Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  Lindy jumped onto the desktop. Huck picked her up and dropped her to the floor. Annelise moved beside him, and he flipped the manual open at the dog-ear, to a chapter titled “THE PIETENPOL ‘AIR-CAMPER’ . . . a Ford Powered 2-Seater Monoplane.”

  “It’s this. Built around a Model A engine. But it’s a real airplane, homemade or not.” He swiveled his head toward her. “The glider was my own ideas, mostly. But this is proven to work. I ordered the plans directly from the designer, in Minnesota. Mr. Pietenpol.”

  McKee had moved in and even he seemed to take some interest. “Model A’s a heavy damn engine.” He set his bottle down and started flipping pages. “Gravity-fed, too. I don’t know much about airplanes, I admit. But whoever figured this out, well. I doff my hat.” He stopped at the motor-conversion diagrams, pored over them for a moment. “If it actually works, I mean.”

  “It does. There’s a bunch of them flying already. Two in Montana, that I know of.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Shush,” said Annelise sharply.

  They both looked at her, but she’d turned to the radio.

  “. . . and in Honolulu, Miss Earhart’s silver Lockheed has crashed upon takeoff on the second leg of her attempt to circle the globe at the equator. Neither Lady Lindy nor her crew have been injured, but damage to the airplane will mean at least a month’s delay. In other news, tensions continue to rise in the northern regions in Spain, where . . .”

  “Goddamn it,” said Annelise.

  Huck and McKee both looked at her. Huck’s ears actually seemed to ignite, as though those words out of those lips held the very breath of the devil.

  “What?” she said. Then, “First one of you makes a crack about women pilots, I swear I’ll come at you with this bottle.”

  “So you do fly planes, then? That’s for real?”

  She looked McKee smack in the eye like a mongoose at a cobra. Or a queen to a drone. “I’m working toward my license. Yes, I’ve flown. Quite a lot.”

  He looked at Huck. “And you built all that back in there yourself, right? Plus your own glider?”

  Huck nodded.

  “You want help?”

  He gave a start. “What all?”

  McKee waved a hand at the manual on the desk. “You’re some hand, that much I can see, but this looks to be a whale of a lot of work. Now I got no earthly doubt you can manage it, but the three of us, together? We’d get this sucker off the ground in no time.”

  “I’m in,” said Annelise. She turned to Huck. “If you want the help, I mean.”

  Huck didn’t quite know what to think. The thing had been a sworn secret for months, and other than Pop and Raleigh, nobody had sussed out a thing. Now in the turn of an hour it was all this.

  Pop’s REO rumbled up outside. “Better stash those bottles,” he said.

  Annelise downed hers in a gulp and glanced around and finally just lowered the brown glass to the floor and rolled it under the desk with her foot. McKee for his part took another slow swig and went back to studying the engine schematics. Huck heard the doors clank on the truck, one then two, heard feet on the gravel.

  He looked at Annelise. “What if she smells it on your breath?”

  She gestured with her chin toward McKee. “I’ll tell her the new fabricator here kissed me full on the mouth.”

  “Guilty as charged,” said McKee. “Even if I don’t know your name.”

  “Annelise,” she said. “Or Miss Clutterbuck, to you.”

  McKee tilted his bottle at her. “Annelise it is.” He shifted back to Huck. “You have the motor yet?”

  Huck’s nerves were already up and whatever was happening between these other two wasn’t helping. “Nope.”

  The door swung open and hit the transom bell, and Pop held the door for Mother. Her eyes went first to Huck, then to McKee’s beer, then to the rifle positioned with its muzzle on the toe of his boot, and finally back to Huck.

  Pop mainly appeared amused. He said, “Working hard, or hardly working?”

  “We’re working hard at hardly working,” said McKee. “This being the Lord’s day and all.” He looked at Mother. “Howdy-do, ma’am. Beer?”

  “This is my new man,” Pop told her. “Mother, Enos McKee.”

  “Call me Yakima,” he said.

  “Enos?” said Annelise. “Really?”

