She shook her head. “I sort of forgot about it in all the excitement with the airplane.”
“Is it here or at the ranch?”
“I don’t think I took it out of the barn. It’s probably still sitting there with the saddles.”
“We need to get it. They might want that back even worse than the watch.”
Her mouth had that taut little set. “Maybe it’s time we spilled this whole thing. It’s not like anyone can stop the airplane at this point.”
“You’re probably right,” said McKee. “Can’t do much until morning, though.”
“I’m worried about my ma,” Huck said. “She spends a lot of time out there by herself.”
Now that the words were out, he felt a flash of guilt along with the queasiness of dread. The airplane had been such a supreme distraction the past few days, he’d cheerfully forgotten everything else.
McKee at least tried to come to the rescue. “Well, your pop’s out there with her now, so don’t fret on it. We’ll come up with something.”
6
“Are you totally sure she won’t overheat? It’s supposed to hit nearly a hundred today.”
They’d come back to the airstrip after breakfast, delivered by McKee, who then immediately left to fetch the satchel from the ranch.
“Totally sure?” He stood on the captain’s chair, tilting a fuel can. “Or just sure enough?”
“I said totally.”
The gasoline crept toward the inlet and he eased off. “It’s a mechanical device. There is no totally.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You’re starting to sound like McKee.”
Who wouldn’t, it occurred to him, go up in the plane himself. Probably better not to bring that up. “We haven’t had a lick of trouble so far. And if we do, I’ve been scoping out landing spots for six months now. I know this country like the back of my hand.”
“McKee,” she repeated. “He’s created a monster.”
“You’re starting to sound like my ma.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I barely slept a wink last night. I’m a little frayed.”
Huck hopped to the ground. “You want the controls? I know I’ve been hogging them.”
“You’ve earned it. Forget about this other stuff.” She fought back a yawn—he saw it in the flare of her nostrils. “Especially today. I’m too tired.”
He had been trying to forget the other stuff, not entirely successfully. They had an engine, hence a full-fledged bird, but at what risk? He didn’t want his mother to stand in the way of his airplane, nor did he want the secrecy to put her in actual danger. Even Pop was in the dark about half of it, and Huck was pretty sure even Pop would blow his stack at the whole unvarnished truth.
“Okay,” he said. He looked at the sun, still well in the east and blushing the long lower edges of the stratus clouds. “We’ll be back before the real heat sets in. Besides, it’s not like we’re way out over an ocean or something.”
They flew across Haystack Butte, and a few minutes after that saw the barn and the house and shelterbelts of the ranch.
Huck backed off the throttle and buzzed the wheat table and the buffalo jump, then circled and took her straight over the yard. No sign of the REO or McKee’s rig, either—evidently he’d already been here and departed again. But even at five hundred feet they could see the chickens pecking about outside their run, the horses in the pasture east of the barn.
Then he spotted the lady of the place herself, working away at the well pump, which made him feel a little sad, because she always struggled with the whining thing more than a taller or stronger person would. She straightened at the drone of the engine, and Huck was pretty sure she was shielding her eyes to take in the unusual sight of a low-flying crate.
He could set down on the access road at the edge of the wheat table, and it crossed his mind just to go on and be done with it. Let the secret out. Maybe she’d even be proud.
He needed the whole business off his conscience, and soon. Needed to talk to Pop, needed to spill it with Cy. Take whatever medicine he had coming, which he was increasingly certain would not entail losing his airplane. Maybe they’d make him take real lessons down in Billings and get a real license or something, but nobody could call him a harebrained dreamer anymore.
The thing to do was to take Cy and Mother up to the airfield and give them a proper demonstration. That was the grown-up solution. Landing in a wheat field out of the blue would be exactly the sort of dern-fool stunt they all equated with dern-fool kids.
