Larque on the Wing (18 page)

To the outskirts of Soudersburg, he told Lark, to its commercial strip, where on the Valu-Mart Shop-All Plaza parking lot an early carnival had set up. Once there, Lark pulled in behind the strip mall, out of sight of the highway, just in case the cops were indeed looking. She parked beside a dumpster, hoping the garbagemen would mistake the Chevette for trash and take it away. Leaving the key in the ignition, she wondered briefly whether she ought to wipe her fingerprints off—

Just a freaking minute. Whose fingerprints were they, anyway? Blinking dizzily, Lark realized: the juvenile delinquent car thief's prints ought to be the same as the Virtuous Woman's.

Whoa. What a bite. But there was no time to dwell on it. Lark hurried after Shadow, who was heading across the lot. The taut, determined way he was walking would have looked all right to Lark if she had never before seen the grace with which he usually moved. His face was gray.

“Shad,” Argent protested, hurrying along beside him, “for Christ's sake, sit down before you fall down. I'll go get him.”

Eyes fixed straight ahead, Shadow did not answer. Maybe he was so far gone in pain and pride that he didn't hear.

They were almost there, anyway, heading up the carnival's small midway now. The place was nearly empty. Only a few moms with little kids were there at this time of day.

Swaddled under layers of duct tape, electrical cables snaked across the pavement. Shadow caught his toe against one and stumbled. Lark and Argent both jumped to catch him, but he straightened within a moment and shook them off imperiously. He strode forward again.

A big man was ambling to meet him. The two of them converged upon one another in the empty—street? Invisible six-guns might have been riding on their hips.

It was a barrel-shaped, curly-haired man in an outrageous magenta high-crown Stetson. “Shadow, come here,” he ordered or invited, and they met, and he gathered Shadow into his arms for a long, gentle hug. Shadow laid his head on his shoulder. Gypsy Davy's face was sweet and rugged and distant, like mountains. Laugh lines gullied the corners of his eyes even when they were grave, as they were now.

Lark knew him. He had once walked past good-girl Sky and winked her back into being herself.

Shadow straightened, and Gypsy Davy let him go. The gray tinge was gone from Shadow's face now, and he looked strong again. Not hurting any longer. Even the bruises around his eyes were gone.

“That's not what I came for,” he told the big man in that level, quiet, barely smiling way of his, “but thanks anyhow.”

“I know we've got trouble. We've been penetrated.” Gypsy Davy's eyes crinkled up as if this were a delectable joke. Like a magistrate ascending the bench he climbed back into his booth, leaving the rest of them standing in front of it. Spur rowels starred the back wall, haloing his curly head, and suspended above him were ranks of Western hats. Lark wanted one, and even though she had no money, she scanned the rows for something that might suit her, seeing neon cowboy hats with glass-beaded bands, cheap black hats with plastic bear claws, tall white Hoss hats, a chartreuse crease-top atrocity with orange plumes like a feather duster, the brand names—Nocona, Bailey, classic straw “Artel since 1868,” fine brushed-felt Resistols, the perennial Stetsons—and leather hats brand-named quite literally, with the maker's initials burned into the cowhide. Hats made of glitz and swagger and the skins of dead animals, yet their massed uplifted brims made Lark think vaguely of angels hovering over this man.

At Gypsy Davy's left elbow stood a rack of bumper stickers,

It ain't how
DEEP YOU FISH

It's how you
WIGGLE YOUR WORM

and

SQUARE DANCERS
do it in
GROUPS OF EIGHT

and

This car is
CONSTIPATED
, it can't
PASS ANYTHING

and

The weather is
HERE
, wish you were
BEAUTIFUL

among others. At his right elbow stood a similar rack of key chains, just as tasteless, shaped like white fish or little raincoats with compartments inside for storage of something circular, maybe a quarter for the phone. No, probably not.

“The problem is not just the woman picketing,” Shadow was saying to his boss. “Or rather, it is, but she is not just her.”

“Shadow,” Gypsy Davy told him kindly, “you don't have to try to explain. I've been watching Skylark for a long time.”

“You have?” Lark blurted. She liked Gypsy Davy already, but Argent, she noticed, was being silent and grim. Jealous, maybe. Obviously there were things Gypsy Davy could do for Shadow that he, Argent, could not.

