Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “And you’ve known about this for how long.”

  He could hardly bear to hold her eyes, so precise a combination of ice and flame. But he swallowed hard, and he blinked his one working eyelid, and he dutifully observed her glare. “Since the dance. The Spring Ball.”

  She started to heave air in great tortured gasps. Her whole body quivered like a willow switch, raised and about to come down.

  The next thing Huck knew, she’d taken two steps in a flash across the room. She slapped him hard across the good side of his face.

  Later, and not much so, she felt awful for hitting him. He looked as stunned as she felt to ignite with that sort of fury, as though some demon had gotten into her and propelled her body outside her actual will.

  The rage went out of her quickly at least. Houston, standing there fighting tears, couldn’t even look at her. His cheek was livid where her palm had landed. For once McKee didn’t say a word.

  Finally she broke the silence. The steadiness in her voice surprised even her. “All right. We’re not calling the police, at least not yet.”

  McKee cautiously tipped his bottle. “What are you thinking?”

  She reached over and gently took the watch out of Houston’s grasp. “It’s opening Pandora’s box, because at this point we’re going to have to tell them the whole unvarnished truth.”

  “So what? Houston lifting a watch off some dead stiff pales next to a bunch of goons jumping a girl to get the dern thing back.” McKee frowned. “Wonder what’s so special about it. Seems like a lot to risk for a lousy watch.”

  Houston tried to say something and choked like he was gagging on a raw egg. He looked back at the ceiling.

  Annelise knew he was still fighting tears. She felt sick in her belly, guilty as sin for hitting him, but her voice remained calm. “If we call the police and begin at the beginning, they’re going to start snooping.”

  “This is a bad thing? Your eye’s already half black, Annelise. Let ’em snoop.”

  “If that happens, they will find the airplane.”

  Huck finally looked at her. “You’re right,” he croaked. “Maybe that’s what I’ve got coming to me.”

  “Shush,” she told him. “Don’t be ridiculous. What’s done is done, but that airplane in there is too big to hide. And we’re way too close to give it up over a stolen watch.”

  McKee blew out a breath. “I can’t argue with you.”

  Annelise studied the dead man’s Longines. It was indeed indistinguishable from Blix’s. Huck had told her how the corpse had looked surfacing through the depths, coalescing gradually and then instantly into what he described as a ghoul, and she tried to resist the image when she buckled the strap to her wrist. She looked at him. “Is this okay?”

  “Gosh, of course.” His lip quavered. His poor face, thanks in part to her. “I’m really sorry, Annie.”

  “Shush.” She had the watch fastened now. “I’m the one who should be sorry.” She stepped forward and pulled him into her, guided his throbbing face down along her own battered mug. “Listen to me. I love you very much. Okay?”

  She felt him tense against her, finally heard him snort back a real wellspring. “Okay,” he mumbled.

  “Too bad we can’t track them goons down ourselves,” McKee said behind her.

  Annelise rocked Houston a bit, listened to McKee finish off his beer. “Like vigilantes, or something?”

  “More like car thieves. When they hauled on out of civilization a while back, they hauled out in a Model A Ford.”

  Huck could hear Annelise turn from time to time in his bed in the other room. He lay there awake on the pallet for a long while, feeling the hot throb around his eye. Pop had left them a note on the kitchen counter saying that Mother was exhausted from the tent meeting and wanted to go back out to the ranch.

  He wanted to think about kissing Katie but he couldn’t, not with any sense of swagger, because at the exact moment he’d lost himself on her peppermint tongue, Annelise had been jumped and pulled down and punched in the face. The thought of her being hurt because of his stupid mistakes made him want to beat his own back with a razor strop.

  Or track the bastards down like McKee said, and not simply to steal any Model A. More like to fill each and every one so full of holes, they wouldn’t hold a pint of water between them. The more he imagined it, the more he wanted to throw up all over again.

  Finally the solace of sleep did creep in, and in the half-light of consciousness he remembered something that did actually make him understand atonement, something that felt akin to what baptism or even salvation was made out to be.

  Listen to me. I love you very much.

  Annelise had said those words to him, after all the rest of it had passed. Her loss, her fury, his confession. She loved him anyway. Very much.

  No one had ever told him that before, or anything like it. He didn’t even know it was a thing people might say, and didn’t know whether he could bring himself to say so in return. But now that she’d said it, he could at least think it.

  He loved her, too. He loved her very much.

  4

  She made her way back to McKee’s a few times over the next couple of weeks, always in the evenings with Houston at the Rialto and Roy out at the place with Aunt Gloria. Her uncle figured something was up, though. One afternoon when she and Houston were at the ranch, he saddled the horses and asked her to ride out with him to move the lease cows from one section to another.

  “I don’t mean to pry, but I’ll sleep better at night if I ask you this. You know about Merry Widows and whatnot?”

  She looked at him from the easy sway of Houston’s little bay. “Umm . . . like, Peacocks?”

  “Okay, that’s out of the way.” He fished out a Lucky Strike pack, lit a cigarette and handed it to her, then lit one for himself. “One more thing. You need help buying them, or does McKee already have a handle on it?”

  She felt herself redden. “Umm . . .”

