Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  Huck turned to Roy. “Ten months, I guess?”

  “Not even that. Started her in October.”

  “Fast work.”

  Huck was red, but hoping he didn’t come off as merely green. “Couldn’t have done it by myself.”

  “Expect you’re wrong about that. This really the first day you’ve flown her?”

  “First day Annie’s flown her. I don’t have my wings yet.”

  The pilot looked at him and back to Annelise. Another gust slapped in off the flat, stronger all the time, making the sagebrush out across the strip flicker like some stiff green fire. The wings of the little two-seater bobbed and rocked in the stir—even the clouds above dashed across the sky. “Been following the equator flight, I guess? A.E.?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Guess you know she’s been grounded for a week. Some Dutch field in Indonesia.”

  “Java, I think,” Annelise said. “Last I heard on the radio, anyway.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. West Java. Here’s the thing about the radio, and the newspapers—they want it both ways with this whole show. They want it to look like the feat it sure enough is, for the publicity and the endorsements and what all, but they’re downplaying like hell what a hairball slog she’s taken on out there.”

  “Hairball or harebrained?” said McKee.

  Annelise shot him a look. “What’s that line of yours again? No risk, no reward?”

  The pilot’s eyes shifted back and forth between them, and he smirked a little, as though he knew already the tale between the lines.

  “Look, I’m not saying a thing against her. She’s no slouch and she’s proved it, many times. But you have to wonder where calculated ends and fool’s errand begins. I’m guilty myself—I fly into some rough-ass spots in some rough-ass weather, with a hell of a lot of weight at my back, crate bucking like a saddle bronc because the wind’s blasting ten ways from Sunday. And at the end of all that, some backcountry strip in the middle of nowhere that makes even this here look like God’s golden runway.

  “Every time you pull one of those trips off, you feel like you can walk on water, and that’s its own drunk thrill. So you keep looking for it, and keep trying for it, and it takes more and more to get to that spot in your own head, until you can’t tell luck from skill anymore. That’s a risky place to be.”

  For a minute nobody said anything, nobody except the wind. Huck leaned against the fuselage right at the cockpit, and even staked down, he could feel the ship tensing and flexing like a live thing. He imagined what it must be like in the bottleneck of a mountain pass, nothing below but miles of rough rock and dark forest and water like a silver ribbon, way down in some backcountry canyon. All he knew was, he wanted to be good enough to do it too.

  He shifted to Annelise. “She’s on the home stretch now, though. Or will be.”

  “Oh, she’s on it,” the pilot answered. He was looking at her himself. “I heard the report right before I pulled out of Denver. She got back in the air day before yesterday, heading for Australia. But what I mean to say is, she’s been through the wringer, more than meets the eye. Hence six days on the ground in Timbuktu.”

  “She’s said she’ll retire after this,” Annelise said. She had to practically shout now, her curls blowing around her face in the wind. “From the first-attempt and record-chasing stuff, anyway.”

  “I know it. We’ll see if she can. Walking on water, you know.”

  “Well, I guess you’re never more alive than when you’re cheating death almighty.”

  Huck wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly in the rush of air off the sage. Death almighty. That was a new one.

  The pilot pointed at Annelise but looked at Roy. The wind had risen to a near roar and he had to shout. “Best keep an eye on this one.”

  4

  The two of them spent the next four days up Coal Camp Road, with Houston in the front passenger seat that first day learning how to taxi around the airstrip and how to make a hop and touch back to ground.

  He learned quickly, she had to say. An easy touch and no trepidation. Then again, he knew airplane engineering inside and out, the same way he had a prodigy’s sense for how to make a car run like a top. She herself was a very good driver, one of the first in her class to get her license. Another of her father’s indulgences, similar to flying lessons. She’d taken both for granted at the time.

  Fifteen minutes in and he was already steering around the runway as easy as riding a bike and before long had the ship turning in full circles in place as though the cowling rotated on a spindle. He hopped on his own after watching her demonstrate the exercise a mere handful of times—just as with the dance instruction. By lunchtime their first day out she was already tempted to let him take it up and make a circuit.

  She knew the jig was about to be up, and she was honestly curious what the reaction might be. Cy Gleason was hardly a concern from where she stood. Houston was worried about him, but that was more congenital than practical. In fact, the airplane was not against the law, and she’d already sent off for the forms to register it with the aeronautics bureau.

  Aunt Gloria, though—there was a wild card of a different sort. It wasn’t that she could really do much once the spotlight beamed its inevitable truth. Annelise could see that even now, as clearly as she saw Cy Gleason’s jurisdictional limits. Anybody who could build his own honest-to-God airplane was definitively too big to spank.

  But there was the rub. The airplane was not merely a lie of omission but a declaration of independence. Gloria had been kept in the dark, by her and by Houston and by everyone. They’d deceived her to break away from her, and that was going to hurt her, and Annelise knew it. She wondered if the others had considered this, too. Roy, probably. Yak definitely, but he was on the outside, looking in.

  She tried to shove it out of her mind. Aunt Gloria was a grown-up. The lanky kid at the controls just wanted to fly. And she could help him.

  “You sure you’re ready?” she asked.

