Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  He fiddled with the spark and got the backfiring down. The brake appeared near useless, so he pushed on the reverse pedal instead, let off and pushed again and got his speed down and his heart out of his belly and back in his chest where it belonged. He clattered across a rough span of washboard and veered around a buckle of frost heave and bottomed onto level ground.

  Two other boys scrambled out of the willows along the river, rods in hand and a mess of fish on a peeled branch. One was a real lunker, Huck could see it even before he’d closed the distance. Raleigh and Shirley, no doubt coming to the racket from the motor. Huck rolled to a stop.

  “Dodging the truant officer?” said Shirley. He was nearly eighteen, hadn’t made it past the first week of the ninth grade.

  Huck twisted in the seat. “Seen one?”

  “Ol’ Rolly here pulled this dern German brown out. You believe it? This dern far down. Gonna get it to town, sell it to the café. Care to give a lift? We’ll let you in on the haul.”

  “That trout ain’t the only thing in this river today,” said Raleigh.

  Shirley made a show of ignoring him. “Old Man Neuman’s rig, ain’t it? Been in the weeds two years at least. What’d you do, sweet talk him out of it? Trade a pie or something?”

  “A jug, more like it,” said Raleigh. He held the dead fish at arm’s length to keep the drip off his dungarees. Whitefish and that single, magnificent brown.

  Huck grinned. “Gas is down to five cents. Lots of cars coming out of the weeds.”

  “Running like a real top, from the sound of it.” Shirley fancied himself a real wisecracker. “Thought maybe ol’ John Dillinger was up here, testing ordnance. Machine Gun Kelly.”

  “Dillinger’s dead,” said Raleigh. “All them old boys is. Pushing daisies. Or locked up.”

  “Yeah, I know that, Rolly.”

  “I think we ought to get a second opinion.”

  “Don’t need no second opinion. Five cents, you said? This trout’ll bring what, twenty? That’d buy some gas. Think this crate can get us to Billings? There’s a girl down there who likes me.”

  Raleigh snorted. “This thing could be a supercharged Duesey and it wouldn’t matter a lick. I ain’t donating my trout to get you to Billings and back.”

  “Didn’t say nothing about back. All I need is to get there. Worry about back later.” Shirley winked at Huck. He tapped the Ford’s battered bonnet with his cane pole. “What’d it take to get this trap running in the first place? I know you got a knack, but young Rolly here is right. For once.”

  “Old Man Neuman tried to run hooch through it a few years back, when gas was pinched. Wrecked the floats in the carb. Ain’t done with her yet, but she’ll run smooth enough, I think.”

  “You know what I think.” Raleigh studied his dead fish again. The red spots on the trout’s long body had already faded and streaks of gray defiled the pale of its belly. “I think we should get a second opinion.”

  Shirley eyed the narrow tip of his bamboo, made it quiver in the air above his head. “Zane Grey here thinks there’s a body down there.”

  Huck felt the tremor in the motor. “A what down where?”

  “A body,” said Raleigh. “A dead dern body caught in a snag on the other side of the river. Couldn’t get to it with the water this high.”

  Huck looked at Shirley, and Shirley shook his head. “It ain’t no body, it’s an inner tube. I promise. A black tire tube with about half the air out.”

  “Second opinion,” said Raleigh.

  “How far off we talking?”

  Raleigh gestured with his swinging fish. “Two minutes. Right down there.”

  “Not no two minutes, though. Ten, more like. Look, the blush is already going on this brown,” Shirley began, but Huck was already ratcheting the brake with one hand, cutting the magneto with the other. The engine dieseled a bit and shuddered still, and he heard the dull hum of the river all the way up here.

  Shirley ran his eyes across the rusted shell of the T. “You sure this heap’s liable to start again?”

  Huck fell even with Raleigh, flashed a snake-oil grin. “Nope.”

  “Liar.”

  “Want a second opinion?”

  “Har har. You ladies is going to an awful lot of trouble for a gol dang truck tube.”

