Larque on the Wing Read Free Page A

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.”
    â€œI don’t remember.”
    â€œYou don’t want to remember. You don’t want to think about me at all. You don’t like me.”
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œLiar. 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.
    â€œMoo 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