Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  Was she afraid for her life, or afraid for her afterlife? She didn’t have a clue anymore. All she knew was that she was scared out of her mind, and that eventually she was going to have to open her eyes and simply take whatever awaited there.

  She peeked with one eye, fully expecting anything other than what she glimpsed, and what she glimpsed caused her eye to clamp itself closed all over again.

  Another airplane, flying out ahead, angled off to port through the struts and cabanes.

  Couldn’t be. Her own ship shuddered through another patch of rough air, and she saw even through her eyelids the vivid kinetic blare of more lightning. She thought again of that silver-foil glimmer earlier at the corner of her eye, before she’d encountered the storm.

  She forced both eyes open and there it was, moving through clouds and rain and swirl, radiant with the same purple glow. She watched it disappear into a bank of mist and immediately doubted again.

  She ran the throttle forward. Her speed had dropped to not much above seventy, and though she couldn’t hear the whine of the engine out front she could see full well the instant launch of the tach, also an exuberant jump of the speed indicator. She flew into the mist herself, saw the wet haze around the ship catch the electrical shimmer and glow like a neon corona.

  Visibility was nonexistent, the fog like frost across a windowpane. She did see the bright surge of another lightning bolt, but not the branch of voltage itself. Her speed had climbed nearly to eighty and she tried to ignore the fact that she was more handicapped in this very instant than she’d been at any prior point, flying totally on some kind of delirious faith. The blazing image of that phantom ship burned yet in her mind, right along with the taunting whisper of doubt, assuring her she’d only been seeing things in her feeble mind, that she was crazy and amateurish and irresponsible for not immediately descending for ground.

  One more glimpse, was all she asked. Please, God, please. If she got it, and if she could stay with it, she’d make the leap, and she would follow. On the faith that whoever else was also out here in this mess, in a real airplane, must surely know more than she did. Must surely know how to get over the mountain. One more glimpse.

  Her air speed passed eighty. The watery mist surrounded her yet. She remembered in a flash that she could travel in two directions—straight ahead and also upward. Would have to, in fact, if she were to clear the elevation of the pass. She cranked back on the stick and started to climb.

  She watched her altimeter and gained another hundred feet in a matter of seconds. She came up out of the fog and into the gray wet vestibule of the storm.

  Nothing at first, or nothing that she could see. She banked slightly to starboard to clear the view out front. Still nothing, and what the hell—those voices starting up again at the nape of her neck, laughing and whispering, tides of foolishness and failure, and all she could think was, Get behind me, Satan, and lo and behold.

  A long lavender-blue smear appeared in the mist at the top of the fog bank out ahead, coming up through the wet haze like a luminous cross, and she hardly had time to hope before the glowing wings and long, broad back of an Electra breached the mantle and climbed fully into view.

  She practically choked on ten things at once, terror and elation and the sheer ghostly weirdness of seeing a glowing airplane suddenly materialize from the storm clouds as though the thing were more apparition than actual. But there it was, floating maybe a hundred yards out.

  It was not, she realized, necessarily a Lockheed Electra. She’d automatically jumped to that because of the mystery ship’s general size and architecture, also probably the name coupled with the fact that this particular specimen actually was bathed in a writhing energy field, as though it had just risen out of the sea and swarmed yet with plankton. But it could have been any number of other airplanes. A big Douglas DC or a Boeing passenger carrier.

  Or the Tri-Motor from that day she’d first flown this very ship up at Coal Camp Road. One could certainly hope—she’d rather follow that high-country hotshot through a tempest and over a mountain than anyone else she could name. She couldn’t tell whether the plane she now followed had retractable landing gear or not, but that would be a clue.

  Another jolt of lightning streaked the sky out ahead. She lost sight of the other ship in the gray-bright burst of lumens, then perceived it again as soon as the lightning ran out. She realized it was still climbing, at a faster rate than she was, and she put more angle into the elevator and did her best to keep up.

