Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  Mother stood and went to the sink. She let the water run from the tap and delivered a glass to Annelise. “Drink this, Annie. I wish we had ice, but we don’t. I hope you’re right, and I hope they find her.”

  Annelise took swallow after swallow, and Huck could practically see the cold moisture on her breath when she lowered the emptied glass and blew the air from her lungs. Mother filled the glass again, and Annelise took it and this time pressed it to her cheek. “If they don’t find her out there soon, even I’m going to start praying.”

  “That would be a start,” Mother told her.

  2

  Shortly into the parade the next morning Huck realized he’d dodged a bullet, unfortunately at Miss Earhart’s expense but then nothing ever did seem to happen anymore without some equal but opposite consequence. Just about the time you pinched a watch off a guy who had no further use for it, your cousin breezed in with the exact same model. Just about the time you screwed up the courage to ask a girl to dance, your mother swooped in like a brood hen and pecked you right back to the coop. He reckoned Pop had it about right—no such thing as a free lunch.

  Still, buzzing the festivities would not have led to a heroic finale. Half the parade consisted as usual of either horseback riders or horse-drawn wagons, a few converted into rudimentary floats and others lugging flag-waving or confetti-throwing passengers.

  By ten in the morning the mercury had already climbed toward ninety. The animals were dark with sweat around cinches and harnesses, and skittish as mustangs from the strings of firecrackers that kept tearing off along the street. If he had flown overhead at seventy-­five or a hundred feet, motor howling along the storefronts, the likely result would’ve been a stampede right down Main Street. He could already imagine Cy roaring up to the runway to punch him right in the mouth.

  “Wish these fools would knock it off with the crackers,” Pop said loudly. He glared at a couple of seventh-grade boys who’d already shown themselves to be the fools in question. They slunk away.

  Pop had his hat kicked to the back of his head. “I was thinking to trailer Wilbur and Dixon in, so’s you and Annie could ride too, but now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  Annelise had pleaded out of the parade altogether, which even Mother seemed to take in stride. Then again, his cousin at this point looked a bit like a wrung-out dishrag.

  Katie Calhoun, on the other hand. A dish, but definitely no rag. Huck spotted her in the parade and gave a start, part nervous shock and part thrill. She’d been gone nearly a month, spending time with relatives over in Butte. She’d sent him a couple of postcards, but he hadn’t seen her since that crazy night at the carnival. Now she rode down Main Street in loose formation with the Big Coulee Girls’ Bicycle Club, in fits and starts because of the pace of the hay wagon just ahead.

  She spied Houston at a pause and waved, pretty enthusiastically. Huck gave a feeble wave back, feeling Mother’s presence beside him as though she suddenly loomed ten feet tall. Katie blew him a kiss.

  “Why, Gilroy. I think that was for Houston. I think this young man has an admirer.” Mother shielded her eyes as the girls started forward again on their bikes. She turned to Huck. “My land, she’s tall. What’s her name, Houston?”

  Huck could feel his blood come up. He forced his eyes from the bicycles. “Who, Katie?”

  “Katie. Well. Maybe you could invite her to church, I’m sure I’d remember if I’d seen her there before.”

  “Oh. She hasn’t been, she’s”—he nearly blurted Catholic but luckily caught himself—“new in town.” This hardly made sense, because how on earth would she be part of the school bicycle club? “Pretty new, anyway.”

  The hay wagon moved ahead, and Katie pumped her legs to get her bike zinging along again. “Those bicycles still make me nervous for young girls,” Mother said. “I hope she’s careful on that thing.”

  Pop gave him a wink, little more than a flick of one eyelid and that may well have been from sweat. He had rivulets seeping out from beneath his hat, the felt around the band already darkening like the damp streaks on the horses. He pointed down the street at the oncoming float, this one pulled by a Ford pickup. A young woman in a spangled gown waved from a throne bedecked with the red, white, and blue and situated atop a coal cart on a short length of track.

  He swabbed his brow. “Speaking of pretty girls, here comes the new Coal Queen.”

