Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “You think they’ll be back after all that?”

  McKee swiveled his head the other direction. Annelise had come into view with the horses. “If I got it figured, that dern albatross of a watch is right there where she dropped it.”

  He kept the Sharps in the crook of his arm and walked up the road, then sure enough knelt down and recovered the second Longines. He took another glance at the rise, then motioned Huck forward.

  Annelise arrived with the horses about the time Huck had the REO backed to the tail of the crippled Ford. She took in the damage to the wheel and hub, the blown-out glass. She looked down at McKee. “I have half a mind to wring your neck.”

  He struck a theatrical pose with Juno. “That’ll have to wait. We have an airplane to power.”

  An hour later they had the Ford backed into the barn. McKee hung a chain hoist from an overhead beam, and after another hour of wrenching, he and Houston nearly had the engine free.

  Annelise paced around with her belly half in a roil. She was supposed to be keeping an eye out for her aunt. She’d look out the barn door at the chickens pecking in the yard and the horses in the corral and the long summer light across the contour of the land, then turn back to the bullet-riddled Ford and feel herself upend all over again. The other two seemed infuriatingly cavalier, or at least single-minded on the task. Why on earth were they worried about Houston’s mother when they’d just double-crossed a bunch of outright criminals?

  Finally she put her head through the shot-out window. The back of the sedan fairly glittered with shattered glass, and the door panel had a gaping exit hole. The same bullet had also ripped through the back seat, white stuffing blooming like cauliflower. “What are we going to do with the rest of this heap?”

  “Dump it down a ravine,” McKee told her. “I’ve got one picked out. With any luck, nobody’ll find it for a couple of decades.”

  She pulled her head back out. “I don’t like it that they didn’t get their watch back.”

  “Hell with ’em. Serves ’em right.”

  “I don’t care. I’d just as soon know they were long gone and never coming back.”

  She reached for the handle on the front passenger door and turned the latch and swung the door on its hinges. A flat leather satchel fell out and landed on the running board with a thud. “Uh-oh.”

  Houston wriggled out from under the car. “What?”

  She pointed. “That. Evidently it slipped down between the seat and the door.”

  “Huh. Wonder if that’s what the guy was trying to get once the shooting started. I figured it was probably a heater.” He held up his grease-blackened mitts. “You gonna pick it up?”

  Yak straightened from the engine. “Pick what up?”

  “This here pouch. Just fell out of the car.”

  McKee glanced at it. “These guys are like the Keystone Krooks. What’s in it?”

  She lifted the satchel with two fingers and held it out away from her, with the distinct feeling that drawing the zipper might unleash some genie that couldn’t be put back. Finally she resigned herself and drew out a small leather-bound book.

  “The Good Book?” said McKee. He shifted to her cousin. “Maybe the guy in the river really was a reverend.”

  “It’s not a Bible. It’s a diary.”

  “Oh, like girls keep, you mean. For all their secret thoughts.”

  “More or less.”

  “These are some mighty demure criminals, I’ll say that.”

  She flipped through it. “Mostly seems like a ledger, in some kind of shorthand.” She went to the front flap. “Here’s a name, though. Charles H. Angle. And a Billings address.”

  “Huh,” said Houston. “Wonder if that’s the guy you just shot at.”

  McKee tested the chain coming down from the rafters. “Who knows? Could be the stiff in the river, or their dern accountant for all we know. Just stow it for now, we’ll check it out when we’ve got more time. We need to pluck this thing and ditch the evidence.”

  “Hello? Houston?” Aunt Gloria, and evidently not far off.

  Houston froze like a salt pillar.

  “Annelise? Where are you two?”

  “Scoot,” said McKee. “Be quick.”

  Annelise shoved the book back into the satchel and tossed it over toward the saddles on her way to the door. She felt sick to her stomach all over again.

  The squall in her center became a blessing in disguise. Aunt Gloria was not far at all from the entry to the barn, and Annelise had barely begun to contrive some plausible excuse to turn her back to the house. Her stricken constitution handled it for her.

