Larque on the Wing (24 page)

She couldn't answer. She just stared.

Sky reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out something small and shining: the token of a truthteller, a star off the tip of Gypsy Davy's boot. Without speaking she passed it to Lark. Then still with that awful not-crying look on her face she waited.

Lark held the star up between her thumb and forefinger so that it caught the light. She could breathe now. Staring past the shining thing into Sky's eyes she vowed, “I promise to love you.”

“You don't love me now.”

“I respect you now. I care about you now. Love will come.”

“Soon?”

“Let me see.” Lark reached out and gathered Sky against her hard young chest again. The little girl nestled there quietly, her boniness somehow softened to accommodate the embrace, and seemingly on its own Lark's head tilted down so that her cheek rested against Sky's hair. It was stringy, and smelled sour. The kid badly needed a bath, but Lark didn't say that. She said, “Yeah, I think so. Soon.”

This was true, for she still held the star.

Voice muffled against her chest, Sky asked, “Do you
like
me now?”

“In a weird sort of way, yes. I do.”

“You don't just want your art back?”

“Art?” Lark blinked down at the child's steady gaze. Her paints and studio seemed very far away and far down on the list of priorities. She said, “Who's Art?”

Sky actually smiled. Lark leaned back against the corner of the sofa, and Sky rested against her shoulder. “Sing to me,” the kid demanded.

“Give me a break! I sing like a moose.”

“I'll tickle you.” Sky's twiggy fingers threatened in the vicinity of Lark's navel.

“Go right ahead.” Lark tightened the nice hard abs Shadow had given her.

The kid's hand dived like an eagle. Abs were no match for those little scrawny claws. It was stomach-muscle hell. Lark laughed, squealed, and curled up, trying to protect her midsection.

“All right! Stop it!” She tried to push Sky's hand away without hurting her. Sky eluded her and kept tickling.

“I surrender!”

“Sing!” Sky commanded.

“Okay, okay!” Lark sat panting. “Christ, give me a minute.”

“That's long enough.” Sky's eagle-claw hand menaced again.

“All right!” With abject obedience Lark sang,

“
Gypsy Davy roams the four-lane
,

Gypsy Davy plays the blues
.

Gypsy Davy sings the only

Song this cowboy ever knew
.

I'm going a little crazy
—

Just stay with me, stinky baby
,

Say bye-bye Gypsy Davy
,

Say bye-bye Gypsy Dave
.”

Against her shoulder Sky lay going to sleep again, breathing more deeply and steadily than before.

“Oh, she's feeling better!” Doris burbled when she saw Sky in the morning.

Indeed, sitting at the kitchen bar with her black hombre hat jammed on her head, chowing down a bowl of frosted flakes and coldly eyeing the world over the rim, Sky seemed to be feeling much better. The kid completely and spiritedly refused to bathe. If Lark was going to feed Sky with affection, she was apparently going to have to do it body odor and all.

“You, however, look like hell,” Doris said to Lark just as cheerily. “Didn't you sleep?”

Slouched on another bar stool, nursing a glass of orange juice, Lark gave her a gunfighter glare. “I'm
thinking
.”

“Well, God knows that's difficult if you're not used to it.”

Defending her honor, Lark emptied six quick slugs into Doris with her forefinger. As Doris did not then fall down and bleed on the floor, this made her feel no better. For an hour or more she had been trying to figure out what to do, come up with some sort of a plan for her screwed-up life or even for the next day or two, but the aspect of her that made decisions of that sort seemed to have gone with the Virtuous Woman. Lark had no idea how she would spend the day or even where she would spend the next night.

“Thinking about what?” Sky said to her mushily around an enormous mouthful of cereal.

“What to do. Me. You.”

Sky shrugged. Doris suggested, “You can go take my mammogram for me.”

“Sorry. My breasts are home in the top dresser drawer. At least I think that's where I left them.”

“Well, get a dickogram,” Doris said.

The idea surprised Lark into laughing. “That'll be the day,” she said.

“Fair's fair. You guys ought to have the pleasure too.” Bitchy before her morning fix of carrots, Doris warmed to the idea. “Wouldn't that be great if every guy in the country had to go in once a year and slap his dong onto a metal slab and watch the other slab come down and squish it flat?”

