And never would. He accepted this now the way most people had to accept failing eyesight and midriff flab and the various indignities of age.
He was—a shadow, almost no one.
For some reason, today the realization did not trouble him.
“Almost there,” Lark called back. Shadow’s heart leaped foolishly at the sound of her boyish young voice.
“Wonderful,” Argent grumped. He would rather have been home with a good dinner and a glass of wine. But here he was, hiking to the boonies in his dove gray silver-stitched Tony Lamas, because his daughter insisted. The poor old guy, he didn’t know what to think of her, how to feel about her. It was hard on him.
Not that Argent was ever at his cheeriest when Shadow and Dave got together. Partly, it was rivalry making him sour. But mostly, it was distrust of Gypsy Davy, and Shadow could not blame Argent too hard for that. Dave had a typical shifty-eyed gypsy family, a larcenous father who ran a gyp joint, a macho, posturing brother. The mother was nothing special. How had Gypsy Davy come to possess visionary powers and healing hands?
There was mischief in Gypsy Davy, Shadow had to admit. The man had a desire to pose, to control, to mystify. And he could be a meddler. And probably Shadow would never really know how he got to be what he was. But maybe it did not matter. Maybe there was a mystery in the clouds of which Gypsy Davy thought, Who the hell is he? And maybe the mystery in the clouds thought it of the mystery in the sky, the darkness between the stars.
“Shad,” Argent complained, “would you quit walking into things? Are you feeling okay?”
“I am Lord-God bloody fucking fine,” Shadow said, watching Lark’s exquisite shoulders now. Had he really been walking into things? Euphoric and disoriented, so that was what it was like.
He had always wanted to fall in love.
But this feeling—was it Gypsy Davy up to his tricks again? Quite a coincidence, that it should start the moment he walked away from Dave’s healing touch.
“You look strange.” Argent was scanning him, his peevishness temporarily on hold, his eyes concerned now. “Are you feeling light-headed?”
“I’m okay, Argent.”
The man loved him. Pygmalion in reverse. He had created Argent, and Argent had fallen in love with him.
He had created Lark, and—
And if he fell in love with her, it would hurt Argent enough to just about kill him.
Shadow looked back at his longtime companion, and his heart froze like a rabbit when the shadow of the hound falls close by, and he thought, I have to decide.
I have to know.
Once and for all. I have to know what love is. Whether I love him.
Lark knew that it would have made more sense to wait until morning to go after Sky, but her frantic heart would not let her. She would not be able to sleep until she found the girl.
“What now?” Shadow asked, well and strong again; thank God or Gypsy Davy at least one thing was going right.
Standing on the far bank of Cowshit Creek, Lark looked out over tall patches of last year’s teasels backlit by the low sun, throwing long shadows. “Just—you know, like hide-and-seek. Walk around and look. It’s only a few acres of field.” There was maybe an hour of light left, maybe two.
“But if she is not visible?”
Lark felt a commotion take hold of her insides. She gawked at Shadow.
“Which is probably the case,” Argent put in snappishly. “You said she disappeared into thin air. It makes sense that she would not be visible.” Argent, who was carrying the plastic bag of food Lark had insisted on buying—with Argent’s money—would far rather have been home on Popular Street, Lark knew. She had embarrassed him in the supermarket by accidentally causing the appearance of a seminaked, mercifully quick-to-pass doppelganger of a dressed-for-success businesswoman they had met in the cereal aisle. By this point in her life Lark generally remembered not to wonder what sort of underwear people wore, but it had been a strange day and the thought had caught her off guard. (It was vintage ecru Victoria’s Secret.) Aside from feeling mortified, Argent was anxious about the Virtuous Woman situation and annoyed with Lark for causing it. Maybe, knowing how he felt, she should not have bullied him and Shadow into coming with her. But she needed to find Sky. She wanted Sky so badly she had almost forgotten why.
Because of her art career? Not really. Her studio was probably being turned into a sewing room with framed cross-stitched inspirational verses on the walls. Did she still have a career?
