Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  He hears the approach of a car, sees the bob and dip of headlights. Probably not Raleigh.

  He gets himself loose, limps around on his hip. The ship leans sideways on its left wing, which is clearly broken through the spar. The tip hit the ground when the wheel broke loose, he’s sure of it. The right wing juts at a more or less proper cant and appears undamaged.

  He’s thinking maybe he’ll nix the wing warping on Glider Number One and engineer actual ailerons. The left wing needs to be rebuilt anyway, and he’s pretty sure he can modify the intact right wing without completely tearing it down. Ailerons would dern sure keep the dern rolling under control.

  The headlights are on him now, the car coming up fast and then braking to a hard stop at the edge of the field, and a third beam, like the blaze of the sun itself, hits him square in the eyes. He looks down at his hands, weird and white in the light.

  His own name thunders through a loudspeaker as though uttered by God the Father Himself. “Houston Finn.” Cy Gleason, the town marshal.

  He’s practically blind, squinting against the light. He shields his eyes with a hand.

  Cy booms on. “If I wasn’t wearing pajamas, I would tan your cottonpickin’ hide. And your old man’s, too.”

  Huck’s eyes go back to the ship, flooded with light, and in a flash of clarity he sees that ailerons alone won’t do it. The problem is that she’s tail-heavy, inherently unstable . . .

  “Houston. Can you walk?”

  His head throbs inside the leather football helmet. He finds his pipsqueak voice. “I think.”

  “Then march. You’ve got a sidewalk full of glass to clean up.”

  He squints toward the light, unsteady on his feet.

  He’s not nixing the wing warping—he’s nixing Glider Number One altogether. He sees it now, plain as day in the beam of light. He’s done with gliders entirely.

  “What on God’s green earth is that contraption, anyway? Wait, don’t answer. I don’t want to know.”

  He takes step after step, the light brighter and brighter, says to himself over and over, I’m not fixing any dern glider. I’m going to build an honest-to-God airplane . . .

  Annelise

  1

  Of course, I admit some elders have to be shocked for everybody’s good now and then.

  —Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It

  She felt like she hadn’t slept in days and in fact had tried to will herself into an outright vigil, tried to summon the same resolve A.E. achieved as a matter of course, up there solo in a ship above the water.

  The North Atlantic twice, South Atlantic once. Honolulu to California next. Then nonstop overland, Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. A woman and her Lockheed like a steady red comet, covering continents in hours instead of months or years or eons. What a time to be alive, whether these nitwits around her realized it or not.

  But still. What endless hours they must have become—dark much of the time, cold all of the time. Knocked around by air currents and light in the head from the reek of the gasoline sloshing right there behind her in the extra tanks. Even so, Annelise knew that Amelia used smelling salts to snap herself back when she needed to.

  Annelise did not have smelling salts, and she certainly couldn’t smell diesel fuel from the sealed canister of a Pullman car, but she went ahead and drank coffee endlessly until her insides felt downright scoured. Her newspaper-shuffling father at first watched and pretended not to, and then tried to ignore her for real and couldn’t, and then attempted a conversation that she wouldn’t have, and finally resorted to pleading, which she both scorned and enjoyed in a manner exactly parallel to her own equal but opposite monosyllables.

  “Are you sure you should be drinking that much coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “But shouldn’t you get some rest?”

  “No.”

  A spell of silence. Then, “This wasn’t my idea. You know that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Annie, can we stop this? You’re making the whole thing worse. Can you just say something real?”

  “Would you like a warm-up, miss?” The porter, with a carafe and what could only be described as extraordinary timing.

  “Why, yes, sir, I would.”

  The man had his eyes either averted or steadied on her mug as he poured, but she flashed him her most angelic smile, showed him the little rows of teeth only recently liberated from an expensive set of metal braces and glinting white as a root laid bare. Definitely not coffee teeth. He gave his own small smile and moved along.

  Her father tried again. “Hey. Can you just say something to me?”

  Again she wouldn’t grace this with an actual answer, though she did cast her eyes upon him when she took yet another bitter sip. She’d always been able to punish him, even when she was supposedly the one being punished. She could play this game forever.

  Eventually the sun came up over the alkaline flats of the desert. Her father had fallen off hours ago, slumped in his rumpled suit, with his rumpled newspaper, the sleeping berth still folded shut. Her own body had a bone weariness, but her brain rocketed with caffeine, and so she slumped in her seat, too, stretched to a fray by her own warring ends.

  She tried to reconcile the two, tried to tell herself this was part of the point. She looked through the crack in the curtain at the dawn. Then she looked back at her father. His skewed neck would ache for a week. He was getting off easy.

  Train travel. What a bore. The Burbank aerodrome and Grand Central in Glendale both routed passenger flights to Salt Lake City these days, although she doubted anyplace in Montana had regular service. She hadn’t been there since she was a girl, but she remembered the ranch as a bona fide jerkwater and couldn’t imagine much had changed, hence its selection for this whole medieval exercise.

