Larque on the Wing Read Free Page B

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