Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  He’d filled out somehow, practically overnight it seemed. Eating lately like a starveling at a king’s banquet, and no longer requiring that cinch of a belt with its auxiliary hole. Even his shoulders strained his shirts. “I’ve got fifty pounds on you at least, and for all I know, that’s the difference between blowing over that pass like a leaf and bogging out like a pig in a mudhole.”

  She clutched the wadded-up overalls like a thing she wished she could hide.

  “You already flew her to twelve thousand feet. You and your vacuum cleaner. Yak told me, and you said it yourself. In the doctor’s office.”

  “Yeah, I did. With some help from clouds, I admit. But I don’t totally know how much gas the Hoover contraption sucks down, especially on some cross-country haul, two passengers, maybe in a headwind, maybe no thermals. God only knows.

  “You are a better flier than I am, Annelise. I’ve had two lessons and what, ten, twelve hours?” He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Baloney. You studied it, you built it, you know it, inside and out. And besides, I’m not”—she tripped on her own voice, looked away as though she couldn’t face his eyes—“I’m not who you want me to be.”

  If anybody else saw the streaks around her eyes, nobody said so. This sight exactly had stopped him cold, when he’d burst through the door into Yak’s apartment. She’d shot bolt up in the bed without a stitch of clothing, but all he could remember was the wreath of gold around her head, and that black stripe across her eyes.

  She was wrong now, though, clutching her overalls there in the yard. He was himself, and Annelise was herself. Yes, she had her own life to muddle through. But she was exactly who he wanted her to be.

  He said, “You’ve got two hundred hours, Annelise. What, two years of lessons? Fact of it is, I did build the airplane, I do know it inside out. But you will always fly farther and climb faster than I can. That’s the plain truth.”

  She threw her head back and looked straight up at the sky. “Why me?”

  He and Yak pulled the bolts connecting the front stick from the controls and fished the linkage out from beneath the gauge panel. More room for Mother and more to the point, no chance she could accidentally interfere with the actual piloting.

  Doc Lipton had the ambulance backed to the edge of the harrowed field. Huck gave the sign and they popped the doors, began to ease the stretcher out. He watched McKee walk over to Annelise, a few feet away in her overalls and a pair of sneakers she’d chanced to leave at the house. Flannel work shirt up top with the sleeves rolled. She was studying the map out of McKee’s Studebaker.

  Pop and Doc Lipton and the men from the church came toward them with the gurney, across the corrugated ground. Huck looked the other way, out across the tables and rims. He could just see the faint blue spine of the Absarokas in the haze above the western horizon. Something moved at the corner of his eye and he shifted over there.

  A whirl of loose soil came up at the far side of the table, spinning and whipping into a gyrating yellow devil. It hovered in place a moment, its mad swirl stretching higher and higher, then darted and danced toward the edge of the jump. It hit the plunge and simply stopped, dispersed into drifting particles again. Over here the air remained still as a church.

  “What’s that mean?” Annelise asked.

  “Means the wind is at your back,” Huck said. “Don’t know if it’s a sign from God or not, but it could be worse.”

  The gurney was nearly to them. “So I keep the compass south and west until I see the big river, then follow it due west.”

  “You can’t miss it,” Yak told her. “Once you hit the corridor, if you do have to land for some reason, you’ve got the roadway and plenty of good flat hay meadow to boot.”

  “Then the river turns south at Livingstone—”

  “Livingston—”

  “—Livingston, right, but I stay west, follow the road and the rail tracks up over the pass. And there’s Bozeman.”

  “You got it,” said McKee. “Can’t miss that, either.”

  They came up with the stretcher, set it by the ship with Mother’s feet pointing toward the prop. She seemed to be asleep now, her eyes fully closed and the rise and fall of her chest fairly regular. Doc Lipton pulled the sheet back and she looked hardly bigger than a doll, there in her night shift.

  They passed her into the front bay as gently as they could, with Pop and the pastor reaching through the warren of cables and struts on the port side, McKee leaning in at starboard to guide her feet. The doc and the deacons lifted her off the gurney and passed her to the others beneath the wing. She murmured a bit and seemed to struggle against the hands and arms that supported her, and actually cried out and shuddered once as they tried to contort her through the maze, but even this seemed more like a reaction from the depths of a dream than anything she was aware of. Yak steered her legs into the bay.

  They got the harness fastened and padded her with blankets. Pop stood on the tire and leaned in and said some things, and Huck saw him kiss her forehead. Yak was already at the prop.

  Huck laced his fingers into a step. Annelise put one hand on his shoulder, the other on the cowling. Put her sneaker into the web he made for her. She stepped up into the cockpit.

  “I wish it was me,” he told her.

  She fastened her helmet. “I wish it were, too.”

  “If they have to cut the plane apart to get her out, tell them to cut the plane apart.”

  “I will.”

  Pop came out from beneath the wing and gave the two of them a curt little wince. He paused as though he wanted to say something, then walked off at his own angle, not toward anybody else at all and maybe not in any direction at all, but simply away. Annelise pulled her goggles down.

