He put his other hand on the smooth gloss of the prop. They’d test-fired the engine back in the shop, with a temporary gas tank rigged and hanging from the rafters overhead, and she’d fluttered to life like an emergent moth. An unmuffled and noisy moth, to be sure, but a thing born for flight. The whirling prop blew dust and debris like a cyclone, flapped the pages of the Flying and Glider Manual like a shuffling deck of cards.
He squeezed her fingers with his own, and she squeezed right back. He said, “Ask me tomorrow.”
2
The bunch of them drove back to the airfield at first light in McKee’s rig and had the wing mounted and the gas line hooked to the carb by nine. They cabled the ailerons and ran through a basic safety check. Annelise went back to the panel truck and returned with a cardboard box.
She lifted the lid and brought out two leather flight helmets and two goggle sets. She handed one each to Huck. “May as well look official.”
He turned them over in his hands. “Well. I was all set to wear a football helmet. Where’d these come from?”
“A little bird brought them.” She batted her eyes at McKee. “Don’t be jealous.”
“That’s a known risk.” He pointed at Huck, then to the prop. “Do the honors, cowboy?”
They let her idle in place ten minutes to get the engine up to temp, then he wormed his lanky frame into the forward passenger seat. Annelise climbed in behind him and made one more check of the rudder bar and stick controls. Huck watched the ailerons lift and lower, lift and lower, on either side of him. The unmuffled engine clattered like an oversize typewriter, even through the grip of the helmet.
He felt her hand on his shoulder. “You ready?” she shouted.
He put his thumb to the air, looked over to see McKee’s lank hair blowing straight sideways. Both he and Pop squinted against the blast. The engine wound higher.
She taxied the plane halfway down the runway and turned it in as tight a buttonhook as she could, and that still put them a little off the actual graveled lane and into the cropped weeds alongside, but she steered right back onto the grit and back the way they’d come. She made a little series of S curves, then straightened again, and Huck waved to Pop and McKee when they passed. Annelise buttonhooked again and this time taxied nearly the entire length of the strip.
She made a complete circle to the left, got back onto the runway, and made a tight circle to the right. She went back down to the starting point and again turned the plane about and let the motor idle down. She shouted to him from behind.
He looked back at her. “How’s she feel?”
“Like an airplane. I’m going to hop her.”
“Already?”
She nodded at him, eyes like blue sparks through the glass of her goggles.
“You want me to get out?”
“No,” she shouted, “but I think you should. Till I know I’ve got it.”
It was the last thing he wanted, too. Except for one other thing—for Annelise to worry about anything other than getting this dream of his off the ground. “How’s her temp?”
Annelise’s eyes tilted to the gauges. “One-fifty almost.”
He gave her another thumbs-up, then wriggled his way out through the cables and cabanes. He slid to solid ground, peered into the cockpit at the panel. Oil pressure looked good and the tach hovered at 1,200, right where it was supposed to.
“Don’t buy the dern farm,” he yelled.
She put her own thumb in the air.
With only one passenger, and a light one at that, the plane got right to speed, and before Huck even quite expected it, the tail raised up to float along level with the ground. No sooner had he gotten his head around that than the wheels lifted and left the earth too, and she was twenty feet in the air, then setting back down again with plenty of runway still out ahead.
Pop and Yak were hooting and yelling, with Pop waving his fedora around like a racing flag. Huck started up with his own whoop, and they were looking at one another and shaking their heads, all three grinning like fools.
“I have to admit,” said Yak, “I always thought this was a pretty half-cocked idea.”
“That’s saying something, coming from you. Watch her.”
Annelise turned at the far end of the strip, and they heard her throttle back up, saw her start to taxi toward them and again make speed. Rudder and flank lifted and caught the morning sun like a signal mirror. The wheels floated up and away, and again the three of them whooped and chortled on the ground, slapped one another on the back as though even a repeat of what they’d already witnessed remained a singular miracle.
She touched back down and roared past and waved, made another buttonhook and went for it again.
She hopped the plane higher and longer a few times, back and forth on the runway, and finally touched down and steered toward them and backed off the throttle. The spinning prop slowed and by some trick of the eye appeared to reverse its own direction in a sort of rotational mirage. Then back to its correct swing, and back yet again to what he knew to be an illusion. A hypnotic one to be sure, like a watch on a fob.
Annelise killed the barking engine and the prop froze. The visual trickery evaporated into sudden, concomitant silence. Huck blinked and nearly tripped as he started toward her.
They spent an hour going over the cables and connections, tightened a turnbuckle here and there, and ran through a ground check of rudder and elevators and ailerons. Checked fluid levels, checked air pressure in the tires. Nothing had shifted and nothing had leaked, and the cables had stretched only barely, if at all. She was sound as the second she left the shop. Huck stood on the seat and topped off the gas tank.
They ate the sandwiches they’d packed in the shade of the wing. Then with the breeze just starting to lift out of the west, Huck spun the prop and refired the motor. Annelise pulled on her helmet and goggles and climbed back to the cockpit.
She taxied to the east end of the strip and pointed the little silver bird into the wind.
