Larque on the Wing (11 page)

“It was like sex squared,” Argent whispered. “No—sex to the nth power. It was immense.”

“I didn't know.” Shadow felt humbled, more so than anytime he could remember before or since. “I knew—there was something about you, but—I didn't know what was going to happen.”

“It felt—like dying, or being born—I can't say what it felt like.”

“Do you understand what I've done? Have you looked at yourself?”

“I don't need to. I know.” Nevertheless, Argent sat up briefly to stare into the motel's cloudy mirror, then snuggled down next to Shadow again. “I'm nearly as damn-doodle good-looking as you.”

“It was in you.”

“Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

“It was! In you all along. I couldn't have found it out otherwise. Argent—listen, I have no idea—”

“Whether you can turn me back into a bald, chinless, potbellied toad? I don't want you to.”

“But—you had a life, presumably—”

“Not much of one. Wife from hell. If she would get angry, or hurt, that I could handle, but she just smiles like a nun.” For years this was all Shadow learned of the woman. Argent never spoke of her again, and he never asked. A cowboy is one who runs away from his mother and his family; no real cowboy has a wife. And after he and Argent had been together a while, it came to seem that there was no past beyond the one they shared.

They lay there on the rumpled chenille in silence again, and then Argent burst out, “Shadow, I—you joystick, don't you see what else happened to me? You've got me on a chain. On a short leash, trotting along at your heels.”

Only then, sliding from the shared mountainpeak into the valley of his ineluctable loneliness, did Shadow begin to understand: it was not just the bodily form of Argent that he had changed with his formidable hands. He had tampered with the man's heart and soul as well.

So they had stayed together. Argent had phoned his wife to inform her he was leaving her, that he would sign over to her everything he owned. He could have simply disappeared into his new body. He could have been a missing person. But he wanted the divorce—so that the woman could not pose as a tragic figure, Shadow decided as he got to know Argent better. There was a certain charming vengefulness in Argent.

They slept under bridges on the outskirts of Soudersburg the first few days. Rather, Argent slept; Shadow spent the nights and most of the days learning to use his hands. He was filled with an urgent need to know the limits of his personal mystery, and coolly experimented on Argent while the man was asleep, finding that sexual arousal was a pleasant but optional accompaniment to his new skill, finding that with practice he could turn his lover back into the plump, anxious-eyed, middle-aged man he had first met, the one who was there waiting in Argent just as surely as Argent had been waiting in him. Some French philosopher had once said something about every human consisting of two souls in a single breast, chest, whatever—often more than two, Shadow sensed, taking an informal poll of the people he managed to touch every day, shaking hands, tapping a shoulder, brushing fingers against a leg in passing. Two souls were the fewest he counted. He sensed a profound division, a cleavage, within nearly everyone he encountered—except himself.

Wanting then to know himself, he had reached a limit. Watching Skylark O'Connell Harootunian leave his shop and leap toward the sky, he knew no more about himself than he had known the day he let Argent wake up and find himself turned back into “a bald, chinless, potbellied toad” again, for a joke. He had thought at first that Argent would not forgive him, even though the transformation was a big help in getting the divorce papers signed, even though he had made him beautiful again afterward and had given him a solemn promise. He had thought Argent would leave him.

He had not been able to figure out whether he cared.

But Argent could not leave. Argent was over his head in love of him.

Years had passed. It was a small step from finding out the otherside of a man to finding out the otherside of a town, Soudersburg. The otherside of a wrong-side-of-town street. A place for the otherness in all those who acknowledged it.

Years had passed. Argent adored him no less than before. The two of them did everything together, shared dreams, shared an apartment, shared Popular Street. Shadow came to feel warm affection for the man, wanted him at night, needed him even, and certainly he did not care to venture outside the safe zone they had made themselves, certainly he did not desire to risk AIDS. But still there was that essential loneliness he wore, his soul wore, like a black wide-brim Resistol that never came off. Occasionally Shadow wondered what it was like to fall in love. He wondered what love was.

Years had passed. His hands kept Argent hard and young. How was it that he, Shadow, had grown no older?