  Still. If her parents weren’t frozen in Victorian amber, they could at least have cut her father’s back-and-forth into something not straight out of the Rutherford B. Hayes era. She’d known better than to suggest air passage herself—Mother had gone so far as to confiscate A.E.’s book, citing it as the root of all the trouble. The Fun of It. Ironic, she knew. Practical or not, she’d have crushed the idea on principle.

  She held her own against the seduction of sleep right on through to Salt Lake. She watched the pink of the rising sun bathe the toes of the mountains west of the city, watched the same pink wash move up the bare slopes and into the snow at the top. Her father stirred when the train slowed.

  They killed a few hours in a diner waiting for her connection north. Annelise freshened up as best she could in the ladies’ room. She would be placed in the charge of a conductor who would see her to Butte, Montana, and then east a few hours to Billings. Her father would turn right back around on the next train home.

  “You could’ve flown, you know,” she said to him. The first time she’d initiated a conversation in days, and he blinked at her across his hash and eggs as though he were not only hearing but also seeing her for the first time in a year. “We could have flown here even, out of Burbank or Grand Central. We could have saved ourselves a solid day, a day neither of us can ever get back. You know that, right?”

  He resumed chewing, and he looked as exhausted to her in the moment as she herself felt. She couldn’t recall ever having seen him with stubble on his face before. Now he drained his own coffee and waved for more.

  “I mean, isn’t that part of it? Not to dillydally your time away? Look alive, because no man knows the day or the hour?”

  “Annelise, I own stock in Douglas. My firm negotiated a property dispute for Grand Central. For that matter, I’m the one who backed your flying lessons. I do not by any means regard myself as a Luddite. Remember I told you this was not my idea?”

  “Then why do you go along with her? Why don’t you put your foot down?”

  He shook his head. “Because
Mother is not wrong, Annie. And as difficult as this might be for you to see, she has your heart and your soul and your safety and”—he halted, tripped over his own words—“and your reputation in mind.” He went so far as to point at her across the table. “She is not wrong.”

  The night’s caffeine had run out of her blood like fuel from a tank, even the remnant fumes combusted and gone. She was still in the air but totally without power, and no place in sight to put down. She tried to hold a level gaze across the table and finally went to rubbing her eyes instead. “She called me ‘damaged goods,’ Daddy. You heard her.”

  Not only that. They went so far as to haul her to the family doctor to have her put in the stirrups and examined, which she dodged only by finally copping en route to what they already suspected. Her father had practically driven off the road. “Is that what you believe, too?”

  He could hardly look at her then, and he could hardly look at her now. “Eighteen is a puzzling age, I’m not going to pretend other­wise. And these are puzzling times we live in, for all of us. Mother included.”

  “These are wonderful times, if you can see the fun in anything. The opportunity. And if it’s occurred to Mother even once that she might not have the answer to every little thing, she’s certainly never let on.”

  He stirred his coffee, stirred and stirred. “You always were headstrong. Even when you were a little thing pulling a red wagon around. Selling books you’d outgrown to the neighbors. You and Mother are too much alike, that’s half the problem. Cut right out of the same cloth.”

  “Too much alike? No, sorry, I live in 1937, not 1837.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “‘Damaged goods’ implies I’d actually stoop to accept a man who wants a piece of property to begin with. Anyone who thinks that doesn’t know the first thing about me.”

  He glanced around, and she realized her voice had risen above the clatter from the kitchen, the clink and clank of plates and knives. A few of the other patrons appeared to notice.

  She tried to turn the volume down. “I didn’t betray you, you know. It’s not even possible.”

  “I know. I can see why you’d say so.”

  “I’m not goods, and I am not damaged.”

  “And I am sorry you had to hear that.”

  “I mean, is a widow damaged? Is Sister Aimee damaged after divorce number two?”

  “I know—”

  “What utter hypocrisy.”

  “I know. It’s just that boys don’t . . . always understand that the consequences, for girls, can be disastrous. Socially disastrous. And visible. And permanent. Boys will be boys, but girls . . . the expectations are something different. Because the consequences are different. Fair or not.”

  Now Annelise did look at him. “Visible? Are you hearing yourself?” She felt the slap of her own hands, clapping at her cheeks with minds all their own. “Everyone knows why girls up and vanish midway through a school year, and it’s not for a mere . . . indiscretion, or a dalliance, or whatever polite terminology you choose.

  “Daddy. People are going to think I’m sent off because I’m actually in a fix. Did this not occur to anyone?”

  He slid out of the booth and walked toward the counter, and she could tell by his posture and gait how strained he was, by travel in part but mostly by circumstance. She read this like she could read her own name. She wished she could resent whatever pain or exhaustion or judgment he felt, because she was the one with no say in the matter, and no power. But the fire seemed to have gone out of her.

  He came back with a fresh newspaper and laid down the front page for her to see: earhart is off around the globe.

  She looked up at him. “That could be me. Someday.”

  “I believe you.”

  “This whole thing is a vast waste of my time. I’ve already started soloing, and now all this.”

  He eased into the booth again. “I’m aware.”