  She veered slightly off course and bent at the waist and heaved once again into the dirt. She spat and gasped.

  “My land, child. What’s into you now?” Aunt Gloria started toward her.

  She forced herself upright and wobbled ahead. “Can you help me get to the house?”

  “My head is pounding.” It wasn’t, really, but she sat in the kitchen with her eyes clenched and rubbed her temples. She heard her aunt wring a cloth into the basin.

  “I’m going to put this on the back of your neck. That always helps me. I get a weak stomach from those awful spells, too.”

  She felt the cool, delicate pressure on her skin, and headache or no, it did feel good. Her belly really was out of sorts, that at least was true.

  “Have you had your back and hips checked?”

  She thought back to that day in the shop when they were slathering airplane dope on the raw muslin of the fuselage. The searing fumes hit her right between the eyes. “I don’t generally get headaches, is the thing. But the boys are using some chemical out in the barn. It burns just to breathe around it, it’s so strong. I think the fumes got to me.”

  “Heavens to Betsy, stay away from that nonsense. Bad enough men have to work with it, but there’s no reason in the world for a woman to. We are just not built the same.”

  She could hardly argue, given the bluff she’d just played. “I guess it is sort of impossible to imagine a girl riding a horse clear from Texas, like Uncle Roy did.” And she had to admit, she actually meant it.

  “Oh, men used to do that sort of thing. Even when I was a girl, the world was a different place. Why, we got to town in a buckboard wagon.”

  “Right, but he was only ten years old.”

  This seemed to stop her aunt cold. Annelise still had her eyes closed, the damp cloth at her neck, but the long silence could not be missed.

  “I guess that’s so,” she finally said. “It’s hard for me to imagine him that young. There are no pictures of him. So I tend to think of him as just . . . older. Always. The age he was when I met him, anyway. Which even then was nearly thirty.”

  Annelise cocked an eye open. Gloria appeared to be lost in thought. “He must have been pretty capable, though. At ten years old, I mean.”

  Her aunt seemed to consider this for the first time, too. “Well, yes. He must have been.”

  “Apple didn’t fall far from that tree. With Houston.”

  “You know I . . . have to stop and remind myself he’s even in high school now? Even as tall as he is, and now with this new voice he has?” She trailed off, then shook her head at the ceiling. “How on earth did it happen?”

  “I could still wring your neck. Don’t go thinking everything’s hunky-dory, just because we made it through that ridiculous stunt in one piece.”

  They were in McKee’s room, not for the usual reasons. She leaned against the countertop with her arms crossed, tight as a bar across a door. He’d tried to nuzzle his way in but finally gave up and sat at the table.

  “You mean the stunt that got us a motor?”

  “You could have at least told me.”

  “You never would’ve gone for it.”

  “You’re right.”

&nbs
p; “Plus I didn’t want you implicated. If things actually went south.”

  She tried to stare him down but his blue eyes never wavered, and she finally looked away herself. “If somebody wound up dead, you mean?”

  “Or if Farmer Brown happened along, or the police came into it. Anything.”

  This was the problem with sleeping with someone. You started to fall for the whole nine yards. “It was still a hell of a risk.”

  “No doubt. But you said it before. Risk has its rewards.”

  “Actually you said that.”

  “And you believe it, same as me. You think Miss Earhart’s not taking on risk, flying over the widest part of the dern ocean? You think the ol’ Lone Eagle didn’t take a hell of a risk? New York to Paris, in a flying gas tank? Come on. Sounds crazy even now, ten years down the road. Who’s that other one you told me about, from last year? Beryl somebody?”

  “Beryl Markham. Who crashed when she landed, by the way.”

  “Lived to tell, though. She set a record, right?”

  She nodded. “True enough. First person east to west across the Atlantic.”

  “Took a risk.”

  She nodded, almost against her will. “A big one.”

  “Well. I took a risk, and here we are. With a motor.”