  The parade ended shortly after eleven. The temperature had climbed above ninety.

  Mother and Pop planned to head out for the ranch to feed and water the animals, then drive back in for the church picnic. On the walk back to the bungalow Huck spied a contingent of the bicycle club in front of the café across the street, including Katie. A throng of other kids stood around as well. Including Bobby Duane.

  Katie straddled her bicycle. Bobby Duane straddled her front tire, with his grubby paws all over the handlebars. She was laughing again, and Huck felt the mercury surge in his blood again, and this time not from embarrassment. “I think I’ll pass on the ranch.”

  Pop clapped him on the back. Mother fanned herself now with a church bulletin dredged up out of her purse. She didn’t look wilted, though. In fact, she appeared more vibrant than Huck could remember in quite a while. She said, “Oh?”

  Huck stepped off the curb. “Think I’ll invite Katie to the church picnic.”

  “And I think that is a fine idea, Houston,” she said behind him.

  Which is how he wound up retrieving his own bicycle from the shop an hour later and pedaling with Katie Calhoun straight up Coal Camp Road.

  3

  There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.

  —Charles A. Lindbergh, 1927

  He knew within one minute he’d made a colossal mistake. His first time flying without Annelise, and already he was too big for his britches.

  He’d barely gotten off the runway and into the thin hot air, and now with the sagebrush and drought-wrung ground crawling just beneath the belly of the plane, he bit the bullet and dove down into the valley near the river, below the elevation of the airfield. His temperature gauge had already edged beyond what he regarded as a comfortable operating range, and at a speed that would barely keep him in the air.

  Keep them in the air, actually. That was the unfortunate irony. It was true he’d known to use a beefier radiator than Mr. Pietenpol called for in his original plan, on account of the elevation difference between Montana and Minnesota. He knew as well that even on a blistering day like this, he could probably fly the ship solo with little trouble.

  That additional weight of the otherwise innocent girl in front, though—there was the kicker. He’d brought her to the plane purely to impress her, to put Bobby Duane Boyd in his knuckle-dragging place, and now his own evil pride might well be flying barely ahead of a very literal fall.

  Katie appeared none the wiser, which made the whole grim circumstance all the more tragic. She craned around in the seat and peered at him through Annie’s goggles, off-colored eyes bright as a hawk’s and her teeth in a delirious grin. She blew him another kiss, and his fear came up like bile. He tried to grin back.

  Holy cow, Houston. Her words came again to him now. You built this?

  That’s why there’s no Glider Number Two, he’d told her. I built Airplane Number One instead.

  She’d had one hand on a strut, the other on the padding around the cockpit as she peered in at the gauges, took in the controls. Houston, it’s beautiful. She reached out and gave his shoulder a petulant little shove. How come you never told me about it?

  You’re the first who knows. I only put her in the air a week ago.

  They’d kissed awhile there against the fuselage. He’d tried to go slow.

  Finally she pulled back from him, her hands still around his neck. She needs a different name, though. Airplane
Number One’s too . . . experimental, or something.

  Yeah, he said. I thought about that. The Spirit of Big Coulee maybe?

  Katie looked past him out at the sky. How about Cloudmaker?

  This girl. Turned out she was right on the first score, even if she didn’t have a clue. Charming as the name she chose surely was—Cloudmaker—experimental was much closer to the truth. He’d managed to coax the ship to just under three hundred feet AGL, which probably seemed lofty enough to her but in terrifying reality was anything but, especially when his temp was already nearing 170 and the thought of pushing the motor any harder put God’s own chokehold right around Huck’s scrawny neck. And her lovely one, whether she knew it or not.

  Height. What a stupid, stupid slap. On the street in front of the café he’d had this moment of jubilation when it dawned on him that not only was he taller than Bobby Duane but Katie was as well, by a solid two inches. He began right then to think of that pigskin-addled jackass as Shrimp, or Squirt. He’d gotten up on the walk and checked his posture in the café’s glass, made sure nothing about him slouched. Katie kept grinning at him. Shorty let go of her handlebars. How pathetic it all seemed now.