  Something else had occurred to her, too, a subject she hadn’t dared broach with her mother around. But she was pretty sure she was right. And as a lawyer and a Christian, wasn’t he obligated to tell her the truth? “Is this even legal?”

  She saw him blink and knew she had him. “That’s a bit of a . . . gray area, let’s say.”

  “But if I’d really put my foot down? Refused to go along with this? You’d have done what, kick me out to the street?”

  “Lord, of course not.”

  “But that’s the only real recourse you could have had. Am I right?”

  He rubbed his bloodshot eyes with fingers and thumb, probably, she imagined, to avoid having to face her. She was yet again in no mood for mercy.

  “I became a legal adult clear back in November, didn’t I? On my eighteenth birthday. California’s one of those states, isn’t it?”

  “You are . . . not entirely wrong. It’s one of those states. One of those few states . . . Most are a, ah, sensible twenty-one.”

  “And now you’re sending me to one of them, against my adult will.” Her stinger was coming up by the second, her scorpion’s defense. “By the standards of the state in which I actually reside. Do I have this right?”

  He shook his head at the ceiling, let out a breath. Gotcha.

  “Because that’s the way it appears. Are you actually breaking the law with this?”

  He was still looking at the ceiling. “Not one that any prosecutor would argue before a judge. Or that any judge would enforce, for that matter.”

  “Why? Because I happen to still be in high school and under your roof?”

  “Something like that, yes. Sure. Like I said, gray area.”

  “And when you wanted to have the doctor examine me against my own free will? Would that have been a gray area, too?”

  People at other tables were definitely looking now, and he knew it, too, and she didn’t give one solitary fig.

  “It never got to that point, Annie.”

  “That’s not the question.”

  “No, you’re right. That would have been wrong. Maybe criminal.”

  “Thank you.”

  He managed to look at her again without blinking, as though the actual logistics of this punitive circus were finally dawning and he realized he’d better hold her with his eyes while he still had the chance. “Frankly, it probably would’ve gone better where your mother’s concerned if you’d come totally clean and given her a name.”

  Her one nearly Pyrrhic triumph. Bleary or not, she felt her ire rise even more. “She couldn’t beat it out of me. I don’t expect you to sympathize.”

  His own bleary gaze didn’t waver. “All right, then. If I can give you one bit of advice beyond that? Going forward, the parole board generally favors model behavior.”

  “Ha ha.”

  A little later he kissed her stiff cheek on the platform and put her back on the train. A little after that the train lurched forward, and with the station falling away, she rummaged in her satchel and found the travel kit she’d put together. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Napkins. A perfectly white and perfectly innocent pair of spare underpants, which she unfolded now inside the satchel.

  She took out Blix’s flight watch, which he’d jokingly let her steal from his wrist that last time. “Careful, now,” he’d told her while she undid the buckle. “That’s where I get my magic powers.”

  She let the watch sway in front of him, baited a swipe from his hand, which she neatly dodged. “I’m Delilah,” she’d said. She teased and twirled the watch back into his reach, danced a little with her shoulders and neck like a cat about to pounce.

  He shook his head, approval in reverse and she knew it. “You’re trouble, is what you are.”

  She held the watch now in her palm, studied again the mysterious dials, the arcane calibrations and elegant blue hands. Blix himself had little practical use for it,
outside the few times a year he flew down into Mexico, but he always wore it anyway, as a token. Or a talisman.

  She wondered if he regretted letting her take it home on her own wrist that night. Surely he must. She had promised to return it at her next lesson two days later, before fate and her mother elbowed in. Now she tried to tell herself that fate as well had entrusted her to keep it, until finally she could navigate her way back to its rightful place. To her own rightful place.

  She thought again of A.E., likely in the air at this very instant and just as likely wearing her own second-setting Longines flight watch. She’d left out of Oakland bound for Honolulu, so hers would be set to the same originating time as the one Anneliese held now. She took some comfort in this even though they were heading in opposite directions. In more ways than one.

  She buckled the ticking device in place, the enormous face of the thing feeling more like a clock than a watch against the slim circumference of her wrist. Maybe it could be her talisman, too.

  2

  He bounced down the washboard above the river and felt the tremor in the motor in the floorboards, distinct somehow from the shake of the road. A prewar Lizzie at least ten years older than Huck himself, all tired springs and tired drive bands and probably tired compression to boot. He hadn’t driven far enough to know.

  He levered the throttle and felt the wind lift, thumbed the dust off the speedometer. The needle jumped like a live wire between thirty-five and forty. Could that be right? He looked up again and saw the edge of the flat, the road tilting off the plateau and down to the river bottom. He had a moment’s distraction at the green blaze along the bank, bright as springtime against winter’s remnant brown. He tipped over the lip of the grade and realized he wasn’t very dang sure of the brake band, either.

  His heart dropped like a hammer with the plunge of the car, a kick to the groin from the inside out. The engine groaned against gravity and wound into a single backfire, then a pause and finally a whole banging barrage, like a pistol shot answered by a fusillade. Now he’d hit forty for sure, the needle when he glanced at it appearing to tremble in place like a setter on point.