  “Sort of,” said McKee. He looked a little sheepish.

  “I don’t imbibe,” said Mother.

  “Enos,” Annelise repeated, as though the very combination of letters and syllables were some exotic if dubious flavor in her mouth. “Is that a, um, family name?”

  “Annelise. Don’t tease the man. Besides, Enos is a good Christian name in the Word. A direct ancestor of Jesus, in fact.”

  “Just call me Yakima,” McKee said. He glanced at Annelise. “My friends all do.”

  “Well, what sort of a name is that?”

  “It’s a place,” said Pop. “Out on the Palouse. By all means, call the man what he wants to be called. And keep your nose in your own business.”

  She grinned at him. “Mea culpa. That’s a legal term.”

  “That sounds about right,” Pop told her, with an unusual twinkle of his own, and Huck realized with an odd flash of chagrin that his cousin already had his old man wrapped right around her finger.

  Mother seemed not to notice. She’d moved up beside him and taken his arm, and he felt himself tense the way he always did these days. What she said next made him feel some chagrin about that, too.

  “I’m going to fix you a hero’s supper, Houston. Pastor was very proud of you. Why don’t you and Annelise bring the groceries from the truck for me? Let Papa and Mr. McKee have some grown-up time.”

  Huck glanced at Annelise. Her blue-gray eyes looked like shards of ice above the sky-colored wool of her jacket, and when they made contact now with his own she widened and then narrowed them again in a way that made him think of signal lights, surging and dimming through a fog. He wondered if she was sending a message.

  She winked and removed all doubt. Otherwise her face was a stone.

  “Mr. McKee, will you be joining us?”

  “Well, ma’am, I’m not one to impose. Or to insult a lady’s invitation, either.”

  “How gallant of you,” said Annelise.

  Everyone looked at her. She looked back at each in turn and finally blinked, and Huck realized that despite the steady coolness in her eyes, she really didn’t know quite what to do in the moment, either. She pushed her sleeve back to check the time, a gesture he took more as a cover for nerves than anything else.

  He saw the watch on her wrist.

  “Son of a—” he blurted, and caught himself in the nick of time. “—gun.” His hand shot in the same instant to his pocket, and Mother’s grip tightened on his arm. Reflex unto reflex. “That is one . . . big ol’ watch.”

  “Speaking of guns,” said Roy mildly, “I see you’ve given ol’ Juno the once-over.”

  McKee seemed to have momentarily forgotten the fourteen-pound howitzer balanced on the toe of his boot. He regarded it with fresh eyes. “Why, yes. I think I may be in love, in fact. Never have actually seen one before.”

  “You can dance with her,” Pop said, “but she’s true to me.”

  “You’re a lucky man. Get her off some old buffalo rounder or something?”

  Mother still had Huck’s arm like a clamp. His hand still gripped the watch through the cloth of his trousers. Jump.

  Stall. His eye caught the open manual on the desk. He needed to get her out of the shop altogether. Annelise stepped for the door as though she could read his mind.

  “Son, that big Sharps belonged to my daddy, and I reckon he did some damage with it the way all them old boys done. I rode with it across my saddle clear from Texas when I was ten years old. Been in Mo
ntana ever since. Me and Miss Juno both.”

  “Clear from Texas,” said McKee. He ran his hand over the concave dish in the fore-end, worn into the wood by the sway of a horse, mile after mile, state after state. “Now that is sure enough something. Reckon I’d like to hear that story one of these days.”

  Roy winked at Annelise, still with her hand at the door. The big Longines had once again vanished into her sleeve. “Set a plate for him, Mother,” he said. “Reckon I might as well tell it.”

  Roy

  In 1873 I hunted in eastern Nebraska, on the Cedar, a tributary of the Loup River, not more than 130 miles west of the city of Omaha, and saw numerous bands of elk. A little further to the west and south, buffalo were plenty.

  —George Bird Grinnell, 1903

  There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight. In after years I was glad that I had seen it. Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.