He banked around and buzzed over again and saw Mother with her water pail, shuffling toward the chicken house. He had to admit he felt more relief than he could have predicted to see for himself that she was indeed still safe from the hazards of the actual dern-fool shenanigans. The guilt stuck in his gorge all over again.
He leveled out and throttled up. He pointed the prop toward town.
He brought her down over the strip and kissed the ground with his roughest bump yet, nothing too severe but a blow to his pride all the same. Annelise didn’t seem to react.
Yak was waiting for them. He climbed out of his rig as Huck taxied over, hooked his thumbs into his pockets. Something about that stance alone triggered another flare of anxiety, and Huck realized that worry over his mother’s well-being had overshadowed other possibilities. The goons could just as easily pay a visit to Raleigh, and even Katie. The implications went outward in ever-expanding circles, like rings in a pond, and here he was, the plopping stone at the center of the whole rippling mess.
Evidently Annelise had the same premonition, because when he got near McKee and killed the clattering motor, she tore her goggles and helmet loose as though trying to escape a trapped hornet. McKee took a couple of hesitant steps. “What is it?” she said.
McKee came up and crouched beneath the wing and set his hands on the leather trim. “It may be a false alarm, keep that in mind. Too soon to know.”
“Is it Pop? Or Rolly?” Huck said.
“Huh? No, no, it’s not the crooks, the watch, none of that.”
Annelise came out of her seat so fast that she bonked her head on the underside of the wing and sat right back down. “Something with my parents?”
He had his hand on her shoulder now, almost as though he wanted to hold her in place. “They’re fine, they’re all fine. Listen to me. It’s Miss Earhart. She’s gone missing.”
Annelise looked as though she couldn’t decide whether she’d heard him correctly. “What do you mean, missing? Crashed?”
McKee shook his head. “No word yet. The news broadcasts are all abuzz, though. She went out of radio contact and never made it wherever she was heading—”
“Howland Island.” She looked up at the wing and let out a breath. Her head swiveled back to McKee with the speed of an owl’s. “This better not be some stupid joke of yours . . .”
He shook his head. “You know me better than that.”
She nodded now, her mouth little more than a smudge across her face. She raised herself out of the seat more carefully this time. “I need to get to a radio.”
Zeniths
1
You will find that patriotism is close akin to religion and that love of country and love of God go hand in hand for the success of the land and glory of the Kingdom of the Lord.
—Aimee Semple McPherson
“I saw an airplane just yesterday,” Mother told them. “Right out over the house.” She clutched Huck’s arm even tighter. “I wondered whether it was about to crash, as low as it seemed to be. Then not five minutes later they interrupted The Gospel Hour with a report about that poor foolish woman vanishing halfway over the ocean.”
Under normal circumstances Huck couldn’t imagine Annelise letting this last slip by without a barrage of retaliatory lip, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Even Pastor White had
taken time out from his Independence Day sermon to address the news, which pretty much demolished Huck’s plan to ease Mother into the existence of the airplane anytime soon. An example of pride going before a fall, no less, although at the close of the service the pastor had at least offered a prayer for Miss Earhart’s safety and recovery.
Huck wondered whether he should have filed a prayer request for his cousin, too. She’d taken to her room with the radio the day before, and when he jerked awake in the middle of the night to the shred of firecrackers down the street, he could hear its low hum yet through the crack beneath the door. She looked so frazzled now he doubted she’d slept at all. Even Mother on first glance asked if she might be coming down with something.
They stopped off at the New Deal for groceries. Annelise found a quarter in her purse and bought a newspaper. Not the Big Coulee Dispatch but the Sunday Billings Gazette, which was twice the size. She took the paper out front and sat on the bench beneath the patriotic bunting draped overhead. Huck went out after her.
“Hey.”
She was scanning the front page. “Hey.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing we don’t already know. CHANCES FOR EARHART RESCUE FADE. NAVY PRESSES WIDE HUNT FOR MISSING FLYER.” She gave the paper a brusque fold and started fanning herself. Tilted her blue-gray eyes at him and bobbed her head like a person about to nod off.
