“Anyway. He left his airplane where it was. Cleaned his brush and came downstairs. We all went out into the yard, held hands in a circle. None of us talking, of course, just waiting. But finally the time’s getting pretty close, and Mama’s got her eyes closed, and Houston finally breaks the silence.
“‘What’ll happen to the horses?’ he says. ‘Who’s going to feed the horses tonight?’”
“Wow,” said Annelise, and it flared in her head that Houston had no doubt been keeping this from her. She guessed she knew why, but a pang went through her anyway. “What did she say?”
“She opened her eyes, but she didn’t really look at him. She just looked up to the sky and said, ‘It’s not for us to worry about anymore.’”
They sat there in silence for a full minute, the horses even now cropping grass around the bits in their mouths. Finally she said, “Well. We’re still here.”
He laughed. “We sure are.” He waved his hand at the horses.
Annelise frowned. “So how far past noon did you all stand there?”
“Ten minutes, maybe. Finally the kid speaks up again, says, ‘How much longer do you think it will be? My hands are getting sweaty.’ And they were—we were all still holding hands, and his was hot and clammy both, you know that feeling?
“Then I realized he was trying to prod it along, because he says, ‘Do you really think we’ll fly right on out of our clothes?’ And finally I’d just had enough. I said, ‘Not today I don’t,’ and I gave his hand a good squeeze and then let go of it. Gloria looked at me, and I told her I had work to do, and Houston was going with me.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Yeah. She did. But not right off. She kept hold of Houston’s hand a little longer—I’d already let go of hers, but she’d kept a grip on his—and looked back up to the sky for another spell. Like if she stood there long enough, it might happen yet.
“Finally, though, she gives Houston’s hand a squeeze too, with the both of hers, and she says, ‘Well, no man knoweth the day or the hour. The Word does say that.’ And she let him go and went back to the house. I moved him into town a few days later.”
She hinged in the moment on telling him the truth about her black eye, telling him the truth about all of it. He already knew she’d given herself to McKee, and he clearly didn’t hold it against her, in fact seemed ready to help. If he could unload this festering secret now, shouldn’t she do the same?
She saw exactly what was stopping her—spilling the beans with Roy would mean betraying Houston. Ironically, she had the sense she couldn’t bring any of this up to her cousin, either, not without betraying some other confidence. Tangled webs, divided loyalties. The problem was, sometimes secrets and even lies seemed to exist mainly to protect the people you loved. Rules, too, she suddenly had to admit.
Her horse stamped underneath her, then shifted slightly to crib grass from a thatch nearer to Roy’s sorrel, and the sorrel turned and bared its long yellow teeth. Her own horse shied away.
“Easy now.” He patted his horse’s neck.
Annelise kept waiting for him to go on, to try to make some sense of it, but evidently he didn’t have much else to say. Or maybe he was waiting for her to put some logic to it, some redemptive conclusion. As the silence went on, she realized it was not an uncomfortable space but merely a shared one, its own patient form of solidarity. As though an answer to human confusion and human folly and human suffering in general surely existed out there somewhere, and if they sat there long enough, waited long enough, well. It might occur yet.
Finally something else flushed the whole tangle from her mind.
“Did my mother know about any of this?”
“I’d sure imagine so. Tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering for the last four months if you already knew yourself, had maybe gone through the same thing at the same time. Well, an hour later, anyway.”
Annelise shook her head, but she didn’t laugh. “No, but we’re not living on a farm outside the general line of sight. And regardless of what my father believes in private, he’s still in the professional class. In that life, appearances matter.” She blew out a long breath, like a boiler bleeding pressure. “To be honest, I never could figure how people with so much money can have so little sense.”
He laughed. “In my personal experience, the two have been equally hard to come by.”
“Money’s slippery. But you have plenty of sense. You absolutely did the right thing, with Houston.”
“That one I stand by.” He tightened the reins, put heels to his horse.
5
Annelise had struggled with the McKee situation, it was true. She wasn’t as amoral as she put forward in theory, and she did have a deep sense of connection to Blix down in California. A gold-star sneak, but a loyal one. Sort of.
Down in California, though. That was the trouble. The ethics of the thing became situational, and this was the situation, and she had to admit that McKee, while certainly convenient, nevertheless owned a part of her heart as well, and had before she’d ever climbed those stairs to his room. So she kept going to him like that same old lodestone.
He had a real way with her, too. A charm.
“You know this is my favorite part of a woman’s body?” He’d only be talking about the inside of her wrist, the words running around an emery kiss of taut skin and delicate bones. Then later he’d say the same thing about her collarbone with his mouth against that, rough and gentle at once, or the flutes of her ribs.
“Look at our hands,” he’d say, and hold his beautiful workingman’s mitt wide against her own fine fingers. “Who thought of that?”
The contrast was irresistible, and she loved him for noticing. It almost made her not want to broach this other thing. “Can you get into trouble for this? I don’t think I’m regarded as a grown-up in Montana until I’m twenty-one.”