  “Hey,” he said. He could see her smudged eyes through the glass. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, and McKee swung the prop out front. A blast of dust went up.

  One minute later he heard the motor wind, and the ship moved forward down the furrows. Stalks and fronds rippled like water. She was up to speed even on the tilled ground faster than he would’ve predicted, trailing a roil of dust out behind. The tail came up out of its dragging skid and her speed advanced yet again, and the wheels left the earth, too.

  She passed through the air across the lip of the jump. She started to rise.

  Signs and Wonders

  I

  Churned field or not, the ship raced up to speed beyond what she could have imagined, dust fairly billowing off the tires. Even so, the dread in her chest and the terror in her mind taunted like demons, whispering and snickering, ready to chant and laugh the second she reached that ancient edge and plunged straight to the hard ground below.

  Except the whipping dust fell away long before she’d even approached the end of the furrows. It took a moment to register that she was airborne and climbing, smooth and steady as a department store escalator. The demons weren’t totally cast off, but when she hazarded a look over the cowling, the only thing in free fall was the face of the buffalo jump itself.

  She flew on straight ahead, hardly able to take her eyes from the altimeter and yet hardly able to comprehend it. Climbing and climbing, right on through whatever angst-driven stupor she knew she was going to have to get herself beyond. She cautiously edged the throttle forward, eased the stick back with her other hand to tilt the elevator. The seat seemed to lift right up against her bottom, while her belly dropped to meet it.

  The rail trestle across the river caught her attention off to starboard. Cottonwood crowns like vibrant green clouds, that same stretch of river Houston had once showed her from this vantage exactly, where he and Raleigh had dredged the body from the floodwater.

  Nearly six months ago, could that be right? In one sense it seemed like minutes and in another like eons, but here she was, hurtling through time and space even
now, the river a mere trickle of what it must have been then and the Crazy Mountains revealing themselves steadily above the horizon, and it finally began to filter through her muddled, addled brain that she really needed to start piloting already.

  She could see the top of her aunt’s head through the little windscreen above the panel. White tendrils, lifting and dancing. She checked her gauges.

  She was a shade under a thousand in the air and holding steady, had apparently marshalled the wit somewhere in her torn and frayed mind to level out and cruise. She couldn’t quite remember. She was only moving at sixty-five an hour, taching below 1,600.

  She glimpsed a flash of something off to port, like silver foil or a signal mirror, angled against the light. Another ship, probably, but when she scanned out to the south she saw nothing but endless sky above endless broken-brown ground.

  She fixed on a big crumbling mesa, or maybe butte, directly to the south. She didn’t really know the terminology, but this one had the look of a gigantic upside-down ice-cream cone, melting with time and slowly spreading at the base. She glimpsed that silver-foil flash and again looked up.

  Nothing. What on earth. If she were merely on a lark and not this particular cruel mission, she’d bank immediately south, maybe close some distance and get to the bottom of whatever it was she couldn’t quite see.

  Another flash, this one in her mind. The proverbial lightbulb. Tacking due west but she wasn’t supposed to be, the tip of the blue mountain to the south and west not a tip at all any longer but an entire saw-toothed ridge, pyramids beside pyramids, rising off the horizon by the second. South and west. The direction she was supposed to be tacking now.

  She tilted the stick and banked left, watched the compass rotate. She leveled again with the needle at SW, the peaks of the mountains swung around now to starboard.

  One decisive move led to another and she leaned on the throttle, heard the hop in the engine out front and for the first time in this whole hair-raising exercise felt a corresponding hop in her own pumping blood. Something along the lines of exhilaration. She throttled up again.

  She could hear the difference in the motor, hear the whir and whine of Houston’s miracle centrifuge. The force of speed pushed her into the seatback.

  The tach had jumped to 1,800 and already she was pushing ninety an hour. The acceleration was pretty remarkable—most of her lessons had been in a Curtiss-Wright training plane, which had little if anything on this reborn bullet that shot her along now.

  The tables and buttes began to soften and melt into muted rolling hills, with towering mountains off to the west and another saw-toothed range looming well to the south. Then the land below unfurled again into hay meadow and pastureland, flat green atolls of sheared-over grass and bunched-up masses of black or red cows, and also a series of ranch yards with crimson outbuildings and houses nestled within islands of shade trees. Big spreads, too, obviously not hardscrabble family places. Then Annelise saw the river.

  She’d been somewhat aware of it on the train to Billings all those months ago, but had paid only scant attention. Now she spotted it, probably at least five miles off and broad as a thoroughfare, lined on each side with the usual vibrant green rind.

  She hurtled along with the speed indicator pegged at ninety-five. Otherwise nothing looked out of the ordinary, with even the gas gauge barely down from a full tank.

  Ninety-five miles an hour, though. Hadn’t Houston said eighty-five? Did she have a tailwind behind her or something? Or were the air and the atmosphere just somehow exceedingly perfect? In her experience the best-laid plans typically went awry rather than the other way around, although she knew uncanny good luck was a thing as well. Lindbergh certainly had it in spades, hence the nickname—Lucky Lindy. Amelia had owned an outsize share herself, once upon a time.