  —Billy Dixon, 1914

  In the last hours of life Roy’s pa saw again the constellations of fire, flickering pinpricks like he’d watched in the picket camps across the Susquehanna in a war thirty years gone, or later in the lodge fires of the fighting tribes in Nebraska and Texas. Rifle fire and mortar bursts, lapping and lapping out of the darkness of his own delirium. Coal fires and streaking cinder in the Glasgow smelters he’d witnessed still earlier in his youth.

  Only nine years old himself, Gilroy had been raised from birth by his father alone, and he’d heard most of the stories already. But what he did not apprehend until the last was the haunting beneath the surface of the tales, as though the wandering souls of the annihilated plodded quietly, grazing sorrowfully along, never ceasing and never arriving, in the canyons and plains of memory itself.

  His father had come into the world a ghillie’s son, on a grandly faltering estate outside Aberdeenshire, and been christened Lachlan Graham Finn after Old Norse ancestry on his father’s side and the staunchly native clan on his mother’s. He took to the land and its creatures from the time he could toddle, turned loose like a hound sprung from the master’s kennel to roam and rout whatever might jump and run, and the chase got fully into his blood.

  By six he was already an asset with hawk and fox control. At fifty paces he could hit the eye of a rook or a rabbit with a pea rifle. His father kept him in powder and lead as a matter of professional interest, and while he might not as a rule slay the lord’s proper game, he was encouraged and even rewarded for exterminating anything that might compete with or raid the lie of or otherwise itself slay the lord’s game.

  He excelled at this assignment right up until the estate fell bankrupt and into receivership in 1862, his fourteenth year. His father stayed on with the new laird, and the youngest of Lach’s siblings of course remained as well, but Lachlan and his older sister were bound for teeming Glasgow, where aunts and uncles caught up and displaced by either the famine or the Clearances, or both, had already migrated. The two arrived to a cramped and stinking tenement and relatives they didn’t know, breathing coal dust and rat pestilence and squalor, and the first bloom of trouble opened in his lungs.

  Though he’d hoped to apprentice to a gun maker the real boom was occurring in the Glasgow shipyards, on account of the war between the American states. Glaswegian boatbuilders came to specialize overnight in blockade runners for the Confederacy, with daredevil Scotch sailing men running the ships first to the Bahamas, then into Charleston or Savannah with munitions, then back to British ports with bales of cotton.

  Starting with a menial job in a shipyard, Lachlan within six months had signed as crew to a steam-powered side-wheeler, a low and lean vessel with both extensive armor and an almost unfathomable capability for speed.

  Roy knew there were gaps in his knowledge of the paternal history. He knew that the steamer berthed without incident in North Carolina and that his father did not make the return voyage, would not in fact ever return to his homeland again. He knew as well that the lung trouble originating in the industrial tenements would be with him for life, flaring and then subsiding for months at a time and then flaring and easing again, before finally pulling him full under into that last, fast decline.

  And though his father came into America under the pretext of the Southern cause, Roy knew he somehow wound up not merely in the North, but also killing for it. As a sharpshooter.

  “Dinnae aisk a man in these western lanes his name, his religion, his politicks. Any one a’ them ca’ buy ya’ trouble, and in big letters. Ne’er stray from that, laddie.”

  He himself appeared almost wholly without either religion or politics, so Roy could never rightly say what compelled him to the Northern ranks. He never doubted, however, that philosophy or any sort of burning conviction had anywhere near as much sway as the simple chance to acquire one of those long-range Sharps breechloaders and put it to use.

  “Made me way to the nearest Yank garrison, an’ fibbed me way into a Berdan trial. Told ’em I’s a member of the Ninety-Fifth Rifles, and a real long-range hand.” Roy remembers the gleam in his father’s eye, the wink. “Nae quite a galvanized Yank, I’ll say . . . but a long-ranger, well. Turns oat I was.”