  They went down off the roadway across a swath of cheatgrass greening through the dead stalks of winter, the bitterbrush and sagebrush greening up, too, and the meadowlarks trilling everywhere. The Bull Mountains loomed like a fortress a few miles off, snow glinting yet on the high northern rims. Otherwise the world had warmed.

  They dropped into a wash and kicked out a cottontail, which raced ahead and cut and bounced pell-mell like a rubber ball and finally vanished down a hole. The rush of the water rose up louder with the close of distance, not a roar but a hiss, like midnight static after radio sign-off. Raleigh and Shirley walked upriver and cleared a willow brake and threaded their poles through the cottonwoods to get to the gravel along the bank.

  The river had already come down from its peak—Huck could see the runoff line a foot or so up the rocks on the far bank—but ripped along anyway brown and fast and high. He saw a butterfly flash in the sun, saw it flit and dip and dart. Mourning cloak, first of the year. That line of azure jewels down each black wing, that yellow edge. Then he saw the body.

  Half sunk and bobbing with the racing flow of the Musselshell, in a snarl of dead limbs and flotsam and jumbled planks lodged and upended, akimbo as the wreck of a raft. A torso in a dark suit with one swollen sleeve now visible, now not with the action of the water. A half-submerged cottonwood sweeper nodded and flexed, the root ball still partly attached to the bank.

  “Could be a tire tube. A big one, out of a tractor.” Had to be. No, a sleeve—there it was again and now gone. Huck squinted and stared and tried to convince himself his first sense had been true. The longer he looked, the less he could swear to.

  “Yeah, it could be a tire tube, but it ain’t. It’s a dern body.”

  “Tube,” said Shirley.

  “Corpse. Black suit.”

  “Okay, look at it. Look. Right . . . now,” he said, when the convex edge of this conundrum lifted again with the water, breached again in its eddy of foam and debris. “That is an inner tube.”

  “Huck? What say you?”

  The figure again went under. A pair of mergansers rocketed down the corridor, careened and splashed crazily to a landing just downriver. The hen had a topknot like a woodpecker’s. “I can’t, either way. Could be a tube, yeah. But. It could be a dern body.”

  “Now hold on already,” said Shirley. “This here’s enough of a goose chase.” He walked to the nearest cottonwood, eyed the crotch ten feet up. He leaned his cane against the trunk. “I’ll go up and shimmy out on that limb, get a topside look. Settle this nonsense once for all.”

  “You’re gonna fall right in the dern drink. That’ll make two bodies in here.”

  “Not likely. On either count.” He studied the crags in the heavy bark, found holds for fingers and toes, and started up. He missed a grip and dropped to the ground once, then tried again and dropped again. “Huck,” he said, “you’re bigger’n this runt. Why don’t you give a hoist.”

  “Well, you’re bigger than the both of us,” said Raleigh. “Stouter, at least. Why don’t you hoist me?”

  “Because it’s my idea. Plus I don’t trust your judgment.”

  It was true Huck was big for his age, or tall anyway. Fourteen and he already stood above most men, certainly an inch or more over Shirley. Gangly as a sandhill crane, too—the only pants that fit for length were invariably agape at the waist, cinched into place with a belt that had additional holes in the tongue.

  He could see this sparring going round and round, the shadows stretching longer, the day pinched shorter. He stepped over and wove the finge
rs of his hands into a basket. “You can both climb a tree, for all I care. Let’s just get somebody into the air.”

  “You’d be the man to know, Slim,” said Shirley, and he put his foot in the web of Huck’s fingers and clambered up at the hoist, and Huck pivoted his shoulders and shifted his hands under Shirley’s heft and started to push, and Shirley no sooner got one grip on the crook of the tree than he let out a yowl like he’d been snakebit.

  Or bee-stung. A handful of honeybees boiled out of the fork, and Shirley launched flailing and hit the ground scrambling. Huck both glimpsed and felt something thud against the bone near his eye while his breath caught for a jolt that never came, and he found himself pounding gravel right along with the others.

  They stopped and caught their breath at the mouth of the wash.

  “Left my rod,” Shirley croaked. “Jeez, look at my hand. Like a dern catcher’s mitt. Bastards got me in the neck, too.”