  It crossed her mind that she didn’t actually have to reach the river but merely bank around to the west and keep it in sight off to port. She began to tilt the stick, then had a second thought and leveled. She flew straight on for the water, passed over the railbed and the roadbed up along the higher ground, and finally crossed over the river channel and banked out across the breaks on the south side. She watched the half globe of the compass rotate around and settle, just about due west. She could see not only the river off to starboard but the rail tracks and the highway too, a couple of minuscule vehicles crawling even now.

  Something caught her eye and she looked back up. That silver flash again, she could’ve sworn, but no sooner did her eyes come back from ground to sky than they locked on the most obvious feature in view. The Crazies, of course, fully revealed and utterly enormous to the west and north. But something else, too—an even more enormous range not of mountains but of seething black clouds, roiling from the back side of the peaks like an ogre clearing a fortress wall. If there was in fact another plane flying, she still couldn’t spot it.

  The Yellowstone ran out of the west. She could see a little town not far ahead but clearly it wasn’t Livingston, where the river angled in from the south. She looked back at the clouds in time to see an actual flash, not the silver skin of an airplane but a bolt of lightning, dancing out of that black-fog abyss.

  What had Houston called a storm cloud? An anvil? Was that ever appropriate now—the top of the mass had flattened like an iron table, with a long, tapering wedge jutting like a devil’s horn off the near end. She’d thought at the time that this was his own original description, a natural metaphor for a kid who’d practically cut his teeth in a blacksmith shop. Maybe she was wrong.

  The entire ominous black system was apparently not content to stay put beyond the barrier of the mountain range but seemed to want to bear down in this direction, and quickly. Already the leading edge had swirled out beyond the facing slope, and the skies behind it to the north were growing broader and darker and seemingly nearer by the second. She saw another purple skitter of lightning.

  At this rate, a wall of weather might cut her off in a matter of minutes. So much for a new lease on luck. Her aunt’s hair fluttered in front of her. She’d asked herself a million times, at one crossroads or crisis or another, what would Amelia do? Now it seemed entirely the wrong question, but the words muttered in her head anyway, muttered like a sad taunt.

  Maybe just those demon voices, whispering all over again. She looked at her gauges, tried to keep her head on straight. She’d pulled her speed down to eighty-five back across the river and she ran the throttle knob up again now, shooting for the erstwhile ninety-five if possible, in the hopes she might outrun that towering juggernaut before the thing could get in front of her.

  The plane did indeed respond. She felt it, saw it. She made speed again in not much time at all but now the throttle was advanced entirely, and ninety-five was evidently the top end. Still the black mass came on like a ghost of the mountain itself, leaving its own solid corpus behind. The river stretched ahead.

  She felt the air temperature drop. Ten degrees at least, like flying into the reverse of a furnace blast, a wall of cold not heat. Weirdly she could still feel the beat of the sun on her left arm where her sleeve was shoved past her elbow, but she felt as well the breath of a chill on her opposite cheek, against the incoming weather.

  The light around her had gotten weird too, as though she were flying right at the edge of a collision of dark and bright, and somehow the presence of each made the other all the more extreme. The outer billows of the approaching front loomed pewter and silver and gray, but the heart of the thing may as well have been cloaked in a drape of black velvet.

  The first blast hit the plane and she screamed, so violently did the little ship roll sideways. She corrected by sheer impulse in the buck and shake of turbulent air. No way she could outrun this thing, and how on earth could it move so fast, the sky overhead already a piling canopy of seething vapor and the sun divided and stabbing through in shafts here and there, even those blinking out one by o
ne as the heart of the mass rolled like a cold black wave over the river and the land and indeed her own airplane.

  So what would Amelia do, exactly? The only thing she could, she supposed—hold her direction and keep on flying. She had roiling gray mist all around her now although evidently she was right within the bottom strata of the storm, because she could still glimpse the river from time to time through shifting apertures in the clouds.

  Just about the time it struck her that she should probably drop her elevation, an outright explosion of electricity streaked like a serpent’s tongue out of the black maw of the storm and shot right by the starboard edge of the wing. The plane went to bucking all over the place again, and she was screaming her bloody head off.

  Gloria

  III

  And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:

  The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord come:

  And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

  —Acts of the Apostles

  I felt always I would Rapture, never die.

  Knew it, even, if that’s not too strong a word, as surely as any of the great prophets and seers knew the truth of their own revelations. Isaiah, predicting the coming of the baby Jesus, or Daniel, foretelling of the restoration of Jerusalem. Some of this they witnessed in dreams, the way I have seen my own fate in dreams. Escaping mortal death like Enoch, or Elijah in his fiery chariot, up and up and into eternal life, in blessed heaven.

  I have been through my own tribulations, that much is also true, and some of them not inferior to the testing of Job at times. Some of them should have killed me the way they should have killed him, but that was not the plan then and I have been shown by their defeat that mere death is not the plan now, and so here I am, the victor of my own prophecy, traveling up and up. Traveling home.