3
A life has to move or it stagnates.
—Beryl Markham, West with the Night
She could feel the heat of the radiator from where it jutted out front and the rush of air off the prop, could hear the unmuffled sputter from the stacks.
So odd the way this whole exile-to-Siberia situation had worked out. She’d expected to remain at the confluence of murderous rage and suicidal boredom for the duration, round and round in a vortex of her own colliding polarities.
But that’s not what happened. She hadn’t been stuck in the middle of nowhere, hadn’t been isolated even within her own head. She’d found instead another tribe, all boys to a man and all pulling for their girl, right over there. Still here, when she didn’t have to be, and flying again, thank God. Blix’s lucky watch back and on her wrist even now, thank God.
She looked ahead, through the warren of cables and struts, triangles and trapezoids exactly equal and exactly opposite, starboard to port, like a cross between a blueprint and a Rorschach pattern. Downfield she saw the lift of the wind sock.
She pushed the throttle forward and heard the motor ramp up, glanced at the tach to watch the needle climb past 1,200. She looked again across the cowling as the ship started forward. She advanced the knob and felt her speed increase, felt the tail rise up behind her.
The sagebrush along the runway appeared to glide, the way telephone poles appeared to slide by the glass of a train car, or the way the sun seemed to drag across the sky. Bodies fixed and bodies in motion, and which was which.
With a headwind now the initial lift came on even more rapidly. She felt as much as saw the drop of the ground below, well before the runway’s midpoint. She eased the stick back and felt the elevators tilt and the nose of the plane instantly climb in reaction. She was two hundred feet in the air in no time, with the terminus of the runway behind
her. She leveled off.
She throttled to 1,600 and flew out over the sage and across Coal Camp Road, light as a bubble and, according to the speed indicator, clipping along already at nearly seventy. She could see the rail tracks and the plunge of the highway into Big Coulee to the north, and badly wanted to bank out across the great pine-studded rim at the edge of the bowl and over the plunge and right out above the buildings and trees of the little town itself.
But she restrained herself. That was for Houston to do. She instead banked left and turned south, straightened out and crossed the road again and flew back toward the flat.
She couldn’t see dead ahead because of the jut of the radiator. She eased the stick left again and steered just north of the airfield, leveled above the dotted sagebrush and peered over the leather padding. McKee’s panel truck looked like a kid’s toy, the metal-sided shed no bigger than a Log Cabin syrup can and the boys in a line like tin soldiers. Even from here she could see them waving, each with both arms overhead in the same calisthenic flagging. She put her own arm up and hoped they could see her too.
She buzzed way out over the east end of the runway, to where the natural sage flat abutted this country’s usual fan of triangular breaks and ravines, standing like a line of Egyptian pyramids and from a distance looking not so unlike one of Sister Aimee’s theatrical painted backdrops. Valley of the Kings. She felt the natural lift of an air current when she soared over, put the ship into a right bank and came around into the wind.
The runway stretched before her like a surgical scar, a wound of unnatural precision. She throttled back and watched the altimeter. She was nearly to three hundred feet and the needle dropped off only slightly. She throttled down again and started to descend.
She hadn’t landed an airplane in what—four months now? Nearly five? But evidently it was like riding a bike. She hit a turbulent patch and bucked around a little but compensated with the stick and leveled, decelerated as she approached the edge of the runway. She cut her speed barely to forty, her elevation within a hundred feet of ground and the plane still dropping.
One quick glance around the radiator, and she saw her champions out ahead at the edge of the strip, McKee with his hands on his knees like a home plate umpire. The altimeter was almost to ground level as she crossed the end of the runway. She throttled back again and heard the engine tune down. The wheels and rear skid kissed the earth so gently she hardly felt the contact.
Annelise steered toward them, and they ran out across the strip as though she’d not only won a race but also set a record. She taxied until the distance closed and they had to shield their eyes against the blast of the prop, then killed the motor and looked at them across the cowling. Huck had a beam on his face like the wink of a coin. She wriggled her goggles up and grinned at him.
McKee of course broke the silence. He thrust both arms in the air and conjured Peter Lorre: “Eat ease a GREAT SUCCESS!”
She gave a bow.
They safety-checked again and this time left the fuel tank within the wing partially empty. Lighter that way, with two of them to consider. The wind had become a little stronger, but that was more a help than a hindrance. Huck again wormed his lanky self into the passenger seat.
He kept expecting to wake up from a dream and find his handiwork well back in the middling stages, say about where he was before his cousin and McKee came along. But the two of them were sure enough real, real as the heat he could feel even now off the radiator.
And as real as the motion of the forward stick, jutting from the floor in front of him and moving in tandem with Annelise’s steerage in the seat behind. She told him to keep an eye on that and also on the rudder pedals at his feet, to start to get a sense of what to do and when to do it, and he watched both as she taxied to the east end of the strip and turned into the wind. He saw the throttle knob move forward, heard the spike of the engine out front.
They gathered speed. He felt the leveling tilt as the tail came up. Annelise poured more gas, and he had the uncanny sensation he was back in Glider Number One that crisp October night, anticipating the cold plunge of his innards even as the ship around him defied gravity and departed earth.
