Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “She’s right, you really don’t know her,” McKee answered, and the guy gave a curious little laugh and moved along in the flow of the crowd.

  “Forgive me for butting in,” he said. “I can spot a guy who can’t take no for an answer from a mile away.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you showed up. He was a little too interested in my watch. Among other things, I’m sure.” She still had his arm. “Anyway, I was wondering what became of you. At the tent earlier?”

  “Well, you know. All that carrying on about temperance worked up a powerful thirst.” He tilted his head toward her and gave an exaggerated sniff, like a hound on a trail. “Speaking of which, young lady. What exactly have you gotten into?”

  She disengaged and stepped for the jakes. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Roy told me the ranch is pretty leveraged,” McKee said. “I don’t know how aware Huck is, or even Miz Gloria.”

  They’d left the fairgrounds and turned down First, heading for the little attic apartment McKee rented in a house half a block from Main. Annelise had never been there. She’d never been alone with him at all, actually.

  “I’m guessing they both have at least a sense. Houston may be a kid, but he’s not dumb.” She struggled with her next thought but finally let herself say it. “Neither’s my aunt, if you want to get right to basic brain power.”

  “No, I wouldn’t call her dumb,” McKee said. “That would be a mistake. Maybe a little crazy, but that’s different. How sickly is she, exactly?”

  Annelise had puzzled over this herself. “She gets bad headaches, and fairly often from what I can tell. According to my mother she was always pretty frail.” The night had cooled down and the breeze had picked up, moving the leaves in the trees. “She’s younger than she looks, with that white hair. A lot younger than my uncle.”

  They reached the house and went around to the stairs on the back. “Speaking of Aunt Gloria, it better not get back to her that I’m here.”

  “If it’s any comfort, the old gent who lives downstairs, Mr. Neuman, is of French extraction.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. “Funny, but no. It’s not much comfort.”

  “More to the point then, he’s deaf as a post.”

  “Now that’s what I want to hear.”

  The door opened into a galley kitchen. Otherwise the apartment consisted of one narrow room not unlike Houston’s attic quarters at the ranch, with a single table and chair and a twin bed down at the far end. Also a line of guns leaning against one wall. Spartan but neat as a pin, the way the tools in Yak’s panel truck were. He opened the icebox and pulled out two beers.

  They clinked bottle necks. “Here’s to sin.”

  “Hallelujah.” She tipped her brown bottle, let the cold slosh rush across her tongue and down her throat, felt it wash through her empty insides like that first evening breeze. She took in the line of firearms against the wall. “So. Still want to teach me to shoot?”

  Royce went down and his beer went flying, but he came back to his feet as though the hardpack had turned to rubber. He dispensed with fisticuffs and simply charged like the football tackle he was, and Huck in his inebriated fury lacked the wit to dodge. Instead he swung, and Royce caught another good one on the ear but also knocked Huck ass-over-teakettle.

  Huck felt the bite of gravel, felt his left arm go numb elbow to wrist. He started to get up, then heard as much as felt a tooth-­rattling blow to his head, and for a spell saw only comets and meteors, heard a gong ringing in his ears.

  By the time lights and sound diminished the entire gang was around him in a circle, including Royce, with Raleigh on one knee in the gravel. Shirley had Royce by the arm. Royce bled from the lip.

  “Just let it go,” Shirley was saying, “and I’ll let you go.”

  “He busted my damn lip.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess chivalry ain’t dead.”

  The entire right side of Huck’s face throbbed steadily, and though the stars were nearly gone, his vision remained weirdly distorted, like he was looking through a fish-eyed optical lens.

  “You all right?” said Raleigh.

  He tried to move his left arm and couldn’t. He lifted his right hand instead and brought it to his cheekbone. Another wave of pain.

  “You’re going to need some ice. He clocked you good.”

  “Can somebody run up to the soda fountain and get some ice?” said Shirley.

  “I will.”