  She’d thrown up again once they’d gotten back to town. They’d hauled the husk of the Ford out on some rough winding road and up a grade, and he’d backed the thing off an inside bend and cut it loose. She could still hear the grate and screech as the car half rolled and half slid down the chute, still hear the rest of the glass coming out when it veered and tipped sideways and finally crashed into the brush.

  Hunched over the commode in the bungalow later, it struck her that she might be pregnant. What an irony that would be. She’d heaved again, hard enough to start tears. That panic didn’t last, thank God.

  She crossed the floor and pushed him into the seatback and sat in his lap. “Don’t get any ideas. My period just started.” Nerves, all along.

  He sat there and held her. “Great news.”

  She laughed. She was frayed, but she could laugh. And they had a motor.

  Air Camper

  1

  According to letters received by the editors, interest in the conversion of the Model A Ford motor as applied to my little ship has been mighty hot.

  —B. H. Pietenpol, 1932 Flying and Glider Manual

  “B. H. Pietenpol,” said McKee. “Who is this cat?”

  He had the motor plans pinned to the corkboard in the fabrication bay, the engine resting in a cradle. He’d studied the prints a lot in the past months, the way Huck had for the better part of a year. They were both stunned by the marvelous simplicity of the whole thing.

  “Some farmer in Minnesota,” Huck said.

  “Yeah, I gathered that.” He looked over at the motor and rapped his skull with his knuckles. “I’m no slouch at oddball engineering, but this makes me feel like a first-grade bedwetter. What in God’s name made him think you could run a homemade crop duster with a full-size car engine? And how in the hell’d he survive the trial and error?”

  Huck shrugged. “How’d Orville and Wilbur?”

  McKee gave him a stumped look. “Good point.”

  They’d been at it two evenings and one full day and had already finished a lot of the modifications. Most of the major adaptions involved the lubricating system. Since the propeller bolted directly to the crankshaft, the motor mounted to the fuselage in reverse of its normal orientation. So in a climb, no provision in the original design could prevent the oil from pooling at the wrong end of the case rather than recirculating through the working system. Down she’d go, in a fatal tutorial on the nature of gravity—not to mention human folly.

  Pietenpol had solved the problem with sheet-metal oil dams in the splash pan, plus a couple of quarter-inch copper lines to the crankcase to route the necessary lube to bearings and rods, regardless of the degree of climb. Simple but ingenious. The stock timing and valve covers were swapped out for lighter versions, and beyond that a handful of tweaks to manifolds or brackets made up the bulk of the reengineering. They had little to do now but replace the original distributor with a hotter magneto for ignition.

  Pop sauntered into the bay. He shook out a cigarette, which he hardly ever did in the shop. He sat on a sawhorse. “That was Cy Gleason on the phone.”

  Huck looked at him. As far as his father knew, the engine came out of a totaled Ford McKee had caught wind of over in Golden Valley County. He tried to conjure a casual line of inquiry and came up instead with a guilt-ridden blank.

  Not so McKee. “What’s he want, donations for the stray-dog fund?”

  Pop lit up and dragged. “Nope. He called to say the state police have a line on the rest of that holdup outfit. Or think they do, anyway.”

  “They catch ’em?”

  Pop blew smoke through his nose. “Nope.”

  “Kill ’em?”

  He snorted. “No, but evidently somebody tried to. Cy’s calling every garage and grease monkey he can think of, telling them to be on the lookout for a gray Plymouth coupe with a cracked-up windshield and pretty serious damage to the roof.”

  Huck had the upper bolt for the magneto run down into the block, and he went to start the lower but couldn’t for the life of him get the thing to thread. He stared at his hand, shaking like he had an attack of the ague. The ratchet in his other hand jumped like an eel and bounced off the floor.

  Pop pulled in another drag. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, sonny. Cy’s calling everywhere, not just here.”

  “Seems like a long shot these guys would risk pulling into a local shop,” said McKee.

  “True, but he’s got to start somewhere.”