“Florrie's daughter?” The fact that Lark was for all practical purposes a young male did not seem to mislead him in any way. “Yes, you better believe it.” He turned on her brown eyes that were merry and sharp and sad.

“But—watching me? How?”

He beckoned—his hands were furred and brawny, not at all like Shadow's slender, sensitive ones. “C'mere.” He swung open a little gate and let her into his gypsy wagon of a booth. “Stand at the counter here,” he directed. “You might want to hold on.”

“Huh?”

Shadow reached up from the other side of the counter, took one of her hands, and positioned it on the board. “Just do what he says,” he told her.

Gypsy Davy took off his magenta hat and plopped it onto her head. Too large for her, it settled over her eyes.

“Hey,” Lark complained, but then her mouth stayed open without speaking, because there was no longer anyone to speak to, she was no longer where she was before, maybe not even who she was, because why would that person be flying? But that's what she seemed to be doing. Flying in the air, her large heart beating strong in her feathered chest, looking down on—

On a dinky little carnival. On Shadow and Argent, standing in front of a hat joint along an asphalt midway. On Gypsy Davy, curly-headed and grinning. On herself, standing there half-hidden under a ridiculous hat. But another self of her was circling above all this on pointed wings.

“I'm a bird,” she whispered.

“Makes sense.” Shadow's ironic comment came to her clearly, as if he stood near her. He was still near her. Yet all she could see was Soudersburg far below.

“You're a skylark,” Argent said quietly. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit.” From far above she could see him looking up at her.

“Yes!” Now Lark knew the meaning of the word. Her wings cut the air, blithe. Her body flexed, blithe. Flying—she had always wanted to do this. Swooping lower, she raced the cars on the highway, looking in at the drivers to see if they noticed her. They did not, but she laughed—it came out as a bubbling birdcall. From her new, higher vantage point she cried back to the others, “I saw some guy picking his nose. And half the men in this town drive with their hands in their crotches!”

“I know,” Shadow told her wryly. “I've lived on the second floor long enough to know these things. Look for Sky.”

“See what's going on back at Popular Street,” Argent put in.

Lark made herself get serious and began to search. Scanning her way up one street and down the next, she saw vacant lots, back porches, junked refrigerators, kids playing with matches. She saw a woman walking a Vietnamese potbellied pig on a leash. She saw people stopped at traffic lights opening their car doors to spit on the pavement. At a gas station she saw an Amish boy scoring some pot. She saw a guy on a Harley in sneakers—he had on his black helmet and his leather jacket with the screaming eagle logo on the back, but it's hard to look tough in sneakers. A little farther off she saw cows releasing methane gas to the heavens. She saw on tall poles the Three Mile Island nuclear evacuation sirens. But she did not see Sky.

She reported as much, and added that she hadn't seen Popular Street either. “Where is it this time?”

Argent started to answer, but Gypsy Davy shushed him, which could not have made Argent happy, not at all. “Never mind that right now,” Dave told Lark. “Keep flying, look again. This time use your heart.”

“Huh?”

“You are seeing with your eyes only. Search with your heart.”

She felt it nearly exploding with excitement and exertion beneath the keel of her breast, shaking her whole hollow-boned body, huge in proportion to the rest of her. A skylark's heart.

Skylark's heart.

Flying, she felt it start to ache.

And there, there, in the neighborhood of tree streets she saw Hoot. Big, sweet, long-necked, huggable Hoot, standing on a corner with a bored police officer waiting nearby and the Virtuous Woman in his arms. She was upset about something, presumably her stolen car, and he was comforting her. He was cuddling her and telling her it was all gonna be okay.

With a pang—a knife thrust could not have felt much worse—Lark wanted to cuddle him. She wanted the V.W. out of there, out of his arms, and out of her life. She felt her wings sag with longing for him. “It's all gonna be okay, Hoot,” she whispered.

“Fly,” Gypsy Davy coached. “Try again.”

On another street nearby she saw her boys coming home from school, trying to shove each other off the sidewalk, like the competitive little pricks they were … or were they? It had been exactly seven hours since she had last seen them, and already they had grown and changed. She barely knew them. Odd, how you can have children, flesh of your flesh, and not know who they are. Her mother barely knew who
she
was.

