Larque on the Wing

by Nancy Springer

  “Is that what she told you? No. I left her the night Shadow found me.” The way he said his lover’s name, Shadow, told her something. The two of them had been together a long time. Between them there were the years of day-to-day, there was the ineffable bond.

  The thought hurt. She had just left her lover behind.

  “Shadow rescued me from that potbellied old poop named Ryder O’Connell,” Argent said, “and he learned how to use his own powers, and he brought some out of me too. We founded Popular Street together. Made it out of what was already here. Or discovered it under what was already here. Thought it up. Brought it alive.”

  She was staring at him. Responding to the stare, he said, “You of all people should know what I mean.”

  “Yes, but—I thought I got that from Mom.”

  “I think—she and I swapped it—back when things weren’t too bad between us.” He was looking down at his perfect pearly-nailed hands, but then he glanced up. “Does your brother show any signs of being peculiar?”

  “Byron?” At first she thought he meant gay. “He’s married.” As if that proved anything. Then she realized Argent was referring to blinking abilities, or doppelgangering abilities, whatever. “Uh, no, not really, Byron is just average weird. All he does is compulsively enter junk-mail sweepstakes.”

  “Lots of people do that. But this weirdness we’ve got—you and your mother and I—really, I think it’s a female thing. At one time I thought of being a woman. Shadow says there is that in me.” She saw a blush briefly turn his beautiful face pink. “We could have looked like a so-called normal couple. But I opted for what you see. Shadow and I decided to be true to what we are.”

  That low, vibrant tone came back into his voice again, speaking of Shadow. This time Lark managed to say, “You think a lot of him.”

  Argent said intensely, “As far as I’m concerned he walks on water.” Suddenly he stood up, brushing at the grass stains on his clothes as if he could get them clean that way, when he should have known better. “I ought to get back to him. Come with me? There’s a lot I need to tell you.”

  Wordlessly Lark stood up and retrieved her food stash from under her bench. But she did not follow the beautiful man dressed in white when he started to walk away. Instead she said, her voice hard again, “I don’t love you.”

  He turned back to face her. “I don’t expect you to,” he said, mildly surprised she had mentioned it, and she intuited something about Argent: in one way being perfect had not changed him. He honestly did not expect anyone to love him.

  Oddly, this annoyed her. “I barely know you,” she complained.

  “I understand that.”

  She challenged, “Why didn’t you ever try to get in touch with me? Why didn’t you tell me your side of it once you stopped being ashamed?”

  He sighed and reached out toward her—but only to take the blue jay feather from her hand. Holding it like a talisman, he said, “I went to your high school graduation and stood in the back. Then, after you got out of college and came back here, I saw you once in the supermarket, once on the street. Damn near fainted when you came into the shop last week. Never told Shadow who you were. Couldn’t handle it.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I can talk to you now that you’re, you know, more like me. But when you were a woman, I couldn’t face you. You looked just like your mother.”

  NINE

  ARGENT SURE KNEW HOW TO OFFEND A PERSON. LARK SAID nothing the whole way to Popular Street.

  Getting in was easy for Argent. He and Lark walked a block, to the first street sign they saw, and then he used the blue jay feather. When they reached the apartment above the Bareback Rider, Shadow was sleeping. Argent sat by the bedside. “Feel free,” he whispered to Lark. “Grab a shower, borrow some clothes, whatever.” He indicated the contents of his home with one vague hand, his gaze on the beautiful young man slumbering.

  In the shower, relaxed by the running water, washing off her pleasant musky I’m-a-guy odor, Lark soaped herself and played with her dick a while, then leaned her head against the tile, closed her eyes, and sighed.

  The father she remembered was balding. His hands had big white knuckles. He wore half glasses to read, and peered over them with worried eyes.

  The mother she remembered was a lapsed Catholic who used birth control.

  It seemed absurd to love her mutated mother but not her reshaped father.

  Why did she love her mother? Was it something she could stop doing?

  What was love? Define love, please, somebody.

