Larque on the Wing (8 page)

Crinolines. God, and for a solid day she had been watching this so-called Sky wear them like the good, good little girl her mother had always wanted.

“Stand up,” Larque ordered the doppelganger, misdirected anger roughening her voice.

The little girl did it instantly, standing like a toy-store doll on display, and Larque went down on her knees in front of her, reaching under her voluminous skirt to tug the miserable net fashion-accessories-of-torment off. She couldn't do it, of course. Her hands slipped right through whatever aspect of Sky she tried to grasp. Sky could impact on Larque's world, boy could she impact, but Larque could not impact on Sky. Sky could mightily screw up Larque's life, but Larque could not do anything to Sky, nooooooo. That would have been too easy. She was stuck with this child who was already done, completed, a
fait accompli
of her personal past.

“Can you do it?” Larque begged her, still on her knees. “Take them off. Please.”

“What?” the little girl asked politely.

“Take off your damn crinolines.”

“I can't. Mommy wants me to wear them.”

“Mommy's not here. Aren't you uncomfortable?”

Sky was looking at her in a peculiar, intent way, listening like a person who has just heard a snatch of a song once danced to with a first love, later forgotten.

Larque pleaded, “Don't they bother you?”

“Yes, I hate them. They itch.” Tears started down the little girl's smooth face.

“Okay! Way to go.” Larque felt a rush of relief and joy, so much so that she felt like cheering.

“Yaaaay for our team,” Doris supplied softly from her place on the sidelines.

Larque urged Sky, “Why are you wearing them, then? Take them off.”

“But—but they make me pretty. And Daddy likes it when I'm pretty.” Sky lifted her head and turned her tears into a Cinderella smile for Daddy. What a princess.

“What a crock of shit,” Larque moaned, more to whatever gods might be awake than to Sky, and she sank back on her butt so that she was sitting on the floor, defeated.

“Stinks,” Doris agreed.

Larque looked up at her. They exchanged despairing comments with their eyes. “Somebody got a twelve-step program for doppelgangers?” Larque asked after a while.

“If they did, I'd have had you in it a long time ago.”

“Not me. Her. She needs help. Pretty was
never
the most important thing to me when I was a kid.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. If your mother told you your father wanted …” Doris looked sharply at Larque. “Do you ever see your father?”

“NO.” Larque heard the edge in her own taken-by-surprise voice and tried to soften it. “No. I haven't seen him for years. He didn't come to the wedding, so I—you know, we lost touch. I don't even know where he is.”

“He's not
dead?
” This was Sky, and suddenly the crinolined princess disappeared under tears, real tears this time, the kind that turn a face red and rubbery. “But—he's not with Mommy! So he's dead!”

“Oh, God, I forgot.” On her knees again, Larque tried to put her arms around the weeping girl. It didn't work. “Oh, shit,” she appealed to Doris. “She doesn't know. The divorce and everything happened when I was a little older.”

“He didn't leave Mommy!” Sky screamed. “He wouldn't leave Mommy!”

“You got mad at him,” Doris said to Larque.

“I guess. I don't remember.” With Doris talking in one ear and Sky bawling in the other, Larque couldn't think.

Doris said, “Bullshit, Larque. You're holding a grudge, or you'd be curious about where he is and how he is and what he's doing.”

Sky wailed, “I want my daddy!”

Larque stood up and screamed hard enough to make her eyes close, “WILL YOU GIVE ME A BREAK, BOTH OF YOU!”

Everything got a lot quieter right away. Not only did Sky and Doris shut up, but Doris's refrigerator clunked silent, and the light over her sink went out.

“Huh,” Doris said. “Must have blown a circuit breaker.”

Larque opened her eyes, but regrettably, all her problems were still there. She did not have her mother's talent.

“Look,” she said to Sky, “I'll call Mom and find out where Dad is, and we'll go visit him.” To Doris she said, “Sorry I yelled.”

“No, you're not.” Doris got up and headed toward the basement to flick her circuit breaker. She wore a nearly unbearable smirk. “Hey, anytime.”

