Larque on the Wing (21 page)

Shadow's eyes flashed up—she could feel them on her even in the dark. Without joining in her laughter he said intensely, “You are Lark in a boy's body. Not just anyone, but Lark, don't you see? You had choices. Your dreams—you are what you dreamed. You could have been what the rules say men are supposed to be, arrogant and quarrelsome and hard. You could have been one of those pathetic James Bond imitators, always positioned for advantage, always on the lookout for a put-down. But instead—” Strange, Shadow did not usually fumble for words. “Lark, the person you are—you call it woman, but I think it can be man—caring and gallant and full of poetry …” His voice lowered to a husky whisper. “In that exquisite body, it glows. Who you are—it makes you quite wonderful.”

She had very nearly stopped breathing. It was happening? But it could not be happening.

He had taken a step toward her. His hand reached out, touched hers—the mere contact of his fingertips tingled through her. But before she could lift her hand to answer his, he pulled back.

“I, also, have choices,” he mumbled—she could barely understand the words, they faltered so. Then he turned away from her and was gone in the night.

ELEVEN

L
ARK DID NOT GO BACK TO CAMP UNTIL DAYBREAK
. W
HEN
she slipped in, Shadow was there, sleeping beside Argent. Lark lay down beside Sky.

An hour later everyone was up. Lark saw Argent give her a hard, watchful look. Didn't he know Shadow had left her standing in a dark field with her fly zipped, her heart hanging out instead of her fun part? Evidently not. Or, maybe he did know and hated her anyway. That would be typical of him the way Mom had painted him: childish, unreasonable. What a crock. But it didn't matter; she didn't really care what he thought. Sky was worse.

Much worse. No, there was no pain, she said. No, she did not feel sick to her stomach. But her skin was the color of putty, she wobbled when she walked, and there was no energy in her, not even enough to be snippy with Lark.

“What would you like to eat?” Lark asked her.

The little girl shrugged her scrawny shoulders. She had refused everything that was still left in the grocery bag, but who could blame her? It was junk.

“I'll get you anything you want.”

Sky barely seemed to have heard.

“What is the matter with her?” Lark appealed to Shadow. “I don't understand what is happening to her.” It was as if Sky were in the last stages of starvation, victimized by a famine that had lasted for months, maybe for years.

Shadow shook his beautiful head. He did not understand either. His dark eyes were opaque and somber. Lark felt her heart go hot with loving him, then cold with knowing it was useless to love him—but she would have to worry about that later. Right now her worry was all for Sky.

“Can we take her to Gypsy Davy? Will he help?”

“Maybe.”

Sky could not walk that far. “Can we take turns carrying her?”

“Count me out,” Argent said. “I am going home.” His voice sounded harsh. His cream-colored clothes were soiled from sleeping on the ground, beard stubble shadowed his face, and his hair lay flat, its platinum luster gone. Argent was not a happy camper.

“To Popular Street?” Lark asked him.

“Of course, to Popular Street, where else? You two”—his glance raked a swift stroke from her to Shadow—“do what you want.” He strode off. Sky sat crooning to herself on the ground, not even aware that her father was leaving her again.

Looking after Argent, Lark called him a name—rather unfairly, as she herself at one point last night had been very much looking forward to doing the act it described.

“No, he's not,” Shadow said in his quiet way. “He's having a hard time.”

“Well, he sure acts like one.”

“I've never seen him like this, and I've known him almost thirty years.”

But—it had not come home to Lark before: could Shadow be that old? What was this guy? A gorgeous fake, like Argent, like her? An old goat in that young-stud bod?

Or a god?

Priorities. Lark said, “Come on, Sky,” picked the girl up like an oversized rag doll, and got moving.

“Follow Argent,” Shadow directed, walking beside her. “No one will be at the carnival so early.”

“But—can't we find him somewhere else? Where does he live?”

Shadow said, “You can't find the sun at nighttime, and you can't find Gypsy Davy before the middle of the afternoon.”

This was awful. Sky looked as if she might die before then. “Is there a doctor we can take her to?” Lark begged.

