“Call the police and take our chances?”
“Nuh-uh. I think she’d say they’re likely to do exactly what they did before. Try to feel us out without putting their necks on the block.”
“Call, you mean. I will admit, every time that phone rings, I about have a heart attack.”
Huck nodded. “And every time, turns out it’s somebody needs a pump fixed or something. Shoot, who knows, maybe we’re luckier than we think. Maybe they did just cut and run already.”
“I hope you’re right. But that was a hell of a stash of illegal gold down there with the stiffs.” McKee started for the workbench after some tool or other, but he stopped himself midstride. “If they do call here looking for you or for Annelise, and if I’m around, do us all a favor. Put me on with them.”
Later Huck would come to think of it as beyond coincidence and more along the lines of the prophetic. The phone did ring, not one full day later. He had that clench in his gut even before he recognized the voice on the other end.
“Houston Finn?”
“You got him.”
“Is Mr. McKee available?”
Huck eased out to the shop. Yak looked at him like he already knew. He hooked a thumb at the office anyway. “Charles Angle. For you.”
He listened from the doorway to McKee’s side of it.
“Yeah . . . Damn straight, and you’re lucky I tend to hit what I aim at . . . Well, you’re welcome, but don’t bet on my generosity twice . . . Yep . . . Yep . . . All right . . .”
McKee turned and sat against the edge of the desk, and his eyes flicked once to Huck in the doorway but otherwise seemed to rove around at nothing in particular while he listened to whatever case or threat or plea came at him through the line.
Finally he said, “Might be a little more complicated, but I follow you. And yeah, I want a written guarantee you chumps are down the road for good . . . I’ll need some time, say a day or two . . . That’ll work. One more thing—from now on, it’s just me, or no dice. Leave women and kids out of it . . . I’m holding you to it. I’ll be waiting.”
He pivoted and set the receiver in the cradle. He turned back to Huck. “You have the watch on you?”
“It’s in the house. Remember, I quit carrying it?”
“How about the satchel, ledger, map—where’s that-all?”
Huck shrugged. “Probably Annie’s room.”
“Run in and take a look. Bring it out if you see it. And bring the watch.”
Huck’s legs felt cemented in place and he realized he was scared to move, not merely out of the doorway but out of the moment, regardless of what McKee had just contrived on the telephone. He’d rather never have heard from them at all, even if it meant looking over his shoulder for a lifetime. “What’s going on?”
McKee shook his head. “I’ve got a day or two to think my way through this. Trust me, the less you know, the better.”
2
Houston uncharacteristically chose of his own election to stay at the ranch one night, for no real reason, which surprised her. Usually he’d sleep over only if he and Roy had some necessary task at hand.
Once the daylight waned he insisted they walk up to the wheat table, to scan for meteors. He did carry a blanket to sit on, but they hadn’t gotten past the barn before he came clean. “They’re back. Charles Angle, Detective Blank. Whoever they really are.”
“Well, of course. Just when I was allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic about one tiny thing. Did they call again?”
“Yesterday. Figured I’d better get you on the page.”
She stopped in her gait and squared off to him. “Are we really going to the field? Are there really meteors, or was that just to get me out of earshot?”
“Actually there might be meteors. The Perseid showers should be starting up pretty quick. Moon’s a little bright, though.”
They kept trudging. “What’s the upshot?”
“I only answered the phone. They wanted to talk to Yak.”
“Oh. And what was that about?”
“I ain’t really sure. I could only hear his side of it, and he wouldn’t let me in on the rest. Told me I was better off not knowing.”
She felt a bit of her old flare coming back, her stinger rising. “Well. You remember what happened last time he made his own plan.”
“Yeah, I do. I remember it got the ship in the air.”
“That is true. Opened Pandora’s box, too.”
They were on the grade already, angling toward the table. The moon was half full or better but at their backs, just up over the black silhouette of a rim. Whether they saw a comet or not, the spray of stars glittering in the velvet was a sight in its own right. A coyote yipped, not so far off.
“I’m pretty sure he’s playing them while he figures out how to turn it all over to the police. I gave him the watch, and he’s got the ledger, the map, all of it. I think he’s trying to keep us out of the hot seat.”
“That does sound like him. Noble, but impossible.”
He chewed on that a moment. “He’s trying to figure out how to spill it without getting locked up himself.”
Bam, there it was, like a comet through the ink of her own distracted brain. She’d spent months agonizing over the jeopardy she’d engineered for Blix, yet somehow never really considered the implications of what McKee had engineered for himself.
“I should get back to town. I feel like a high-grade bitch at the moment.”
“Shoot, I don’t think Yak thinks that at all.”
“That’s not the point, Houston. I missed the ball on this one.”
They reached the top and walked along the field and finally spread the blanket and sat with the moon at their backs. Even the amaranth that had taken over the field had not done much, bone-dry as the summer had been. Still, she could hear the breeze in the stunted stalks and fronds, coming through the dark like a whisper.
“I’m not trying to get you to come back, if you don’t want. And Yak didn’t put me up to it, either.”