“Miz Gloria’d have my head, I’m sure. But trouble, with the law? Uh-uh. You may not be able to decide for yourself about the school dance, but otherwise you’re a woman at sixteen in these parts. We could get married today if we wanted.”
“Put that out of your head right now,” she told him.
He only laughed. “Here’s another curveball. Fella I worked with over in Butte went and got hitched to his high school sweetheart right after they graduated. Both eighteen, but get this—his wife automatically became a legal adult the second they said the I do’s, and he still had to wait until he hit twenty-one. When they bought a house, only she could sign the contract.”
She frowned. “So you can legally hop into bed at sixteen, but you don’t get to be an actual adult for five more years?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“It’s eighteen for both, in California.”
She wasn’t sure how much to tell him, how much he’d even want to know. Then again, lying there naked in his bed, it occurred to her that he was the only one she could tell. Solidarity by secrecy.
“I seduced Blix, you know, not the other way around. He’s about your age, and he’d have gone to prison if we’d gotten caught. Could have, anyway. I was still seventeen at the time.”
“Risk does have its rewards.”
“Maybe so, but I think he was pretty nervous about it. He’s much shyer than you are. Wouldn’t have touched me if I hadn’t gone out of my way to make resistance totally futile. But part of me always felt guilty as sin for putting him in that position.”
He put his finger to the tip of her nose. “What do you know? There is a conscience in there.”
A joke, of course, but he was more right than he probably knew. She couldn’t evade the haunting feeling that she’d brought the theft of the watch upon herself, although she couldn’t decide whether this stemmed from two-timing Blix or carnal behavior in general. She tried to dispense with all of it as, in Roy’s words, impractical, but the gho
sts of her upbringing hovered nevertheless. And despite her running internal monologue, she could never quite jettison the terror that God was in fact watching and ready to pounce. At least none of McKee’s rubbers had broken.
And weirdly enough, the watch business turned out to be not quite finished. She was in the office at the shop, waiting for her parents’ weekly check-in, when the call came.
She lifted the receiver. “Hul-loh,” she said.
“Miss Clutterbuck.” Not her father’s voice, and somewhat distant.
“Yes?”
“First off, apologies for our previous encounter. But it’s come to our attention we have something that belongs to you. Or your beau, at least. Your flyboy.”
“We.” Oddly, it struck her that this was the title of Lindbergh’s account of the flight to Paris, a reference to the way he’d come to think of himself and his plane. A perfect, almost spiritual fusion of man and machine. Why was this occurring to her now? “Who’s we?”
“Doesn’t matter. You have something that belongs to us.”
Already she felt herself shaking.
“So what are we going to do about it?” Her voice was also shaking, which she resented even as she heard it. Her chest had gone tight as a steel band. “All I know is, I’m missing my watch.”
He paused again. “And now you’re wearing another one exactly like it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t kid yourself. We’ve got it on good faith.”
She had the unsettling feeling she was being peered upon. She heard the creak of the swivel chair beneath her, realized she was actually on the edge of her seat. She forced herself to lean back.
He went on. “Let’s keep this simple. We have something of yours, you have something of ours.”
“My eye was black for a week.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan and I apologize. We don’t want anything like that happening again.”
“You almost got yourself shot.”
“As I said, we don’t want anything like what happened last time. Let’s just make this work for all of us. You get yours, we get ours.”
“A simple exchange?”
“As you said. You’re missing your watch, I’m missing mine. Easy math.”
“Where and when?”
“Good girl. I’ll call you back. Same time tomorrow. And, miss?”
Her brain wanted to scream through this whole thing, was trying to see it from every angle. “Yes?”
“We know you never called the police last time. By all means, keep it that way.”
She heard the gentle return of a handset into its receiver, heard the line go cold. She hung up her own phone. She stared at the watch on her wrist.
“Now this beats all,” said McKee. “Back for the original watch. You can’t make this stuff up.”
He and Houston had been out shoeing horses all day at a ranch north of town, had rolled back in not long after the call. Houston was now sitting in the cockpit of the airplane in the shop, for no real reason other than the possibility of it. He looked mighty worried, though.
“What do I do?” she said. “I’m out of ideas here.”
McKee shrugged. “Seems like you’ve got three choices.”
She looked at him. “You are way further ahead on this than I am.”
“What are they?” said Houston from the cockpit. “The three choices, I mean.”
“Number one: Do nothing. You’ve got a replacement watch, miraculous as it is. Tell ’em to pound sand.”
“They won’t,” said Houston. “Not if they’re still nosing around for the dern thing.”
Annelise held out her hand for McKee’s beer. “He’s right.”
“Of course he’s right. So, number two: Go ahead and make a straight-up trade, if it means getting them down the road once and for all. Also if you’re really attached to having your beau’s original watch back.”
“I’d prefer to think of myself as more practical than sentimental, but it is sort of that way. He used to say the watch gave him his special powers. He trusted me with it.”
“A fool and his watch are easily parted,” said McKee cheerily. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Huck cut in. “What’s the third choice?”