“Bend over, honey,” Lark mimicked the voice of the technician who had most recently made sandwich meat of her breasts.

“God, yes!”

“Spread your legs, dearie.”

“Jesus, oh yes, wouldn't that be wonderful if they had to get ballograms too?”

“It'll never happen. They wouldn't go.”

Sky was eating her second bowl of cereal and ignoring both of them. Doris just stood there, probably thinking about her ex, laughing, with the carrot peeler in her hand.

“Get real, woman,” Lark told her. “We're talking about men here. They wouldn't stand for it.”

“Stand—for—it!” Doris bent over the sink laughing.

“Face it,” Lark grumbled, “only women are sheep-shitty enough to voluntarily go and put themselves through this sort of crap and pay a hundred fifty dollars for it.”

“Well, if dickogramming ever does happen, I'm going to get a new job.” Doris straightened up, as bright-eyed as if she had eaten two pounds of carrots.

“I don't want to hear about it,” Lark said.

Doris eyed her brightly. The woman sure did know how to enjoy her neuroses, get fun out of her own hostilities. “You taking it personally? Still wearing that pop-on phallus of yours?”

“Of course. All the time.”

She got Doris to drop off Sky and her near Soudersburg on her way to work. The sun was shining like crazy, global warming was going to make it a midsummer day in April, and sometime while conversing with her orange-tinted friend Lark had felt her brain sputter and quit. Obviously for a person like her, a cunt with a dick, life was meant to be lived, not thought about. So forget thinking anymore. The future would just have to take care of itself. Lark hugged Sky around the shoulders, and the two of them headed off toward Cowshit Creek.

She rolled up her jeans and left her boots on the shore, and Sky left her ugly oxford shoes, and they spent the morning in the creek. At first there were alligators in there, so they teetered from rock to rock. Once they had slipped in often enough they waded on the mucky bottom and caught crayfish. Downstream they found a dam of sorts, and they added rocks to deepen the pool behind it, and of course they both managed to fall in. They took off their clothes, spread them on the bank to dry, and went in some more. Sky now smelled more like creek than sweat, and her hair was as stringy and green as waterweed. Lark didn't care. What could anybody expect? The kid was a barbarian.

“We've got to get you something to eat,” Lark told her when the sun and her stomach agreed it was lunchtime.

“Crayfish would have been nice,” Sky pointed out. “We could have built a fire and cooked them.” Lark had refused to put crayfish in her boots, and there had been nothing else to keep them in.

The crayfish had been small and brown and looked to Lark about as appetizing as earthworms. But she just smiled and shrugged. “Let's head over to the carnival,” she said. “People drop french fries and things.”

Back in their clothes and footwear, feeling good and looking disreputable, they walked through the outskirts of Soudersburg. In the gutter Sky found a fat red rubber band, a bottle cap with a picture of a buffalo head on it, and a flattened safety pin—not because she wanted to get into Popular Street, but just because. Lark found a sheet metal screw and a pair of nuts. Maybe life really was a matter of what you were looking for.

The carnival was just starting up when they got there. Nobody had dropped any french fries yet, but on the midway they ran into Gypsy Davy.

“Yo, hey!” He crouched down to greet Sky hat brim to hat brim, eye to eye. “You're on your feet again, little one!”

“She's golden,” Lark said. “She walks, she talks, she's full of chalk. Thank you.”

He looked up at her with a smile as curly as his hair. “You did it,” he chided. “Ain't you got it figured out yet?”

“Your hat helped somehow.”

“I'm hungry,” Sky said.

Lark reached out one arm and gave her a sidelong hug. From under her outlaw-black hat brim the kid shot a killer look at her. “Really hungry,” she clarified.

“Hey, my treat.” Gypsy Davy headed them toward a hot dog stand, looking happy and expansive. “The hat just kept her going a little longer,” he told Lark over his shoulder. “Gave her good dreams. Took her mind off her misery.” He ordered them corn dogs, vinegar fries, Cokes, and Dixie Cup ice creams, then stood with them and watched as they ate. Lark could not figure out why he was being so avuncular. Was that affection turning his wide face pink, or was it a reflection off his magenta headgear? She hoped he didn't lust for her body. “Listen, thanks,” she said, trying to make it sound like a clean break.