She reached over and thumped his knee. “That actually never occurred to me. Guess I really have been down the rabbit hole.”
“Never expected the rabbit hole to be out here, I can tell you that much.” She heard him hesitate and had some idea of what he’d say next, even as he tried out the words. “Is it going okay? With my ma?”
What to tell him, exactly? By now she and her aunt were in the midst of a days-long conversation, or monologue even, as though a stopper had finally exploded out of a fermenting bottle. “This might sound crazy, but there’s more to her than you realize.”
She knew about Gloria’s silent envy of her headstrong sister, knew as well of the commensurate shame that skulked right along with it. She knew her aunt had feared herself a pariah long after the incident with the bicycle, terrified late into her teens that she’d end her days an old maid, unwanted and unloved.
Then the miscarriages, more than one, once she did meet Roy and marry, and no matter how hard Gloria tried and no matter how hard she prayed, she couldn’t shake the gnawing fear that her childhood curse brought those losses to bear as well.
Much as Annelise had come to wish for her cousin and her aunt to find some sort of honest peace, for both their sakes, she herself could see the possibility only because she’d been placed in the trust of each. For all the open confession with her aunt, Annelise never had let on about the airplane, and it was not for her to betray Gloria’s confidence now. The same way she had shrewdly kept Roy in the dark on all manner of things, while dutifully keeping Roy’s confidence on others—that dubious wait for the Rapture, for example, had never come up with either her aunt or her cousin. Tangled webs and divided loyalties, and for what? Surely not to abet these pointless family rifts.
They sat in silence and finally a fast streak bloomed and almost instantly split, a brief bright V tha
t winked out again in an instant. She heard the catch of her own breath.
“That was a good one,” he said. They watched a while longer. Again he broke the silence. “So what all have you been doing out here? Do you just argue, or what?”
She grinned at the stars. “It’s actually been very peaceful. She’s talkative, when she has an ear, and I don’t mean lectures. And we listen to the radio.”
She could practically hear him gnawing on that one. “Sister?”
“In the mornings, when she’s on. But I play whatever I want when her programs are over. And she’s pretty partial to symphonies. Knows a lot about them, actually.”
He had no idea. “How did that happen?”
“Listening to the radio, most likely. She has a lot of time to herself, Houston.”
“Symphonies,” he said.
“Indeed.”
“And she lets you play whatever? Dance music? Without harping?”
She’d been a little surprised herself, at first. Now, nearly a week in, she wasn’t surprised at all. “She’s very much like my mother—stuck in the routine of seeing a child where one no longer exists. Still wearing the same mask she did to talk to a five-year-old, in order to train us up in the way she thinks we’re supposed to go. I don’t think she’s even conscious of it. I think it’s part instinct, and part habit.”
Just this morning Annelise had watched a sleek little doe run a lone coyote off across one of the pastures, while the doe’s spotted fawn flag-tailed it for the trees in the other direction. The doe charged after the yipping and yet steadily retreating canine, lifting and kicking and slashing down with her front hooves, like a cross between a parade majorette and a knife fighter. They went fifty yards at least in this fashion, with the coyote weaving and scrambling to avoid a trouncing, and finally turning tail for the horizon. The doe circled back for her fawn.
It dawned on her then how motherhood and terror were simply manacled together like convicts on a chain gang, with one unable to so much as lift a leg without feeling the nagging jolt of the other. In the case of a person like Gloria, the necessary instinct took on even greater implications, and there was the rub. It was one thing to make sure a toddler didn’t chase a ball into a street, but quite another to suffer the endless, foreboding panic of eternal judgment. That burden ceased to be something like a prisoner’s weight, and more along the lines of a cross to bear.
She could tell he was hesitating, but finally he said it. “Was it Miss Earhart that made her come around? See herself in you? I can barely remember it, but Sister disappeared that time . . .”
“That was probably part of it. Also part of why I let my own guard down and told her some things, really private things. I think she saw she could let hers down, too.”
“Or take the mask off.”
Touché. “Yes, exactly. She realized she could drop the mask, and talk to me like a grown-up.”
“You told her about Yak?”
She actually laughed. “Um, no. I think that would’ve had the opposite effect. But what I did tell her, she could relate to.”
She herself had experienced flashes of an almost grown-up uncertainty in the past couple of weeks, even about her own raw impulses. If she’d simply stayed with Houston at the carnival that night, she doubted she’d have ever been jumped on a darkened street.
Then of course McKee had gone on his ridiculous rampage with the Sharps. Would the one have ever happened without the other? Almost certainly not, and now it sounded like he was having his own second thoughts. Why all these dire consequences, for the mere sin of lunging at something, just for the fun of it?
It was like her cousin could read her mind. “I’m sorry they haven’t found her yet, Annie. Miss Earhart.”
“That’s all of us, buddy. Including your mother.”
“Do you think she’s still out there?”
She took it face-on. “No. I don’t. She probably should have quit the whole show when she wiped out in Hawaii back in the spring. Taken it as a sign.”
“A sign? You mean from God?”
“I don’t know, Houston. But she took a big risk, and here we are.” She sucked in the cooling air. “Now they’re even calling off the search.”