  She came out, careful not to let Argent see her naked, simply because she didn’t want to give him anything of herself. With anyone else, maybe she wouldn’t have minded. There was a feeling in her as if she could do things now she could never have done before. But letting this oddball excuse for a father look at her bare male body was not one of them.

  Would Sky love him? Where was Sky?

  Lark heard clinking noises in the kitchen. Evidently, Argent was making lunch. She hoped he served real food, not sawdust pills.

  He had already put her clothes in the washer, but his were too big for her. She softfooted to Shadow’s dresser, careful not to awaken him, and found some clothes to put on that were only a little loose on her. Black tee shirt, black rayon briefs, black jeans faded to soft charcoal gray. Decently covered except for her bare feet, she went into the kitchen to see what was to eat. Good food. Waldorf with chunks of white tuna in it. Pepperidge Farm bread. Fresh fruit salad.

  Why did she feel so naked, so thinly shielded, as if her skin lay right against the world?

  Argent gave her food but took nothing to eat himself.

  Life to Lark had become a weightless, airy sensation, not unpleasant, somewhat exciting, as if she could float away, maybe even fly—but it might not be a good idea to fly yet. Food. That was what she needed, food to weight her down.

  Sitting across the table from her, Argent said without preamble, “The thing is, I’m worried about you.”

  She mumbled around a mouthful of salad, “That makes two of us.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s no joke, Lark. You’ve given yourself away and given yourself away until you’re nothing but a soul with its butt hanging out. You don’t know how much danger you’ve put yourself in.”

  Her heart stopped momentarily from hearing him describe so precisely the naked sensation she had been feeling. But her jaws kept moving. Good food. She wanted to eat.

  Argent said, “If Florrie were here, she could blink you without even thinking about you.”

  “Good thing she’s not here, then.”

  “Would you listen to me?” He raised his voice a notch. “It’s not just Florrie. You might get so that anybody with an opinion of you can do it. Imagine, if a grumpy preacher looked at you and thought, ‘whore of Babylon,’ and that’s what you were? Or you might not even last till that happens. You might just fade to nothing, blow away in the wind.”

  She did not want to hear what he was saying. It was strange enough just to be with him, and it peeved her that he could not have waited until after lunch. She had wanted him to give her this meal, and now it was ruined. She flared at him, “What do you care? I could have been blowing in the wind all these years for all you cared.”

  He said, “Just because I’m a rotten father doesn’t mean I can’t wish you well. Let me help.”

  Before she could shape a suitably biting retort, Shadow walked in, probably awakened by their heightened voices. He did not stagger, but every step was taut and careful. Argent jumped up to steady him, lowering him to a seat. Lark ran to the sofa and brought a knitted blanket to wrap around him.

  “You’re not explaining it very well,” Shadow said to Argent. Because of the quiet affection in his voice, the words did not sound harsh.

  “You do it, then. She’ll listen to you.”

  This was true. Lark listened to Shadow.

  “It’s because you’ve split that
you’re likely to be in trouble,” he told her. “You’ve lost …” He stopped, staring at his own injured hands on the table, then started again. “People, most people, are like flowers with three parts, three petals that overlap. One part is the child. Whatever you were as a child, everything you feared, everything you wanted or dreamed, it all stays with you. One part is the parent. Whatever your mother or father or teachers told you or wanted you to be, that is a part of you too. And the rest of you is self, your own unique mind and will. One part in three. But it all overlaps, it is hard to tell most of the time how much is self, how much is child, how much is—”

  “I am not my mother,” Lark objected with vehemence.

  “Call it training, then,” Argent said softly. “Same thing.”

  “Yes.” Shadow looked up at Lark, his gaze strangely opaque. “Please don’t fight me, please listen. The spirits you call doppelgangers, most often they are one of the parts, are they not?”

  She thought about it. The shoe seemed to fit—not that it proved anything. “Yes,” she said warily.

  “When you first came to see me, you had the child part of you along with you as a spirit. How did that happen?”

