Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

“Sorry,” said Annelise. She tightened her grip on Raleigh with a bit of theater. Huck could tell he was trying to stand as straight as possible. “I think I’ll stick with someone who can actually pronounce debonair.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I always do.”

  They moved up the stairs and into the foyer. The overheads were off but strings of paper lanterns crisscrossed the length of the hall, throwing a mute orange haze around the ceiling. Huck looked across the mass of heads, watched Katie and a couple of other girls enter the gym. Through the maw of the far doorway he saw other lights, spectral lights, revolving in splashed projections across the one dancing couple he could see, gliding in orbs against the slick wax on the floor. Stardust.

  They neared the entry and Huck saw the reason for the slow-going. Mr. Jenkins, the school principal, stood at the double doors, admitting kids on an orderly basis. Not only that, but worse—Junior Joe Candy was right there with him. Huck glanced back, saw Bobby Duane weave. He wished he’d been up ahead with Katie when she’d gone in.

  The clarinet in the gym drifted to the song’s close. From this position in the hallway, the whole thing sounded remarkably like a live radio broadcast out of an actual ballroom in Chicago or Denver. Somebody onstage started talking through a microphone. He leaned forward and put his head near Annelise’s. “We need to lose these dunderheads behind us.”

  She stood on tiptoe to look ahead. Mr. Jenkins let another batch of students through, and the dwindling line moved forward. She looked back. He felt her peppermint breath against his ear. “It’ll look too obvious. Besides, we’re not really with them,” and she got no further because the kids just ahead went in and there they were.

  Junior Joe took in Raleigh. “Nice bloomers.”

  Raleigh did a little pivot. His voice sounded even more wobbly at volume. “Why thanks, Officer. I somehow lost track of my caddy, though.”

  Mr. Jenkins cut in. “Miss Clutterbuck. I’ve been expecting you.” He shifted to Huck. “I hope you’re keeping your cousin out of trouble, Houston.”

  Huck was looking past him, scanning through the low spotted light for Katie. He saw her with a few other girls near the refreshment table, graceful as a greyhound. He pried his eyes back to Mr. Jenkins. “We just want to go to the dance.”

  One of the lunkheads behind him picked that precise moment to let off a belch, which Huck fully heard despite the amplified chatter of the emcee. He caught another whiff of alcohol, fumes that could peel paint. So did Mr. Jenkins.

  “Houston, I’m going to ask you one time. Have you been drinking?”

  Huck realized he had three inches at least on Mr. Jenkins. “Drinking? Let’s see . . . I guess I had water with supper, ’cause we were out of milk. Oh wait, is that what you mean?”

  The emcee’s amplifier let out with some violent, piercing shriek, then clarified again.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what I mean. You aren’t that sheltered.”

  “Are you talking about, you know, strong drink?” He glanced past Mr. Jenkins’s head, saw Katie looking over her shoulder at the door.

  “Quit stalling, squirt.” Junior Candy had sidled shoulder-to-shoulder with the principal to completely block the doorway. “You smell what I smell?”

  “Answer the question, Huck,” said Mr. Jenkins. “Tell me the truth.”

  Please, God, please. “I’ve never had a drop of anything in my life. That is the truth.”

  “Well, somebody here has. And Miss Clutterbuck does come to us as a bit of a known quantity.”

  Annelise still had Raleigh’s arm. By chance or for all Huck knew actual magic, the prattle out of the microphone ceased at that precise moment. “Actually,” she said, “you don’t know the slightest thing about me.”

  Annelise had the remarkable ability to seem utterly aloof and rapier-sharp in the same breath. She hadn’t spoken loudly at all, but something about that flat, poised delivery sent a chill even through Huck. Junior Joe was clearly a little unnerved, too, shifting back and forth on his feet, eyeballs scanning up and down over his cousin’s outfit. It occurred to Huck that the deputy’s head was probably swamped with dirty thoughts. His cousin wasn’t the only known quantity.

