The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  From the start, D. K. didn’t like Brad. When Annie announced she was marrying her classmate, D. K. bluntly asked her, “He can go fast but can he go slow? If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.”

  “Don’t be gross,” Annie told the old flyer.

  “Baby, that’s the last of your worries,” he rightly predicted.

  Clark also had his doubts about the marriage. Only her optimistic aunt Sam kept saying, “Brad’s the One.”

  He wasn’t.

  Now, legally separated from him, Annie lived alone and taught flying, mostly to men, some of them men like Brad Hopper. She taught them to fly combat jets off carriers for Air Wing Three of the U.S. Navy. A few of her students afterwards sent her emails from Key West or Jeddah or Fujairah, telling their news or congratulating her on promotions or commendations. Their emails quoted back to her the blessing with which she’d sent each of them on a first solo flight. It was what D. K. had yelled at her morning after morning: “You’re Goode to go!”

  ***

  Annie’s passion for velocity was a trait she knew she had inherited not from D. K. nor from Clark or Sam, but from Jack Peregrine. “We fly through the air,” he had sung to her at bedtime. “Jump, Annie!” And she would fly off the bed into his embrace; he would hold her tightly by her small forearms, swinging her around in a skipping circle until, dizzy, she would sail off, landing back on the bed, scared but laughing. “You’re a flyer,” he’d say, placing the too-large pink baseball cap on her head like a crown. “You’re off to see the gizzards of the wonderful wizard of Nod.”

  “It’s not Nod, Dad, it’s Oz!”

  “For the love of Mike, is it? Well, I’m the wizard of Nod, darlin’, and I’m going to make you the Queen of the World.”

  Decades later, as an adult, she found herself humming, “Wonderful wizard of Nod,” when she climbed into bed. Long after her father was out of her life, she could still hear his voice singing. He would sing with the radio or the television; when he heard Latin music, he’d pull her into a dance. “Come on, one, two, cha-cha-cha.” And they would dance around the motel room and he would promise, “I’m going to leave you a million dollars. You’ll be the richest queen in the whole wide world.”

  The word “leave” always frightened her. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  But, just like a wizard, her father had gone away, taking his smile and his stories with him. And so, of all the tales he’d told her, she had come to believe that not one of them was true.

  The story of “The Queen of the Sea” was one of his most elaborate tales. He’d added to it for years, working out its details, changing it this way or that as they’d crisscrossed the big country together on long, wide, unending highways.

  He told her that a long time ago, caravans of mules, roped together fifty by fifty, lurched over the mountains of Panama, weighed down with silver from the Potosi mines, with Peruvian gold, with emeralds.

  When the mules reached the port of Nombre de Dios, a fleet of Spanish galleons with empty hulls was waiting for them. Crews of slaves loaded the ships with treasure and they set sail on the Carrera de las Indias, around the Cabo, their sailors keeping watch for the high bluffs of the Havana Harbor, where they could safely drop anchor before the long voyage to Spain. Many ships never even reached the open Atlantic but sank with their cargo near Cuba. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships sank. Indeed, by the time of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government was estimating that in their territorial waters lay a hundred billion dollars worth of sunken treasure from these ships. They said that all the spoils, collected or not, belonged to the Cuban people. Their researchers were particularly interested in a sunken ship called La Madre del Salvador.

  Her father said that La Madre was a Spanish vessel that in 1549 a sudden storm had blown up against the reefs near Havana. It sank, bilging tons of gold and silver ballast onto the floor of the sea. A nobleman on board, Don Carlos de Tormes, drowned while removing a statue from a small trunk in his cabin, a wood trunk covered in ornate leather and clasped with ornate iron. In the trunk was a gold effigy so precious that Don Carlos had written home about it in a letter still preserved in a museum in Seville. He called it La Reina Coronada del Mar, the Queen of the Sea. It was a reliquary, fifteen-inches high, of the Virgin Mary, crusted with gold and jewels that a year previously had belonged to Inca priests. The priests had handed over the temple treasure to a small squadron of Spanish soldiers who had hacked to death randomly selected members of the Inca community and then expressed their perfect willingness to butcher everyone else. Gold seemed to calm the Spanish down.