Sky, where are you?
“Your mother traumatized the crap out of her,” Shadow was explaining. “I think she opted out of this plane of existence. I think you’re right; I think she ran away to be a cowboy and I think she might be here, but probably she’s living in her version of here, do you understand? And if that’s the case, how can you locate her? If she’s doing what I think she is, we have a huge territory to cover.”
Lark nodded. From under the brim of a magenta hat she had seen it. “Can Gypsy Davy help?” she whispered.
“He already has.” Shadow’s eyes were darkly clouded; it was impossible to know what he was really thinking. “It’s up to you now. You know her better than we do.”
Lark sank down on the ground. Shadow settled himself beside her and gave a quelling glance to Argent, who puffed a sigh between his tight lips and did likewise. All three of them sat in the sundown light, waiting.
Waiting for Lark to come up with something.
In a way, Lark knew, it was hopeless. But in a way it was the same sort of situation that she as an artist had handled all the time, whenever she faced the intractability of concept, canvas, and perceived world.
She let her mind wander, let her thoughts be random. The supermarket, where cashiers and customers alike had eyed her suspiciously because she was a young male invading a mostly female domain. She had never realized young hunks had to put up with that sort of prejudice—little old ladies edging away from them as if they might get their purses snatched—and she didn’t like it. It upset her. Then she had gone and committed doppelganger, which was worse than farting in public. At least the omnipresent piped music covered poot-noises—probably that was what it was for—but nothing covered her doppelgangers. Argent was probably sorry he had ever taken part in conceiving her.
She knew what kind of underwear Argent wore: silk bikinis in hot colors. She knew because she had looked in his drawer.
Lark studied the ornaments on the toes of her boots: tiny broncos bunched to buck. How appropriate for her. Argent’s boot toes were studded with silver roses. Shadow’s had silver coiled rattlesnakes. That didn’t fit. Shadow was no snake.
She had to find Sky.
Not exactly looking for the concept, just waiting for it with a relaxed mind, Lark let her eyes stray across the messy randomness around her. Weeds. The cowplop silhouettes of industrial West Soudersburg. The sumac clumps by Cowshit Creek.
Other sorts of brush there too. Sassafras. Pussy willow.
Lark got up and walked over to study the bushes. The others followed.
Without looking up at them Lark said softly, “I remember now. There was an art to finding things. Sometimes truthtellers carried a stick and followed it, even if they didn’t know what they were looking for.”
“Oh, terrific,” Argent said bitterly to Shadow. “She’s going to go dowsing for her.”
Shadow did not answer. Her gaze on the willow twigs, Lark only asked, “Does anybody have a knife?”
Shadow did, of course, a Case Barlow with bone handle. Lark chose the thicker blade and cut the length of green willow stick that had caught her eye. Just a straight, stubby piece that would have been good for a whistle—she would have to make one for Sky sometime. “Okay,” she said more to herself than to anyone else, and with her truthteller’s stick in hand she wandered away into the fields beyond Cowshit Creek, heading toward the sunset.
There should have been other people with sticks and animals on their hind legs dancing ar
ound a monolith, the way she had drawn this scene as a child. But there was only her.
“Don’t get lost,” Argent called sourly after her.
He would probably thank God if she did. Lark did not bother to answer him. “Sky,” she whispered, “where are you?” She closed her eyes, shut out Argent’s disapproval, and tried to let the willow rod in her hand lead her.
It stood there inert—which of course was what any sane person would expect. Not that anything in Lark’s life was sane, but still … this was asinine.
To hell with the truthteller’s stick. Lark opened her eyes. “Sky,” she called, looking around.
“Sky,” her call echoed back, tugging at her heart.
And quite suddenly the willow stick tugged at her hand. Flinching with surprise, for a moment she fought it before she remembered to follow.
It led her in figure eights and big circles. Slow and tentative at first, it soon gained speed until she had to trot to keep up with it, stumbling on rocks and ditches she couldn’t see through the weeds.