  The Bull Mountains shimmered out ahead, an apparition in a furnace. But above them, something else. Cumulus clouds, bunching over the ridge. Katie must have seen them back on the runway and so came up with the name. Now she peered over the cowling, watching the ground as it reeled below.

  He had fog at the top of his goggles, a bead of sweat rolling down the right lens. Couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside the glass. Must be inside, otherwise the push of air would surely splatter any droplet into a hundred tiny polliwogs. He was as hot as he’d ever been in his life, hot as the engine out front belching like a breath out of hell. All he’d wanted to do was impress a girl.

  Now all he wanted was to bank around and head right back for the runway and he knew he couldn’t, not at this speed that hardly kept him in the air to begin with, let alone climb back even to the altitude of the airfield. But he looked at those clouds and looked at those hills, creeping closer through the mirage, and he thought of something.

  The clouds gathered out of the north. In the past he’d watched both raptors and scavengers harness the air currents beneath formations very much like these, watched them fix their wings and soar up and up, as though floating rather than flying.

  At the same time, a good blast of wind could pluck a grounded airplane by the wing and toss it right on its back, hence the stakes and tie-downs. Despite the terrifying absence of climbing ability at this particular moment, the basic science was unavoidable—he and Katie were limping along in what amounted to a giant kite. All they needed was an updraft.

  He had sweat in his eyebrows inside the goggles, then sweat running into his eyes inside the goggles, and finally he reached up and tore the goggles loose. The sudden lick of air felt like balm in Gilead. He swiped thumb and forefinger along each eyebrow, felt the salted moisture gather and drip and fly away with the wind. The stick in his other hand felt slick as a greased eel.

  Katie looked back at him, gave another happy grin. She had no idea. She put her hand out over the cowling and pointed down. He looked and saw what she saw—a little band of pronghorn in the sage, heads lifted in curiosity but otherwise not particularly worried about this giant insect buzzing in a slow line overhead. Then they were past.

  He hoped Annelise was right about Amelia, hoped she was out there at this very moment, floating in her buoyant Lockheed, flare gun in hand and rescue a matter of time. A silver speck on an endless sea. How amazing that her will to achieve could be taken so seriously that half the Pacific Fleet was even now steaming along in what might well go down as the biggest rescue operation in history.

  He remembered Annelise’s worry about the plane overheating, as though she’d had some premonition about this or about Amelia, or both. She’d probably slap his face all over again if she knew what he’d gotten himself into. What he’d gotten Katie into. He felt like slapping himself.

  The line of mountains began to crystallize through the heat. He’d kept their speed at forty, and even at that hobbled pace the engine’s temperature had crept another five degrees north. If he could keep on like this just a few more minutes, he’d have them to the base of the slope and almost certainly to a rising column beneath that billowing stack of clouds. Slow and steady. A matter of time.

  Jump.

  Stall. The seconds were beginning to feel like agonizing hours, as though he had flown into some madhouse warp of not simply time but calculation, and the unnerving potential for miscalculation, and somewhere in between the two, the unavoidable anxiety of the second-guess.

  He realized his hand had gone of its own impulse to the throttle knob. The temptation to shove the thing forward and double his speed and close this infernal gap had become nearly more than he could resist. Surely he could risk another ten-degree spike.

  His own head had begun to overheat, that was the problem. He thought to tear the leather helmet loose the way he’d torn away the goggles a moment ago, and let that roiling pressure bleed off with the wind. Maybe he’d have clarity then, an end to this foggy delirium of choice and counter-choice and damned dire consequence.

  He forced his hand back from the throttle. He was being tested, that’s what this was. What had Pastor White said the other morning, about pride going before a fall? That’s exactly the trap he’d flown himself into, trying to impress Katie. What had Mother said, about Miss Earhart? Look where such folly had led . . .

