Larque on the Wing (6 page)

“Come on,” Larque told her.

“Why?” But there was no invigorating brattiness in the word. Sky turned to her eyes tame as a dove's. The child was requesting information, nothing more.

“So we can get you back!” Larque cried with more vehemence than lucidity. “C'mon.” Fleeing, she headed out the door, and Sky—if it was still Sky—followed her meekly.

The dog, a simple-minded beagle-poodle cross named Harold, snarled hysterically at Sky when Larque brought her into the house, though he had not even barked at her before. His claws clattered on the kitchen floor in his frenzy. He crouched and lost control of his bladder.

“Senile,” Larque scolded him as she cleaned up. The dog was only three years old, but what could one expect of a curly-haired, pinto-spotted, rat-tailed boogie? “Don't mind him, Sky,” she told the child. “He's brainless. Lost what little gray matter he ever had banging his head against the front door, trying to terrorize the mailman.” She smiled, but her heart was clenched like a fist in her chest.

She took the girl up to her studio. As she set up her spare easel, she saw that Sky was trembling. Afraid of punishment, maybe. Understandably so. Larque was the woman who had slapped her.

“Don't be scared,” she told her.

“I'm sorry about what I did. I didn't mean to.” Gracefully, tenderly, without contorting her face, the little girl started to cry.

“Trashing this place, you mean? I'm not worried about that.”

“You're not?”

“No. Here, would you like to paint something? You can use up some of this oil paint you got out.”

Wet-faced, fawn-eyed, the youngster obeyed. Using the flat side of the brush like a rubber stamp, she started doing careful, orderly flowers in lemon yellow. Then she mixed some other colors, using plenty of white to mute them into pastels. Crimson became pink. Violet turned into lilac, ultramarine into powder blue. Her tears had dried. She made more tidy flat flowers, and some lettuce green leaves.

“There, that's pretty,” she said when she was done.

“Uh-huh,” muttered Larque.

The pseudo-Sky pointed at the stormy oil the real Sky had done two days before. “That one's ugly,” she said.

“No, it's not. I kind of like—” Glancing at the painting in question, Larque failed to explain what she liked about this passionate sheet-cake impasto, because her jaw had dropped and she was staring. She stepped closer—it didn't help. Purple cloud and brassy sunlight remained, but the black-hat cowboy and the white-hat cowboy were gone.

Sky hadn't done it. Sky didn't know how it had happened. It was no trouble to get this new, improved Sky to talk and answer questions, though the answers were no more solid than she was. The Florrie-approved doppelganger was pretty, quiet, polite, earnest, cooperative, eager to please. Larque just about hated her.

“I think somebody blinked,” Sky offered shyly.

“Who? Why?” Larque's voice had gone shrill. Something about this child made her so mad she wanted to cry.

“Mommy, maybe. Because it was ugly.”

“It wasn't ugly!”

“You said it was ugly. You didn't like it.”

“I changed my mind!”

“You didn't like me when I was ugly.”

“Well, phooey on me!” Larque grabbed a little stubby brush, an old favorite, stabbed at the palette's puddle of black, and started striking in what should have been the legs of a black horse awash in mustard-colored sunshine. She painted fiercely, vehemently, more so than she had in years, trying to give back to Sky's canvas what had been ugly and true. But the brush turned in her hand. She felt it happen. Now what should have been the black rider had become a meaningless paisley shape, a black fish most inappropriately swimming up the painting's arid mesa.

“Jesus Christ!” Larque slammed down her brush, picked up the palette knife and tried to scrape off the black blob. It would not completely efface. She invoked the deity again, told herself to calm down, and tried another approach, starting to paint with white.

Her brush, despite her intentions to depict the white-hat rider on the white horse, complemented the black fish shape with a white one. She had completed a yinyang which floated, apparently sizable and in midair, over Arizona or someplace.

“Jesus jumping-on-the-water Christ!” To hell with calming down.

“It's prettier now,” Sky said doubtfully.