  She watched it bank to starboard, held her breath when she lost sight of it behind the pillar of the radiator out front and breathed again when the big luminous bird edged back into view through the opposing struts. Though she hardly dared take her eyes from it, she forced herself to peek at the compass, saw she was technically still flying due west, which meant the blue phantom out ahead had angled slightly north. She zeroed on it again and banked as well.

  She managed to keep it in sight until it leveled out and tacked dead west. She positioned herself slightly to port to keep it in view, and just about the time she’d settled enough to make a somewhat objective assessment of the whole surreal situation, another raw chain of lightning throbbed and forked against the clouds out ahead. The Electra or Tri-Motor or whatever it was vanished again in the flash.

  The lightning flickered and held for an inordinate amount of time. She tried to ignore the livid flare of it, to keep her eyes fixed on where she’d last seen the other ship. When the voltage finally did blink out, the big glimmering ghost was rising in another climb and she lost sight of it yet again, only this time behind the barrier of her own glowing wing. She cranked back on the stick and checked her altimeter.

  Coming up on 5,500. She had her speed upward of ninety and holding, the throttle wide open. She edged the stick farther back and tilted the nose up as far as she dared, and evidently the other plane was still really climbing, because she sure couldn’t manage to tilt her own wing at enough of an angle to get another reassuring glimpse.

  She had an absolute dread of stalling off in this particular crate, the mere thought of which brought those awful spiraling dreams rushing back, that spiraling ground rushing at her own spiraling mind. The dreams felt real enough in the moment the way this other nightmare felt real enough now, and in any case she couldn’t afford to give up even an inch of gain, never mind risk plummeting into an actual tailspin.

  She had to find it again, though. Had to convince herself, once again, that what she’d seen was really there. She climbed another couple of hundred feet, and when the missing phantom failed to appear beneath the edge of her wing, she went ahead and banked to port.

  The big soaring bird immediately tilted into view, still awash in that hypnotic energy and thank God, thank God. She banked back toward it, lost it again behind the angle of the wing. She checked her altitude.

  Evidently she’d hit an updraft in the swirl of the storm, because even now she’d topped six angels and still climbed like a kite. She gave it another two hundred feet, hoping the mystery ship would again drop into the aperture beneath her wing. When it didn’t, she banked again to port and to her surprise saw the big plane right there, much closer than it had appeared before, maybe two hundred feet above her and about the same distance out ahead.

  God, it looked just like an Electra. Or did, until another blinding flash in the ether caused it to vanish again into thin air, and the instantaneous blast of turbulence behind the flash had her fighting her own bucking ship back to a sort of wobbling level.

  She rode out the worst of it and checked her gauges: 6,200 and flying steady, speed down to around eighty with the chop. She came back on the stick again to resume her climb and in a matter seconds watched the other airplane come back into view beneath the wing. She held her attack a little longer, then moved the stick ahead and came out of the climb with the Electra again positioned just off her starboard struts. She had
it in her head that they were high enough now to clear the pass.

  Twice again a jagged tongue of lightning strobed the dark cavern of the storm, and twice that gigantic apparition vanished before her eyes. And both times it reappeared, though seemingly much farther out ahead than when she’d lost sight of it. What a weird phenomenon.

  Finally she saw what must have been a break in the wall of the gale, dead ahead and circular and bright, like looking up to see the filtered disk of the sun through the last atoms of a fog. The Electra seemed to tack right for it, still alight with that charged wreath around it, and now she understood the difference in sheer power because the other plane accelerated like a racehorse, pulling down the stretch and diminishing by the second, heading straight for that platinum hole in the swirl.

  She couldn’t keep up. Her throttle had been jammed all the way forward for a while now, with her speed in the headwind topped at eighty, about half what a twin-engined Lockheed ordinarily cruised at. She kept her eyes on the ship as long as she could, squinting against the bright glare at the break in the clouds, watching as the electrified glow contracted into a mere blue dot, smaller and smaller, and finally dissipated entirely within that silver-white window at the edge of the storm. Annelise flew toward it herself.