This was getting questionable. “Are you taking me to Sky?” she demanded of the object in her hand. It gave no satisfactory reply. Her mother had always said that talking to her Uncle Ralph, her father’s brother, was like talking to a stick; now Lark had a basis for comparison.
The stick towed her straight through a briar patch. “Ow!” she yelled, hanging on grimly. It headed into a broad swath of poison ivy. Too bad. Maybe she wouldn’t get any through her jeans. It took her down into the bed of Cowshit Creek, and even though there wasn’t any cowshit in there anymore, there was plenty of mud very similar in consistency.
Nearly up to her boot tops in the stuff, Lark had had enough. She snatched her stick away from whatever invisible force had charge of it, hurled it into the water, and stood panting with anger and exertion. By the time she got her breath back to speak, she understood. It wasn’t the willow stick’s fault. It was Sky who had been jerking her around.
“Why are you mad at me?” she hollered. “I didn’t do anything to you!”
There was, of course, no answer.
“And what have you done for me? Get me screwed, that’s what! Since the day you showed up, nothing but—”
“Lark,” a steady voice rebuked her, “shouting won’t help.”
It was Shadow, who stood looking down at her from the top of the creek bank with the last gleam of sunset lying tender on his dark-haired head. Lark had forgotten he was there. Seeing him so suddenly, she felt a rush of emotion—he was gorgeous, he was gay, she adored him and would never have him, she was knee-deep in the goddamn mud while he stood haloed in twilight glory, and he had just spoken to her in so patient and teacherly a tone that all her frustration focused on him. Shouting could not begin to express what she wanted to tell him. In that instant, without forethought but quite deliberately, she attempted to doppelganger him. If she could never be his lover, by damn she would at least see what sort of lace-and-satin undies he was wearing today. Undies, hell—she would see him. All of him.
Fiercely she focused on Shadow.
At once her effort had an effect, though not the one she wanted. Shadow felt it—she saw shock freeze his perfect face, tighten his perfect body. Reverberations staggered her, as if she had just hit against something rock hard. He was impervious, she could tell that in an instant. Anything she could do would just bounce off him.
But at that exact moment Argent walked up behind him.
Shadow knew what had happened almost before Lark did. He turned to see. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“Daddy,” Lark whispered, and sudden, unexpected tears started down her face. For there next to Argent, dressed only in baggy boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, stood an overweight, balding, middle-aged, bespectacled, and bewildered man—the father she remembered.
“Daddy!” another voice cried—faintly, as if it came from far away. Only a few feet from Lark, but barely visible, Sky hovered like a wraith above the creek mud.
“Daddy!” Sky wailed.
Lark gasped, forgetting all her anger. The child was thinner than ever—how could she have gotten so terribly thin overnight? She looked emaciated, almost skeletal. Her skinny, see-through face twisted with emotion, her frail body trembled, her twiggy arms stretched toward her father. Partly running—but leaving no tracks in the mud—partly hurtling herself through the air, Sky sped to—
Her daddy? Not her father, really. Only a doppelganger of her father.
Mute and peering, the apparition stood stupidly and did not respond to Sky’s approach. Her embracing arms cut right through it—even in her translucent state Sky was still more solid than this particular phantom. Already it was starting to fade.
“No!” Sky cried. She struck at the dull thing and burst into vehement sobbing, then threw herself to the ground. “No, don’t go!”
Lark slogged her way out of the mud, struggled up the creek bank and went to her. The Ryder O’Connell look-alike was gone. Argent, like it, had not moved or spoken through all this.
“Babe.” Lark sat down on the ground by Sky and gently gathered the little girl into her strong young tough-guy arms. “Sky, it’s okay. Don’t cry. That wasn’t really Daddy. He’s”—She glanced at Argent’s flat, pale face and decided against what she had been going to say. “He’s not here, I’m sorry, but look. I brought you food. Look, I brought you Twinkies.”
Sky was listening to none of this. Sobbing against Lark’s chest, Sky now felt as solid as Lark did—which wasn’t saying much, really—but also pitifully starved.
