Larque on the Wing (3 page)

He liked the firm ass of the blond in velvet pants, and turned back. But one of the aging limpies got out of his sedan and hurried up to him, ridiculous in a fringed suede vest that bared a soft belly paler than his mushroom-top of a Stetson.

“Listen,” the Pickle Park cowboy said in a choked voice, “I'll pay you.”

In that moment Shadow made up his mind that he was never going to be one of these aging suppliants. Never. Somehow it was going to be different for him. He would not grow old.

At the same time, the scornful words that had rushed to his mind went unspoken, because he sensed something. This man—this round-faced, sad-eyed man—hid some power that called to Shadow like the hidden lightning calling from the clouds.

“No,” Shadow said softly.

“Please.”

“No, you won't pay me.” For some ineffable reason that had nothing to do with pity or kindness, he intended to service this middle-aged closet queen. “Come on.”

Because his would-be lover seemed uncomprehending, he reached out and grabbed him by the wrist to lead him toward the shadows between the two concrete-block buildings coyly marked “Pointers” and “Setters.” But when his fingers came in contact with the man's pulse, revelation like electric shock went through him, rooting him where he was. Somehow via his own hand he knew this man's soul, and it was lonesome and visionary and yearning. Like his own.

Shadow whispered, “You want to be a hero.”

The other gave a nervous smile. “Yes.” His mouth was small and triangular, like a baby's. An inappropriate mouth. Everything about his appearance was inappropriate to who he really was.

Shadow said quietly, “You want to fight for justice. You want to leave your mother and spend your life among men someplace where you can stand tall, wear a code of honor at your hip, be adored by tenderfeet everywhere. You want to speak little, ride hard, love a stallion. You want to have courage. You want God to come to you in a sunset and touch your shoulder with his gun barrel.”

The round-faced man understood now that Shadow had not merely noticed his getup, his boots and jeans and vest and Stetson, his fantasy. He stood agawk. Shadow got moving, in a different direction this time. Cowboys do things right. “Drive,” he told the middle-aged man, shoving him toward his Buick. He got into the passenger side.

The man drove. A dozen hungry eyes watched the two of them go. “Where?” the Stetson asked when they were out of the Pickle Park.

“You choose. Some motel.”

“Motels are too risky.”

“I am asking you for an act of courage.”

The stranger swallowed, nodded, and turned toward Soudersburg.

“What is your name?” Shadow asked him after awhile.

“Argent.”

It was a dreamed-up name, of course, used only for adventures like this. Probably changed as often as Shadow changed his. Yet in a way it was more true than the man's real name, whatever that might be. “Okay, Argent,” Shadow agreed, low-voiced. “Is this the place?”

It was. “Cabins,” the wooden sign proclaimed. “Kitchenettes. Color TV In Every Room. Vibra-Beds.” Argent went and rang the bell, brought down the owner's sleepy wife from her bedroom over the office, made the arrangements. Inside the small cold-floored room, with the door locked and the blinds drawn, Argent did not go at once to the chenille-spread bed, but looked at Shadow in the light. He took off his oversized Stetson—another act of courage, for the hat concealed a balding head.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked Shadow. “You are beautiful. Way out of my league.”

Not yet knowing the answer, Shadow went to him and kissed his babyish mouth. With half-lidded eyes Argent gasped, but so far Shadow himself felt no reaction—except in his hands, which lifted to Argent's plump shoulder blades, their finger bones buzzing and tingling like Shadow's mind. An image was growing, growing, glowing like heat lightning in the shadows behind his eyes. Sex with one of his own kind—it was potent and hidden and holy. But something even more potent and hidden and holy would happen to him tonight for the very first time.

TWO

T
HE MORNING AFTER
S
KY KICKED HOLES IN MOO COWS AND
ran away, Larque reported to her studio as usual, to work. Maybe if she painted a few hours longer each day, she could regain some of the lost income the doppelganger child had inflicted.

With this objective in mind, she chose a largish piece of cold press, soaked it, and stretched it on her favorite board. As she waited for it to damp dry, she stood back—her slippers felt thin and frail on the uncompromising floor—and tried to plan what image she would produce on it. Grazing geese again? Covered bridge? Rustic mill? Somehow none of her usual standbys seemed worth doing for any amount of money. Cowboy? No. Wouldn't sell.

