Larque on the Wing (2 page)

Tonight, as usual, she and Hoot stacked their guitar-shaped anatomies together, sleeping like nested spoons. Larque lay awake a while, her cheek resting against the back of Hoot's long neck. It bothered her a little that Hoot did not love Sky. Yet—who ever said she had to be rational?—she herself wished nothing so much as that the repulsive kid would just go away. Disappear. Make like a tree and leave.

On toward morning, lightly sleeping, Larque heard or dreamed noises that might have been pieces dropping off the old house faster than any normal person could fix them, or one of the boys clattering the filthy water glass in the bathroom, or a guinea pig rattling its way out of its wire-topped cage, or Sky making a mess in the studio, or a psychopathic intruder coming in through the kitchen window. Of course, that was what it had to be: a homicidal maniac with a ten-inch knife. So what else was new? Life was fraught with danger. Soon Hoot would quit his job again, bored the minute he learned what he was supposed to do. Bored by home repairs, too. Soon the bulge in the house wall would worsen until the bricks parted like a grin and the roof fell in. Sighing, Larque shut her eyes harder against the noises and continued to sleep.

It was Sky making a mess in the studio.

Hoping the doppelganger had gone away, not wanting to know where she was, Larque didn't see her until after everyone was out of the house in the morning, until she went upstairs to the small spare room with a good north light, her place of self-employment. Her college degree had been in library science, so of course she had spent her life doing something utterly unrelated: she painted for the gift-shop-and-craft-fair market. Southeastern Pennsylvania, the area where she lived, was blessed with many such shops and fairs, attractions to which New Yorkers with no proper sense of the value of money came by the busload. Larque was blessed with a debased, uncultivated taste in art which enabled her to make a steady income from signed limited editions of her work, often more than Hoot made from whatever he was doing at the time. There were two simple secrets to her success: bland subject matter and decorator colors. Whenever she felt an urge to produce something creative, she lay down until the spasm passed. Brain farts did not sell. Real people did not want originality; they just wanted something that matched the living room drapes.

The fashion colors for interiors this year were the “southwest shades”: “pueblo,” “hot sand,” “desert rose.” The subject matter, paradoxically, remained as Eastern and rural as ever: old barns, covered bridges, contented cows along lazy creeks. Larque had gotten so she could paint the things in her sleep. Only the palette changed from year to year. This year's holsteins were spotted “sunset purple” instead of black, “yucca” instead of white.

Walking into her studio for another day of turning out a dependable, money-making product, Larque felt bored but secure, as if in an armchair in front of a well-worn TV show. She had always liked the feeling of knowing what was going to happen next.

Or had she?

There was Sky, at an easel, standing in front of a big canvas Larque had been saving—she had intended someday to paint something important on it, something major, a statement. What, she had no idea, but something, once she knew what she wanted to say. But Sky had gotten to it ahead of her, and was making a mess of it. Having a paint tantrum. Splattering barbaric-colored oils on her blouse, her skirt, her skinny body, the easel legs, the floor, via the canvas. Her masterpiece was crude, which perhaps accounted for her fury; it is rough to be trying for a visual manifesto and come up with something more like an ambitious attempt at cake icing. The canvas was divided more or less diagonally between yellow ochre and Mars violet, a composition which Larque translated as storm and sunshine. Very dramatic, she had to admit. The kid had a good sense of graphic design. There were some muddled bread-loaf shapes in the background; cumulus clouds? Mountains? The middle of the canvas was taken up by two blobs Larque could not at first interpret, a black one, mostly in the sunlight, and a white one, mostly in the cloud shadow.

To hell with interpretation. To hell with good graphic design. The room smelled of turpentine, the palette was a catastrophe of paint, five times as much as was needed, the worktable was a ruin of squashed and split and curled tubes.

“My Winsor Newtons!” Larque cried. “You couldn't use the cheap paints, no, you had to get into my Winsor Newtons.”

The doppelganger child jabbed fiercely at the canvas, her narrow jaw grinding her crooked teeth together, her pinched face grim and rapt. “You paint lies,” she told Larque. “Prissy-color lies. This is no good, but at least it's true.”