Larque ignored the doppelganger. She was recklessly pulling out her largest, most expensive watercolor block, penciling in only a few light guidelines before she started to paint: an exquisitely handsome black-haired man. An ineffably beautiful man in silver-studded white. A black outlaw hat. A creamy straw Stetson. Two Popular Street cowboys.

It was a scene that had been burning hot in her heart since the moment she had met them, and she didn't know why. Her need defied analysis. She knew only that she had to paint this picture to save her soul.

She couldn't.

What should have been a brooding, dark-browed hero might as well have been Howdy Doody. She saw it happening, and felt somebody she had once known having fits inside her, and told her shut up, okay, stop being a baby, these things happen, the reach sometimes exceeds the grasp, everybody has days when things just won't go right. She rinsed the brush, squeezed out a little more Payne's gray, attempted the figure dressed in white, and watched again as the brush defied forty years of marriage between her mind and her hand, turning him into a grinning cartoon, a caricature of what she had wanted to depict.

Before it could be entirely over, Larque dropped the brush to the floor. She backed up against the studio wall and stood there leaning for support. When she had caught her breath, she whispered to the spirit-girl sitting quietly nearby, “Babe, we are in deep trouble.”

The child turned big eyes to her but said nothing.

Once again Hoot came home to only the most sketchy of supper arrangements. He was, however, accustomed to this, and gave his first attention to the girl sitting at the kitchen table. “Who's this?”

“Sky,” Larque said in echoing tones to the interior of the refrigerator.

“Get outta here!” This was not an eviction notice, but an expression of disbelief. Hoot ogled Sky. “You gotta be kidding. I wouldn't have recognized her.” He stared some more and started to smile. “What did you do with her? She cleans up nice.”

Sky seemed to feel no need to react to any of this, but Larque straightened up, closed the refrigerator door, and looked at her husband. Twenty years married, and didn't he understand anything? She found him wanting, and this distressed her mildly; she preferred to approve of Hoot.

“I liked her better messy,” she reproached him, “and I still can't paint.”

He seemed not to hear reproof, merely a statement of fact. “Well, you'd better get started up again.” Hoot crossed the room, plopped himself down at the kitchen table opposite Sky, and said, “I quit my job.”

Larque no longer bothered panicking when this happened. She asked merely, “Why?”

“That Alec.” This was his boss, Alexandra. “You know I installed that garbage disposal for her a few weeks back.”

“Yes.” This had been a freebie that shot most of a Saturday afternoon. “So?”

“So she goes and gives me a gift certificate for dinner for you and me at some restaurant.”

Sounded good to her. “So?”

He looked astonished, evidently expecting her to understand at once. “So don't you see? What the hell does she think I am, some sort of money whore?” Impassioned, Hoot was turning pink, and whenever he got that way he reminded her of a big golden retriever with a pink nose. He expounded, “She should take us out to dinner if she wants to return the favor. Giving a gift certificate, that's just the same as if she had paid me.”

Probably the poor woman was baffled by him. “Hoot,” Larque told him, “not everybody plays by the same rules you do.”

“Well, they ought to.”

“Why should they? Anyway, the rules change every day.”

“Not mine, they don't. Anyway, I handed it back to her and told her why, and we got in a big pissing contest, and I quit before she could fire me.”

“If you'd let her fire you,” Larque pointed out, “you could collect unemployment.”

“That's not the point! Plus, I haven't been working for her long enough to collect unemployment. So I'd rather quit.”

“Idiot,” Larque muttered.

“Huh?”

“I'm thinking, kind of a quixotic reason to quit.”

“Well, she's the one who took offense when I tried to set her straight.”

“You don't try to set the boss straight!”

“If you're me, you do.”

This was true. And for most of their marriage Larque had cherished—let her count the ways—this man who was quixotic, unpredictable, boyish, full of cloud dreams and masculine quirks and surprises. Generally she did not try to tell him what to do, proud because she had a career and made money and could spoil him, could keep him like a beautiful, large, impractical pet, like a palomino stallion in the living room. Generally he did not try to tell her what to do, either. He had made her the tacit exception to his idealistic rules about human conduct; she could have given him a gift certificate and he would have found a dozen reasons why it was wonderful. To Larque, this irrationale was part of Hoot's charm, and it included his attitude toward her doppelgangers, which was simply that whatever Larque did was fine with him as long as it didn't keep him awake at night. One thing Larque had noticed early, when the children were yowling infants: Hoot's chivalry ended when the lights went off. Luckily, doppelgangers were usually quiet as ghosts.

