Larque on the Wing (25 page)

His face still softened by astonishment, he said simply, “Argent.”

“Huh.” Lark held Sky tighter, feeling the pain start to gather again in her hard young chest.

Shadow said, “Between the two of us, we've hurt him pretty thoroughly.”

“We didn't do anything. I wish we had. I wanted to hurt him.” Lark said this without heat but without remorse either. Her father was another one who didn't care about her. “Lay your hands on him if you want to heal somebody.”

“I already did.”

“And it worked?”

“Yes. Well enough.”

“Damn,” she said, only half joking. Then she sighed. “Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

“Come back where I can keep an eye on you.”

“Why? You don't seem to give a flying shit about me.”

“I give several shits about Argent. I need to find a way to save Popular Street.”

“Ah.” Everything Shadow had said had of course been the truth, but this was the bottommost truth. Shadow and Argent needed her to somehow get the Virtuous Woman off their backs.

Draped comfortably over Lark's chest and digging her chin into Lark's shoulder, her legs kicking in a contented way, Sky seemed to have settled in for the duration. Lark tucked her chin and pulled her head back to look at the kid.

“Please,” Shadow said.

Lark did not raise her eyes, but put the matter to her doppelganger. “Sky. There's something I haven't been telling you. I know where Daddy is.”

The little girl jerked upright in her arms and stared at her wild-eyed.

“He's inside Argent,” Lark told her gently. “The trouble is, he doesn't particularly want to come out.”

They looked at each other a moment, and then Sky laid her head down on Lark's shoulder again. Her feet had gone still.

“He doesn't love us?” she asked.

For a moment Lark couldn't speak. Shadow answered. “It depends what you mean by love,” he said. “He does care in his way. More than you know.”

“Lark,” Sky insisted.

Lark muttered, “Not as far as I can tell.”

Sky lay silent, hanging on tight.

“So what do you think?” Lark asked her. “Should we go see him?”

“Fuck him,” Sky said to Lark's shoulders.

Where had the kid learned that kind of language? Jeez. But Lark found herself in agreement with the sentiment, if not the literal interpretation thereof.

She looked up. “There you have it,” she told Shadow. Behind her, with its shrill music blaring, the carousel went round and round.

“Please,” Shadow said. “Think.”

“If I was any good at thinking, I wouldn't be wearing a dick.”

“Please come back with me.”

“No.”

His perfect face had not changed. Her refusal had not affected him, and in a moment she knew why. He wasn't finished yet. He was holding an ace.

“You might want to reconsider,” he said. “I have a feeling you are going to need my help. Somebody came into the Magic Makeover this morning looking for you.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Big guy,” Shadow said. “Very Germanic, but personable in a blunt way. Peasantlike. I believe you are related to him by marriage. Name's Geoffrey Harootunian.”

THIRTEEN

O
N HER WAY BACK TO
P
OPULAR
S
TREET
, L
ARK WONDERED
how the truth, which was supposed to set her free, could feel so much like coercion.

The truth was, she needed Shadow at least as much as he needed her. She needed his coaching. At this point he knew more about who she was than she did.

The other truth was, her heart was pounding and she felt shaky all over at the thought of seeing Hoot and the boys again.

Skipping along beside her, Sky squeezed her hand.

“How did Hoot know about me?” Lark asked Shadow, who was striding along black-booted and silent at her other side.

“Ask him when you see him.”

“I'm asking you.”

“Ask him.”

“I can't! What am I supposed to do, just walk up to the house and knock on the door? What if the V.W. is there? She's too fucking much like Mom. What if she blinks? Do you know for sure she doesn't blink?”

Shadow sighed. “Being around you makes me feel like I don't know anything anymore.”

“What did you tell Hoot about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Not even that I would try to find you.”

“Well, shit! Why not?”

Shadow gave Lark a sideward look that was fairly expressive for him, but remained silent.

“Where the hell are we going?” They had already passed several corners that could have served as entries to Popular Street.

Shadow said, “We need to go in the back way.”

“Back way?”