“Says who?” Larque flared. “Anyway, nobody's ever going to see that, because it's never going to dry. You've got it piled on so thick it'll just crack into pieces and fall apart. So all you've done is wasted a ton of expensive paint. Do you have any idea how much art supplies cost?”

Sky stopped painting and looked at her. “You are seeing it,” she said.

“So?”

“You are the only one who has to see it.”

“Why? Why do I have to see it?” Larque tapped her foot and wished suddenly, fiercely, and illogically, for boots, something that would make a more impressive stomping noise than her Canvas slip-ons. She felt seriously annoyed with doppelgangers that talked back, or talked at all—Sky was the first that had ever done so in her experience, and her experience was all she had to go on. She was the only person she knew or had ever heard of who had these problems. There was no Doppelganger Prevention hot line listed in the phone book, no National Doppelganger Association she could write away to, no Weirdos Anonymous she could join. She was on her own with this spirit child.

She was not used to a doppelganger that was so physical, either. Previous doppelgangers had been wispy things, not capable of impacting on her life's environment. Sky seemed far too real, standing there holding a boar-bristle paintbrush. Larque could almost smell the twitchy kid. Maybe even touch her if she cared to try, which emphatically she did not. Next thing the kid would be wanting her own phone, requiring orthodontia, needing a college education.

Larque did not give Sky time to answer her question, but stormed on. “What do I have to do to get rid of you?”

Sky set down the paintbrush and showed crooked, yellow-coated teeth in a challenging smile.

Larque demanded, “Tell me what you want.”

The spirit girl's smile turned to a scowl. “You made me promises,” she said.

“Such as?”

“Such as, you were going to be a truthteller. Such as, you were going to do things. Such as, you were never going to wear stupid white shoes.” Sky was growing impassioned and articulate and her nose was running in a big, green way. “You made me promises, and you went back on everything, you never kept any of them.”

“I don't remember.”

“You don't want to remember. You don't want to think about me at all. You don't like me.”

“That's not true,” Larque said automatically. Her momma had brought her up right. She knew how to be nice, polite, civil even to people she loathed.

“Liar. You lie all the time.”

Larque slapped the brat. She had never slapped her own kids so hard or so spontaneously; her own ferocity took her very much by surprise, sending a shocked reaction through her heart much as her hand passed right through Sky's cheek and jawbone with only slight, sickening resistance. Sky's eyes widened, and she gasped, but did not cry.

Then her eyes narrowed. “Told you you didn't like me,” she sneered, backing away. Her foot in its ugly, sensible oxford shoe shot out, connecting dead center with a finished watercolor that was leaning against the wall, matted but not yet framed. The kick tore a triangular hole right through a herd of holsteins.

“Moo cows,” Sky mocked. “Barnie poos,” aiming another deadly kick at another painting. There was power in those skinny translucent legs of hers. Power in her bony hands and arms. She ripped Larque's partly finished pink-udder watercolor off the drawing table and tore it up. She knocked over the stool. She ricocheted around the room, destroying painting after painting, print after print, old mills, grazing geese, a month's worth of decorator-colored work. Stricken, Larque stood still and watched this gone-wild manifestation of her childhood self. She did not remember being this way, so very angry, but what the girl had said was true: Larque did not like to remember Sky.

Sky threw the last readily available painting to the floor, breaking its glass. She stepped on the paper beneath with her overlarge shoes (meant to grow into) and shredded its hayfield scene with her heel. “Okay, you're rid of me,” she said, and with her too-big skirt flying she darted out the door.

Larque breathed out.

She spent the day cleaning up. Crying some—because she was angry, she told herself. What Sky had done amounted to nothing more than vandalism, totally uncalled for. Hundreds of dollars of potential income, up a puppy's wazoo. Her day ruined.

She could salvage the big canvas, she decided, and use it herself. A palette knife and some turps would take off Sky's painting. But standing in front of it she found that she couldn't touch it, despite an urgently felt need for revenge, because she had just seen something.