Probably he was the only man in the world who would have put up with them at all. Larque had searched long and hard for him. As a teenage girl, living in the woodsy A-frame with her Wiccan mother, she had read paperback romances and dreamed wet dreams and realized that her own situation was desperate if not hopeless: what man in his right mind would get involved with a paranormal-textbook case like her? Embarrassing things happened when she was around. Eggs dropped out of birds like tiny bombs falling, and stray cats cloned kittens on the spot. Once, lucky enough to be out walking the town with a hunky soccer jock, she had looked at him with a lewd thought and accidentally produced beside him an instant naked replica in complete genital detail. This startled her, because it was the first time she had seen a human penis, let alone an erection. However, it startled him even more, and he had forthwith abandoned her, which left her with a very attractive naked date but without a ride home. Not that the naked date was of much use to her. Being without substance, he could neither talk with her nor enter into physical converse. He was good only for looking at, and even that was causing problems. She held her sweater in front of him as a modesty shield, but people were screaming anyway, and then the police arrived to take him into custody. They tried to put cuffs on him, but the things went right through his wrists. This upset them, and though they gave her a ride home, they talked angrily with her mother when they got there. The year was 1968; already there was enough rebellious flower child in Larque so that when she grew annoyed at the cops she thought, “Pigs,” and that was a mistake. Not that they made trouble. They left right away and did not come back, but she felt bad. Altogether it was a depressing day, and the hunky boy avoided her ever afterward, so she never did find out what had happened to the naked doppelganger.

And this sort of disaster was what she had to look forward to by way of a love life.

“Learn some self-control, dear,” her mother had advised her.

“I can't! Who's going to teach me? Are you going to teach me how not to make doppelgangers?”

“No, honey, of course not. I meant the other thing.” Florrie's Chiclet-shaped face flushed pink, and she made small push-away gestures with her plump square hands. Sex seemed to be something else that Florrie had blinked out of her existence. There was no man in her life—Larque would have known if there was—nor did she show any signs of wanting one. Her world revolved around some other sun. This was as close as she ever came to discussing “it” with her daughter.

Nevertheless, when Larque persisted in talking about her dismal social life and future prospects, her mother had taken her to a Circle meeting. “Skylark wants a sweetheart,” she had announced to the women of her coven, her tone martyred.

“Now, Florence,” said another woman gently, “they're good for making babies. Don't you want a granddaughter?”

“Every sister is entitled to find her own way to truth,” said a sleek gray-haired woman exquisitely dressed in expensive woolens. “Skylark needs what Skylark needs.”

This was the attitude taken by most of them. They devoted more than one evening's Circle to Skylark's problem. The Ouija board would not perform for her, and tea leaves were inconclusive, but a poodle-haired matron consulted numerology charts and came up with 186403201. A black woman in a turban went into a trance and told Larque to be on the lookout for a Scottish man. A redhead with a physics degree had Larque lay hands on her computer, which then randomly generated an image resembling fireworks, or a fountain, or possibly a dandelion. The sleek wealthy woman tried scrying for Larque in a crystal ball and said, “I see an owl.”

More damn bird jokes. But Larque kept her dignity. “What kind of owl?”

“I don't know precisely. What sorts of owls are there?”

“Um, barn, screech, great horny?”

“Yes, of course. One of those. Perhaps screech. Or great horny.”

Larque spent the next several months looking up everything she could find on the symbolism, mythology, and folklore of owls, as well as Scottish history and literary references to fireworks. Her enjoyment of the research made her decide to go into library science, and she chose her college accordingly. For three years her choice of career was the only demonstrable effect of her meetings with the Wiccan Circle.