Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  Cloudmaker

  Also by Malcolm Brooks

  Painted Horses

  MALCOLM BROOKS

  Cloudmaker

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Malcolm Brooks

  Jacket Design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

  Jacket landscape painting by Three Forks MT-based contemporary artist Liz Chappie Zoller. More information at PearlSnapStudio.com.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Excerpt from Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, © 1937 by Random House and © renewed 1965 by Rungstedlundfonden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved; B. H. Pietenpol, excerpts from Flying and Glider Manual (Modern Mechanix and Inventions, 1932); Amelia Earhart, excerpt from The Fun of It (Harcourt, Brace, 1933); Amelia Earhart, excerpt from personal letters (Letters from Amelia, Beacon Press, 1982); Aimee Semple McPherson, excerpt from “I Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve” (A Negro Spiritual) (Echo Park Evangelistic Association, 1935); Author unknown, excerpt from “Give Me That Old-Time Religion” Public Domain; George Bird Grinnell, excerpt from “Antelope Hunting Thirty Years Ago and To-Day” (Outing, vol. 43, 1903); Billy Dixon, excerpt from The Life and Adventures of Billy Dixon (Cooperative Publishing Company, 1914); Beryl Markham, excerpt from West with the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 1942); Charles Lindbergh, excerpt from We (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927); Margaret Culkin Banning, excerpt from “The Case for Chastity” (Reader’s Digest, August 1937); T. S. Eliot, excerpt from The Waste Land (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1922); Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2021

  This book was set in 13.25-pt Perpetua Std by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2705-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4633-5

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Cole and Ethan,

  and Samson and Reuben . . .

  Fly high, boys.

  And for David Comstock, 1914–2005, in memoriam.

  In the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space . . .

  —Isak Dinesen

  I’m willing to agree that the editors can make this the best airplane how-to-build that was ever published if I just do the necessary writing. So here goes . . .

  —B. H. Pietenpol, 1932 Flying and Glider Manual

  Prologue

  Scorpio slides down and Orion stalks up, and the stars in the October sky otherwise align.

  An eight-cylinder Buick roadster with out-of-state plates and nails in two tires had limped in off the highway at dusk. She rests now nine hours later in the wash of light from the open door of the shop, new tubes in place and the convertible top down and the rightful owner in a boardinghouse not two blocks away, unaware of his contribution to any of this.

  The kid hits the ignition, and the cold car jolts and roars like a cat. Withered leaves jump in a blast of exhaust, and he works the pedal, feels as much as hears the engine’s high-tuned rumble. The leaves skitter again.

  He’s endured months for hope of this moment exactly, and with the Montana winter lurking just to the north he knows it’s either now or hold off until spring. Eternity to a fourteen-year-old. Here is the fastest car to appear in Big Coulee in at least a year. He’s actually gone so far as to pray for such, and with the prize dropped right in his lap, he can’t help believing he’s received not simply an answer but a bona fide green light from God. Even Pop knows the score, put him on the pierced tires with a wink and a nod and made himself conspicuously scarce.

  He backs the car around the side of the shop, and Raleigh appears like a red ghost in the taillights, behind him the wide wing of the glider a fainter red blur against the night. Huck walks back and the two of them wordlessly take opposite sides and roll the ship forward, tiny spoked wheels greased and silent, the luminous sailcloth bobbing.

  “Looks like a gol dern giant moth,” Raleigh mumbles, and he’s right, or at least not wrong, or at least not wrong in this diffuse red light. Still, Glider Number One looks to Huck entirely of a piece with the legendary experimental fliers of Orville and Wilbur Wright from four decades past, with its overhead wing and skeletonized rib section connecting the tail and rear flaps to the operator’s chair, actually nothing more than a plank atop the axle and a corresponding plank out front for a footrest. Only the cookie-cutter wheels appear truly misfit, repurposed as they are from a baby buggy and looking absurdly out of scale beneath twenty-three feet of wingspan. He wonders if this occurs to Raleigh as well.

  They hitch forty feet of hemp line to the bumper and attach the tag to another ten of shock cord with a spliced steel ring at each end, the second of which mates to a release on the ship’s footrest. Raleigh straightens up. “All set?”

  Huck weaves between cables, ducks beneath the wing. He settles to the narrow plank and reaches for the leather helmet, on self-administered loan from the high school football supply. He screws the helmet down and cinches the strap. He peers up at Raleigh. “How do I look?”

  “Like Tom Swift. In his Airship.” Raleigh looks over at the bungalow, dark as a morgue. “Reckon your pap’s watching?”

  Huck tests the scissorlike levers jutting between his thighs, works the pair of them back and forth. He can feel the tips of the wing torque and twist through the tension of the cables. “Pop? Far as I know, Pop’s been in bed since nine.”