  They sat against the shed with their sandwiches, watching the airplane glint like a jewel. Still practically no breeze with the temperature north of eighty, and no doubt fixing to climb higher yet with the arc of the sun. Huck didn’t quite know how the ship would handle on a hot day, especially with two people. He needed to cross this other bridge first, and quickly.

  “Sure you’re not asking if it’s you who’s ready?”

  “No, I’m not sure, actually.” She swiveled her head to him. “No offense, but it is a homemade crate, with a first-time pilot. Not to mention an unlicensed instructor.”

  “Pot, meet kettle.”

  “Pretty much.” He anticipated what she was going to say next before the words were actually out, because the thought was in his head, too. “Honestly? Compared with everything else lately? Going up in the air with you at the stick is the last thing I’m worried about.”

  Huck examined the dregs of his sandwich. “So it’s not just me.”

  She winced. “This has all been wonderfully distracting the last few days, I’ll admit—I mean, in one way I’m in heaven, getting back up.

  “But then I’ll check the time, and all I can hear are feet rushing up behind me in the dark, or the crazy sound that Ford made when we rolled it down the mountain.” She held up her wrist with her beau’s watch. “Maybe this thing’s not such a good-luck charm after all.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It got us where we are right now, I guess. I just wish Yak had left the other one right there where you dropped it.” He paused. “Or at least had that plan B of his come together.”

  Annelise cocked her head at him. “Plan B? What plan B?”

  “You know that supposedly anonymous tip to the police?”

  “That was Yak?”

  Maybe he’d said too much. “Who else would’ve known about it?”

  She slapp
ed herself in the forehead. “Do you have the other watch now?”

  “Hell no. I haven’t touched that thing since we tried to get rid of it.”

  She looked at him. “Because it’s the opposite of a good-luck charm?”

  “I don’t want that albatross anywhere near me.” He pointed for the sky. “Especially five hundred feet up.”

  A little later he got hold of his nerves and took the rear cockpit for the first time, with Annelise up front. He taxied out to the far end of the runway, powered up, and flew a wide loop around the flat.

  He banked back toward the strip and powered down, and as the ground floated up toward the belly of the plane, he had a flash in his brain to the night he’d crashed the glider last fall. A flare of both familiarity and slight panic, triggering the merest hesitation of his hand on the throttle. He looked at the back of Annelise’s helmet-clad head, then glanced at the gauges.

  His attitude indicator showed a perfect level. He glanced back at the ground and watched the last of the sagebrush skim along thirty feet below, and now when he looked ahead he saw not a baseline on a ball diamond coming at him in the dark, but the wide flat threshold of a runway. The doubt diminished. He eased back again on the throttle, watched the ground lift again. He set down with no more jolt than the bounce of a rubber ball.

  Out in front, Annelise raised both arms in the air, like a kid on a roller coaster.

  The next day in the cool of the morning, he flew her a thousand feet above ground level, out across Coal Camp Road and over toward the long flat spine of the Bulls. He kept one eye on the temperature gauge.

  The ship had an oversize radiator in relation to the original design—a standard Chevrolet core split down the middle and stacked in tandem, a trick he’d picked up from other gents who’d tweaked Pietenpol’s specs for higher-elevation flying. She ran at a steady one-fifty, well below the point of a vapor lock or boil-over. He ran up beyond eighty, thirty miles an hour faster than he’d ever gone in a car, and watched the straight-on smooth approach of the mountains.

  He’d thought to bank back around before he’d gotten much above the foothills, but the sloping red soil and scattered firs came on in such short order that he caved to giddy impulse and stayed right on tack. Dunn Mountain rose up high and pyramidlike through the haze to the east, but here the flat-topped spine ran long and tree-studded and many hundreds of feet below, even at the highest knobs and rims.

  They passed across the southern slope and saw the character of the land totally shift. Sagebrush and squat black juniper, clear to the horizon. Dry washes, cutting and forking like arteries of sand and wind. He banked west along the base, saw the white dot of a wagon canvas far below, saw minuscule grazing sheep.

  The terrain reeled almost slowly along from this elevated vantage, although he’d never yet throttled below seventy. They crossed a weird expanse of sculpted sandstone formations, an army of gnomes frozen for all eternity. The north-side coulees with their snarls of wild plum and buffalo berry may as well have been an ocean away.

  He banked north and crossed back over the line of mountains. Annelise had her elbows on the leather pad around the cowling, torquing back at him to grin or make a silly face now and then, but mostly looking out at the endless geography below. Off to the east he could see the ribbon of highway, see the parallel run of rail tracks a little way off, and when his eye followed to where the trestle crossed the river, he caught the boiling clouds of smoke out of the 12:20 coal train. He banked toward it, throttled up and closed the gap.

  He flew down the line of empty cars, the first few of them nearly invisible beneath the billows out of the stack until coalescing like a ghost train through the vapor, then finally a full reveal a dozen or twenty cars back. It struck him as odd to see a roaring freight engine with all its scissoring locomotion and volcanic plumes but hear nothing above the rush of his own soaring bird. He flew over the caboose and banked around once more.