“Go back to square one and call the police. Tell the straight-up truth.” McKee shrugged. “If they can connect the dots to set up a pinch, there might be a reward. Might be a means to an engine.”
“Yeah, might,” Houston replied. He thumped the stretched skin of the fuselage. “Might be a means to never getting this thing off the ground, too, ’cause Cy’s gonna kill me for taking that dern watch. Not to mention building an airplane in the first place.”
McKee shook his head at Annelise. “Would you talk some sense into him?”
“Actually he’s making perfect sense. We go to the police, they will at the very least confiscate the one watch we do have.” She shook her head. “No way am I losing both.”
She tossed around half the night, trying to figure it out. She’d slide into rough sleep and jerk right back out again. She felt like a spider’s prey, even her old reliable stinger wound in sticky silk. Yak was right, of course—under normal circumstances they’d have gone straight to the police. But not unlike her cousin, she wished she’d never taken that other watch in the first place.
Normal circumstances, that was the kicker. She was pulled between poles. Wishing for the solace of McKee’s bed in one moment, then in the next practically sick with the position she could put people in. Could she be in love with more than one person at the same time?
Maybe everyone could. What did they make you say, on betrothal? Forsaking all others? As though the fork in the road were bound to come up eventually, and nothing good would come of the detour. Maybe that was the original sin.
She returned to her own first plunge. Blix had gotten his mitts on a Lockheed Vega, the same model Amelia soloed across the Atlantic and so, like Lindbergh, secured her fame. Yellow not red, but otherwise a gleaming totem, fairly screaming speed with its blunt taper and comet-shaped fairings at the wheels.
She showed up for her lesson, and he told her he had something to show her.
My God, Blix, is it real? Can I sit in it?
He let her twist his arm.
Sit in it? For like a minute, you mean? Guess I pretty much have to cave to that . . .
The Vega belonged to some South American millionaire who’d left it while he hunted sheep out in the desert, or something to that effect. She could barely hear Blix and barely contain herself either, had already squeezed through the door and threaded her way to the little trapezoidal cockpit.
No dual controls, just a single stick and pedals. She looked overhead at the sliding hatch that allowed the model’s more illustrious pilots—Wiley Post, Ruth Nichols, Amelia, of course—to stand up out of the cockpit for the flashbulbs and crowds. Blix peered in.
Barely room for one in here, let alone two.
Oh, I think we could fit. Don’t you want to try?
One thing led to another. She squeezed over to the side, and he got up into the pilot’s chair. Worked the controls around.
I tell you I met Wiley Post once? Right after he set that eight-day record.
You did. Now tell me you don’t want to fly this thing.
Oh, I’d love to fly this thing. That big Wasp out front? Four hundred horses and then some. We could shoot this baby to Mexico and back, still have time to run for lunch.
Let’s do it then.
He’d only laughed, at first. But one thing did lead to another.
They didn’t get anywhere close to Mexico, and he didn’t ever offer the controls and she didn’t ever ask, but for twenty glorious minutes she sat wedged right alongside him while he climbed and dove and chandelled, maneuverin
g like the plane was a cross between a roller coaster and a flaming javelin. Her heart and her belly both dropped and rose and dropped again, and every so often he’d bank hard so that she’d have to lean into him with gravitational force, and they were both laughing and laughing, pressing and pressing against each other, and she felt like they were some giddy airborne version of Bonnie and Clyde.
They didn’t venture far from the airfield, maybe five miles or so, but with the throttle wide open they reached even that limit in what seemed like seconds. He made one flat run at 180 miles an hour, and she could feel the thrum of the engine in the seat of her underpants. She got to thinking.
Finally he dropped for the runway as though the airplane itself had a parachute attached. He nosed up at the last possible second, set her down light as a feather. They taxied back over and powered down outside the hangar. A grinning moment of silence.
She is one hot little tamale.
Speaking of which. Guess we didn’t quite make Mexico. But you were right, we do have time to grab lunch. Legs still pressed together in the cockpit, faces just this close. Or, um, something . . .
That was the day she’d pounced. One thing leading quite to another. Somehow that was a year ago already.
Now it was all this. She’d kept him safe, kept him out of it. Let herself be sent off just to keep him out of it. And then she wore his watch—straight into someone else’s bed. And now it was all this.
But there was only one person she knew to conspire with—the same one she’d already shed everything for besides the watch. She was aware of the irony.
She rode out of town in McKee’s Stude, first thing in the morning. His own wheels had been turning, scheming up an exchange on a backroad proximate to the ranch.
She felt a creeping dread. “Doesn’t it make way more sense to meet in a public place? Like the café? I could sit at the counter, and one guy could come in and sit next to me, and we trade watches, he leaves, no one the wiser. And I’m safe in the process.”
“Uh-huh. They’ll go right for that.”
“How do you know they won’t?”
“Because for all they know, the two guys in the booth behind you and the cook in the kitchen and maybe even the waitress are undercover law.”
Cloudmaker Page 21