  “Be that as it may,” Mr. Jenkins allowed, “somebody’s been drinking. I can smell it.”

  “We can smell it,” Junior echoed. “Loud and clear.”

  The band started up again, a slower song with a prominent piano line. Huck had heard it before, although he couldn’t conjure the name now. Duke Ellington, he was pretty sure. Katie was still with her girlfriends, still at the punch table. Still looking this way.

  Annelise unhooked herself from Raleigh. She leaned toward Junior.

  “Smell it loud and clear is a mixed metaphor,” she said, “or something,” and put her painted mouth into a defiant ring. Huck knew her eyes must be locked right on to the deputy’s, because Junior Joe looked instead straight to Huck, then to the lanterns on the ceiling, then anyplace at all except back to the gaze of this beautiful, brazen, ice-cold and incalculable little minx.

  She blew a long breath of air at him. “Satisfied?”

  Junior may have been unnerved, but Mr. Jenkins actually laughed. “What about these two behind you?”

  “They’re on their own.”

  His gaze shifted past her to Bobby and Royce. Huck heard some minor commotion at his back. “All right then. You three can head on in.”

  “They most certainly cannot.”

  The voice came seemingly disembodied out of the hallway, and for a moment Huck wondered if it were merely a figment of his imagination. But no. Right at the eleventh hour, things truly were awry. He knew because Annelise had whipped around at the sound and confirmed with the look on her face exactly what Huck feared. Mother.

  With Pastor White, it turned out. She pushed past Royce and Bobby Duane and took hold of Huck’s arm, and for the first time it was all he could do not to wrench it away. “Not these two, anyway. Raleigh is not under my roof.”

  “You can’t do this,” Annelise said.

  “I certainly can, my dear.” She nearly had to yell above the piano number’s rising finale. “I have a responsibility.” She turned to Mr. Jenkins. “You, sir, are running a dance hall for children. Thank God Pastor White brought it to my attention, since nobody else had the courtesy to. I suppose you’re offering them liquor, to boot?”

  Now this was rich. “Mrs. Finn, I can assure you this function is completely chaperoned and entirely in the students’ best interest—”

  “Best interest?”

  Applause rippled once more from the gym as the song finished.

  “Mr. Jenkins, do you mean to tell me it’s any more than a hop, skip, and jump from the dance hall to the saloon to that house of ill fame out on the tracks? Do you genuinely not see a connection?”

  This was not Mr. Jenkins’s first encounter with Mother, Huck knew that. Huck again looked toward the punch table. Katie was no longer there.

  “Mrs. Finn,” said Mr. Jenkins, “we prefer to think of this in an educational way, as a formal experience. A way to teach social skills to young adults. Like it or not, couples have been dancing together since the beginning of time.”

  “That may well be, but you’re not turning any son of mine into some dance hall lecher. Or my niece into Salome.”

  The band launched into another swing number. Pastor White was shaking his head at Bobby and Royce, both of whom looked, despite jackets and ties, like they’d fallen off a turnip truck. “Garbage in,” he said, “garbage out.”

  “Children,” said Mother, “Pastor White has offered to drive us home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Annelise.

  Mother still had her grip on Huck. She looked at Mr. Jenkins. “I am this girl’s guardian, and I forbid her to participate. On moral grounds. Do I make myse
lf clear?”

  Mr. Jenkins turned to Annelise, this time with something like a change of tune. Or a shift of allegiance. “I’m sorry, miss. You’d better go.”

  Annelise turned to Raleigh and gave him a little curtsy. “I hate to run. Go cut a rug.” She pushed past Huck and started down the hall.

  Huck took one last look into the revolving light of the gym. He couldn’t see her, though. He reckoned he should’ve known something like this would happen.

  Mother began to pull him into motion but stopped up short with barely a step taken. She leaned toward Bobby and Royce. “You boys should be ashamed. You smell like a distillery.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Royce mumbled. Bobby actually looked green to Huck, at least in the low light from the paper lanterns.