  It struck him that he was not in fact praying his way through this, hadn’t fallen back on the old Please, God, please even one time, and didn’t begin to now that the realization brought it to mind. He realized he wasn’t at all certain whether God looked down in the first place, whether to help, or dish out doom, or any of it.

  He didn’t know if God existed. Just flat couldn’t say one way or the other. Was this the panic and heat and delirium talking? Wasn’t this the sort of circumstance that generally forced people in the other direction?

  A foxhole conversion, is what Pastor White would call it. That moment under fire when a gent’s looming demise made his own life flash through the machine gun strobes, and he’d pledge anything for a miracle.

  Of course the opposite could also be true—the apostle Peter, say, denying his own faith before the rooster crowed. So where did that leave him, Houston Lachlan Finn, right here and now? Somewhere smack in the middle, he guessed, unable to tell where faith in God ended, and fear of his own mother began. It was the realization of a lifetime.

  He felt the updraft the instant he flew into it. Or thought he did—maybe the physical sensation was actually just a trick of the mind, triggered by the cue that the sagebrush and undulations in the ground below had begun to shrink. He looked to the altimeter and watched the needle climb nearly a hundred feet in a matter of seconds, that great column of clouds almost directly overhead now. He looked at the temperature gauge, watched the needle there come slightly down.

  The wall of the mountains jutted a half mile off. He pushed the throttle knob ahead, squinted against the surge of wind, and edged the stick back. The ship climbed like a rocket. He heard himself whoop like a war chief. Katie craned back with a grin as wide as the sky and whooped along with him.

  He eyed his temperature and, when it appeared to hold steady, throttled up again. His altimeter gained three hundred feet in nearly the blink of an eye.

  They were above the ridge of the Bulls now, still rising on the draft. He banked beneath the clouds, then leveled off to fly southwest down the spine of the mountains. He ran the throttle nearly fully forward and came back on the stick, took her up to five thousand feet and called it good. He backed his speed off and merely cruised for a stretch, until his heart settled.

  He looked up at the bright billowing mass and instantly squinted and shied, as though a camera
bulb had popped inside a darkened room. He shielded his eyes and looked again. The floor of the column seemed barely above them, dense enough to appear nearly calcified, and blinding indeed with that concentrated platinum light. He banked the plane again so Katie could see, too, out beyond the edge of the wing above her head. He looked over the low side and took in the haze from the heat across the land below, stagnant as murk on a pond.

  The air beneath the cloud came on so cool he wished he could actually drink it, just gulp it down like water. He leveled again and watched his gauges and realized they were gaining altitude, as though the bright billows above pulled at them with an attractor beam right out of Amazing Stories, some mad inventor’s ionic elevator.

  He realized he could let the updraft carry him right up into the mist, and no sooner did the thought cross his mind than he shoved it back out again. He’d already gambled enough, and who knew what he might encounter within that blinding mass.

  He banked back toward the landing field and throttled up, and in a few minutes he’d gotten beyond the reach of the clouds. He flew without a hitch across the sandstone and sage to the runway. He buzzed the limp sock once, made a wide sweep and set them flat on the ground, like a feather alighting on a cobweb.

  He taxied to the tie-downs and cut the prop and just sat there. The engine ticked out front like a blazing stove. Was that the hiss of steam as well? Probably so. He tilted his wrist to read the big Longines, the first time he’d ever properly worn it, again to impress Katie. They’d been in the air barely twenty minutes. He felt as though he’d aged twenty years.

  Katie tore her harness loose, tore helmet and goggles free as well. She pivoted up onto her knees and looked back at him, hair a tangle of damp black waves and teeth as white and blinding as those towering clouds.

  “Houston,” she breathed, “this is the best day of my whole entire life.”

  4

  Annelise on the other hand seemed to descend ever deeper into the trench, even two days along. She’d barely left her bedroom, and never so much as got out of her pajamas. She just sat there with the radio, tuning through song after song after serial, one end of the bandwidth to the other and then back in the other direction, for fear she might miss something clear down where she’d started.