  The rain had tapered off somewhere behind her, she hadn’t really noticed when, and she seemed to have outpaced the lightning and thunder as well. Even the charged shroud around the skin of her plane had diminished, though she thought she could see a remnant glimmer dancing and forking at the tip of the wing. Up in the front bay, Aunt Gloria’s white hair fluttered above the seat.

  She drew nearer and nearer to the nucleus of the light, the billows and clouds limned with silver, forming a tunnel, swirling like a slow vortex that sucked her along, and she wasn’t certain she’d be able to keep her eyes open against the increasing brilliance much longer, as though she were flying into the very sun itself, just beyond that last screen of fog.

  Finally, with her eyelids narrowed to the merest slits, the plane cleared the grip of the storm entirely and burst into the crystal blue jewel of open sky.

  She could see the road far below, like a ribbon winding down from the mountain. What had to be Bozeman lay out ahead, buildings and trees and streets, nestled at the foot of another soaring range. The land unfurled all around.

  The bright clear air was almost painful to look at, but she held her squint and scanned everywhere, looking for another airplane. None appeared in any direction. She passed over the city and began her descent.

  She spied the airstrip out where they told her it would be, just west of town. She buzzed the runway and checked the wind sock and took a quick scan around for anything resembling a Lockheed Electra, then did a double-take at what appeared to be McKee’s white Studebaker, parked just off the tarmac.

  Not McKee’s rig but an ambulance—she could see the red cross now. She flew on out past the end of the runway and made a broad bank around, came back with the wind behind her to face the east again. The black tower of the storm hung out there still, rising up over the notch in the mountain. She flew toward it, saw one last flare of lightning stretch down toward the ridge south of the pass. She banked again and put the storm at her back, once and for all.

  She slowed her speed and came down light as air to the runway, ran out past the hangars and a handful of berthed ships here and there, but nothing resembling either a Lockheed Electra or a Tri-Motor. She steered around and maneuvered toward the ambulance, could already see three or four men with a stretcher.

  She steered within fifty feet and killed the motor, was already fumbling at the safety belt before the plane had reached a stop. The men with the stretcher were running toward her, and she wriggled up out of the seat and ripped helmet and goggles loose. She half leaned, half crawled across the windscreen and deck. She peered down at her aunt.

  “Gloria.”

  Gloria’s eyes were closed, her mouth slightly parted so that Annelise could see her teeth against her bottom lip. Tiny little teeth. Please, God, please. The stretcher was nearly to them, and she could hear their feet on the tarmac.

  “Gloria.”

  Her aunt’s eyes opened, met her own. And she smiled.

  Epilogue

  75 Point Lookout

  Milford, Connecticut

  February 11, 1985

  Dear Annelise,

  Many thanks for your kind condolences. I think Mother was more surprised at her longevity than most anyone, but she did indeed see eighty-five, still on her feet and still more or less as she ever was, right to the end. She talked about you often, and I know she always prayed for you, which of course was entirely her way. She always thought that God, in His mysterious ways, sent you to Montana solely for her rescue.

  Of course she never knew the half of it. We had us some times, didn’t we? Some of the best of my own life, in fact. Reading your letter again, I have to believe it is the same for you—after so many years it is like hearing a voice from the long past, even while bringing the events of that hot summer roaring back as though they happened only yesterday. Nearly half a century, though—how on earth can it be?

  To answer your question, yes, the Piet is still in storage in Big Coulee, with the wing detached. I saw it again only a few weeks ago when I took Mother’s ashes to be placed there beside Pop. Gosh, he’s been gone so long already now . . . more than thirty years, somehow, and now here we are, senior citizens ourselves, and how on earth did THAT happen?