  “What makes him think somebody other than Johnny Law’s after them?”

  Pop exhaled again, shifted to his hired hand. “According to Cy, somebody blew half their roof off. With a dern big gun.”

  McKee clucked like a mother hen. “Poor bad guys.”

  Pop laughed, but Huck had the sense it was half against his will. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch, all right.” He turned to Huck. “Where’s that cousin of yours?”

  Huck left the ratchet on the floor and concentrated on the bolt. He held on to the solid anchor of the motor with his off hand and got the shakes under control. He started the threads. “She went up to the post office. I guess a package came for her.”

  Yak had again picked up the 1932 Flying and Glider Manual, flipped it open to the motor conversion. “So how’d Cy catch on that these bozos are still around?”

  “That’s the funny thing. Anonymous tip, to the Custer County Sheriff’s Office. They put the word out, and sure enough, a deputy up in Garfield passed a gray Plymouth with cracked-up glass and some kind of gash in the roof. So now they’re putting shops onto it, too.”

  “Anonymous tip,” said McKee. “Sounds like something Raleigh would come up with.”

  Huck nodded. “I’m sure it wasn’t Raleigh, though.” He realized how incriminating this sounded as the words passed his lips. “I mean, he’d tell me if he caught wind of something. Anyway, he’s been over in Oregon with his pa the past week.”

  “I mainly meant he seems well versed in detective lore.”

  “He does have a wild imagination.” Pop studied the smoke curling off his cigarette, then looked between the two of them. “Kind of like some other fellers I can think of.”

  McKee’s eyes never strayed. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  Roy rubbed his forehead. “I’ll bet. You kids are gonna drive me to drink.” He looked over to Huck. “How’s that magneto shaping up?”

  Huck was running the last bracket bolt down even then. He leaned back on his haunches. “I think we’re just about ready to power an airplane.”

 
Pop stubbed his cigarette on the sole of his work shoe. “Regardless of whatever else you daredevils have going on, brace yourselves. Cy’s gonna steam like a clam the second you put this thing in the air.”

  “How are you thinking to plead?”

  “Ignorant.”

  “Think he’ll buy it?”

  “Hell no.” He stood up off the horse and unlocked one of the caster brakes on the cradle with his foot. “We cross that bridge when we get to it, I reckon.” He looked at Huck, tapped the motor’s long iron head. “You ready?”

  Two nights later they towed the hay wagon in from the ranch and under the cover of full dark winched the fuselage onto the deck. They lowered the wing out of the rafters and lashed that on as well.

  Roy towed with the REO while Huck and McKee rode on the wagon bed itself, holding on to the fuselage. Annelise tailed in the panel truck.

  They took a backstreet parallel to Main until they cleared the last cluster of houses, then jogged over to the highway and went south a mile to Coal Camp Road. They bobbed and bounced up the gravel incline to what passed as the local airfield, in truth just a graded and graveled strip of sage flat with a tin-sided shed and a handful of petrol barrels. Occasionally some sport flier from Helena or Billings would drop in to refuel, but otherwise the strip mainly saw Forest Service planes or visiting coal executives, and those weren’t exactly common, either.

  Pop towed the wagon down near the shed. The full moon was only two nights past, and it hung now bright and barely gibbous over the butte to the east, throwing her cold white glow across the flat, throwing long shadows off the sagebrush along the runway. They’d brought carbide miner’s lamps, but between the moon and the headlights of McKee’s rig, Huck could see already they wouldn’t need them.

  They had the wing loose and stowed against the shed and the fuselage offloaded in a fast half hour. Huck studied the propeller in the moonlight, the glint along the lacquered blades and a pool of the same gleam on the silver shoulder of the cowling. He looked up at the sky, took in Arcturus and Vega through the blue-white glow. He took in Scorpio.

  He realized Annelise had come up beside him, could suddenly actually scent her on the breeze. Soap like the soap that Katie used. She took his hand. “Nervous, Colonel?”