“I don't know of any doctor who treats doppelgangers. Easy, Lark. She'll last.”

In fact, as Lark carried her, Sky's color began to look somewhat better. The little girl revived enough to put her arms around Lark's neck.

There was a long walk before they made it through Soudersburg's industrial outskirts to the little streets of the city proper, but after that it was easy. Shadow picked up a bright chip of plastic to use as a token. They turned a corner, and they were on Popular Street.

Something was different, though. Cars were rolling through—muscle cars with radios blaring and the drivers leering, Buick sedans with the windows rolled up and the fat-faced kids staring out the back. Pickups packed with rednecks.

“Tourists in fairyland,” Shadow said, his voice taut but utterly level. He was acting toward Lark just as he always had. There was something about Shadow that bided its time, seldom smiling, seldom scorning—like the cloud shadow through which lightning passed, he hung steady no matter what was going on around him. He watched from a distance. Even walking right there beside her he seemed distant. Lark did not know if she would ever get past his poise again. Or rather, if he would ever again show his heart to her. It was not something she had caused or could ever cause to happen. He had come to her.

Why?

And then, the next midnight moment—why had he backed away?

“Shadow,” Lark whispered.

He seemed not to hear.

“Shadow!” she called as if he were half a mile away.

He turned to her.

What could she say? She just looked at him. He looked at her, and she understood. He was what he had always been, a suspended being. A thundercloud hangs halfway between the earth and the stars; Shadow hung somewhere in the darkness between her and Argent.

As if they had talked, he turned back to the crowd on the street. “How did they get in?” he said of the intruders.

When they came up the stairs to the apartment above the Bareback Rider, Argent was already out of the shower—he had been able to walk home faster than they. Dewy in a white terry cloth robe, he stood leaning on a windowsill, looking down somberly at the invasion of traffic in the street. He seemed both calmer and more desperate than earlier, and glanced up at Shadow without speaking.

“Nobody owns Popular Street,” Shadow said quietly. “Nobody owns me, either.”

Just as quietly Argent said, “I know that. But I can't help how I feel.”

“About what? This?” He gestured toward the out-of-control world below. “Me? Your daughter?”

“All three.”

“All three of her?”

Argent snorted and turned away from the small attempt at a joke. He said to Lark, “Why don't you take your doppelganger and get out of here.”

“She needs to eat!”

Argent deeply sighed. “Take her to the kitchen.” Then for some reason he followed Lark there, pulled a pan out of a cupboard, and banged it onto the stove.

Her arms aching, Lark put Sky down on a chair at the table, but the kid went limp in protest. “Spaghetti bones,” Lark complained. “Sit up.” Sky couldn't be that weak.

The little girl spoke for the first time in an hour. “I want to sit on your lap.”

“I hate to tell you this, Sky, but you are grimy and you stink.”

Snot began to run. Sky was crying again.

“Oh, okay. Jesus.” When her boys were little, bawling and clinging to Larque's legs and following her into the bathroom, she had vowed that she was never going to go through this sort of thing again. Never again would she sit at a kitchen table with a slurping kid in her lap. But life has a way of coming around for another try at you.

Come to think of it, that was what life was doing to Argent. Taking another swipe at him. Look out, here she comes again. First the mother, then the daughter—in triplicate. Lark felt as though she could be sorry for Argent if she ever stopped being angry at him. And he at her.

Feeling the way he felt, why was he helping her? For some reason he had put some Lipton's chicken soup on to simmer for Sky. Now he was crouching by Lark, or rather beside the child in Lark's lap, with a moist washcloth, scrubbing gently at Sky's face and hands, trying to clean her up. Shadow was in the shower. Argent smiled at Sky but said to Lark in carefully quiet tones, “What the hell are you trying to do to me?”

In tones not nearly so careful or quiet she retorted, “I'm schizo. What do you expect?”

“I mean it. I want you to explain. Start with yesterday. Why did you pull that fat old man, you know who, out of me?”