  Shirley pulled his hand away and studied it as though the palm might reflect a duplicate of the wound at his nape, what showed to Huck as a rising red boil with an angry white center, the pinprick of the stinger like a bull’s-eye. “This ain’t good, boys. Last time I got stung I about choked to death. Swelled like that dern truck tube down there. Doc said I dodged a bullet.”

  Raleigh had relaxed his hold with the fish and now the pale, skewered mess of them bled down the leg of his pants. “So what do we do?”

  Shirley looked at him. “Cross our fingers and hope flyboy here can fire that Liz again. And get to it while I can still suck some dern air.”

  They made their way up the draw. By the time they crossed the cheatgrass the red poison at his nape had worked around to his throat and up into his jowls, a mix of bruise and flush. His lips had ballooned, although his eyes appeared to shrink into slits. He looked like a pumpkin impaled on a barber pole.

  Huck felt the anxious smack of his heart, felt a bead of sweat down his ribs. “Almost there,” he told Shirley. He pointed at the T, slouched in the lean of the sun. “I’ll run ahead, get her going. You want to keep walking?”

  Shirley shook his head. He’d begun to wheeze like an engine sucking a vacuum. “Thung thwullen,” he said. He pawed at his eyes with his good hand. “Can’t thee thit.”

  Raleigh’s peepers, on the other hand, were wide as moons, his mouth taut as a strop. Huck said, “You want to stay with him? Wait, no—come ahead. You’re gonna crank.”

  They started to run, and the sprint went weirdly as if in a dream, seemed to occur in two cosmic places at once. On the one hand, he and Raleigh both ran and ran for what felt like agonizing eternity without ever closing the gap, the Ford always just ahead, just ahead, no closer and no closer and no farther away, either, with every long, desperate stride.

  On the other, they seemed to appear at the car in an impossible jolting instant, as though they’d never made the physical dash at all but somehow catapulted not merely over the cheatgrass but also across the very plane of time itself.

  Some trick of the mind, some distorted phase of panic. The rush of fear in the blood.

  The fish hit the bed with a damp thud, and Raleigh went running for the front. Huck jolted back to himself, scrambled behind the wheel.

  Raleigh looked at him across the hood. “Is he gonna die?”

  “No.” He backed off the spark advance. “Crank it. Keep your thumb clear and get out of the dern way.” Raleigh gave him a look, and Huck said, “Wait, hold up. Hold up.”

  Huck pulled the choke halfway out, experimentally advanced the spark. He and Raleigh watched each other through the cracked glass. The lever hit the top of its arc, and Huck heard the spark pop in the cylinder, saw Raleigh jump as the gas fired and the engine belched and shuddered awake.

  “Hot start,” he yelled. “Didn’t think it would work.”

  They bounced across the cheat, and Raleigh jumped free before Huck fully managed a stop, helped Shirley fumble into the bed, and then swung back in himself, and Huck stomped her right down into gear again.

  Huck ground in low through the trace of his own wheels in the grass and swayed back up onto the roadbed, steered again around the frost buckle and over the corduroy at the base of the grade, and started up. After fifteen feet he thought better of it, let gravity and the brake lever bring them to a stop.

  “What are you doing?”

  Huck eased back down to level ground. “No way I’m coming down that hill bass-ackwards if the motor cuts on us.” He backed around and twisted to see over his shoulder. He glanced at Shirley, prostrate and gurgling in the back, and started up the hill in reverse.

  “I thought you put gas in this heap.”

  “I did. But she ain’t near full, and I don’t trust the carb yet anyway.”

  Raleigh snorted. “That’s the least of it. Hate to stake my ol’ bee-stung hide on a dern jalopy, tell you that much.”

  Huck gave it more throttle than he needed to and craned his head around to see. The T went up the grade in a steady shot, whining the whole way like the engine might blow a seal. They leveled on the flat up above and he swung around to face forward again and started for town. And a moment along when he stomped her into high, the Ford lunged like a hot-blooded horse and he felt a surge not of speed but of hope. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash in the air and he looked and beheld again the mergansers, circling and winging back toward the river, gliding like killer angels—

  He caught himself from that same eerie distance, that same angle of refraction. Caught himself thinking, Please, God, please let there be gas. Please, God, please keep Shirley alive. Please, God, in Jesus’s name . . .

