Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  One bright note. My uncle has turned out curiously on my side, so far as I can tell. He’s what you might call a salt-of-the-earth sort, a farmer (rancher??) but also (even more??) a mechanic or machinist or some such combination, and definitely no Mrs. Grundy like the rest of the family. And my little cousin Houston (actually six inches taller than me, but a frosh kid) not only has Lindy fever in spades, but I swear the ingenuity of the Wright brothers and G. Curtiss put together.

  He’s building his own airplane, Blix. I’m not joking, it’s a real ship, from published plans. Two-seater, mono wing, but otherwise looks a bit like Bill’s Gipsy, or a Stearman, or will anyway when he’s got it all together. Called an “Air Camper,” evidently? Have you seen any of these things? They use a Ford car motor, which he needs to wrangle yet, but I have little doubt he’ll finish and fly it. He’s that kind of kid.

  Of course I’d blouse out of here this very minute if I could, but even so I halfway hope I’m still around when he gets her up and off the ground. He’s doing this right under my aunt’s nose and she doesn’t have a clue or she’d put the kibosh in a second, and I would love, love, LOVE to watch him pull the whole thing off just to see the look on her face—or maybe even lift off and fly straight out of exile myself, how rich would that be? A fantasy, I know. And I know I am probably pasting my mother onto my aunt, but how can I feel otherwise? They’re two sides of a coin, and it’s hard to be any less furious at either of them for this whole nonsensical business . . . when what have I done, really, except behave as though I’m glad to be alive, with a glorious hunger, and happy to know I can be swept away? Didn’t you feel that way, too?

  I guess I should tell you I’m sorry I took your watch that last time, but I’m not, if you want the whole selfish truth. I wear it when I sleep so I can feel it hum in the dark, like a pulse I imagine to be yours. I hope you like the sound of that, hope it takes some of the rub out of letting it slip for the time being off your wrist, and on to mine, and then away.

  Did you know the times I would wrap my fingers around your wrist, just to feel your real heart race? Did you? Bet you didn’t, not in those particular moments.

  Anyway, I will be a proper guardian, I can promise that. I don’t exactly know when I’ll get a reprieve, but when I do, and I will, your lovely watch will return with me. In the meantime, I know it’s ridiculous to ask you to wait for me. I know how you flyboys are (she writes, with a wink and a glare). But you know me too, and I am no canceled stamp. If the charms of some other girl have your attention when I return, I will merely set my trap and lure you right back. It will be easy.

  Write to me at this address to let me know I’ve indeed reached you, and also so I know how you are. But for the love of God, write only as my flight instructor, not with any hint or suggestion you might be what you actually are. I doubt highly my aunt could get to my mail before I do, but I have no guarantee. And as much as I want to read about how you would like to take me apart and see what makes me run, well, you know the stakes.

  Isn’t it a drag about Amelia in Hawaii? I still have not been able to gather exactly what glitched, but evidently it wasn’t small potatoes. Have you seen photos or newsreel? Let me know, it’s like the GOBI DESERT up here for the otherwise free in spirit and curious of mind. That is no April Fool.

  Yours,

  The other A.E.

  3

  “Any line yet on an engine for this baby?” McKee asked.

  They had the muslin-sheathed fuselage and also the wing elevated on horses on the main floor of the shop, the welders and lathe and compressor pushed back by the forge, which left little room to work on much else. Huck had doped the edges and seams before school, then walked around with his head in a nitrate fog until third period.

  Now Pop and McKee had the big bay doors rolled back to ventilate the place, with the REO and McKee’s panel truck strategically parked to block the view from the street. Huck, in his jumpsuit and rubber gloves, dipped a brush into an Arbuckles’ can to get the first coat applied everyplace else. Annelise helped for a bit, until the fumes drove her back to the house with her eyes crossed and her stomach churning.

  “We don’t,” Pop answered. “This is more a nickel-and-dime operation. Catch-as-catch-can.” He winked at Huck. “I got a wrecker down in Billings keeping an eye out, though. Something’ll come up.”