  “Don’t worry, it ain’t that obvious. But I’m around you two enough to see that if it ain’t happened yet, it’s probably about to.”

  “McKee won’t get me into trouble.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “I got enough keeping me awake at night. I don’t need that worry on top of everything else.”

  She felt a spasm of guilt in the moment, not for their current conversation but for lying to him about the origin of her blackened eye the night of the revival. She and McKee and Houston simply worked her into the fistfight story, with a fish tale of how she’d caught Houston’s elbow while trying to pull him away from Royce.

  She knew from experience the way a lie could roll off her tongue, sweet and gold as pure clover honey. Sometimes she felt perfectly fine about it and sometimes not, and this fell into the second category for sure. But as McKee had pointed out, it really wouldn’t do to put her uncle in the position of keeping a secret of that scale from the police even if he did agree to it, and both of them doubted he would.

  “Roy?”

  He’d risen up in the stirrups, looking at something through the screen of junipers. “Yeah, darlin’.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just being practical.” He blew out smoke. “Reckon the world would turn a little easier in general if people were just more practical.”

  She rode a few steps in quiet satisfaction, feeling the sway of the bay’s gait and hearing the creak of the saddle and realizing how much she’d missed having her own horse, missed having all that harnessed power beneath her. Finally she came back to herself. “Practical as opposed to what?”

  “Practical as opposed to pining, for some lost place in the past that was never there to begin with. I’ve done a fair bit of figuring over the years, and I’ve come to see it like this: the notion of the good old days may not be the worst thing anybody’s come up with, but it ain’t
far off from it, either.”

  She listened to the soft thud of the horses’ hooves in the sand of the wash. “The Garden of Eden,” she mused.

  “Yeah, that’s what they’re all in a panic over. Some crystal palace where nobody ever farts or dies, and the babies fly in on a stork. Nothing changes, nobody misbehaves, and the bread just bakes its own self.”

  “Paradise lost.”

  “Reality lost, is more like it. Here, follow me to the top.” He clucked and tapped his horse out ahead and angled up a ribbon of trail, threading the junipers to the flat of the low table, where he reined to a stop. Annelise came up alongside. The table gradually declined into an open bowl with a handful of black cows grazing in the sun. “How’d you get into airplanes anyway?”

  “My eighth-grade English teacher sort of took me under her wing.” She laughed at her own accidental wit. “Miss Callenby. She was still a really young woman herself, I’m sure a complete garçonne out of the classroom—”

  She caught his sidewise look.

  “Flapper,” she said. “Or would have been, back in the day. Anyway, she saw some of the same bratty independence in me, I’m sure. Loaned me a few books, stories and novels that she’d really loved when she was in college, and also another one that maybe was the best gift anyone ever gave me. The Fun of It, by Amelia Earhart. That set the hook.”

  Roy leaned over and put out his Lucky against the heel of his boot, tossed the butt into the sand. “You like being alive, don’t you.”

  “I guess so. From all appearances.” She snuffed her cigarette and straightened up again. “I get the sense that all the puritans you’re talking about really don’t, though. And so their whole purpose comes down to boring the rest of us into submission along with them.”

  She thought for a moment. “One thing I will say about Aimee McPherson—she at least brings some spectacle to the endeavor. I mean, Angelus Temple may as well be called Angelus Theater. It’s like a cross between a Roman circus and that tent revival we all endured. How long did you stay with it that night, by the way? I’ve been wondering.”

  “Quite a while, after you and the kid ducked out.” He waved a fly away, pulled his hat off and wiped the sweat from his hairline. Gave her that sidewise, gold-toothed grin. “Tell you the truth, it was all I could do not to bolt on out of there with you.”

  “I had to. Bolt, I mean. My legs were about to go out from under me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure the preacher would’ve gladly laid hands on you, if they had.”

  “And the lame would have instantly walked, I suppose.”

  He chuckled. “Aunt Gloria went forward to get herself healed. No more headaches, no more ailments.”

  “I wondered. How’s that working out?”

  “Time will tell.”

  “You know,” she told him, “I think it’s amazing, you covering for Houston so he can reach for something big in the here and now. He’s lucky to have you.”

  “Yeah, well. I raised myself, for the most part. Rode from the bottom of the country to the top when I was ten years old, mainly because I didn’t have a mother to tell me no.” He looked out at the expanse of sun-curing grass and black cows. “Houston tell you why I moved him into town?”

  “Only that you wanted him to have a normal life, or something to that effect.” She gave a little laugh. “Although I’m not sure flying a glider down the street in the middle of the night qualifies as normal, exactly.”

  He snorted. “That’s downright ordinary, compared to what he didn’t tell you.” He waved at another fly, but shook his head at some other irritant buzzing not in the air but evidently inside his own skull. When he finally spoke again, she had the sense he was swatting at whatever that was for the first time in a while.

  “A few years back some radio preacher out of Oregon started predicting the Second Coming, on a certain day and time.”

  “I remember. October, I think it was. And he thought Adolf Hitler and who’s it, in Italy? Mussolini? He thought they were predicted in Revelation.”