  Katie Calhoun. Huck couldn’t see her from flat on his back but was pretty sure the voice was hers.

  “I need to stand up.” He couldn’t tell where the alcoholic fog in his head ended and the effects of the wallop began. The other kids were mostly quiet, just watching.

  Royce had moved off a few feet with Bobby Duane and Shirley. He took a pull from a bottle and winced when the stuff hit his lip. He looked at Huck and shook his head. “That was a hell of a jab, Galahad.”

  Huck collected himself and managed to get fully if not steadily to his feet. He wobbled off a few steps, felt the wash of whiskey in his gut like a drowning green wave. He bent at the waist and heaved right into the gravel.

  “You’ve got the prettiest teeth I’ve ever seen.”

  McKee leaned against the little run of counter by the sink. He wasn’t as tall as Huck, but he was lanky in his own way, with the shoulders and forearms of his trade. Blue eyes and dark hair, too.

  Now she really bared them. “They didn’t come cheap.” She felt her eyes shift to his own mouth, felt herself go into motion as though drawn across the floor by a lodestone.

  They kissed awhile in the kitchen, kissed and talked and drank and kissed again.

  “How’d you get to be such a firecracker?” He had his hand in the small of her back, his fingers just down across the swell of her bottom.

  “Born that way, I guess.” She was pressed up tight against him, could feel his apparently unabashed arousal against the plane of her belly. She pressed herself even tighter, and his hand at her back pressed tighter yet. “It takes one to know one. You’re not exactly any kind of a dud yourself.”

  “Raised the way you were, I mean.”

  She pulled her head back to look up at him. Her hand cupped the back of his neck. “That’s only one part of anything. I’m still my own person. With my own mind.”

  He shook his head and his mouth had a little set to it, but she couldn’t tell whether it qualified as mirth or something else.

  “What?” she goaded.

  “You, is what. Most people wouldn’t know their own mind if it walked up and punched ’em right in the mouth. I know what I’m talking about, too. You think you got it with both barrels, you ought to see how I grew up.”

  She had a vague sense he’d come up Mormon, although they’d never talked about it. She was curious, but that could wait.

  “Are you planning to ravish me?”

  He slid his hand up her back and cupped her neck. Then he slid the same hand up into her hair, grown out over the last three months and no trick at all for him to seize a fistful close in to her skull. He pulled and then pulled harder, until she gave in and tilted her head back. “My goodness, miss,” he said. “It never crossed my mind.”

  “I’ll take my leave, then.” She stuck her lip at the ceiling in a pout. “Boo.”

  He steered her to his bed. Though the window was open, the room hadn’t cooled with the night and he left the taut covers in place, pushed her down on the quilt and settled half on top of her, and with his lean weight constricting the draw of her own breath in a half-painful, half-delicious way, she went ahead and got completely lost on his tongue, at first on his last cold blast of beer, and then on their shared inquisitive hunger and finally, when he pulled back from her mouth and moved to her neck, the crazy electric currency of being wholly and gloriously alive.

  He put his tongue
down her ear and she practically convulsed.

  “You are one big romantic, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t answer, just seemed uncannily able to read her body. She felt his hand cup her breast through the fitted fabric of her dress, felt him glide the ball of his thumb exactly across the invisible bull’s-eye beneath. She wanted to sit up and reach around behind her back, run the zipper down her spine and shed her clothing like a skin, but before she could rouse herself, he’d already slid down the span of her belly. He hiked the hem of her dress.

  He put her legs akimbo, and the next thing she knew, his mouth nuzzled the inside of her thigh, very close to the bridge of her underpants, and she was startled by this and stiffened with irrational panic, and he shushed her and had one ankle in his grip and the flat of his other hand pressing down on the opposite thigh. He put his mouth right to that white cotton saddle. Right there.