  “Better hope for sooner rather than later,” said McKee. “By my figuring, we’re right close to running out of things to do here.”

  Huck knew he was right. Hard to believe, really, that the build had come so far so fast, but McKee did indeed work like lightning. The way things were going, and assuming they came up with a motor, they might even have the thing ready for trials by July. Which led to the next obvious conundrum, one that in a way made the feat of the actual build seem a mere trifle. Mother.

  The phone rang in the office and Huck jumped like he’d been forked. Two shorts and a long, the house cadence. He’d had a dread of the sound for two days now, ever since Raleigh brought up the police detective in the restroom at school. The phone rang again. He swallowed hard against his leaping gorge.

  Pop kept on with his brush. “Dern phone’s making me crazy. Ringing all day long and then nobody there when I pick up. Your turn, kid. The one time we ignore it, we’ll miss a line on your engine.”

  Huck peeled off his right glove heading through the office door. The blaring receiver jumped in its cradle, made his heart jump in his chest. He accidentally dropped the glove to the floor. He thought, Please, God, please, and lifted the handset.

  “Finn Metalworks.” His voice squeaked back to him in the earpiece the way it always did, like a panicked mouse floundering in a bucket trap. Otherwise just the usual hollow crackling in the line, and a long-enough silence at the other end to suggest that Pop’s persistent irritant might well prove his own answered prayer.

  No such luck. “Houston Finn, please.” A man’s voice but barely audible, as though he were unusually soft-spoken or maybe not very proximate to his own handset.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re him?”

  “This is Houston.” Huck felt his sweat rise. “Who’s this?”

  The man seemed fond of disconcerting pauses. “This is Detective Blank, with the Billings police. Do you know what this is about?”

  “Uh, I guess?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then.”

  He could feel the watch in his pocket, like a combination scorching cinder and five-hundred-pound millstone. “The body?” He sounded piss-scared and could literally hear it, his voice quavering up and down like a drunk sawing at a warped violin. His mind raced again to Please, God, please, and then it occurred to him that surely God was not on his side but on the detective’s.

  “You guess the body. What else, besides the body?”

  The whole truth wobbled on the tip of his tongue, poised like any dark secret to claw for the bright light of day through the first available crack and finally reveal itself in a moment of both unavoidable judgment and sweet honest release. Salvation by confession. Besides, Annelise had the identical watch, right there on her wrist.

  Then he remembered Cy. The second that hard case knew he’d been had, he’d descend on the shop like Attila the Hun, no two ways about it. If the stolen watch had come to seem like a tar baby, the airplane absolutely remained the last thing Huck intended to put on the block. What did Pop always say? Cross the high creek when you get there?

  “Hang on,” he said, “my pop wants to talk to you.”

  Finally the distinct lack of a pause. “Hold on, hold on,” the man said, the voice now much less distant as well. “You’re a straight shooter, right? A real straight shooter. You want to help the police, right?”

  “Yes, sir.” His voice cracked again, squeaked again like that drowning mouse, that cracked violin.

  “The thing is, that gunshot stiff you b
oys found had some items on him that could help round up the rest of the gang, and we’re talking about a bad bunch here.”

  Huck cut right to the chase, and to his surprise, his pitch somehow bottomed to a previously unknown depth in the earpiece, dropping an octave and into some steady, unflappable timbre. “What sort of items?”

  His voice had changed, just that quick. He spoke again, mainly out of auditory wonder. “Who is this, again?”

  He waited for an answer. None came.

  “Hello? Hello? Are you there?” He didn’t sound like himself at all, and certainly not like some green kid. He sounded like a movie star. “Hello?”

  He heard the static in the line, the pop and crackle like the dead space at the end of a phonograph record. Then the distinct sound of a telephone receiver settling into its cradle, cutting off the call. What on earth.