  Mother turned back to the gymnasium door. Both Raleigh and Junior Joe had seized the moment and made themselves scarce, but Mr. Jenkins evidently didn’t have the option. Mother looked right at him. “I rest my case.”

  5

  “Is there really a brothel in town?”

  Huck was no longer surprised by anything to come out of her mouth. They each held a piece of linkage in place on the front end of the tractor. “Sort of. A little way out of town, really. I’m pretty sure Shirley’s been.”

  “Wow. Guess it still is the Wild West out here. I’m surprised your mother and Pastor White don’t lead the charge down there, too.”

  Pop came out of the barn with a socket box. “If they tried that they’d have a riot on their hands and they know it. Too many ornery young bucks working in the coal seam. Without the cathouse to take the edge off, there’d be a fistfight on every corner.”

  “So it’s a necessary evil, then.”

  “It’s a necessary something. Pressure valve, I guess.”

  “And the bluenoses just look the other way? After last night, I have a hard time believing that.”

  “Oh, they’ll harp about it, no question.” Pop ran a nut down onto the spindle. “Like any vice. But push comes to shove, they’d have to pretty much eliminate erections to make it go away completely.”

  “Heaven forbid,” said Annelise brightly.

  Huck felt that old flush in his face. “Guess we should’ve figured where Pastor White got himself off to last night. When we saw Sharon, I mean.”

  “I’d have run interference if I’d known,” Pop told him. He slid a cotter pin through the castle and reached for a screwdriver. “I reckon they guessed I wouldn’t play along on this one, though, because they sure kept me out of the sewing circle.”

  Pastor White had driven them out here to the ranch the night before, then went back to town to let Pop know not to expect them. Pop wasn’t usually one to rock the boat where Mother was concerned, but he may well have gotten his dander up with the pastor alone.

  “All right, I’m going to fire this thing. Why don’t you two drive over to the hay yard with a couple of poles and restring the gate before the cows get in.”

  “I think Aunt Gloria wanted me to come back inside after I helped you here,” Annelise said.

  Pop looked at her. “That what you want to do?”

  “Well, no. But I’m supposed to be choosing my battles.”

  “I’ll fight this one for you. High time somebody stood up for normal life around here.”

  Ten minutes later Huck steered the truck down the two-track toward the base of the bluff at the east end of the ranch. “Hang on,” he said, and put his foot hard into the pedal before hitting the grade to the table. The track was dry as chalk even now in the second week of May and the dust rolled behind them like ash. Tools and general ranch equipage bounced in the back.

  He drove down the edge of the wheat field along the lip of the bluff. Pigweed had already sprouted across the open expanse, with very little sign that grain had ever grown here at all. “Mormon crickets got the crop last year,” he told her. “That’s why there ain’t much stubble out there.”

  “What are Mormon crickets?”

  “Like locusts, in the Bible? Giant hoppers, millions of them. They ate this whole dern wheat crop, eighty acres, in less than a day. The field was just black with them.”

  Annelise looked across the field, out to where the far side of the table tilted slightly with the contour of the land. “Why on earth do you keep this place? It just seems like so much . . . trouble, I guess.”

  Huck had never considered this. “I’m not sure. Habit?”

  She laughed and he realized it was a funny answer, even if he hadn’t intended it as such. He liked that he could make her laugh, especially after last night’s sour conclusion. She’d ridden out to the ranch in Pastor White’s car in withering silence, despite the pastor’s initial attempts to engage the both of them with a sort of forced camaraderie.

  Huck had at least tried to be polite, for both their sakes. He’d been disappointed, to a degree, but the truth of it was, Raleigh’s news about the fraudulent Detective Blank scraped at his nerves like a cocklebur. It was pretty difficult to worry about much else.

  Annelise on the other hand fairly steamed, and in the end she prevailed. Most of the drive had elapsed in uncomfortable quiet.

  He steered down off the table at the far side of the field, then stopped again on the lower ground. The lip of the bluff unfurled to the south with the plunge of a cliff. Huck set the brake. “Want to see something really wild?”