  “That is our story. You ready?”

  “Born ready. Remember, middle of the street. Get me under the wires at Second and light her up.”

  “Forty by Fourth.”

  “Forty by Fourth. Way I’ve got her figured, I can cut loose by the time you get to the church, and you can hook south and sneak on back. I’ll sail out over the ball diamond and set her down.”

  “Don’t crash.”

  “I might.”

  “Don’t die.”

  “I won’t.”

  Raleigh crawls out in first gear with the headlamps cut and the parking lamps low. The slack goes out of the rope and the rope comes off the ground and tightens into the shock cord, stretches the elastic out of the cord and yanks the glider forward in a jump. Huck hears the shift into second and steady they roll down the street.

 
The trees loom on either side, all reaching crooked branches, all dead and dying leaves. With 3:00 a.m. gone they creak past dark cars, past dark porches on darker houses. The wing appears blue-white now against the black of night, bobbing and rocking overhead. Gravel crunches.

  By the time Raleigh turns onto Main and the macadam, the left buggy wheel has begun to squeak in its rotation, a whine at regular intervals. The Buick throttles up, and the whine off the wheel hub speeds, too, as the air rushes at his face, rushes around the vibrating wing, and even though they have not yet made the Second Street wires and not nearly achieved their speed ceiling, the ratio of the Buick’s whitewalls to the tiny cookie-cutters on the glider nevertheless has the buggy wheels already flat zinging across the pavement. In no time the right wheel wails in answer to the left.

  Most of the buildings along Main jut at dark angles, electric bulbs switched off at closing in these struggling times, although the shell-shaped globe atop the gas pump at the filling station beams like a beacon, and low-watt streetlamps glow here and there along the blocks ahead. Raleigh’s foot goes deep into the pedal now. Huck watches the black power lines come into view with the moon behind them and seemingly cross the sky above the street like wipers across a giant windshield, an illusion of approach, which then vanishes behind the leading edge of the wing. He realizes he’s got about a block and a half to test the warping before the moment of truth.

  The buggy wheels fairly shriek, a sound like tangled alley cats. Out ahead the Buick roars. Hot exhaust and chill autumn air. Huck tenuously moves the levers. He feels the tension load in the cables out to the corners of the wings and feels an almost imperceptible shift in the glider’s lateral balance.

  He goes to try the cables in the other direction and something seizes as the arms scissor past each other, and for a disorienting moment he panics at this unexpected glitch and shoves hard on the right-hand lever, yanks hard on the left.

  The pair of them unstick with a nearly violent lunge that sends him deep into the cables, and the torque on the wing in conjunction with the now significant speed of the Buick puts the glider into a hard roll to the right, the left wheel jumping off the ground and the opposite wing veering down. The right wheel speeds on edge along the pavement, throwing a fountain of sparks like a blade to a bench grinder.

  He knows full well the technical advance of ailerons over Wilbur Wright’s original wing-warping design, and regardless he’s built this particular specimen to the earlier patent. Now as he teeters at velocity on one screaming, sparking wheel, it races in his mind that he’s an idiot, that he shouldn’t have allowed fundamentalism to beat out evolution, shouldn’t have been so hell-bent on doing things the old-fashioned way.

  He’d wanted to begin at the beginning, is all. The Wrights had the sense to start with actual birds, spending endless hours watching through field glasses the giant gannets and eagles glide and soar with the flex of their wings, and so rule the air. Making sketches and notes and even studying pantomimes with their own arms, until they landed on the first workable method of steering a heavier-than-air ship.

  Back in the summer he’d ridden out to a dog town one roaring-hot weekend and shot a hundred or so gophers over the course of an afternoon as they popped and popped out of their dens, cooling his rifle barrel with a wet rag and heating beans in the can for supper and sleeping out overnight with the coyotes and owls.

  By midmorning the vultures began to gather, two at first and then six and before he knew it twenty or more, appearing as though thin air and magic were one and the same. He lay in the sagebrush and watched the circling kettle through a telescope he’d built himself the winter before. They congregated impossibly far up and spiraled impossibly down, on the same invisible currents that vectored the slightest carrion whiff to whatever far-flung points they’d originated from. At ground level, even by noon, Huck couldn’t smell a thing.

  He watched the way the vultures flared their wings while they circled at a single, static elevation. He watched them not merely glide but even climb without flapping so much as a feather, as though air itself were an elevator.

  He remembers all this in a cockeyed flash on this crisp October night, careening along on the razor edge of that screaming, sparking wheel, and without really thinking he throws the levers back and reverses the warp.

  The glider reverses its roll, slamming back down hard and overcorrecting and tipping this time onto the other wheel. The spark shower goes up there as well. He backs off the levers and sets the ship aright.