  She recoiled again involuntarily, felt herself half against her own will flinch away from him farther up the bed, bumping her head into the wall in the process, but he lunged along like that same hound on the same hot trail and got his mouth on her again, and now there was no place to go, and she felt the circular pressure of his tongue and felt herself relax. She whimpered like a bunny.

  She had never heard of this, had never even imagined it. Blix had certainly never—

  Blix. Oh God, no, not now, plenty of time to think that through later, and oh God, yes, he was doing something else down there, pushing the line of her panties aside, and she felt his silken tongue actually against her tremoring wet flesh, and mind and body both caromed into places with no room for guilt at all, both her hands in his hair, both hands pulling at his hair—

  She tripped and tumbled, down and down, bouncing over stair steps in the firmament, an endless invisible flight, each launching jolt and plunging drop like the thump and fall of some sweet giddy turbulence, sky and ground and round and round, so far below and so far above—

  He clapped his hand over her mouth, and she came slightly back, heard herself crying out like one of those wringing ecstatics at the tent revival. She clamped her teeth.

  “I’m glad I’m bad,” she murmured.

  She was naked now or nearly so, her shoulders and arms free and her unzipped dress bunched around her middle like an empty life preserver. Underpants and brassiere tossed God knew where. He was still inside her, and she could feel him twitch from time to time. She stroked the skin of his back.

  He laughed. “I’m pretty glad myself.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Too much to get into. But I started off with a good teacher.”

  “Well, God love her. Here I thought I was quite the cosmopolitan.” She shifted, looked down with her eyes and then back to his face. “Pull that out of me before you lose your ’chute. How’s your hand?”

  He flexed his fingers. “Just fine. No blood.” He reached down and eased back into the world. “I hate that part,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “Want a beer?”

  “Always.”

  He fetched two more from the icebox and pulled the door half open to let the night air flow. He padded naked back to the bed. She’d fully shed her dress now and lay there propped on the pillow, splayed in the lick of the breeze. Belly flat as a pancake. “You’re a doll,” he told her.

  She draped a leg over his. Checked her watch, the only piece of apparel left on her. “I hope Houston’s okay. He finally ditched his halo and decided to live a little.”

  “What’d he do, hold a girl’s hand?”

  “No, but he wants to. So he chugged half a bottle of rotgut with that in mind. Right before I ran into you.”

  “Liquid courage?”

  “More or less.”

  She tipped her beer to her lips, and he teasingly reached over and pushed to hold the tilt of the bottle, until the flow came faster than she could swallow. She started to laugh and beer sloshed down her chin and across her chest. He let up and she sputtered and laughed some more and finally slapped him a ringer across the cheek. “You are an ass.”

  He licked beer from the flush of her clavicle. “I’m just the way God made me.” He listed on an elbow. “You feeling okay about this? I know you’ve got a real beau . . .”

  “Oh, I’ll feel bad in the morning, I’m sure. I’m not that heartless. I think this was a foregone conclusion, though.” She pointed at the artillery along the wall. “We’ve been packing loaded guns around each other for three months now.”

  “Glad it wasn’t just me.”

  She looked at her watch again. “I should get dressed. I told Houston I’d bring him food, and that was hours ago already.”

  He could still feel the bilious scorch in his gullet, but he was indeed more sober.

  Katie and her friends returned with two cups of ice. Somebody came up with a clean handkerchief, and he’d parked himself on a loading dock alongside the elevator and held a dripping compress to the side of his face. His mouth tasted awful and his head still throbbed, and he hardly noticed either because Katie sat there with him.

  “I think it’s dreamy, the way you defended your cousin’s honor.”

  In truth, he had a feeling he’d reacted at least as much out of basic possessiveness as anything else. He mixed Annelise up in his head with dancing chorus girls, with the actress Jean Harlow, even with Katie herself. Couldn’t exactly bring that up, though.

  “It’s one thing to think a girl’s pretty, but that ain’t a free pass for poor behavior.” This last was one of Mother’s lines.