Larque told her gently, “Go get yourself a carrot and you know what you can do with it.” She tried to grab Sky by the hand and came up with a fistful of air. Sighed at herself. “C'mon,” she told the kid. “We gotta boogie.”

“Let me know how it goes,” Doris yelled after her, grinning. From the dark basement stairway her teeth shone faintly orange, like a special effect in a horror movie. With friends like her, who needed horror movies.

“Listen,” Larque complained at her, “my mother left my father, not the other way around, so why would I be mad at him?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh, shut up.” Larque got in the car, already knowing. Because her mother had trained her to be mad at him, that was why.

“Doris is right,” she said to her doppelganger on the way home. “I should have looked him up a long time ago. Maybe I actually do have one normal relative.”

Probably not. What could be normal about a man who would let almost thirty years go by without trying to contact his daughter?

Shadow knew where Larque's father was. Shadow knew a lot of things about a lot of people—other than himself, whom he barely knew at all. He did not know his own past. He did not understand the power moving through his own hands, where it came from, whether the ability to direct it was something he had been born with or whether Gypsy Davy had somehow given it to him.

Did the knowledge come with the power? Somehow he knew of the othernesses underneath the appearances of things.

He knew the otherstories—of foundlings, changelings, princes, angels, desperadoes, outcasts, orphans, strays. The stranger riding in. The stranger riding away again.

In other words, he knew all the otherwords—freak, geek, drifter, loner, outsider, oddball, fag, queen, queer.

He knew women adored him, and he knew why—other than that his body was beautiful.

What he did not know was himself, who he was.

“Who are you?” the man who called himself Argent had asked him, gasping and trembling atop the chenille bedspread of the
COLOR TV
*
VIBRA-BEDS
motel.

The only appropriate answer Shadow could give was a shrug of his black-clad shoulder.

“How did you
do
that?”

“I'm not sure.” It had never happened before. He was going to have to learn control, and he was going to have to learn it fast.

“Well—what now? I can't go back.” Already it was morning. Argent should have been on his way to the state university where he professed mathematics, but he was going nowhere, for he was neck-deep in love, like standing naked in white wine. “I won't go back. I'll follow you if you try to leave. Will you stay with me?”

Shadow did not love him, but felt he owed him something. “Yes. For a while.”

“Thank you,” the man whispered. “I won't ask more.”

“There will be danger.” There would always be danger for Shadow, who sometimes went places where he knew people would want to hurt him. He did not know why he did it. Trying to go home, maybe—if a beating had taken his memory away, a beating could give it back—or maybe looking for trouble out of a sick kind of superiority, to show that he could survive, or maybe out of inferiority, an illogical conviction of guilt, getting himself hurt because he felt he deserved it? He was not consciously aware of the guilt. Yet he felt a sense of being responsible, of obligation to Argent because he had laid his hands on the man's soul.

“We won't be able to go far,” he added, “unless—do you have money?”

“Not much. You?”

“No.” But money was unimportant to him. There were other ways to survive, better ways, the gypsy ways, and Shadow knew them all. Also, a vision was growing in him, hot and quiet, like power growing within black clouds, of what he might be able to do. Things he had no right even to dream of doing.

He touched the shaking man's forehead briefly with one hand, and Argent quieted. “It will be all right,” Shadow told him. “We will make our own place.”

Dead silence.

“Mom?” Larque insisted. Probably she should have gone to see her mother instead of phoning, for the sake of eye contact and all that. But for some reason phoning seemed safer.

“I don't know, dear. I haven't heard from him in years.” Florrie rushed to change the subject. “Are you going to take a vacation this summer, sweetie?”

Larque almost fell for it. “Hoot seems to be taking his vacation right now.” But then she caught herself. “About Dad,” she persevered. “Where was he the last you knew?”

“I really don't remember.”

“Mom, you must have some idea.”

“I'd like to go to the shore,” her mother said. “You know, I haven't been there since that time you were about six and you got so burned.”