“Yes. Your alter ego has brought reinforcements. The street is full of hyperventilating women carrying placards.” Lark did not much like his disgusted tone as he said the w-word. “Most of the stores are closed.”

He pulled his cat's-eye marble out of his pocket and led the way into an alley that looked like any other alley: dirt, dumpsters, poison ivy. The faded lettering on the delivery doors, however, announced the Penis Place, Beauty and the Beast, the Cop Shop, the New You Tattoo.

Lark wondered briefly if there was poison ivy growing in the alley on the other side too, the one behind Araby. If so, that might explain the rash she was getting on her firm young male buttocks.

“Magic Makeover,” Sky read, bouncing with excitement, as they reached the back door at the alley's far end.

Just at that moment a redoubtably skirted, placard-toting duo strode into the alley from the other direction: the Virtuous Woman and Florence Lawrence. Taken by surprise, Lark and Sky and Shadow found themselves facing the enemy at close range.

“There, honeybunch, see?” Florrie said to her doppelganger daughter affectionately. “I told you there would be perverts skulking back here.”

Sky was hanging on hard to Lark's hand with both her little twiggy paws. Shadow was shoving in front of Lark and Sky to shield them with his body. Lark found herself looking at her own mother in terror, because where Florrie expected to find perverts then perverts were what Florrie would find, and once she blinked, they would all three become drooling pederasts or something.

The next few minutes got very confusing. Only approximately in this sequence:

Shadow pulled a key like pulling a gun and reached for the Magic Makeover's back door.

Florrie said, “Hold it right there.”

The V.W. scanned Lark and Sky utterly without recognition.

Tall, blond, and placardless, Hoot Harootunian came around the corner, happening upon the scene of the fray. He double-took, then yelled at Lark, “You!”

“Begone, perverts,” the V.W. intoned to Lark, Sky, and Shadow. “We are closing this Sodom down.”

Sky began to cry.

Lowering her placard like a weapon, Florrie barred Shadow's way.

Somebody farted. Lark hoped it wasn't her.

Standing by the V.W., Hoot ignored that woman whose worth was as rubies but said furiously to Lark, “Just how stupid do you think I am? You really thought I'd believe this stainless steel no-kinks porcelain-assed yutz-face is you?”

Lark put her arms around Sky.

Shadow told Florrie, “Step aside, witch.”

Hoot yelled at Lark, “What the hell are you trying to prove? Saddling me with this dead fish on ice while you go running off?”

Florrie did not move. Shadow's cold tone perturbed her. She blinked him.

The V.W. said to Hoot, “You are disgusting.”

Unaffected, Shadow told Florrie, “Move your fat ass.” She gasped, eyes wide with shock, then blinked him again. He was still there.

Hoot complained to Lark, “You been having fun? Tell me how much fun it is being a guy. Give me lessons. I'd sure like to find out.”

The V.W. said to Hoot, “No self-respecting woman would do those things, especially not with her husband. You are sick and lewd.”

Sky ascended Lark as if climbing a tree and clung to her strong young chest and shoulders like a monkey.

Hoot could ignore the Virtuous Woman no longer and told her, “You are a classic tight ass.”

Florrie heard this, swiveled like a door knob, drew herself up to her full height of four-foot-ten and commanded, terrible in wrath, “Don't talk to my daughter that way.”

Lark saw Florrie turning on Hoot and yelled, “No! NO!” But her mother did not listen any better than she ever had.

God, no, not Hoot
…

Time stood still.

Florrie blinked him.

Hanging onto Sky as if the kid riding on her chest could somehow hold her up, Lark saw it happen: one moment Hoot stood there glowering, and the next moment Lark was looking at a blond, Hoot-shaped nincompoop in a powder blue polyester leisure suit and three-tone tassel loafers. “Goodness, I do apologize,” he said to Florrie. “Sorry, dear,” he told his wife. “How very rude of me.”

Lark screamed.

It was the hoarse scream of a young man driven beyond her limits. Seeing Hoot being blinked was even worse than having it done to her. She wanted to annihilate her now-smiling mother for what she had done to him. But even worse she wanted Hoot to be himself again.

