go back?

  “But it wasn’t much like the real thing,” Hoot said. He turned to her suddenly. “Lark, why the hell did you go and do it? I just don’t understand.”