The white, white paper confronted her like the back of God's nightgown. If she touched it, God would turn around, and then she would know the truth about herself.

Eight hours later it still faced her, blank and white.

“It's gone,” she told Hoot, nearly blubbering, when he got home. His supper wasn't ready. Too bad. He had to understand, it had not been a really good day. Make that the last couple of days. They sucked. “It's just plain gone.”

“What now, dog gone?” Hoot tried to joke. The night before it had been paintings gone, destroyed by a runaway doppelganger. She could do more paintings, Hoot had gently reminded her after sympathizing. As for the doppelganger, they always disappeared sooner or later, didn't they? Sooner was better. Good riddance. Larque had agreed.

But now she glared at him. “It's gone, I'm telling you! It went with her.”

“
What's
gone?”

“My—whatever you want to call it! Stupidity. Weirdness. Whatever it is that lets me paint. It went out the door with her. Read my lips, it's gone, I mean all the way gone. I can't do a thing.”

Hoot gave her a hug, his cure-all. He was big and solid and a good hugger, but hugging wasn't going to give back what Larque had lost.

“Hey, Mom-dude,” said Jason, the teenager, who had sized up the supper situation with the eyes of a pragmatist and was boiling water for boxed macaroni and cheese. “What's the big deal? You just go out and get a real job like a normal person. No prob.”

“It's not that simple.” Turned loose by Hoot, Larque slumped at the table, sniffling. “I want to paint.” Upstairs was a big canvas which for years had been standing in its corner, waiting for her to get done with rustic spring-houses and sheep on a hillside so she could fill it with the important work she was going to do someday. Now it was violated, and her soul was lying in a white, white emergency room, and her need was urgent but it would just have to wait—the doctors were all busy with somebody else. “It's awful,” she elaborated. “I'm screaming inside. It's like not being able to come.”

“Mom!” protested Jeremy, the prude.

“Come where?” Rodd, the youngster, wanted to know.

Jason was glad to explain the term to him in slightly inaccurate detail that Larque didn't bother to correct, feeling too wretched even to talk about sex. “Honey, hey!” Hoot sat by her, patting her balled hands. “It'll pass. It's just a dry spell.”

She got up and left the room, her sense of humor gone with Sky, too.

That night she lay awake, and for once Hoot stayed awake also, holding her until the kids were silent, then making love to her as if that magical act could transfer some sort of vital essence to her from him, as if it could solve her problem. In his stolid Germanic way he really cared. He even did a lot of the down-and-dirty stuff he usually skipped. And Larque climaxed epically, which she didn't always, though it did not matter to her unduly whether she did or not; sex with Hoot was always good, the holding, the kisses, the ultimate closeness, it was an act involving her naked soul as much as her naked body. But this time, as she lay under him, her soul felt hollow, hungry, cavernous, even though the most exciting orifice in her body was sublimely filled.

Mid-life was fun, all right. Funny, rather. It was just one big joke, ha ha. A bad joke. So funny it hurt.

Still in her nightgown, Larque shut herself in her studio early the next morning, letting the boys get themselves off to school while she confronted the terrifying whiteness of the blank paper. An hour later she could stand it no longer. She had to do something, and she knew she was on her own.

She slammed the studio door behind her. Put on blue jeans, a chambray shirt. No makeup. Suddenly she felt sick of the daily tyranny of foundation and blush and lipstick and mascara. What a waste of time. Why in the world should she have to cover her face with cosmetics, mask her real self with makeup, in order to be considered presentable? Men never did; they just went around with their faces hanging out, and nobody ever thought the worse of them for it. To hell with makeup from now on. Perm, too. Why should she sit still for three hours of slow torture of the scalp just to be what some unidentifiable authority had decreed attractive? Now where the hell were those boots? She owned a pair of expensive Western boots left over from her college days—their silver-tipped toes and ridiculous heels, not to speak of the cactus flowers stitched on their shafts, had always made her feel self-conscious in them, so that she had not worn them in years, but now she dug them out from the back of her closet, dusted them off, and pulled them on. Nor were they boots made for walking. She limped in them. Nevertheless, out the door she went in them, afoot because Sky was afoot, striding painfully toward the country west of town, the way Sky might have gone.