  His father never much mentioned the total number of graybacks killed or wounded, and likely did not rightly know himself. The war is not what he talked about anyway, for the most part, because whatever he participated in during that time, conducted at distance and hence remove, paled in comparison with what came after, when he mustered out of service with his Sharps and his sniper’s pay, then made his way west by rail and paddleboat to Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  He hired on with the Union Pacific Railroad as a meat hunter. If his bullets-to-mark tally remained uncertain from his days hunting men, his record of ungulate kills for the railroad was precise as an abacus. In two years, with the steady progress of the railbed unfurling across the plains of Nebraska and much of Wyoming, he shot 4,552 buffalo, all with the breech-loading Sharps. Sometimes he roamed out overland with a wagon and team and a contingent of meat cutters, sometimes he rode the supply locomotives and utilized the roof of a train car as a shooting platform.

  A few times he and others engaged Cheyenne or Arapaho raiding parties, and he killed a few there as well, although the formidable range of the rifles generally made for short-lived rebuff.

  “Ye’d knack one or two dane,” he regaled the boy, “or flaiten th’ pony beneath th’ raider, and they’d lose the taste quick enough.”

  He followed this work long after the last golden spike put the transcontinental road into business, supplying meat for various spur crews through the late sixties and finally striking out as a straight-up hide hunter in the seventies. Roy would eventually understand that these latter were the slaughters that truly ghosted the old man, the ones that woke him in the shape of nightmares two and three decades hence.

  In Omaha he acquired a Sharps New Model .50-70 cartridge gun, chambered in the standard U.S. arsenal round and a definite improvement over the earlier paper-case rifle. He teamed with a pair of skinners, put cash down for a wagon and rolled out with an entire procession of like entrepreneurs on the vast level reaches across Kansas and Colorado.

  At first they encountered the big shaggies in pockets and bands and they killed as they went, peeling the hides and taking the tongue for trade and what choice cuts they needed for camp meat and otherwise leaving waste in their wake, the dead beasts opium-eyed like naked overgrown larvae, marbled pink and white and laced with veins, and ghoulishly comic with their furred heads and horns still attached.

  Farther along an actual river of bison, thousands upon thousands the way he first saw them on the rail line to the north, stretched across the muted yellow plain like the stark black aftermath of a brush fire. He and his crew pitched camp a few miles o
ut from the next wagon. They set up shop and got down to business.

  He killed more than one hundred the first day. His skinners did their work through the second day, while he primed and repacked cartridges for the Sharps at the wagon. The herd continued to drift but never disappeared. The boom of heavy rifle fire rolled over the plains from different directions until nightfall, sporadic but steady.

  Buzzards, blowflies, and, by the scorching middle of the third day, stench. The dead bison began to bloat, badly, their legs stiff with rigor but elevating awkwardly anyway into the air as the gas in their guts inflated them like dirigibles. Some of the bodies burst, either spontaneously or from the peck of birds or the orgiastic swarms of snapping coyotes and snarling wolves. A few of these Lachlan rolled to kingdom come on general principle, five hundred grains of accelerated lead the practical equivalent of a Jovian thunderbolt.

  The skinners peeled those hides, too. They finally headed for the nearest rail depot with scant breeze and the temperature certainly north of ninety. The wagon fairly groaned beneath a mountain of green stinking hides, Lachlan’s lungs fairly scorching with sputum and blood, as though the air itself contained a writhe of some insidious pox.

  So it went for three seasons in the Ogallala country and then west along the Saline River around Fort Hays, until the herds there had so diminished by 1873 that the trains began to run more or less on schedule.

  The following season Roy’s father and several hundred others cast their eyes south, toward the Staked Plains. The herds there had rebounded after good years of rain, and besides that, the dry hot air might ease his crippled lights.

  He knew as all of them did that this was hostile country, still controlled by the last holdout bands of Comanches and Kiowas, a bloody and no-nonsense bunch indeed. So the outfit fairly bristled with guns and ammunition, not only the cannonlike tools of the buffalo-killing trade but also a pair of repeating Winchesters per man, and a like quantity of Colt’s revolvers modified to take the same cartridge. Enough ammo to mount an insurrection.