  Huck went back to the shop floor. McKee had taken up for Huck on the fuselage. Pop brushed away on the wing. Despite the ventilation from the shop door and an oscillating fan on the workbench, the fumes sliced the air like mustard gas.

  “Anybody worth knowing?” Pop asked.

  “Billings police.”

  Their heads swiveled as though managed by a single brain.

  He chose his words. “I think it was just routine. Like a follow-through? He didn’t stay on long.”

  They were still looking at him, each with the same grin. “Say something,” McKee told him.

  Huck felt himself redden. “Uh, something?”

  McKee looked at Pop. “Reckon Miz Gloria won’t be looking to change any britches now.”

  “Reckon you’re right.” Pop wagged a finger at Huck. “But with a baritone like that, I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries to put you to saving souls over the radio. Brace yourself.”

  McKee turned back to Huck. “So, cowboy. Want a beer?”

  “My ma said the same thing,” Raleigh mused. They were eating lunch in a corner of the schoolyard. “Phone like to ring off the hook all afternoon, and nobody there when she’d answer. Finally my old man got up from dinner to pick up, and that seemed to put an end to it. They figured it was kids, playing a prank.”

  “It’s got to be related, though, right? Every time one of us answers, it’s the Billings police. Otherwise nobody’s there.”

  Raleigh shook his head. “Yeah, but it don’t add up.”

  Two girls angled across the yard in their direction. Pastor White’s daughter Sharon and Katie Calhoun, who always made Huck a little tongue-tied. The breeze out of the west blew her skirt tight against her legs and he thought of the lissome showgirls in Footlight Parade. Katie was the tallest girl in school. She’d have fit right in.

  “Ladies,” said Raleigh. “To what do we owe the honor?”

  Sharon glanced at Katie with a tight little smile that seemed to advertise its own slyness, as though half the fun of knowing a secret involved letting on that a secret existed in the first place. Meanwhile Raleigh was not only girl-crazy in general, but also still basking in his brush with fame from the newspaper story a few weeks back, a precarious combination indeed. Huck wished he’d never laid eyes on that dern watch.

  Sharon pointed at Huck. “Say something.”

  This was getting ridiculous. He’d been called on earlier to read a paragraph in English class, and the reaction had been swift—a general murmur, punctuated by a catcall or two. Even Mrs. Hall had declared the delivery “very stentorian,” whatever that meant.

  He felt himself redden. “Uh, like what?”

  Now both girls had that sly little smile. “Told you,” said Sharon.

  An odd silence fell over the bunch of them, even Raleigh apparently stricken dumb for once. The class bell saved them all.

  Voice change or no, he was still sweating bullets over the watch and the phone call. Then sixth period rolled around, and to his undeniable elation but also complete horror he was paired in gym class with Katie Calhoun, to learn the basics of ballroom dancing.

  Huck sat behind her in homeroom, but he generally lacked the courage to speak to her. Mostly he paid attention to the back of her pale neck, on account of the contrasting color of her hair—black as an obsidian arrowhead, worn straight on top with a neat part to the side, a short wreath of permanent waves along the sharp line of her jaw.

  She always smelled like some fancy bar of soap, and he’d always been sort of slightly aware of it. They squared off in the gymnasium and, following instructions, moved to put their hands on each other. Her palm felt hot as a pistol.

  “Did you hear what she said, Houston? You have to be firm, or I can’t follow along. You have to hold me tighter.”

  Katie had always been a little standoffish, honestly. Now it seemed she had a bossy streak as well. Another Annelise. He had to admit he sort of liked it.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You won’t hurt me.”

  He went ahead and pressed his hand to her side. He felt the lean run of her ribs beneath her dress. They reminded him of the riffled waves in her hair. He could feel the bottom edge of her brassiere. He caught the scent of her again, and she was listening to Mrs. Hall over by the phonograph, whom he couldn’t seem to hear at all, and Katie was looking full-on at him with something like expectation. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were two slightly different colors, one blue and one green, the pupil in the latter slightly larger than its twin.