Now Larque knew why she hadn't ventured to Florrie's bungalow: so she wouldn't get blinked. God knew how many times she had been blinked at while she was growing up. It might explain a lot about her. Heck, Florrie was blinking away all the unpleasant parts of this conversation right now. Larque knew this because she could hear the clicks on the line. Clickety-blink, clickety-blink.

Larque closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried one more time. “
Mother
,” she said, “he's my father. I'd like to find him. Help me.”

“Oh, for goodness sake.” Florrie's voice went high, rapid and agitated. “Honey child, you don't want to talk with him. He is not really a very nice man.”

People who did not possess this particular ontological quality, this quiddity called “very niceness,” were not allowed in Florrie's world.

Larque urged, “But you do know where he is.”

“Why should I have the least interest in knowing where he is?”

Coming from Florrie, this was almost a straight answer, because what she did not want to know she truly no longer knew. Blink, blink, all gone.

“Dear?” Her voice had reverted to being girlish and serene. “How are the boys doing in school these days?”

Larque next placed a long-distance call to her brother, Byron, in Virginia. He was home, of course, because she had timed it right. Six days a week Byron could be counted on to be at home, waiting, around the time the mail came, because he was afflicted by an interesting form of brain flatulence: he really believed that adventure, wealth, and salvation were possible via the U.S. Postal Service. He lived for the next delivery. Worked evenings, if at all. Had the largest box on his rural route. Hated Sundays.

“Dad?” His tone made Larque's question seem preposterous; why on earth should he, Byron, know the whereabouts of their mutual father? “No, I don't know … last I heard, wasn't he right there in town with you?”

“Was he?” Larque was not unduly surprised. The way her life went, all ironies were possible. Probably, now that she was looking for him, her father had moved to Australia.

“I think that's where he was, right there in Soudersburg, maybe a couple of years ago. One of those streets with a tree name, wasn't it? Elm? Pine?”

“How would I know? Nobody tells me.”

“You didn't ask. Did you get my Brother's Helper letter?”

“Yes, and I threw it in the trash. By, don't waste your postage money sending me that sort of thing.” It was another of his pray-and-get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.

“I just wanted to give you the opportunity to get in early.” He sounded peevish and stuffed up; he had the flu. “This time next month I could be worth a hundred thousand smackeroos.”

“Dream on.” Byron had always been like this, younger than she even though he was older, the kind to send away for stuff from the backs of magazines, enter cereal box sweepstakes, place his gold sticker on the box marked YES! I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. Sort of like Mom, except she blew her money on religion once she got rid of Dad. While he was still around he kept her on an allowance. Byron had a nice wife named Carolyn, a Waldenbooks manager, to take care of him, but women's work didn't pay enough, which might be why they had no kids.

“How's Carolyn?”

“Fine. She hasn't caught this crud yet, but she will. So will you. This bug's so potent it'll crawl through the phone lines and get you.”

Involuntarily Larque pulled back from the mouthpiece.

“Hey, sis,” Byron went on affectionately, “you got a few bucks to spare? Doctor bills caught me kind of short. Just till next month, when the Brother's Helper money starts coming in.”

“No,” she told him, “sorry.” She really was sorry, too, that was the appalling thing. There was something never-say-die about Byron that made her want to humor him just on the off chance that he really might win one of his mail-in sweepstakes someday. Whatever it was about him—it was nuts, but you could almost call it courage. Larque ruefully adored him.

“Hoot's quit his job,” she explained. “And I'm kind of unemployed too, right at the moment.”

“Unemployed? You?” Byron sounded astonished, though of course he had not been surprised to hear about Hoot. “How does a free-lance painter of your talent and popularity become unemployed?” He was serious. Byron genuinely loved her work, which was almost the same as loving her. Larque's house might be decorated with dog hair and Escher posters, but Byron and Carolyn had decorated their place with Larque originals.

His tone was so warm that she felt herself smiling. “Long story,” she said. “Tell you next time I see you, okay? Gotta go.” She told him to get well, then hung up.