  He gave her a single giant nod. “That’s exactly right. Anyway, they took it all pretty serious at the church here in town. Now mind you, people in these parts are primed for it—you’ve seen a bit of the despair by now. No need to feel guilty, but a lot of the country ain’t so well situated moneywise as what you’re used to.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Right. So Pastor White got pretty caught up and started preaching on Armageddon and how the pieces are already in place, and at one point he invited another preacher up from Billings for a debate on whether the Rapture happens before or during the Great Tribulation. White’s a before man, but this was about a week after the Italians invaded Africa, which they at least agreed to be a sign that the end was indeed on the approach.”

  “I’ve sat through a bunch of this stuff, too—” Annelise started.

  “Well, hang on. I have a feeling I got you beat.” He shook out another smoke and offered her one, but this time she declined. She could still feel the dizzy lift in her head. He lit up and went ahead. “Like I said, Pastor White and the whole dern congregation got pretty single-minded on the topic, but I’m sure you can guess who really went above and beyond.”

  “What did she do?”

  He looked rueful. “Like you say, it was in October. Houston and me were still mainly living out at the ranch then, with him going to the rural school down the road. And I guess you probably remember the prediction was pretty specific. High noon on the appointed date.”

  “What I remember is thinking, Okay, noon. Noon where? Greenwich, England? Jerusalem? Rome?”

  He chuckled. “You’re quick, I’ll admit. That sure never occurred to most. Anyway, the day rolls around, and Gloria keeps Houston home from school.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  He was nodding and talking. “I took him out that morning, up to the wheat table with a shotgun, and the two of us kicked around the edge trying to scare up a pheasant.” He turned his head to her briefly but couldn’t seem to hold her eyes.

  “You have to understand something. For years I’d been lonely as hell. Never had a mother myself, then I lost my father, too. Not even ten years old. So when I met your aunt and saw this mix of—not weakness, exactly, and not illness, either . . .”

  “Fragility?”

  “Yeah, fragility. Mixed all inside out with faith. Some kind of suffering perseverance. Not so unlike my own pa, comes down to it. But I saw something else in her, too, those first days she’d come west.”

  He looked down the slope at the cows, then out beyond where the land rose up again, tables and buttes fainter and fainter with the hopscotch of distance.

  “It’s majestic, down in those parts. Like paintings you see, railroad posters. Mountains and waterfalls. Not so spare the way it is here. She was bewitched, I guess, and the wonder of it all just came off her like a shine on a coin. First time she’d been on a horse, on a trail; first time she’d done anything at all just for the fun of it. Possibility—the world as a bigger place. But right at the edge of it, fragility.

  “And I guess I thought I could maybe keep that notion of possibility alive for her, and that would keep some possibility alive for me, too.” He still looked rueful. “We got married, and much as it pains me to put it to words, I stayed pretty lonely anyway. Watched her nearly die in 1918, that damn Spanish flu. She had the first miscarriage then, and at least one other before Houston stuck. And after he was born, you could really see the fragility in her, and the fear, too. Taste it, almost.”

  She watched a single bead of sweat gather and form where his hat met his temple, then roll down toward his cheek and pause at the ridge of bone beneath the skin.

  “I got to just going along with whatever took the sting out for her. Half believing, maybe, and half just . . . accepting what she needed to get by on.”

  Annelise found
her voice and she let it murmur out. Water over stone. “Did you find any pheasants? With Houston, that day?”

  He had never stopped nodding, that bead of sweat still in place, and she wanted to reach over and put her fingers to it. “We did. One giant rooster come right up at our feet, like a land mine going off. You ever had one spook you like that? It’s the damnedest thing, this green-headed dragon, exploding out of nothing but dry dirt and thin grass, right there in front of you . . .”

  “Did you kill it?”

  His horse shook its head around against the reins, and Roy let it drop its neck to crop grass. Annelise slacked hers, too. “Nope. I shot but I missed. On purpose.” He studied the smoldering tailor-made in his fingers, then cocked his head to look at her. “Figured it wasn’t, you know, practical. On the off chance we were about to rise on up into the air.

  “So about eleven we tromp back down to the house. Houston had a lot of those airplane models already, and always one under construction. He went up to his bedroom, I figured just to kill time and maybe put on his Sunday clothes or something. But when I went up to get him, I found him sitting there at his little worktable with a pin-striping brush, painting on one of the models.” Now he did look away from her, and she could see he was actually choking a little.

  But he kept on. “He asked. He asked me. If he held on to it when Jesus came, did I think he could take his airplane too.”

  “Oh Lord. What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t know. Because I didn’t.” He was shaking his head again, and she knew he was either dumbfounded by the memory or flogged by guilt, or both. “I wanted to tell him he could try. But I didn’t.”

  “Because of Gloria.”

  “Yep. Because of Gloria. I knew it wouldn’t go over.” His cigarette had a ridiculously long ash, but he didn’t tap it loose. “She’d already told him what would be left behind, crumpled on the ground when we went up. Clothes and shoes, wedding rings. Watches. The gold off my tooth. Cars wrecking on the roads, when their drivers disappeared. Trumpets blasting and the sky wide open, like the sea coming apart for the Israelites.