They were already afloat above the runway. Somehow he’d missed the moment altogether. He looked over the leather padding and watched his own shadow sail atop the silhouette of a moving airplane. He forgot the past entirely, forgot everything but the rush of wind in the here and now. His belly was not dropping after all.
Her plan had been to hop a few times with the both of them aboard, to get a feel for the ship with the weight of another passenger. So when the stick in front of him moved straight back, and the nose of the plane angled in response, he fully expected her to shift forward again, fully expected to touch back down and land.
Instead she held the climb and held it some more, and even with a good hundred feet of altitude, it hadn’t totally sunk in that his cousin simply intended to fly. He twisted around and saw the grin on her face. He let himself believe.
They sailed back out across Coal Camp Road, and again he looked over the cowling to catch their shadow, threading and blinking through the sage maybe two hundred feet below. He looked out across the sweep of the prairie and the plains and caught sunlight on the silos beyond the river, and from this vantage even that appeared a downright stone’s throw. He could see the entire top half of the Absarokas out on the wide rim of the world, a solid three-hour journey by car. He never had seen them up close.
The stick between his knees tilted to the side and the airplane tilted too, banked in a slow sweep that finally did make his stomach drop, in a way that reminded him of sledding in winter as a youngster, or sticking tight to Wilbur when the horse hooked hard to cut a cow. A way that reminded a body of its own blindsided capability for wonder, or the capacity for thrill. A way that reminded him it was okay to do something for the fun of it.
He’d intended to keep his attention on the controls as she flew back beyond the runway and banked around again, but he found in the moment that he simply couldn’t. He watched Pop and McKee leaning against the fender of Yak’s pint-size panel truck as they passed, then looked over the other side to see the ship’s smooth shadow gliding across the ground.
He was faintly aware of the throttle knob moving back when Annelise brought the motor down. Otherwise he just sat there and felt the rush of air, took in the magic sight of the runway coming, a ways off at first and then in no time right out in front. The motor dropped again and he felt the wheels bump the earth, with no more thump than a hop off a milk crate. He looked up at the wing above his head, this thing that could bend the flow of air and so defeat the very law of gravity.
Please, God, please never entered his head.
They parked the sleek little ship along the runway not far from the shed and tied it to a spread of stakes against the wind. They’d come back tomorrow, and he would begin to learn.
They took turns with Annelise’s little camera, snapping photos of each other leaning against the ship, and of Huck and Annelise sitting in the cockpit with helmets and goggles. Pop was getting a shot of the rest of them lined against the fuselage when they heard the drone of another plane above the breeze across the flat.
A Ford Tri-Motor. Huck predicted it by the sound, confirmed it by the oncoming profile. They watched the big silver bird make a pass over the runway to check the wind sock, bank back the way it had come, and make a sweeping return way out over the sage.
The pilot brought her in so subtly at the far end of the strip that Huck couldn’t discern the actual touchdown, a feat like sleight of hand. He watched the slow, deceptive crank of those three oncoming props out front—one on each wing, one on the nose—as she went from clearly airborne to clearly not, rolling on her tires down the straightaway.
The plane’s corrugated flank bore the legend JOHNSON’S FLYING SERVICE, a commercial outfit out of Missoula that Huck knew to
specialize in backcountry flying. The pilot taxied over and came to a stop, cut his motors and slid a window shut in the cockpit. A moment later he hunched his way through the door aft of the wing and stretched his back a bit. He wore a sweatshirt and sneakers, which for some reason Huck hadn’t expected. He sauntered over.
“You all heading out or showing up?”
“Heading out,” Roy told him. He hooked a thumb. “The kids here just had ’em a successful test run.”
The pilot looked past them, and Huck watched his eyebrows lift. “Built you a Piet, did you?” He fished out a pack of smokes, shook one loose, angled against the breeze, and fired it. He looked over the cup of his hands at Annelise, still in her flying helmet. “You the resident barnstormer, miss?”
“Only because I’ve had some lessons.” She thumbed at Huck. “This guy’s the up-and-comer.”
The pilot clapped him on the shoulder. “No offense, sonny, but she’s a sight better-looking.”
He strode past them and leaned into the cockpit, thumped the heel of his smoking hand on the turtle deck a time or two, and stepped back to scan the length of the whole ship. “Seen a few of these here and there. Midwest, mostly. Some of ’em pretty raggedy, but this here’s a good build. A really good build.”
“You out of Missoula?” Huck asked him.
“Last I checked. Supposedly. Ain’t been there in a month, though.” He was looking at the landing gear, a split-axle rig that deviated from the original fixed strut of the standard blueprint. “You’re smart to set her up thisaway—most don’t take the old Rocky Mountain forced landing into account. Pretty much asking for a crack-up.”
Annelise made a theatrical gesture at Huck. “This is my cousin, Houston. He’s a genius.”
The pilot looked at him. “Your build?”
Huck could feel the flush inside his own skin. “Well, I had a sight of help.”
The pilot stubbed his cigarette with his sneaker. “How long she take to put together?”
Cloudmaker Page 26