Years had passed. His hands were still long and strong, their skill controllable and predictable now, a Popular Street barter-system pay-me-someday livelihood, with sexual apparatus marketed at a safe distance and on the side, for the sake of Argent's peace of mind. Respectability was no concern of Shadow's, but Argent's happiness was.

Maybe he loved the guy after all.

Who was this woman who had just skylarked down the sidewalk to buy herself a penis?

Maybe he knew; maybe he would never know. The past twenty-seven years had been peaceful. Argent tended to keep life quiet, and Shadow had come to like it that way; most of the time the quietude felt good. Shadow had nearly given up always needing to know everything.

“I can't deal with this,” Hoot said.

Larque stared back at him. “What's to deal with? I can take this thing off.”

“I still can't deal with it.”

The unfortunate circumstance was, bedtime had caught her with her penis on. She had impatiently waited until the boys were in their rooms before she shut herself in the bathroom to try it out, and her experimentation had gone even better than she expected. Especially with the aid of some hand lotion. Her new toy was so much fun, in fact, that she kept playing far longer than she had planned, and even when Sky had come into the bathroom, right through the locked door, the doppelganger's presence had not perturbed her for more than a moment. Let the kid watch. The whole thing was after all Sky's idea, and the child's interest reminded her fondly of playing doctor with some forgotten neighborhood bad girl, lo these many years ago.

“Told you it was fun being a boy.” Sky smirked most obnoxiously, savoring victory. Larque didn't mind.

“I'm going to start spelling my name Lark,” she announced. “L-A-R-K.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“I have to get myself a cowboy hat.” She wanted a low-slung sporty black one, like Shadow's.

“Black,” Sky agreed.

Lark went on with what she was doing. She had never quite realized, or cognitively grasped as Doris would have it, that men have orgasms every single blasted time. What a bite. Though to be fair she had to remember they had a lot of performance anxiety too. They always had to get it up.

Which was evidently not going to be a problem for her. When Hoot came upstairs, there she stood in the bedroom naked except for her Calvin Kleins (brand new, courtesy of Shadow) and even though her husband was fully clothed and scowling at her, she was having an erection just from loving him. And it showed. The erection more so than the love. Choosing her penis, Lark had followed the same guidelines as for selecting a diamond ring, going for the most sizable one she felt she could wear without looking tacky. She loved it, and she loved the way it felt right now.

She loved her new body, too, which she was purposely showing off, which was not only slim and strong but hard and
built
, with solid pecs, a ridged slab of abs, altogether a torso to die for. She was better-looking than her own teenage son, and had told him so. At which point he had informed her she looked like a butch dyke and had slammed off to his room, nearly sobbing. It had genuinely surprised Lark that Hoot and the boys had raised such a fuss and commotion when she came home. It surprised her that they did not know her, that they needed Sky's presence at her side to convince them she was who she said she was. She felt like herself all right, only more so than before—what was the problem? But apparently they thought of her being female as if that were more than just a bodily thing; they defined her somehow by the cushy contours of her flesh; they thought that an accidental gender distinction
was
her somehow, when really, from Lark's point of view, it didn't have much to do with who she was at all. They were vastly upset. Even after she grumpily went upstairs and put on her breasts for supper and stored her new penis in her top dresser drawer until later, they did not seem consoled.

“I don't care who you say you are,” Hoot was fulminating now, “you look like a queer to me, and you're not getting in my bed.”

“It's my bed too.”

“I don't care!”

“Fine. Just for that I'll keep this on.” Like Madonna gesturing onstage she indicated her crotch, which had gone slack. She no longer felt loving. “Be that way.”

“You can keep it on and I'll tell you what else you can do,” Hoot bellowed. “First thing in the morning you can take it back where you got it. And you get yourself put back the way you were, or else don't expect to live in this house with me. You hear me, Larque?”

“That's Lark spelled L-A-R-K. You're thinking it wrong.”

“I'll think it any way I fucking like! I'm thinking a few other things too! You want to hear them?”