  He began to stir, and also panic. His eyes darted around at the other squared-off couples.

  Katie tightened her grip and shook his hand. “Firmer. Don’t be a limp noodle.”

  Unfortunately he was anything but. Luckily he was wearing an old sweater of Pop’s, which he wore partly to conceal the usual belted cinch-job at the waist of his pants. He tried to think about white paper, cold water, arithmetic. Bible verses. Anything to get himself under control.

  “You’re blushing,” Katie informed him. Unnecessarily, to be sure—his neck was hot as a stovepipe. She said, “It’s really cute.”

  This did nothing to subdue either the blush or his infernal pecker. By the time they began the first run-through of the basic step—slow, slow quick-quick—he was mainly concentrating on not bumping into or otherwise poking her, because he doubted she’d find anything cute about that indignity at all. He found himself torn between badly wishing he were anywhere but here and badly not wanting his hands to be anyplace but where they were.

  He walked home after the school day and tried to busy himself with the airplane. He could still smell the soap on her, still feel the heat of her hand. The stir in his trousers. He couldn’t get that line out of his head, about being cute.

  “You are one lucky bastard,” Raleigh had cracked after gym class, wit fully restored. “All over Lady Brett in there like a dern picador.” No doubt a reference to some book he’d read, which like many of Raleigh’s musings went right over Huck’s head.

  Pop and McKee and the REO were nowhere about, and Annelise had gone to the school library. So he was there in the shop by himself when the blare of the telephone jolted his attention right back to the watch in his pocket. He lowered the file in his hand and forced himself to walk to the office.

  The phone’s jangle seemed to course through the dern watch. He swore he could feel every piercing ring, zapping like voltage right into his leg.

  The ringing had stopped by the time he made the office door. He could still feel the watch, like a live wire in his pocket. Lindy brushed up against his legs and started purring.

  He turned to head back to the fabrication bay. The shriek of the phone again stopped him short. He stood there with his back to it, let the thing keep right on ringing.

  4

  “You have to go, Houston. It’s mandatory, unless you have a note from a parent. Which, come to think of it, your mother would love to provide, given her aversion to anything resembling normal fun.”

/>   Big Coulee Central had its first-ever Spring Ball scheduled for the coming Friday, largely as an extension of the ballroom dance instruction. Annelise was right, attendance was required­—­otherwise all the boys would predictably skip, and the girls would be stuck dancing with one another.

  “Also assuming you stoop so low as to ask, which is tantamount to saying the both of us will wind up stuck out on the farm all weekend. Bore. Ring.”

  “Ranch,” said Huck. “I keep telling you.”

  “Whatever,” said Annelise. “A yawn by any other name is still a big fat yawn.”

  They were on opposite sides of the kitchen table in the bungalow, Huck with the new issue of Modern Mechanics. Roy had been out at the ranch all day and likely wouldn’t return until morning.

  She narrowed her glare at him. “Besides, if we’re stuck out there, we won’t be able to work on the airplane.”

  This struck a chord—she could see it in the way he flinched. He looked so worried all the time, it practically made her furious. Even furious at him, even when she knew full well this was hardly reasonable. She wished she could pump some of her own cold blood straight into his veins.

  He kept his eyes pinned to the open page. “I’ll just get Pop to write one. Then we can stay in town, and you can go to the dance if you want.”

  “I’ll tell him not to. He’ll listen to me, too.” His eyes remained in place, but she saw him react. “Why on earth are you so stubborn about this? I thought the only thing boys wanted was to get their grubby paws on a girl. Are you just scared of it?”

  Now he did look at her, just a glance and down once again. “I don’t like to dance, is all.”

  Annelise crossed her forearms on the tabletop and set her chin atop and tried to catch his eye. “But girls love it, Houston. If you get any good at it, we’ll fight like cats over you. Besides, you’re the only one tall enough to dance with Katie Calhoun. I already heard her talking about it.”

  He began to redden. “I already danced with her. In class. She’s kind of snippy.”