Lark glanced down apprehensively at Sky. But the little girl seemed to be in a stupor, following none of this. It was an alarming symptom of how far gone Sky was that the child, whose wits were usually as sharp as her elbows, had not yet linked the doppelganger of her father to Argent.

Lark admitted, “That wasn't meant for you. I was aiming at Shadow.”

“You can't do that to him.”

“Do you mean I can't, or I'd better not?”

“You can't. He's not like us. Was that the first time you tried anything like that?”

“On him? Yes.”

“But on other people?”

It seemed important to impress on this irritating man, her so-called father, that she had never made a deliberate with-malice-aforethought effort to doppelganger anyone. “Not people! I just doppelgangered my way into Popular Street once.”

There was a heartbeat of silence. Then, “God have mercy,” Argent whispered, letting his washcloth drop to the floor. “The whole street?”

She nodded.

“God help us. Lark, what am I going to do with you? You're dangerous.”

“Just—just stop making me mad!” At the time this seemed a reasonable solution. “Shadow wanted to change you back to being who you really are. Why couldn't you just do it? For your daughter? For Sky?”

“Why couldn't you do it for your husband? You love him, don't you?”

Touché. So thoroughly, hurtfully touché it nearly took her breath away. For some reason, maybe because it was the truth or maybe to wound him back, she said, “I love Shadow.”

Without even blinking Argent retorted, “Well, that may be the only thing we have in common.”

Lark did not know what to say, so, like a typical male, she glared. She was still glaring, and Argent was ignoring her, a moment or two later, when Shadow padded in barefoot from his shower.

“Have a look outside,” he told Argent. “No, on second thought, don't. I'll tell you.”

But Argent had already stepped to the window. “What next,” he said in doomsday tones.

“I told you not to look.”

Lark slipped out from under Sky and went to see. It was just the Virtuous Woman again, marching up and down punily with her hyperventilating message, protesting. Except—

“
Mama mia
,” Lark groaned.

Except it was not just the V.W. Marching along with her—no, not marching. Toddling up and down Popular Street on short legs and stubby sneakered feet, toting another homemade antigay placard, was a beaming little lady with every blue-gray hair firmly sprayed in place.

“Florrie,” Argent moaned.

“Mom,” Lark said at the same time in exactly the same tone. This impossible woman was another thing she and her father had in common.

“Get back.” Shadow pulled Lark away from the window. “Don't let her see you. Right now you are in terrible danger from her if she feels like changing you to suit herself. You are all in pieces. I have never met anyone more mutable.”

“And with more talent for making trouble,” Argent grumbled.

“Think of it as potential.”

“I don't want to think about it at all.”

“You'd better start to think—”

“Suppose
you
start to think with your head instead of your ass!”

Lark left them there quarreling and went back to Sky. She got soup and offered it to the child and tried to spoon it into her. But Sky was not interested in eating it.

With a satisfying sense of pattern in a disorderly world, Lark stole Florrie's Suzuki Samurai that afternoon, drove it to the Valu-Mart Shop-All Plaza, and ditched it next to the same dumpster where she had left the Chevette, which was now gone—maybe it really did go with the trash? She hoped she would not find it waiting for her when she got home. If she got home, ever.

Argent had refused to come along this time, and Shadow had stayed with him. Probably they were fighting. Probably after they were done fighting they would make up and make love. There was order in a chaotic world, all right, but Lark did not appreciate it this time. Fuck them both.

She carried Sky in her arms to Gypsy Davy's booth. The little girl rode along without looking at Whack-A-Mole or the green rubber frogs leaping toward their plastic lily pond or the ferris wheel or giant fully poseable stuffed flamingos or any of the bright things they passed. When they reached the pony ride Lark said, “Hey, snorting horsies!” but Sky lay limply, her eyes closed, her head nestled against Lark's shoulder.

Curls holding his magenta Stetson high, eyes merry, Gypsy Davy leaned burly-shouldered over the counter of his booth. “Hats for heroes! Hats to live on in legend!” he bellowed. “Chance of a lifetime, right here! Come one, come all! Be a cowboy!”