She did not. Felt like she was going to cry—goddammit, cowboys didn't cry. Managing to glare instead, she grabbed all the blankets off the bed with one swift tug, which felt good; she would not have been able to do it before. Snagging her shirt and jeans in her other hand, she strode out, kicking the door shut with a bang behind her.

Downstairs, Sky welcomed her with a smile. A reward for her defiance, Lark recognized. She threw the blankets on the sofa and sat beside them, staring down at her own strong-boned feet with a shaky sigh. It was hard to accept that Hoot's loving tolerance of her peculiarities, on which she had depended so long, had its limits. But facing that, she faced what she had to do. There really was no choice.

“Well, kiddo,” she told Sky once she had her voice under control, “it was nice while it lasted.”

Silence. Lark looked up. Sky's smile was gone—the little girl's face had closed over like a frozen lake. At once Lark realized she had blown it. Cripes, she shouldn't have said anything, not when she needed the doppelganger's cooperation.

She showed those great straight teeth of hers in a boyish grin. Purposely turning her voice bright she said, “Hey, it ain't over yet. It's still nice.” She said, “Hey, Sky. Whatever became of that little star?”

Sky did not fall for it. “What little star?” she mumbled.

“You know. That little metal star you borrowed from me.” The little metal star that let her find Popular Street. Once might have been a coincidence, but two times looked more like cause and effect. Lark had a feeling she was going to need the thing to get back to the Magic Makeover.

Sky was smiling again, like icicles this time.

“You still have it?” Lark could tell she did. She knew that look. “Give it here.”

Sky shook her head.

“Sky, give it!”

The little girl sneered in fear and edged away. Her frail-looking body shook. But at the same time she challenged, “So you can go ruin everything? You promised you'd do what I said!”

“That was just for then.”

“No, it wasn't! It's for always!”

“No, it's not. Sky, I can't. You heard Hoot.” Probably the whole neighborhood had heard Hoot. “My marriage is gonna go splat down the john if I don't get put back the way I was.”

“So you'll do what he says, but you won't do what I say!”

“I have to.”

“No, you don't!”

Being a boy, or at least a physical approximation of a boy, let Lark take quick action when Larque would probably have sat on her overweight ass and argued and coaxed. Shooting off the sofa, Lark grabbed the brat. Sky jumped up at the same time, and although Lark's hands caught her by the arms, they then slid right through her.
Damn. She's a spirit. I keep forgetting
. Should have expected that. What was surprising was the half an instant of first contact, when for just an eyeblink it had felt almost as if Sky were solid and could be held.

Sky danced away and between two insubstantial fingers held up a glinting thing—the star. “You want it, you come and get it!” she sang and, as if lifted on wings of her own daring, she darted out the front door, into the night.

Lark swore. Shadow must have put some new vocabulary into her—she swore more effectively than ever before, and the swearing did not slow her down as she reached to pull on her jeans and shirt. No boobs, no bra, thank Shadow. No socks, no boots either, dammit. They were up in the bedroom with Hoot, who was probably lying there wide-awake and hulking and skulking, blanketless and too cussed to go to the cedar hutch and find himself any covers. No way in cold old hell was Lark going back into that bedroom where she would be reminded of wanting Hoot.

The nights were not very chilly now, in April. Not hesitating even to grab her wallet, Lark ran out barefoot after the doppelganger.

Far down the street she could see the small white-bloused back receding. She ran after it. Her legs felt different than before, tireless, springy. It did not take her long to catch up with a runaway ten-year-old.

Or maybe Sky wanted her to catch up. Because by the time she reached the infuriating kid, with her anger blown away by running and the pavement cool under her feet and the stars all around her weightless head, Lark had half forgotten Hoot and half remembered a few details from a time long before she had known Hoot. She remembered she had always wanted to walk on cool dewy bare feet, in weather no one else had considered suitable. She remembered she had always wanted to run outside without her coat or hat or mittens or purse or keys. She remembered she had always wanted to go out and wander in the night. First she had been too young, under Mommy's orders to go to bed and stay there. And later she had been afraid. Women who went out into the night, who unwisely let themselves be in the wrong place at the wrong time, could be raped.