  A skilled goldsmith fashioned the statue of Mary out of the plunder. He dressed her in the style of the Peruvian earth mother Pachamama and beat out a broad golden cape, studding it with little rubies and sapphires and diamonds. He made her a gold crown, capping it with seven large emeralds, sixty carats apiece, each on a gold rod that formed a sunburst. In the Virgin’s arms was a small silver baby who wore a crown of silver thorns. On her breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. Her heart was a 135-carat star ruby, resting on a tiny box that held, allegedly, a real thorn from Christ’s crucifixion crown, with supposedly his real blood on it.

  As Annie’s father told the story, when La Madre del Salvador sank, everyone aboard drowned, including Don Carlos, who died clutching the Queen of the Sea. For centuries the Queen slept in his skeletal arms, floating slowly along the dark coral reefs among rusted anchors and broken olive jars and bits of majolica bowls, all part of the wreckage of more than five hundred other Spanish ships that had spilled their spoils along the silver route. Time rolled on, nudging the statue loose from the proud nobleman’s bony hands, until finally its crown snagged on a spar near the Colorados Reef. Then one day, a fisherman, diving to untangle his net from the reef, saw a gleam of gold only ten feet below the surface. Diving deep to the shimmer, he freed La Reina Coronada del Mar and took her home.

  Jack told Annie how in 1815 this devout fisherman had donated the Queen of the Sea to a monastery in his remote village. Afterwards, for decades, rumors spread in that part of Cuba about a relic recovered from the reefs. But eventually the stories muddled into idle chitchat until finally only a few old people had ever even heard of the statue.

  In 1898 a war had started in Cuba called the Spanish-American War. The U.S. Army invaded the island to free people like the fisherman and they bombed the monastery. Annie’s father told her how an American armament officer, searching for survivors in that monastery, found in its rubble the jeweled statue of the Virgin Mary and took it home with him to North Carolina. This officer’s name was Joseph Peregrine.

  Once home, Peregrine rebuilt the house and called it Pilgrim’s Rest. In 1900 he changed the name of the whole town from Aquene (its Occaneechi name) to Emerald. Because he was the richest man around, no one objected. Everyone called Captain Peregrine “Boss” and he bossed everyone in his family and in Emerald until somebody killed him. Before his sudden death, Boss had taken all the jewels out of the statue and buried them at Pilgrim’s Rest where nobody could find them, until generations later his great-grandson Jack did just that. Or so Annie’s father told her.

  When a child, riding along the highways, Annie did not understand most of the details of what her father said about La Reina Coronada del Mar. But it was a story she liked to hear. It was a story about a mother, even if only a gold one fifteen inches high; a mother who was lost for a long time and then miraculously found. Back then Annie still hoped to find her own mother some day. She’d always thought that she would suddenly pick her mother out of a crowd, maybe by spotting and identifying her with her special neon-blue X-ray sunglasses, although her mother and she had never met, although her father had made up a different, unbelievable story every time she’d asked him who her mother was.

  In her first year at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie started having a recurring dream in which she confused the Queen of the Sea with her unknown mot
her. She had this dream so often that her aunt and uncle began to call it “Annie’s dream.” Still asleep, she cried out and they hurried to her room and told her it was just a dream. But she knew that and it didn’t help.

  In this dream, she was flying a little red airplane over a blue ocean. The colors were uncomplicated, like colors in a crayon box. Red, blue, yellow. Water and sky were the same bright crayon-blue so that there was no way to know air from ocean except for a black line between them. Flying beside her was her father, also in a red airplane. Their planes looked like a children’s ride at an amusement park.

  As Annie’s plane floated out of clouds, she saw a small wooden ship, a Spanish ship with square sails, sailing precariously through the ocean. At the prow of this ship stood a young woman, whom Annie knew to be her mother. The woman had red-gold hair. She wore a gold cape like the Queen of the Sea. Her ship was sinking and she was shouting for help.