It wasn't. “Come back to the booth,” he said. “I've got something for you.”

“Uh, like what?”

It was free passes. “Take the kid on the rides,” Gypsy Davy instructed. Then he reached up and seemingly at random slapped a hat on her head, a flattopped, broad-brimmed felt one just like Sky's except it was vanilla white. “Keep it,” he said. “Good luck.”

Damn, I wanted black
, Lark thought. Then,
Good luck with what?

“Horses!” Sky shrilled, pulling at Lark and hopping around on her skinny legs.

“What? Where?”

She tugged Lark toward the carousel, and Lark began to understand: the hat made everything look brighter, more significant, more alive than it might really be. The plastic merry-go-round figures were real horses to Sky. Bucking broncs, maybe. Galloping mustangs. Cayuses done up in war paint.

“Trade you hats,” Lark offered Sky.

“No way!”

The black-hat cowboy, Sky, chose a white mount with eagle feathers in its mane. Resigned to her white hat, Lark took the red-eyed black bronc by the kid's side. It was a wide prairie. They rode for a long time, until all their passes were used up.

During the ride Lark glanced from time to time at the mirrors on the carousel's hub, bending the brim of the white hat down in front, denting the crown and rolling the back into a sportier shape. Maybe she could dye it black. Even as was, it looked good over her handsome young-man face, her True-Blue eyes and strong jawline.

Something inside it was scratching her, though. Between go-rounds she took it off and looked at the band.

“Indians coming,” Sky was saying. “Comanches.”

“Hold them off a minute, would you, buddy?” No wonder the hat scratched. There was a piece of paper stuck inside it. Lark pulled it out; it came away easily in her hand. Heavy, rough pink paper, it turned out to be a note from Gypsy Davy.

“When you get yourself together,” it said, “come see me. There are things for you to do. You are one of my people.”

Shadow was there waiting for them when they got off the carousel. Gypsy Davy must have called him, Lark decided afterward. Stalled Sky and her with the free passes and then—phoned? There had to be some kind of phone that hooked up to Popular Street, sort of a transdimensional hot line. Or maybe there were other means of communication that hooked up Shadow to his boss.

Christ, he was so beautiful it almost hurt to look at him.

Lark stood looking at him anyway, uncertain how things lay between them.

“You promised you would not do that again,” Shadow said, sans greeting.

Trying to doppelganger him, he meant. Her burst of temper in the night—now that Sky was better, she had almost forgotten it, though the angry, desolate feeling was coming back at the sight of him. “It was kind of a scattershot,” she defended herself. “Not aimed at you.”

“I felt it anyway.”

“Sorry.” She didn't mean it. Let him feel some pain.

Uninterested in this sort of talk, Sky went back to pat the horses, which all stood still and let her stroke them.

“Look,” Shadow said, very low, “why are you angry at me if I care for Argent? You have found a way to use that shiny new equipment of yours, evidently.”

That stung badly enough to make her wince. “Damn you!” she shouted. “I wish I'd never met you.”

She meant it only for the moment. And it affected him only to make him more serious and sad. “Look,” he said softly, “I never intended to hurt you. Let me put my hand on your head and take the pain away.”

“No!” She did not want him touching her. Yet there was something so honorable about him—in his way—that she lowered her voice. “I'll keep my pain, thank you.”

“Lark—”

“Forget it. Forget me. What do you want, coming here?”

The carousel had started up again. With no painted ponies to caress, Sky came wandering over to stand by Lark, and Lark hunkered down and hugged the little girl. It was not meant selfishly, yet it made her feel better, especially as Sky hugged her back.

“Whoa!” It was a sound of happy surprise, from Shadow. Looking up, Lark saw that she and Sky had startled out of him the widest smile she had yet seen on his ever-still face. She stood up, hoisting Sky in her arms. Her back to Shadow, the little girl giggled and jiggled and kicked.

“C'mon, Shad. Spit it out.” Lark found suddenly that she had forgiven him for disappointing her. What the hell, she could still be crazy about him, and who cared if anything ever came of it. “What's on your agenda?”