Flesh of her flesh? Which one of her?

“Keep going,” Gypsy Davy urged.

“Uh-oh,” Lark murmured.

She saw a familiar mini-Jeepish vehicle, a red Suzuki Samurai, pulling into the driveway of—her home, the Harootunian residence. Her mother got out and toddled into the house. Hoot had left the door unlocked, probably because the boys had forgotten their key again, but Mom would have gotten in anyhow if she really wanted to. Florrie knew all the usages of a charge card. Florrie had her ways.

Harold the Boogie ran up to her with his entire hind end wagging, wedged his snout firmly into her crotch and applied leverage, with no discernable effect except to make him very happy. Florrie was the only adult human of Harold's acquaintance who was short enough for him to crotch, and she never dislodged him, because she didn't notice. Having a dog's muzzle stuck between her legs did not meet the criteria of acceptable events in Florrie's world and, therefore, it was not happening. If she ever did notice, she would probably blink the son of a beagle into a Pomeranian, but this time she merely patted Harold's mobile backside and looked around. “Dear?” she called.

“Up here, Mom,” Lark answered from the carnival-booth-cum-sky. She heard somebody, maybe Shadow, maybe Gypsy Davy, laughing at her. “Shut up,” she said, and Florrie blinked.

“Skylark, sweetie?” Florrie stepped away from the dog and climbed the stairs, short-legged, puffing. As if she had the eyes of a spirit as well as the body of a bird, Lark followed her. So did Childe Harold, his nose firmly adhered to her round bottom.

At the top of the stairs, a door stood open so that the first thing Florrie saw was an unmade bed—Hoot and the V.W. must have left it that way. Perhaps disturbed by its implications, Florrie blinked the rumpled bed, and at once it came to order, now complete with pillow shams, pink ruffled skirt, and a cabbage rose quilt. Cabbage rose priscillas appeared on the bedroom windows.

“Oh, no,” Lark groaned. She loathed cabbage roses.

“Honey pie?” Florrie called, moving on. “I thought I heard you up here.”

“No,” Lark whispered, suddenly shaking with terror, “oh, no, Mom, not the studio. Please, no.”

Florrie peeked in, nodding approval at the pastel-colored flower daub Sky had done, peering with gently furrowed brow at the child's other painting, on which the black-hat cowboy and the white-hat one had reappeared, riding through sunshine and shadow—but only for a moment longer. Then Florrie blinked the piece into oblivion.

“Damn you!” Lark cried.

Florrie looked around, then shook her head. “Must have been a bird,” she said to the dog, and she went downstairs again. The Escher posters on the walls turned into buttercup-and-daisy confections as she glanced at them. She looked around, her soft square of a face beaming as she blinked buttercup-and-daisy slipcovers onto all the furniture to match.

The Virtuous Woman would probably love it when she came in. “I can't take it,” Lark whispered.

“Then get out of there,” said Shadow impatiently.

“Move on,” Gypsy Davy directed.

Lark did as they said; she straightened out and flew. Flying for her life. Running away, really. “What direction are you headed?” Gypsy Davy asked after a moment.

“West.” Was he stupid? Of course, west. Where else would she go, running away to be a cowboy? It was what she had always wanted to do, where she had always wanted to go, the wild West, the wide open spaces, the big sky country as seen on color TV by a ten-year-old girl watching “Bonanza”—

Sky.

She was going where Sky would have gone.

“Sky,” she whispered.

“About time,” Shadow commented.

“No, I don't see her yet.…” But she knew now where Sky had to be. She was flying toward the place. At the western edge of Soudersburg, on the other side of what the maps labeled Benson's Run but all real people called Cowshit Creek, was an expanse of dry, weedy fields where the plantain was already pushing its cactuslike spikes toward the sky.

“I still don't see her.”

“You put everybody else first,” Shadow said with bemused and muted anger. “Your husband, your kids, your mother, your damn dog, everybody else before your own self.”

Lark did not answer. It was only what women had always been taught to do. Anyway, lighting on a plantain stalk she had taken a piece of black-and-yellow butterfly wing in her beak, and now she was a truthteller, and she saw: Cowshit Creek was the great river that divided civilization from the frontier. Beyond it stretched Indian Territory for five hundred miles. A sere, trackless wilderness lay before her.