  Annie flew back up to her father’s plane, shouting for him to do something. But he sped far ahead until he was only a fleck of red on the blue horizon. She couldn’t keep up with him. So she turned back to try to help her mother. But she was not in time. Waves swept over the ship and her mother disappeared beneath the sea.

  And that’s when Annie woke up.

  The first adult to whom Annie told the details of this dream was neither Sam nor Clark but her flying teacher, D. K. Destin. She told D. K. one day when he was maneuvering them in and out of white clouds high above Emerald; the sky looked so much like the sky in her dream that she began talking about it. She told him about the woman on the ship that she couldn’t save. She explained about the golden statue of the Queen of the Sea in her father’s story and she told him as many details as she could remember.

  D. K.’s cornrows shook as he blew away her father’s tale of sunken treasure with a loud puff of air. “Sugar Pie, the man was yanking your chain. There’s no ‘Queen of the Sea.’ He was as full of it as a mountain of guano under a pile of cow patties.”

  “What’s guano?” she asked the cranky pilot.

  “Shit.”

  Annie giggled. “Guano. That’s a funny word.”

  “It’s real.” He took her hand, slapped it at the control panel of the small Cessna. “This is no story. Wham! You’re shot down in the China Sea! You’re squiggling through a puckered pocket of metal and all of sudden your legs won’t work. What the fuck, your legs won’t work!”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Damn right. Your lungs are bustin’ in that cold black salty water and no air to breathe. Air’s so high up on top of you, you can’t even see it. And you know what? Swimming best I could up out of that water, if I’d spotted a little gold statue of the Virgin Mary with million dollar emerald eyes, right there in front of my nose on some fucking coral reef, I wouldn’t have stopped for two seconds of my dying breath to get that sucker loose. Not two seconds!”

  “Amy Johnson wouldn’t have stopped for two seconds either.”

  “Damn right,” he agreed. “Amy’s in the fuckin’ English Channel, poor thing, her plane’s down in the fog and all they come back up with was her pocketbook with her goddamn lipstick in it. In real life, you gotta make some choices.”

  The dead World War II pilot Amy Johnson had recently become Annie’s idol. D. K. had told her about the beautiful young British flyer who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and who died at only thirty-eight in World War II while ferrying bombers for the RAF. Annie had Amy’s picture on her bedroom wall. D. K. was full of such lore about bygone pilots and their heroic deeds.

  “Courage,” he told her. “That is the only thing worth guano. All the money in the world’s not worth shit.” He slapped her hand again on the panel. “What’s the only thing?”

  “Courage.”

  “That’s right. Give me that toothless smile of yours, Orphan Annie.”

  She frowned, indignant, tightening her lips over her missing front teeth. “I’m not an orphan, I’ve got Sam and Clark. I’ve got parents.”

  D. K. laughed. “You got too many! You got more than you know what to do with.”

  She covered her mouth grinning. “You’re guano.”

  “And love’s a game of give-and-take, baby. Me and your Uncle Clark. We both loved America, we gave it all we had and the U.S. took it all and look at us now.”

  “What’s wrong with you and Clark?”

  “Not a damn thing.” The old vet D. K. banked his plane and they headed home.

  Chapter 3

  Thunder on the Hill

  When, at seven years old, Annie first heard her “uncle” Clark Goode calling to her as she hid in the barn beneath the airplane, she had to wipe her eyes on the knees of her jeans in order to see him. A tall, thin man in khakis and plaid shirt stepped through the big doors, closing them against the rain. Crouched on the dark dirt, the child hugged the wheel cover of the Piper single-engine plane, frightened by the sound of the doors and by the lightning that cracked across the sky, as if one of the fairy-tale giants in her father’s stories had broken open heaven with a sledgehammer.

  The tall man ambled over to the lantern and when he saw her he tapped three reassuring pats on the plane’s wing. “Hi there, Annie,” he said. He had sandy hair and wore glasses with round tortoise-shell rims. Offering her a pair of little blue plastic sunglasses, he asked, “These yours? I found them in the yard…”

  She took the glasses but didn’t speak.