  “She is pretty.” Katie was looking off into space. “All the boys are smitten by her.”

  “Most of the men, too. Seems like.”

  “Well. She does seem sort of older. You know? Poised, or something. With her beret, and her . . . attitude, I guess. To tell you the truth, she’s intimidating.”

  “I know. But she’s not as cold as she seems sometimes.” Another thing struck him. “She ain’t as bulletproof as she seems, either.”

  How much to tell her? He’d promised a long time ago to keep mum about why Annelise was here in the first place, and God knew he was no stranger to keeping a secret. “Shoot, she nearly passed out at the tent meeting earlier—”

  He really couldn’t win. He’d been so intent on preserving his cousin’s privacy about her beau, he just uttered the first thing to pop into his head. He never had spoken to Katie about the Spring Ball.

  “Passed out?”

  “Yeah. From the heat. I practically had to carry her outside.”

  “I wondered if you were over there tonight.” The other kids were a little way off in a cluster, and the lot of them let out a raucous laugh at some joke or goof or something.

  “Me and Annelise both.” He looked at her with his one eye. “I wish I hadn’t told you.”

  “Oh. How come?”

  “It’s a little embarrassing, I guess. My ma, though—she’s really strict about that stuff.” His mouth felt like a hay bale, and he could feel the fire yet in his throat and even through his airways. He took the cup of ice and drank a good bit of melt out of the bottom, then sucked in a shard and spoke around it. “Probably sounds crazy, I know.”

  “It doesn’t matter. My family’s Catholic, although we haven’t been to Mass since we left Butte.” She put her elbows on her knees and her sharp little chin in her hands. “Have you ever been to Mass? That might seem strange to somebody from the outside.”

  Pretty and nerve-racking as Katie was, and despite the dripping hanky and the heat around his eye, he couldn’t help considering what a muddle religion truly seemed to be.

  At one point that fire-breather at the revival delivered a scorching aside about the prophecies ushered in by President Roosevelt and the recovery programs, even suggesting that the president himself might be the Antichrist, here and living among us
. Huck had wondered what Mother thought of that one—despite the thrall of the meeting, she generally subscribed to Sister Aimee’s sense that the president was only trying to help in plainly dire times. His repeal of Prohibition, though—that she blamed on the Catholics.

  “Houston? Did you really fly down the street that night?”

  He came right back. “Yes. I sure did.”

  “What was it like?”

  The ice disappeared on his tongue. “Not exactly a pure D success. I smashed out the window in the New Deal and cracked up altogether when I put down in the ball field.” His mind had gone back to that night again and again, and he always came around to one thing. “But for a few seconds there, I felt like the king of the whole dern world. Even after I crashed, I knew I’d just had the finest one minute of my life.”

  “How high up were you?”

  “Thirty feet, I guess. I hit the sign out front of the Deal, and that was way before I got to my ceiling.”

  “Thirty feet,” she said. She looked up at the elevator, as though trying to calculate how tall it might be. “With a plane you built yourself.”

  “Glider. Glider Number One is what I called her.”

  “Glider Number One. Gosh. I wish I’d seen it.” She turned her head to him. “Weren’t you scared?”

  He remembered in a jealous flash how Bobby Duane had been making her laugh earlier, and he wished he could think of something funny, too. “Not when I was in the air. I almost turned it over in the middle of the street when I was trying to test the controls, and that was pretty scary. Raleigh and me sort of stole this big Buick to tow with, and he had me going almost forty, just on these chintzy little buggy wheels. But I thought about it a lot beforehand. I had a pretty good idea it was all going to work.”

  He lifted the handkerchief from his face and squeezed the sopping melt into the dirt. “On the other hand, the trouble with putting two and two together is sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”

  Raleigh’s pinched line, but it got a laugh out of Katie.

  He tried another. “To put it another way, that ol’ Charlie Darwin can be one cold son of a bitch.”