“I know it. Don’t think I’ve ever been this dern hot.” Even in the shade he could feel the sweat rising through his hair like oil from a seep.
“It’s fucking sweltering.”
Down the street a riot of laughter went up from the guys in front of the tavern. “I think they heard you.”
“Who cares.”
He was only joking, which of course she knew. Didn’t she? “Can I sit down?”
She tried to smile at him.
He eased to the far end of the bench. “Gonna be a record, I guess. The heat, I mean. Wheat’s gonna have a tough time next spring, we don’t get some moisture in the ground.”
She nodded and fanned.
Huck ran his fingers through his hair, felt the slipperiness of his own scalp. He flicked sweat toward the road. “I had it in mind to buzz the parade tomorrow, just right down the middle of the street, with the old Stars and Stripes flying off the wing. Make a big bank out over the ball diamond and come back over again.”
Annelise chewed her lip. “That isn’t a bad idea, Houston. Or wouldn’t have been, if it wasn’t for all this.” She flapped her folded paper around.
“Thing is, Independence Day is the only regular holiday my ma really gets excited about. Almost like it’s Christmas. She comes in for the parade every year, even in the middle of the week. That’s how much she likes it. I thought maybe I could fly over with the flag, and she’d think it was really patriotic, and Pop could take her up to the airstrip so she’d know it was me all along.”
“Oh, Houston. I wish it were all different.” Now she did force a smile. “At least you’ve got the airplane to begin with.”
He watched Junior Joe Candy slow to a stop in the police cruiser in front of the tavern, talk to the gents out front. Across the street, another burst of firecrackers ripped out of the alley. Despite the heat, everything seemed pretty amiable.
He eyed the door on the New Deal. “I guess it’s like Yak says. If it ain’t one damn thing, it’s some other damn thing.”
They ate cold sandwiches for Sunday supper to avoid firing the stove.
Pop dragged the fans in from the shop and cranked them full bore, which helped a little but also dampened the Independence Day broadcast out of Great Falls. Mother and Annelise each dragged a chair to either side of the little Zenith and sat there like a pair of unlikely peas in the same steaming pod, right down to the tendrils rising around their ears in the sweep of the fans.
The truce didn’t last. A rendition of “The Yankee Doodle Boy” closed out the hour, and Huck saw Annelise tense up. He picked up the words tragedy and South Pacific amid the rush of the blades and leaned closer to the radio.
“. . . have steamed from Hawaii to join the U.S. cutter Itasca in the search, including the battleship U.S.S. Colorado, with three small scouting planes on board . . .”
“Now this is hardly—” Mother began, but Annelise stopped her with a sound like a stab and a glare as frigid as the day was hot. Huck looked across the table. Pop gave him a stoic wink.
The report went on. Several weak radio signals had been picked up that were believed to be from the missing aviatrix in the hours after her last verified dispatch. It was not known whether her eighty-thousand-dollar flying laboratory had gone down over land or sea. Other naval vessels stood by, expected to join the search as well. “And now a return to our holiday revue, brought to you this hot hot Fourth of July by the cool cool cool Crystal Creamery Company . . .”
Mother shook her head. “Eighty thousand dollars. What did they call it? A ‘flying laboratory’? Now imagine the cost of these rescue shenanigans, and to the American taxpayer, no less. I’m praying for her of course, but do you see where folly leads? Straight to the bottom of the ocean.”
Huck watched the flush rise in Annelise’s face, and he knew it wasn’t from the heat.
“The flying lab, as they called it, had gigantic custom fuel tanks. Has them, I mean. If she ran out of gas and was forced down on the water, the empty tanks alone would float her like a bobber.”
Huck remembered what the Missoula pilot had said, about walking on water. Despite the swelter he felt a chill up his spine, felt the hairs stand on his arms.