Her scream was like a karate yell that focused all the force of her passion on the pseudo-Hoot in the leisure suit, willing the real Hoot to come back. Without thinking, she was doppelgangering him.

“Lark, you're doing it again!” she heard Shadow warn. She saw Florrie turn her pudgy little body to stare, but she couldn't stop. She couldn't leave Hoot that way. Not her Hoot, not the guy who loathed wearing pajamas, knew sixteen separate and distinct brassiere jokes and occasionally spit his Juicy Fruit into the trash from distances up to ten feet away. God damn her mother anyway. Give her Patrick Swayze, she'd turn him into Pee Wee Herman without the interesting police blotter.

Well, she was her mother's daughter, Skylark, and she wasn't going to let it happen to Hoot.

Maybe because she knew him so well—maybe because she loved him—she doppelgangered him as never before. She tore him out of her mother's phony replica within a heartbeat. There he stood in the alley next to the other one, naked, dazed, very attractive, and as solid as she was. And swearing. She felt sure it was him because of the way he was swearing.

“Jesus sheep-fucking shit!” he exclaimed, covering one of the more attractive portions of his body with his hands.

Lark's mother's mouth fell open in outrage. Her eyes widened, staring at Lark. In an instant she would blink.

Sky screamed, clinging to Lark's neck. Lark tried to cover the child with her arms. Somebody gave her a powerful shove. “Inside, stupid!” Shadow yelled, getting between them and Florrie as he propelled both of them through the back door of the Magic Makeover. He reached out to grab the naked Hoot, the more genuine of the two extant Hoots, by the wrist, and dragged him inside the back room, then slammed the door behind all of them. Leaning against it, he stood panting. Lark had not seen him so shaken up since the night of the fag bashing.

“You come out of there!” Florrie was shrilling from the other side of the door.

She could yell until doomsday. They were safe in the windowless back room of the Magic Makeover; blessedly, Florrie could not blink them unless she could see them. Nevertheless, Lark felt her skin crawling like ten thousand little lizards. She sank down to sit on the floor with Sky huddled in her arms as Hoot plopped down across the small room from her.

From outside came the sound of the other Hoot's voice saying, “You're quite right, darling. I am a lucky, lucky man to have such a decent, God-fearing woman for my loving wife.”

Hoot was staring at Lark. “Christ,” he whispered. “What happened? It felt—it felt worse than dying. What did your mom do to me?” He was shaking.

“She blinked you,” Lark told him. “She rearranged you and made you into what she wanted you to be.”

Also from outside came a mouselike squeaking noise Lark did not at first recognize, because it had been a long time since she had known Florrie to blow her self-imposed serenity. It was the sound of her mother's fury.

“She can do that?” Hoot's deep voice went up an octave.

“She's been doing it to me most of my life.”

“Jesus, Lark.” His voice softened, and also his eyes. “Are you okay?”

She had not realized her face was wet with tears, Sky's and her own. His concern made her throat lump up. She could not speak.

Shadow gave everybody one of his dark looks, straightened up from his stance against the door, and began moving around his shop's back room, which was messily full of his paraphernalia—clippers and curlers, magical rinses and cosmetics, sultry glam magazines, movie stills curling on the walls. The alley noises had faded away. Shadow pulled a stack of hand towels and a couple of plastic perm cloaks out of a metal cabinet, slammed its door with an impressive crash, and tossed the things at Hoot. “Put those on,” he ordered.

The towels were too small to wrap around Hoot's Germanic midsection. The plastic shawls were translucent. Hoot demanded, “How?”

Shadow ignored the question, staring fixedly at Lark. “Do you realize,” he said in a tone more piteous than scolding, “that I now have three versions of you plus two of him to deal with? How long do you propose to keep this up?”

Gazing at Hoot, Lark physically ached with longing but knew what sort of reaction she could expect if she, a boy, tried to touch him. She barely heard Shadow. Sky, however, stiffened to defiant attention and pulled herself out of Lark's arms to face him.

“Are you in charge?” she challenged.

“Somebody better be,” Shadow complained. “The whole fucking thing is falling apart.” He nodded toward the front of the store.