Larque on the Wing Read online

  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.

  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

  THE MORNING AFTER SKY 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 th
e 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.