She knew, or remembered now, how Sky had felt when adults were angry, how Sky had dreamed of being free, of running away to the wild wild West.

Town had to be gotten through first: Soudersburg, Pennsylvania, a place with small-town thoughts and big-city problems, with beveled glass bay-windowed Victorian mansions on one side of the tracks, boarded-up crackhouses on the other. Soudersburg liked to keep its blond children and colonial charm well separated from what went on in the back streets. The Historical Riverside, with its Shot Tower and Old Stone Inn and petting zoo and Williamsburg-colored gift shops where the tourists bought, where Larque's paintings were sold, stood well away from the sections where the “Drug Watch” signs were posted and the dark people lived.

On those rare occasions when she emerged from her studio and went into town, Larque didn't usually walk—some of the streets between hers and the Riverside were dangerous.

To hell with danger.

On impulse, or maybe instinct, Larque turned onto a street she'd never walked before, a place where narrow row houses were crowded like Sky's teeth and where people escaping the narrow indoors sat out on their front steps even on the coldest days of the year. This wasn't a balmy day, but not cold either. Just fresh, whispering of warmth to come, of bare-chested boys and young love. Ah, April, the cruelest month for people who were past forty or paying self-employment income tax.

Larque walked up to the first stoop-sitter, a stout housedressed woman with her nylons down around her ankles, and asked, “Have you seen a funny-looking little girl? Maybe yesterday, maybe the day before?”

The woman peered at her out of eyes that were creases riding on heavy cheeks.

“Skinny,” Larque elaborated. “In a skirt and blouse like they used to make us wear in the fifties.” The white cotton blouse and overfull skirt, like the sensible shoes, had been bought large for grow room and made Sky look tiny and twiggy inside them, a mayfly dwarfed by her own wings. “Straight hair cut short. Scabby knees. You seen her?”

“Don't you have a photo or nothing?” the woman complained.

“No. She might have been looking for a cowboy. Anybody dress like a cowboy around here?”

“That guy on Popular Street.”

Larque had never heard of Popular Street. “Where is it?”

“A ways from here.”

“Which way?”

“Any which way.” But the woman pointed toward the west. Larque walked on. Black children playing on the sidewalk giggled and ran from her to hang on to parental legs. The people atop the legs had not seen any funny-looking little girl.

“Can you tell me how to get to Popular Street?”

“No ma'am. Never heard of it.”

She went on, asking sometimes for the skinny child in the out-of-date clothes, sometimes for the cowboy. More and more she sensed, and felt with a queasiness in her chest, that a part of her was gone as surely as if she had lost a leg or a breast. Everything about this part of town was new to her, yet her eyes were not taking in the details of dormers and breezeway gates, broken shingles and the look of graffiti on brickwork. Her mind was not recording the slant of the morning light on disjointed concrete. The camera wasn't working.

God. She'd forgotten. When she was Sky, she used to pretend there was a camera built in behind her eyes, catching everything she saw on film so that someday she would be able to make people understand important things: how a penny can be pounded thin and made into a dime for the soda machine, the way cats pant during the dog days, how black telephone wires swooping up toward the sky shine white.

“Have you seen a funny-looking little girl?”

Leaning in her doorway, which was probably the entry to her place of business, a miniskirted bimbo in fishnet stockings laughed in Larque's face and wouldn't answer her questions. Half a block later, an old man with a garbage bag full of aluminum cans told her, “Ask around on Popular Street.”

“Where is it?”

“I ain't exactly sure. Somewheres around here.”

She found herself more and more keeping her eyes on the ground, walking slowly. Her feet hurt unbelievably. If she could just find a truthteller, she could ask him the way. She remembered about truthtellers now, too. They were people sometimes, animals sometimes, but if they were people, they had to carry something in their hands like an offering. Animals too, for that matter. She used to draw pictures of people and animals on their hind legs, swarms of them around a big rock like a monolith. The ones carrying something in their outstretched paws were truthtellers. The others were not. Truthtellers spoke only to truthtellers. Or if they spoke to someone who was not a truthteller, then that person would be changed.