“Daddy went away,” she bawled. “He—just went away and—left me.”
Lark made herself look up at Argent again to see how he was reacting to all this. Daddy had indeed gone away and left her, and at this point she nearly hated him for it. But she was back-burnering her own feelings for a while. Before she could do anything about them she had to figure out what to tell Sky about this white-hat cowboy.
Argent, she saw, looked as cornered as before. And Shadow, like her, was eyeing him.
“No,” Argent said in reply to Shadow’s silent query.
“Things would still be the same between us,” Shadow said.
“No. You think they would, but—how could you live with an old poop? No. Absolutely not.”
“I think you’re going to have to.”
“No! I can’t do it!”
“Shhhhh,” Lark said to all three of them, the two men and the weeping child. Only the men shushed. “Babe, listen, we’ve got Butterscotch Krimpets,” Lark tried again, her lips close to Sky’s ear. “And candy corn. And Devil Dogs.” She had bought all the junk foods that she remembered Sky, the kid she once was, had craved.
Sky just cried.
Lark pulled back. “Hey, Sky,” she asked conversationally, “where you been?”
The child sobbed but sat up to answer her. “Captured—by the—Indians.” With some degree of pride Sky added, “Cheyenne.”
“I believe it.”
“They were good to me,” Sky elaborated, taking time out from weeping, “but they didn’t have much to eat. The white man had taken their hunting lands.”
“Really? Well, here.” Lark reached into the grocery bag, which Shadow had brought and placed beside her. Luck handed her something semihealthy, an apple turnover. “Do you want to eat this, or should I?”
“I’ll take it.” Ignoring the snot on her own thin face, Sky ate.
Shadow sat down alongside Lark and Sky. After a moment Argent joined them. They all settled on the dank grass and ate Twinkies and sugar wafers and peanut butter cups. They drank nutritionally obscene Kool-Aid from environmentally obscene plastic-coated boxes. Night had fallen; stars shone overhead like distant spur rowels on the black velvet back of Gypsy Davy’s wagon. Argent was quiet and did not eat much. Shadow did not speak to him, but sat staring at Lark.
“You startled me,” he said to her. “Caught me off guard.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yo
u tried to—what’s that word you use?”
“I tried to doppelganger you. I’m really sorry. It was just that—I was frustrated.”
“So are we all. Don’t do it again.”
“No. I won’t.”
Shadow said, “I imagine it must feel a lot like that to have a bullet bounce off you if you’re wearing a Kevlar vest.”
“I won’t mug you that way again.” It was a solemn promise, something she could not have said if she hadn’t meant it; she could never speak less than the truth to him. “Donut?” She offered him a box of Tastykake powdered ones.
He shuddered slightly. She and Sky ate most of the donuts between them, for dessert. Afterward, Sky headed for the creek bed and some bushes to take care of a natural function. She was that real? Apparently so. Lark, who had followed along, squatted beside her before she remembered she was no longer exactly one of the girls. Oh well, it was just Sky. Anyway, it was dark.
“Will you stay with me now?” she asked Sky softly before they rejoined the others. “Don’t be scared of Mom. She blinked me, but I got me back.”
“I guess,” Sky mumbled. “Will we find Daddy?”
“Maybe.” What the hell else could she say?
When they got back to the others, Argent was complaining to Shadow, “You’re crazy. Sleep here?”
“Go back by yourself if you don’t like it.” Shadow did not look up from what he was doing: clearing away stones and laying down a mat of last year’s dried grass, making himself a bed.
They all did the same, though Argent did it sullenly. In a way they were just on the edge of Soudersburg, but in another way camping along their trail made sense; they might as well have been in the middle of Indian Territory. They had walked out here—the Chevette was still sitting behind the Valu-Mart Plaza, or else the cops had taken it, or else it had gone with the trash. There was no phone anywhere near. It had been a long, strange day, and they were all tired.
Larque on the Wing Page 15