  He pried his left hand loose from the wheel. He flexed and unflexed his rigid fingers, his frozen grip. Big Coulee was only two miles off, the tops of the elms showing above the rim at the west edge of town.

  “How’s he looking back there?” He had to shout above the clatter of the motor, the jostle of loose fenders, and the open rush of air.

  Raleigh took in Shirley over the back of the seat. “Not any dern better. Best put the spurs to her.”

  Huck could still feel the spot on his cheek where the bee struck. A miracle he hadn’t been stung smack in the eye. The speedometer bounced and wagged in the general vicinity of forty. “She’s full gallop right now.”

  They hit the macadam outside town, and the rumble of the gravel fell away. For all its roughshod rattles and rust, the T smoothed out across the skim of the pavement, and Huck remembered in a flash that this was how it felt to lift and level and properly soar. Even the raggedy sputter of the motor seemed to settle and glide. He forgot about Shirley, forgot about praying. He just drove and drove and let himself dream.

  Huck let the motor wind out again, and the backfiring recommenced, and he backed off the spark, didn’t try to brake, just held tight to the wheel with his left hand and throttled up again with his right when they careened around the last bend and leveled onto Main. A dog trotted blithely down the center of the street, and Huck squeezed the bulb of the horn. The dog glanced back at the blare, tucked tail, and cut for the sidewalk like he’d been scorched. Then the siren started.

  Raleigh twisted again in his seat. “Guess we had that coming.”

  Huck took a quick glance himself and caught the grim red mug of the driver barely twenty feet behind, jaw set behind the windshield of the new black-and-white. Not Cy Gleason but his deputy, Junior Joe Candy. Hard to know which was worse.

  “Thing’s a dern rocket,” said Raleigh. The siren wound up to an outright scream behind them, and Raleigh cautioned another look.

  The hospital was two blocks down and a block over, and Huck set his jaw and didn’t slow a bit, and by the time he reached his turn, people were popping out along the walk like gophers out of their holes, all shop aprons and feather dusters and jaws uniformly agape. He took the turn too wide and skidded sideways, heard Shirley th
ump around like loose cargo. He fishtailed straight again and in a quick second veered past the line of elms into the circular drive and braked to a hard stop in the covered ambulance bay. The T backfired and stalled.

  Out in the street, the cruiser overshot the entry and wailed on down to the exit, squealed in that way and roared on up like the champ to the chump in a Charles Atlas ad, all sinewy lines and gleaming chrome, the V8 badge on the grille like the sneer of a natural-­born winner.

  Raleigh was already out of the car, already starting for the building. The cruiser braked nose-close, its siren winding down but still unnervingly loud beneath the canopy.

  Huck said, “Hey.”

  Raleigh looked back.

  “Best not bring up that inner tube.”

  Raleigh said, “No shit, Sherlock,” and vanished inside the hospital doors.

  Huck got out and Junior Candy did, too, ambling around the T’s skewed fender. He walked up and stopped just to the inside of what a person with any sense might regard as a polite and sociable sphere, eyes still roving casually around the ceiling or out at the budding trees. He started a slow pink bubble at the precise moment he brought his wandering irises in from the beyond and trained them, like blue gun muzzles, directly on target. The bubble expanded, nearer and nearer. Junior’s gaze finally vanished behind the pink balloon.

  The bubble popped. Junior worked his tongue and pulled pink spatter back into his maw. Same blue glare. “Houston Finn. We meet again.”

  Huck could smell the aftershave, smell the hair tonic. His voice had not yet dropped, and to his horror, the first syllable when he found his tongue squeaked out like nails on a blackboard. In that instant, Shirley shot bolt upright in the pickup bed.

  He looked like a hydrocephalic farmhouse killer from one of Raleigh’s detective magazines. Junior Joe did a double take and heaved out something along the line of “Gid-gadamighty,” and the door to the surgery banged open. Doc Lipton and Sonny the ambulance driver and Raleigh charged out with a gurney.