  Anyway, the ship looks its own age, at this point. A dilapidated relic, like an old horse-drawn buggy covered in dust and white pigeon chalk, tucked away and forgotten.

  So I have been dickering with the county historical museum to make room for an airplane. Progress is slow. But I would hate for it to wind up eventually in the city dump, after all those wild and woolly times we had. My own kids were limited to Lincoln Logs and Erector sets, and nowadays my grandkids have to make do with plastic Legos. I’d like for future generations to see how we were able to amuse ourselves, back in the “wild old days.”

  By the way, I finally visited Mr. Pietenpol. The man himself, at his home in Cherry Grove, Minnesota, in 1983. He has since died as well, but he told me he built twenty-one airplanes with numbers, and a number of others that never were registered. Some of his later ships were powered with Chevrolet Corvair engines from the 1960s. I chuckle to think that if old Yak could’ve let fly with Pop’s big buffalo gun at a chintzy little Corvair, the whole car would have probably disintegrated on the spot! Mr. Pietenpol certainly got quite a kick to learn that we supercharged our own little ship with a Hoover vacuum cleaner.

  I know we’ve sort of skirted this subject over the years, but I often think of that day you flew to Bozeman and saved Mother’s life. Now that she has in fact departed for some other place in the sky, or maybe nowhere at all, I can’t help finally circling back. I’ve run it through my head so many times now, as I imagine you must surely have, too.

  Mother certainly did. She had no real memory of the storm itself, exactly, only the darkness and roar and the roughness of the passage. She told me that she did not even understand she was in an airplane but believed she must be in some sort of flaming chariot, like in the Bible when one of the prophets—Elijah, I think—rides up to heaven without dying. You described it as Saint Elmo’s fire, which I’m sure is correct. I myself experienced several episodes of the same in 1944, when I served on a B-17.

  How that storm should have coincided with the events of that particular emergency seems a whole other question. As you no doubt recall, we were deep in drought to that point, and I believe that Independence Day 1937 still qualifies as Montana’s record high. No rain had been predicted at all and certainly not a storm of that magnitude, or I would never have suggested such an endeavor, and Mother very likely would not have reached the age of forty, let alone eighty-five.

  The rest of us c
ould see the sobering dark tower of it as we drove south toward the Yellowstone River, although even with McKee hauling like a maniac whenever the road would permit, the trek was in general slow-going, and the weather had continued on toward Billings and beyond by the time we reached the junction heading west. The land was still soaked, though, the river a little off-color and potholes full to the brim in the roadway, water vapor steaming all around.

  If the situation had been different, we would’ve been grateful for every drop. But if the dread over Mother’s condition were not enough, we had to spend a couple of hours further dreading the sight of a wrecked airplane over every hill and rise. I remember very well our immense relief when we got to Big Timber and were finally able to call ahead to the hospital. Not only had you made it through, but Mother was already well along in the surgery that certainly saved her life.

  I remember being caught off guard in the days after that, when you chose to return home to California. Or maybe it was simply disappointment to see you go, although even then I knew not to take it personally. We had the blood-oath bond of conspirators that summer, it’s true, but in retrospect I think we were all pretty frayed.

  I’ve often puzzled over what you told me you saw, battling your way through that storm. You swore me to secrecy at the time, and I have made good on that, never have mentioned it to a soul, including you, until now.

  However, I have also come to understand that it’s not an isolated situation. I very much recall reading Lindbergh’s book from 1953, in which he finally after twenty-odd years confessed that he’d been visited and assisted by what he called “phantoms” there in the cockpit with him while he fought to keep himself awake. I nearly fell out of my chair.

  You looked like you’d seen a ghost, too, when we finally got to you that day in the hospital. At first I figured it must have been just plain circumstances, the pressure on you with Mother’s ordeal, multiplied into something else entirely by that killer storm. Until you pulled me aside and tried to tell me what you witnessed up there. A glowing airplane, leading you through darkness. A Lockheed Electra. Possibly.