  They walked down the base of the wall to a stone lid thirty feet overhead, a shelflike protrusion telegraphing into space six feet off the vertical plane of the bluff. He pointed straight ahead at the carvings, etched into the flat about eye level.

  “They’re shield figures.”

  “Where?” Annelise asked, then her eyes put the faint images into her mind. “Oh my.”

  Huck picked his way across the jumbled ground to the most prominent figure and ran his finger around the scribe of the circle, an image two feet across and containing a starlike etching within. A smaller circle, obviously meant to be the head of a man with a bonnet or sheaf of hair, perched above the upper edge, and another oblong shape jutted at about ten o’clock from the main circle. He pointed out a few others, similar in pattern but fainter, muted by time.

  “From Indians, I guess,” she said softly.

  “Really old ones. Before white people and horses. And guns.” He pointed to the stone lip above. “This was a buffalo jump.”

  She squinted overhead, the jut of the stone sharp and strikingly three-dimensional against the blue sky beyond. She laughed and looked back down. “It’s making me dizzy.” She stepped forward and put one delicate finger on the groove in the stone. “What’s a buffalo jump?”

  “They used to stampede a bison herd toward a cliff like that. Because of the way the ground is up there, you can’t see it’s about to drop off until you’re right up on it. By then it’s too late.”

  She looked up again, then back to the ground at their feet. “Back in them wild old days?”

  He heard the sputter of the tractor winding along on the table above. “That’s the truth. Them really wild days.”

  “What did you call these? Shield figures?”

  He ran his finger partway around the rim of the large circle. “It’s a warrior, behind a shield. This is his club.” He pointed to the oblong shape. “We can come out and dig around later—the ground’s full of bones. Parts of buffalo skulls.”

  Annelise looked around at the ground. The tractor idled up, then down. “You’ve dug up bones before? Where are they now?”

  “The skulls I have down at the barn. Most of the others just disappear. I guess animals drag them off. I’ve found arrowheads, too.”

  Ten or a dozen points in the past few years, most of them not much larger than the leaf of an ash tree, but once he found what had to be a spearhead, pecked out of pink chert and fully five inches long even with the tip broken o
ff. His history teacher at school, Mr. Dyson, told him it might be many thousands of years old.

  “You know a road crew found mammoth skeletons not too long ago?” he’d said. “With big points like this one still stuck in the bones?”

  “Mammoths? Like elephants? In Montana?”

  “New Mexico. But they lived here, too.”

  Huck had never much thought about mammoths, but he knew plenty of dinosaur bones had been found in Montana. He’d somewhat averted his eyes from the subject—Mother believed the big femurs and giant petrified eggs had been planted in the earth by the devil himself to confuse people about the age of the world.

  “Remember what Yak said about Charles Darwin?” he said to Annelise.

  “One cold son of a bitch, I believe.”

  He looked away from the most intact glyph to one of the fainter remnants nearby, an image nearly ghostlike now after eons of wind and weather licking at the sandstone wall. He wondered in the moment how much time had passed between the first etching and the second. A thousand years? Two thousand?

  “Ma’s locked horns with the school before, you know. About evolution.” The very word still made him nervous.

  “Small surprise. But forget that. The real question is, how are you going to live your life in the here and now? You may be building your airplane on the sly, but the second you lift off and fly, the secret’s out. Everyone’s going to know. Including your mother.”

  He nodded. “I try not to think about it.”

  “That doesn’t change anything. Clock’s ticking.”

  She held up the big watch on her wrist for emphasis, and he felt a stab of guilt, the watch in his pocket jabbing yet again. It flashed in his mind just to haul it out and show it to her, get at least that guilty secret partly in the light of day. Except that would make Annelise a part of it, too. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

  A little later they walked back over the rough ground to the REO. The wind was coming up out of the west, strong enough to blow loose grit through the air and start dead, spindly vegetation rolling and bouncing across the earth. “Are those tumbleweeds?” she asked.