  He caught the train again and flew alongside, steadily gaining until he came up to the roiling exhaust and that frenetic working engine, and just as steadily moved out ahead to leave the long train behind. Now he followed the curve of the empty track toward the highway and the pines and the wide stone rim above Big Coulee.

  Annelise looked back at him again, grinned again. He tried to lift his eyebrows through his goggles. The steeple of the church on the far side of town came into view, and the ball diamond and the New Deal and the tops of the big eastern elms. They cleared the plunge and the entire town slid into the bowl before them, no larger than a Lionel train village at Christmastime.

  He could identify everything in the coulee in little more than a glance. The hospital and the high school, and over here the long roof of the machine shop and the bungalow next door. The REO and McKee’s panel wagon parked out front. The Rialto with its neon marquee set just back from the sidewalk. The rail depot where he’d fought Royce and run from Junior Joe and kissed Katie Calhoun, all in a single night. Even the very street where Yak’s little apartment was, where the girl in the front bay had taken her drubbing and somehow paid in advance for this very view.

  It all looked so gol dern small.

  5

  She had that woozy flush in her languid arms and lazy legs and right to the roots of her curls. Warm water through slim copper pipes. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Well, you do have me where you want me.”

  “Were you the anonymous caller? About the car, with the bullet through the roof?”

  He gave her a mock Who, me?

  She thumped his shoulder. “Can’t you at least tell me that? You told Houston.”

  “No, I did not tell Houston. But I can see how he figured it out.” He studied the missing contents of his bottle. “That day Cy called the shop. I basically told Roy he was better off not knowing.”

  “Surely you didn’t make the call from there, though.”

  “No. I went clear to Ryegate and used the phone at the depot.”

  “Smart.”

  He tapped his skull.

  She handed him her own beer and he took a pull. “But they still haven’t caught them.”

  “Nope. Roy talked to Cy again today, when you and the kid were with the plane.”

  She took her bottle back. “We should’ve left that watch right there in the road.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been kicking myself. At the time, though—poetic justice, and all.”

  She sucked in a breath, blew it back out. “Every time a car’s headlights shine across the wall in the middle of the night, I sit straight up in a panic. Maybe we should get married. Then I could stay here, with this arsenal you keep around.”

  “I do. For better or worse.” He banked his hand like an airplane. “Sorry, flyboy.”

  She laughed a little. “It would fix my mother’s wagon, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Especially after we convert back to the faith of Moroni.”

  “Ho. Even I’m not that vengeful.” She bit a nail, caught herself and stopped. “Do you think they’ll be back?”

  “Hell, who knows. We’re idiots if we don’t consider the possibility. That’s why I dropped the dime so quick, hoping the police would pick ’em up in a day or two and put an end to the whole business.”

  She thought it through. “That could’ve been a problem in its own right. What if they’d spilled the whole thing? You did shoot up two cars, after all.”

  He got up and made a trip to the icebox, sauntered back in the usual unabashed fashion. “I thought about that too. Singing to the cops means admitting to jumping you, which would put them in an even worse fix.”

  “Okay. That may be true.”

  “It’s pure D true. But there’s more to it even. Has to be. Otherwise, why go out on a limb that flimsy, just for a watch? Even a rare one?”

  “Right.”

  “You bet I’m r
ight. Whatever they need that thing for, they don’t want Johnny Law to know one solitary thing about it. So yeah, we probably haven’t heard the last of them.”

  “You’re getting me worried all over again. You know Houston walks home after his shift by himself? What if they ambush him the way they did me?”

  “I can’t imagine they’ll get that bold again.” He swung his legs to the floor. “Plus, he doesn’t wear the watch, so it’s not such a sure thing as it was with you. Get dressed, though.”

  She looked at him.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been wrong before.”

  “I still don’t get it with this flipping watch,” said Huck. He sat behind the desk in the office with Lindy in his lap, held the dead ghoul’s Longines into the lamp’s glow.

  Annelise and McKee had been waiting for him out front of the Rialto, sitting there on the running board of McKee’s Stude. Huck instantly assumed something had gone wrong, both parents flashing in his mind.

  Nothing of the sort, it turned out. Pop had stayed out at the ranch with Mother, and all was quiet so far as anyone knew. But the giddy buzz of the past few days with the airplane had begun to subside. Other business remained.

  “Nobody gets the flipping watch. It’s a dern puzzle, and we need to put it together.”

  “Maybe it is just sentimental,” Annelise said. “Or personal. I can sort of see it. I sure wanted mine back. Or Blix’s, rather.”

  “I’m not buying it. How the hell would they even know they swiped the wrong one? There’s no difference between them. Even the straps are the same.”

  Huck thumb-nailed the hinged cover on the back of the watchcase and studied the intricate assemblage of gears and wheels. Minuscule ratcheting pawls and golden cogs, like a glimpse under the hood of the universe itself. “Only difference I can see is the serial numbers.”

  “You ever memorized a serial number in your life?” said McKee. “On anything? A gun? A motor?”

  Huck drew a blank.

  “Neither have I. Besides, with a watch this unusual, why would it even cross their minds it might not be the right one?” He looked at Annelise. “You still have that satchel?”