“Yeah, I heard. On the radio.”
The low hoot of an owl sounded, from which direction she couldn’t quite tell.
“You know they’re talking about banning exploratory flights after this? ‘Stunt flying’ is what they’re calling it.” She snickered. “Somehow I doubt this would be the terminology, if it were a man.”
“Well, I doubt they’d have thrown half the U.S. Navy at the search, if it hadn’t been a woman.”
She wanted to hit him, more so because he was probably right. If Lindbergh had gone down and vanished a decade ago, it would’ve been entirely on Lindbergh. How things had changed, the further the envelope got pushed.
“I haven’t told anybody this, but I think you ought to know. You remember how hot it was, the day of the parade?”
“I’ll never forget.” She shifted her eyes to his long dark mass beside her. “What happened?”
He stalled, but not for long. “I . . . made a big mistake. Got too big for my britches, basically, and took Katie up in the ship. And I couldn’t get the dern thing to climb, Annie. Had to dive into the valley, below even field elevation. Couldn’t make three hundred feet clear to the Bulls, motor running so hot I couldn’t get any speed. Just stuck. It was like flying in a casket. Most scared I’ve ever been in my life.”
“Gulp,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Kept a line for the mountains, hoping I’d hit an updraft if I could hold out. Tried not to crap my pants for what seemed like thirty-three hours, but was really only ten minutes maybe. Luckily this big bank of clouds rolled in at the same time, and I got us under ’em. Like hitting an elevator—altitude came way up, temperature came down. Pulled it out, I guess.”
“Babe, I hate to say it. Your airplane is brilliant, but let’s face it—it doesn’t work well enough. It’s more dangerous than it should be.”
“I know it,” he said, so automatically it surprised her. Evidently his jaunt with Katie really did scare the lights out of him. “To be fair to Mr. Pietenpol, it probably works better where he lives than it does out here. And it works fine here, too, if the weather’s right.”
“What’s Yak’s line? If you don’t like the weather in Montana, give it ten minutes?”
“Right. I already thought of that.” He went quiet again, and she could tell he had something else in his head. “You ever heard of this guy William Faulkner? Writes stories about the South, I guess? According to Rolly, anyway.”
Now this was not what she could have predicted, God love him. “Yes, I read a novel by him, and it was really . . . unusual, I guess.”
“Like dern near impossible to follow, you mean?”
“Well, difficult would be another way to put it.”
As I Lay Dying. Her ninth-grade English teacher had told her about it after learning she’d already encountered Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She’d been totally put off at first, mainly because she’d loathed every trashy, malformed, bucktoothed and gap-toothed and no-toothed character in the book, and could not for the life of her imagine why such an unrepentant collection of knuckle-draggers merited such excruciatingly lofty language.
Now, in this exact moment, she had the sense she may have been wrong. “What does William Faulkner have to do with your airplane?”
“Thing is—this book? Raleigh gave it to me, because it’s supposedly about barnstormers. It’s called Pylon.”
The night air had cooled considerably, and she grabbed the edge of the blanket and pulled as much around her as she could. “I don’t know that one.”
“It’s just the way you said—sort of difficult. I got about thirty pages in and had no idea what was
what, who was who, who was supposed to be talking, nothing. So I pretty much gave up.
“None of that’s the point, though. I’ve been stewing over that Ford motor myself, and I think this book may have accidentally solved it for me. There’s a part in the beginning where they’re tearing an airplane down in a hangar, and he says something about a supercharger on the top end. You know what that is?”
She’d heard the term before, no doubt in one of those shop-talk conversations involving a lot of random numbers and codelike terminology. What had Houston just said about Faulkner? No idea what was what, and who was who . . .
“Not the faintest,” she said, “other than I gather it makes an engine more powerful.”
“You know what a Duesenberg is, though, or an Auburn Speedster?”
“Big, glamorous cars.”
“For the last few years they’ve been supercharging Dueseys and Auburns, and Cords, too. The basic engine ain’t any different, just outfitted with an impeller to increase the air and fuel going in. Bumps the power by a third or better. I’ve been studying up, and I’m pretty sure I can build a supercharger for the Ford.”
If six months ago she had heard something along these lines from any not-quite-fifteen-year-old boy, she would’ve automatically rolled her eyes. “How complicated is it?”
“It’s really not. You remember that busted Hoover vacuum in the back of the shop? I’m pretty sure I can convert the housing and impeller from that. Then I’ll have to work up some brackets and whatnot. Nothing but a thing.”
She smiled to herself in the dark. “Well, you’ve sure got to do something. I’m glad we at least agree on that.”
The meteors had really started to fly, three or four of them in the last minute alone. She heard the owl again, from back toward the house and barn. He said, “Seems to me like I’ve got to do something just to get you back in the cockpit.”
She ribbed him again. “Always thinking of me.”
“It’s true, though.”
“I know it. Don’t worry—I’m still me. Somewhere in here. I’ll get back up again.”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll build the charger, quick as I can, and put her to the test. If it solves the power issue, you’ve got to try her out for your own self.”
Cloudmaker Page 35