Larque on the Wing (16 page)

But love and the marriage bond were not everything. There was also her need to be—to be. To be Lark.

Once she followed her need, would she ever find her way back to Geoffrey Harootunian? And would he want her if she did?

Lark felt her heart beating fast in her strong young chest. There was a kind of freedom in not knowing the future.

Freedom. That part of being Lark felt good, very good. Freedom and the spicy fast food she was swallowing. Freedom and her hard young body to take her wherever she wanted to go.

She had no money, no husband, no driver's license, no car. No passport, no birth certificate, no social security number, no phone. No home. No breakables except her own bones. No bed to sleep in. Nearly no gender. The Virtuous Woman had all those things that had once belonged to her.

No birthdate or age that made any sense. No picture of a boy named Lark in the high school yearbook, no classmates who would remember Lark that way. No family anymore. No job, and no chance of getting one without all the pieces of paper she lacked.

Realizing all this, Lark felt at the same time panicked and joyously weightless, as if she could grow wings and fly. She wandered lonely as a cloud.

“No income,” she said aloud, “no income tax.” She finished her second piece of chicken and licked her fingers. As soon as her stomach was full she found that she badly wanted to sleep. And why not. The sun was warm. Daffodils were blooming. In a little traffic-island park by a statue of some portly Civil War general she found a wooden bench only mildly sullied by bird droppings. Also, on it like a gift awaiting her, like a chocolate on her pillow, lay a really nice blue jay feather. Her mother had always told her not to handle wild bird feathers because they would give her lice. Her mother had told her a lot of things, few of them true. She picked up the slate blue shining thing and held it between her fingers as she went to sleep.

A few hours later she woke, stiff and sunburned, and blinked at the man sitting on the grass beside her head. It was Argent.

In the sun he verily shone: “silver belly” Stetson, hair like white gold, ivory skin, and those strange turquoise eyes. Grass stains on the elbows of his linen suit from leaning back while he waited for her. Maybe he didn't care about his clothes—but she knew he did care. She knew he was a silver-stud pearl-button dandy. What was he doing there?

He said without greeting, “It's not a good idea to sleep out in the open. Predators can't resist a person asleep. And a homeless person is a victim nobody will report.”

She was always cranky when she first woke up from a nap. And something about his tone, pedantic, preacherly, seemed to hint at an assumption of ownership that clashed badly with her newfound sense of freedom. For both reasons, Lark was irritated, and flared at him, “What's it to you? What do you care?”

He said, “You're my daughter.”

Hoot stood out on his front sidewalk looking at his own front door, so bemused he was nearly going cross-eyed. He felt so Lord-God happy and relieved to have Larque back, happy right down to his you-know, he should have let it go at that. But he couldn't. Despite feeling really, really fine, he kept staring and thinking.

In the first place, Larque had not wanted to do some of the down-and-dirty sex stuff she usually loved.

In the second place, instead of putzing around in her studio the way she usually did, she was cleaning the john, which she hardly ever did.

In the third place, those clothes, that hair—they just weren't her.

But mostly what bothered him was the wreath, the stupid heart-shaped grapevine thing he was staring at. He had given it to her, and she had kissed him and hugged him and said she loved it and hung it on the door. And that was all.

“Wreath wars!” was what she should have said. “Damn the torpedoes, full peed a head!” or something like that. She used to make fun of the neighborhood wreathupsmanship. Also the ribbon wars. Like, neighbors were always displaying red ribbons for being against drunk driving, purple for supporting battered women, yellow for the hostages, green for the environment, blue for being nice to cops, white for antipornography—Larque swore she was going to put up a wreath of black ribbons and be prosmut. Or a wreath of all colors, every conceivable color, so she could be for and against every conceivable cause, and the neighbors could go crazy trying to figure it out. That was the way Larque was. That mind of hers and that wicked sense of humor never quit.

But the wreath—she had just hung it there.

The door swung open, startling him. Larque breezed out of the house, wearing high-heeled pumps with that dowdy-looking skirt she had glommed onto somewhere. “I'm going grocery shopping,” she sang, blowing him a kiss. “Perdue roasters are on sale for eighty-nine cents a pound at the Giant. We can have roast chicken and stuffing and mashed potatoes for supper.”

Hoot nodded, waved, watched her pull out, then turned back to stare at the door some more. He no longer felt really, really fine. Something was still wrong with Larque.

Lark stared at Argent. She could not possibly recognize this so-called father or feel anything for him. He looked nothing at all like the daddy she remembered.

Later, she was to go through all the various degrees and forms of anger, doubt, tenderness, grief for the lost years. And if there had been time to think about it and plan it and imagine it, likely she would have wasted that first white-hat sunlit moment with kisses, tears, or shrieks of rage. But as it was, waking from sleep with the blue token of a truthteller in her hand, she blurted out her first thought.

“Christ,” she said, “Mom blinked you too.”

His mouth gaped and his breath seemed to stop for a moment but then came back as a yell of laughter. He laughed long and loud and hard while she lay on her bench and watched him—not, she decided, laughing at her, or not entirely. The lines of his shoulders had been tired and tense, and the thoroughgoing laughter eased them. He was laughing at the wackiness of it all. Life was hilarious and bizarre.

“Sorry,” he managed to say when he was mostly done laughing. “Sorry, I—you're right, she tried to blink me all the time. But not into this. Not hardly, not your mother.”

“She didn't want you to be gay?”

“Florrie?” It was a stupid question, and he would have had a right to laugh at it, but instead he smiled the warm, slow smile of a cowboy at Lark. “What do you think?”

Lark shrugged and sat up, starting to function, starting to remember she had reason to be angry at him. She said in a hard voice, “I think somebody should have told me. Nobody told me why you went away. I thought it was my fault.”

He stopped smiling. “I—I'm sorry. I felt—”

“How do you think I felt? You abandoned me. Never came back, never even sent me a postcard.”

“I was ashamed. Back then—the way things were—I wanted to die, didn't think I was fit to live. They convinced me the best thing I could do for you was stay away from you so you wouldn't have to know.”

“They?”

“People in general. The way they talked about queers.”

“And Mother in particular,” she said. Florrie the Mortified, head firmly tucked into sand. It was all starting to make sense, yet Lark's voice was still edgy and tight.

Argent said, “I don't want to criticize your mother. I don't hate her. She just scares the shit out of me.”

That surprised laughter out of her the way she had surprised it out of him. The reward of truthtellers is often laughter. Lark lay back on the park bench and kicked her booted feet and laughed until she felt afraid she might wet herself. Then she made herself stop, sat up again, and crossed her legs tight. But her voice was soft and quiet and relaxed.

“So Mom kicked you out on your sinful wazoo,” she said.

“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

A
RGENT SURE KNEW HOW TO OFFEND A PERSON
. L
ARK 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.”