  “Sam’s out there looking for you…Want one?” He held out an unopened can of soda.

  Annie, struggling to sound indifferent, quoted her father. “‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”

  “That’s a good one.” The man had a slow soft accent that she later learned to identify as Tidewater. “That’s from an old movie called Stagecoach.”

  “I know. My dad says it, ‘no silver cup.’”

  “Your aunt Sam loves movies too, so I watch a lot of them. She’s out there driving up and down the road, calling for you, figuring you ran after your dad.”

  “My dad drove too fast.”

  He nodded. “Always did…Some storm, huh?” There were loud rattles of noise like giants stomping on the barn roof.

  “Is it a hurricane?” She had seen those in movies on TV.

  “Nope.” The man sat on the ground next to the plane, wiping reddish dirt from his hands, looping his arms around his knees, bending his head so it was in line with hers. “It’s hail. Ever seen hail?”

  Worried, she shook her head, watching his face. “Maybe it’ll get my dad?”

  He looked at her, thought about it. “No chance. Jack will be okay. I promise.” Tilting his head, he smiled. “Jack’s always okay, right? Just when you think he’s done for?”

  She stared at the man squatting there beside her, wondering how he understood her father so well. As if he’d heard the question, he added, “Your dad and his sister Sam and I sort of grew up together. He was her little brother. Well, still is.” He took off his wet glasses, shaking the rain from them, cleaning them carefully on his shirtsleeve. “My name’s Clark Goode.” He held out his hand but Annie ignored it. “I live here with Sam. Your dad ever mention he had a big sister named Samantha, Samantha Anne?”

  “That’s my name backwards. Mine’s Anne Samantha.” She scooted a few inches from behind the wheel cover. “My dad showed me Sam’s picture. On their bikes. He said he brought me here before. When I was a baby?”

  “I believe he did.”

  Annie tightened her arms around her jeans, leaning over her knees just as the man was doing, his hands clasped on his long arms. She considered pretending she personally recalled that earlier visit to Pilgrim’s Rest but decided to admit, “I don’t remember coming here.”

  “I don’t remember when I was a baby either. I bet you’ll like Sam.”

  Annie stared at him glumly.

  “She’s nice,” he said.

  There was a loud crack of rumbling noise. Annie slid herself a little
nearer the man. “Thunder on the hill,” he said calmly and finding a small stick, drew circles with it in the dirt. “So Jack hit the road? Gold prospector but it never pans out.” Seeing her confusion, he added, “That’s a pun. Pun’s when a word means two things at once. Like a pan you find gold in or ‘pan out’ like something works out or it doesn’t.”

  “I know,” she said, although she hadn’t heard of puns before.

  “Did your dad mention where he was going or when he’d be back?”

  She shook her head, dropping it with a sigh to her knees.

  They sat together awhile, neither speaking. The hail stopped clattering. The barn grew darker and Annie inched forward again, closer to the man. They were quiet a few minutes longer. Finally she said, “His license plate is MJ87143. I can remember any numbers I see.”

  “Amazing.”

  She felt compelled to admit, “I can only remember for a while if it’s a lot of numbers.”

  “Still.”

  “This airplane has a number.” She pointed at the Piper. “NC48563.”

  “Exactly right.”

  “My dad said this plane’s my birthday present. Probably not true.”

  The tall man stood up slowly, kicked the wheel. “Sure it’s true. Been sitting in the barn a long time waiting for you to get here.”

  Surprised and pleased by his easy agreement, Annie scooted back to show him her father’s dragon tail of letters curled beneath the plane’s wing, spelling King of the Sky.

  He admired the writing with her.

  “I bet it’s fast,” she said.

  “Probably. I’m kind of a slow-lane guy myself.” He suggested they leave the barn to look for Aunt Sam while there was still some light to see by. “Sam calls her movie store Now Voyager. What’s your favorite movie? We could watch one tonight and get some takeout. You like Chinese food?”

  Annie’s favorite movies were Top Gun and Blazing Saddles but she wasn’t about to tell the stranger that. “Do I have to stay here?”