  Even though he sat half-naked, with no truthteller’s token in his bruised hand, something about Shadow demanded honesty and received it. Lark thought about Sky better and more carefully than ever before. When she finally spoke, her voice was low.

  “I think I had forgotten about her. I think she came to remind me.”

  “The adult self had taken over. Yes, I see. And then the child rebelled. She was spirit when I met her, but she is solid now?”

  “I thought she was that night for a little while. But then when Mom blinked me, she looked terrified and just disappeared into thin air.”

  “That is another problem and a serious one.”

  Lark remained silent, staring without seeing, thinking about Sky. Part of her lightness, the thinness of her substance, she decided, was because of being without Sky. There was no real weight of seeing in her anymore. It had been days since she had noticed a new color or trick of the light. Not much by way of dreams in her anymore either. Not much wanting to be a cowboy or anything else. Not much fun. Not much playfulness.

  “Besides Sky,” Shadow went on, “there is the most recent doppelganger—”

  “The Virtuous Woman,” Lark supplied sourly.

  Her tone made his face hint at a smile. “Good name for her. She is parent, is she not? Argent says she reminds him all too strongly of your mother.”

  Being without parent was perhaps not a tragedy. Yet—it might be better to have an anchor of heritage, some weight of tradition, some bedrock of The Way Things Are Done to stand on, some limits. And certainly it would feel better to have Hoot. And the boys. All her sense of family was gone. There was not much by way of steadfastness and fidelity in her anymore. Not much to feel right about, either. Not much to feel good about in a moral sense.

  “You’re saying—” Lark’s voice shook. She stopped and tried again. “You’re saying, once they become solid, I’ve lost what is in them?”

  Shadow hesitated, a truthteller’s distanced sheen in his eyes.

  Argent put in, “We’re just saying we’re worried, young’un.”

  Shadow said slowly, softly, “We don’t really know, Skylark. We’ve never met anyone quite like you before.”

  Still tired—unusually tired—Lark took off her boots and napped that afternoon on Argent’s pueblo tan sofa accessorized in sandstone and desert rose. She understood now the deep resonance she had felt the first time she set foot in his apartment. Not just because of the decorator colors, though her ability to cash in on fashionable color schemes was a knack she might well have absorbed from him. And not just because of his tidiness—she barely remembered that aspect of him, so much at odds with her own slobbish tendencies. Mostly, the pang in her heart had been a reaction to his art. Some of the paintings on his walls had been around the house when she was a child—in the attic, because Florrie didn’t like them. But on rainy days Skylark had gone up there and stared into them and ridden between their mesas in her mind.

  Lightly sleeping, she dreamed of Sky. The place of her dream was wide open, made of sunset and rimrock and canyonland. Shadow was there, too, dressed in his customary black, but riding the white horse. Sky rode the black horse, laughing like an angel, and her arms were white wings.

  The sound of a raised voice woke Lark. “I fucking don’t believe it,” someone was saying angrily.

  Lark got up groggily and sockfooted to the next room to see what was the matter. The speaker was Argent, standing rigidly at a window.

  “The cunt. How did she fucking do it?”

  Lark frowned, not much liking the way he spoke of women. If being male meant calling women names, then maybe she ought to forget it. Forget that, and forget finding her father. How would it ever be possible for her to think of this corny silver queen, this stud who reeked of Buff-Brite, as her daddy? She wasn’t even sure how she felt about him as a friend. There was not much warmth in him except for his gentleness for Shadow. And right now even that was slipping. Shadow was heading toward him from the bedroom, wavering a little as he walked into the hallway, and Argent did not even stretch out a hand to help. Argent was mightily upset.

  Lark stood at a different window and looked. Down on the corner of Popular Street was a solitary picket marching punily back and forth with a sign that said SODOM MUST BE DESTROYED.

  “She shouldn’t fucking be able to get in here,” Argent ranted. “Since when do we let her kind of bitch in here?”

  “She has the power to find her way in,” Shadow replied quietly, “just like Lark and Sky.”