  The sparks don’t subside but fly now from both wheels, and both wheels wail like warring banshees, and just about the time he starts to wonder whether the pair of them might fly off or combust or otherwise disintegrate altogether, Raleigh roars across Fifth and the sparking and the shrieking simply stop.

  The vibration of the road stops, too. The wheels still whir on either side of him but softly now, silently, spinning by inertia alone. He presses on the elevator pedal.

  The macadam drops and in no time he’s twenty feet in the air, sailing dead level past the great glowing eye of a streetlamp. Only his stomach plummets.

  He hears the rush of air over the curve of the wing. He feels the same rush against his eyes and squints and thinks, Goggles, I need goggles, like a proper airman. He squints down and sees Raleigh, glowing green in the dash lights and looking smaller than ever behind the wide wheel of the Buick. He looks up again just in time to realize his right wing is heading straight for a power pole.

  He scissors the levers by sheer reaction, and the glider instantly banks away from the pole but sharply enough and steeply enough that he practically slides off the seat. He backs off the levers and levels with his heart in his throat and thinks, Harness, need to rig a harness.

  He barely has his balance before Raleigh encounters the one wild card on the route, a shallow dogleg where Main Street kinks to follow the natural bend of the coulee. The firehouse sits on the street’s inside bend, the New Deal Mercantile directly opposite, and when Raleigh rips with tires squealing through the jog, the glider swings hard sidewise on its tether and the New Deal zooms right at Huck out of the night, twin windows in the second story right there like a pair of sinister dark eyes.

  Huck braces himself as best he can against the vertical strut and cranks again on the levers and puts the ship into a hard roll as it arcs right up tight to the building. The outer edge of the wing clips the hanging shingle out front with a bang, the hard jolt inextricable from the sickening sounds of indeterminate wreckage, but the tear of fabric definitely in there somewhere. A cascading smash of glass trickles through the dark behind him, finally giving way to the piercing hammer of a tripped alarm.

  Raleigh already has the Buick opened up on the straightaway heading out of town. The glider stabilizes with the velocity and climbs a bit higher still. Huck feels the air shift, feels the temperature rise, and is wondering if this warm band in the ether might qualify as an actual thermal when the dead gold leaves of an oak reel by at eye level. The black silhouette of a cross towers into view.

  Not a cross. Another power pole, with just enough pale moon behind to show it stark against the sky. He’s no sooner eclipsed it when he sees the backlit steeple of the Foursquare church, with its own smaller cross, set just back from the street. This he can’t mistake for a single other thing.

  The road bends at the ball diamond, and Raleigh’s foot comes out of the pedal, he can tell by the drop in the motor. He moves his own foot to the release on the plank and kicks. The tether drops like a gallows rope.

  The glider rolls to the left as though to follow the car by default, and he hears again the sound of rending fabric, remembers again the jolt with the sign on the New Deal. He levers the wings and rolls back the other direction and straightens out.

  He soars of his own momentum over and past the hard curve in the road, glances to the side, and sees the Buick receding, angling away. Again he
sees sparks jump, smaller this time, sporadic, like what fireflies out east must look like. The steel ring on the shock cord bounces and skips along the macadam behind the departing car. Then the glider rolls hard in the other direction as he loses speed, and his field of view rolls with it. The Buick vanishes for good.

  He corrects the roll and has to keep back and forth on the levers to hold the ship steady. He’s losing altitude, sees the dark mass of the bleachers pass just below. He stays on the levers, works them against the wobble of the damaged wing.

  Don’t crash.

  I might.

  Don’t die . . .

  Even in the dim light of 4:00 a.m. the worn-dirt baseline comes at him like an actual runway.

  The crash occurs somehow gently and disastrously at once. The ground lifts up and the wheels touch down and turn against the earth with none of their prior urgency, slow as he’s now going, and Huck’s just realizing he’s all right, just forming the words aloud to himself in utter wonder, when the left cookie-cutter hits some divot in the soil and breaks completely away.

  The next thing Huck knows he’s airborne again and corkscrewing sidewise, the plank dropping out from under him and then hammering back into his hip, his legs totally akimbo over his head before the whole bucking, twisting contraption slams to a stop.

  His head bounces off a wing strut. The sparks this time go up right inside his own brain.

  He shuts his eyes, waits for the white lights to dim. When he hazards another look, he thinks he may be seeing actual stars, only in pairs, in twins. He blinks, blinks again, and finally holds just one eye open.

  Orion. Betelgeuse. Whatever was out there on the other side.

  Back along Main Street the New Deal alarm goes silent but Huck continues to hear the ghost of it ringing in his head, hammering on and on. He opens his other eye and half watches, half forces the merge of the twinned swimming stars. He begins to untangle from the wreck.