The black and white blobs—suddenly they made sense to her. They were meant to be two cowboys on horseback. A white-hat cowboy on a white horse and a black-hat cowboy on a black horse, riding close together. Brothers, maybe. Or friends. Or partners.

How juvenile. Yet—how could she have forgotten? When she was a kid, and all the other little girls were talking about being nurses or secretaries or teachers or mommies, she, Skylark, had wanted to hear the call to courage and the lonesome song in the night. She had wanted to have the long strong muscles, the view from horseback, the comradeship, the danger, the wild weather in her face. She had wanted to wear tall boots and carry a gun. She had wanted to face down death and laugh at snakebite.

She had wanted to be a cowboy.

Back then when he first met the man in the white Stetson, in the mid-sixties but it might as well have been the fifties, Shadow was on the road, always passing through, a shadow in the night of a different town each week. Taking different names, too, as the mood moved him. He didn't yet know his own. Didn't remember parents or where he was from. There had been a brutal beating—strange, it had left no external scars on his attractive face and body, though his bones still throbbed on rainy days—somebody had kicked the shit out of him, maybe a gang, maybe his own family. Probably the family. That had to be it, he thought, because he knew himself to be pretty strong inside; the cruelty of mere hostile strangers would not have been enough to make him forget. Probably his loved ones had hurt him and cast him out because he was queer. That was the kindest word back then, queer.

Anyway, he had woken up in an Airstream belonging to a carnival gypsy, with a bloody head and broken shoulders and no memories, no history of himself as an individual—but there were compensations. Incredible compensations, as he found once he had come through his personal hell and accepted his loss and stopped feeling sorry for himself. He began to believe that knowing everything about themselves separated people from knowing everything else. Not having his own boundaries clearly defined anymore, he felt himself at one with the cosmos in a way that never before would have seemed possible. He knew things.

He knew his own kind in the crowds around him. Knowing them made him feel not so alone.

Through his booted feet he knew hidden things in the earth. He sensed where lightning had struck.

His hands felt long and taut. He knew the power in himself. He knew the power waiting in the clouds.

Coming into a strange town, he always knew where to go to get what he wanted.

Into town, baloney. It was always way out of town, as far from nice folks as possible, along some state route usually, like those places with the homemade signs, “Adult Book Store,” “Go-go Girls,” “Massage.” Except it didn't even get a sign and a building. It got an abandoned drive-in, maybe, with a screen to hide behind. This was way before the Stonewall riot and gay liberation. Being homo was dirtier than dirty.

The night he met the white-hat cowboy it was at the Soudersburg Kennel Club grounds, better known among interested persons as the Pickle Park for what went on inside its judges' stand and around its concrete-block hygiene facilities when the nice people who raised purebred Bedlington terriers were asleep. In Soudersburg, Pennsylvania, in the sixties, if you were gay and you wanted—no, not companionship, forget companionship—if you wanted a quick sexual release, you had to sneak to the Pickle Park at two in the morning. Shadow envied the ancient Romans and their public baths and their candid seductions.

Those were the days when he was riding an old Indian motorcycle. Pulling in at the appropriate dark hour, he parked defiantly under the full glare of the security lights and was conscious of exposure, of watching eyes, of being young and beautiful and new. The others were hiding in cars scattered among the trees. Brake lights flashed a signal; they wanted him.

Like a model on a catwalk Shadow strode down the lineup of them, scanning the peep shows behind the windshields as dome lights glowed one by one. A darkly furred, ropy-muscled man dressed only in straps of leather stared back at him. A blond man in tight velvet trousers lay across the back of the seat, buns up to advertise his preference. A heavy-browed man, arms purple with tattoos, fingered his stick shift. Forget him: middle-aged. So were most of the others. Colloped middles. Double chins. Poor old guys, accountants, schoolteachers, married, maybe even had kids. They had managed to hide it from the neighbors all these years though probably not from the wife, but now they were worse off than any honest-to-God queen growing old with a lover. These guys were alone in their closets. Who was going to do it for them now that they were not young and pretty anymore? Not him. Not Shadow.