  Lark blinked at him in surprise, then looked down at the marcher again and gasped. It was the Virtuous Woman, poodle perm and all. Sleepy, Lark hadn’t recognized her feminized self at first. Probably she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t recognized something familiar about the V.W.’s placard either, but now she did. The large letters of SODOM MUST BE DESTROYED appeared to be drawn in rose madder oil paint. And the sign itself was—

  “My canvas!” Lark cried out. “The bitch! She’s gone and put a broom handle through my canvas!”

  Her outcry must have been piercing enough to penetrate Argent’s wrath. He stopped raving to turn and stare at her. Shadow looked at her also, and for the second time that day she saw the ghost of a smile move one corner of his lovely mouth. But for once she did not want him to smile.

  “My canvas,” she tried to explain. “My art. She’s taking my art!” It hurt her more to see the Virtuous Woman with that canvas than it had to see her with Hoot. Which made sense in a way. Hoot was Hoot, her big dear husband, but her art was her self, her soul.

  Still watching her with cloudy eyes, Shadow was no longer smiling.

  “I’ve got to find Sky,” Lark whispered to him. She had not meant to whisper, but her voice quavered away.

  Argent gave her a hard look. “You think finding Sky will help what’s happening out there?” He pointed at the window. What he had said was not so much a question as a challenge. Clean up your mess, he seemed to be scolding.

  Shadow laid a quiet hand on his arm. “Help me get dressed,” he said. “I need to go see a gypsy.”

  “What!”

  “Lark could use some advice,” Shadow said in his level way, “and so could we. It’s time I went to see my boss.”

  For the first time it began to connect in Lark that this man, Argent, really was her father. He shouted just like her father.

  “No way in hell!” he was yelling. “You’re not going anywhere except back to bed.”

  Shadow shrugged, then grimaced with pain as he wobbled toward his dresser and tried to pull a drawer open with one hand while supporting himself against the mirrored wall with the other.

  “Fucking fool!” Argent reached him and slammed the drawer shut. “Just fucking go lie down!”

  Shadow turned painfully and looked at him,
brows straight, eyes dark. Argent softened his voice.

  “Idiot, you’re not strong enough.”

  “Truth, Argent.” Shadow’s command, though not loud, plainly bore force. “It will not kill me to go see Davy. What is the real problem?”

  “That I care about you!”

  “That you don’t like Dave.”

  “It’s the same thing! Fuck all, I don’t trust the man and I never have. Who the hell is he, anyway? What do you know about him for sure? He could have been the one—you think he nursed you afterward, but how do you know he didn’t do it to you himself?”

  “Ryder! Just back off.”

  Lark backed off instead. Lightning in Shadow’s eyes told her that he was seriously angry. He would never have called Argent by that name unless he was furious, and his wrath made her suddenly aware that she was shamelessly gawking and eavesdropping. She retreated to the living room, where she could hear only occasional words. The two of them were keeping their voices low now, and their tones were more sorrowing than hostile.

  “Only if I come with you,” she heard Argent grumble. Shadow had won.

  “Just—stay home and soak your head.” Panting, Shadow was evidently struggling with jeans, or maybe boots.

  “Let me help, for Christ’s sake. Damn stubborn asshole.”

  Lark could have used help getting into her own boots. The quarrel had not disturbed her, which was new—when ever had quarreling not disturbed her? Maybe part of being male was not always feeling a need to keep the peace? If so, good. Great, in fact. But she was having trouble with her boots because she was tired, still not functioning very well. One foot wedged halfway home. By the time she got herself together, Shadow had already picked up his battered black wild-West hat from the hall table, slapped it onto his head, and was struggling down the stairs.

  “Would you wait a goddamn minute?” Argent yelled, his volume and obscenity levels noticeably waning. Shadow did not obey, but Argent managed to catch up and help him. “Christ, if pride had calories you’d be six feet wide.”

  “No, you,” Shadow panted. “You eat it all the time.”