His mother nodded. “I hope you’re right. I don’t wish the poor woman any harm. But modern people keep forgetting that Almighty God did not put us here to chase our own glory. He gave us these brains we have, this curiosity, to seek and know Him.”
To Huck’s shock, Pop spoke. “Well. There might be more than one way to skin that cat, comes right down to it.”
Mother looked less surprised than Huck would have figured. “Have your cake and eat it too, you mean? Serve Christ by serving yourself? How do you explain this missing airplane, then?”
Pop shrugged. “Don’t feel any need to. Life ain’t safe, never has been. And whatever confounded reason there is to the world, toiling in boredom because boredom is safe ain’t much of a way to honor the life we’ve got. Seems to me.”
“Oh, I understand, maybe more than you realize. I’m glad Christopher Columbus raised his sails when he did. I’m even glad Orville and Wilbur Wright learned to fly.”
She looked at Huck. “It’s true. Minister’s sons, with exemplary lives. And yes, more souls can be saved because of airplanes. God has a mission for everyone, and every age has its own opportunities. But God doesn’t change with the age. He still wants us to put our faith in Him, even now, not in our own newfangled Babels. Give the glory to Him, rather than boast of it for ourselves.”
She glanced to her niece. “I don’t know what’s in Miss Earhart’s heart, whether she knows Jesus or not. But we live in a country that’s fighting for its soul, and she’s this new America’s idea of a heroine. It’s not Susan B. Anthony any longer, or Harriet Beecher Stowe. It’s not even Annie Oakley.
“I have no doubt that Miss Earhart has some fine qualities. But the fact remains, she is a figure for an age that has lost its compass. And I choose my words carefully, for the hand of God does not dabble in mere coincidence.”
To Huck’s surprise, Mother reached across the space between the chairs and put her hand on Annelise’s knee. Annelise looked at Mother’s flushed face and said, “Do you believe God’s watching out for her?”
Mother sat back in her chair. “I believe God hears whoever calls upon Him with an honest and open heart. But the heart can be hard, and God is not accountable to anyone. He will bless those who invite Him in, and He will curse those who don’t, and I worry for the so
ul of our entire nation. Look at this curse, upon us even now—a great depression, and years of failed crops, years of locust plague, years of drought. We’re like the Israelites in the wilderness.
“Did you know that this heat spell is a record? On the birthday of our country, and on a Sunday, no less. Is that coincidence?” She shook her head, and her fine white tendrils lifted again with the arc of the fan. “I don’t believe it is.”
Annelise’s own curls settled in turn. “I refuse to believe there’s anything wrong with trying to be good at something. With following your own dreams, and . . . okay, your own heart, if you want to get right to the center. She’s showed a whole lot of us that we don’t have to settle for what we’re offered, or for somebody else’s notion of our proper place. A woman’s proper place. Obviously she inspired me. And okay—thank God.”
“But, Annie, she’s not done any of it for God, for His glory or His purpose. She’s done it for what? The fun of it. By her own account. There’s more at stake than that.”
Pop started to say something, but Mother ran right on over top of him. At moments like this, it was easy to forget she was only five feet tall and generally not robust.
“I understand her allure to so many young women just like Annelise. I understand it and it worries me, because she’s presented as the sunshiny model for the future—forward-thinking and sophisticated, next to the old fuddies in the Dark Ages. Out with the old, in with the new. But tell me, where’s all that gotten her now?” She turned back to her niece. “On the birthday of our beautiful, suffering country even. Is that coincidence? I don’t believe it is.”
Huck kept expecting Annelise to find her stinger and strike, and he sat there with dread’s big fist in his chest, wishing it didn’t always have to come to this. But when he glanced back at his cousin, she simply seemed overheated and otherwise out of gas.
“Actually we don’t know where it’s gotten her, at the moment,” she finally said. “That’s the trouble. But she can float, for a long time.”
Cloudmaker Page 28