Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “How long you have this flivv?”

  Raleigh spoke above the sputter of the motor, dusk and chill dropping all around. Huck saw a kitchen lamp come on in the house, saw Raleigh’s ma peer out the window.

  Huck shook his head. “Till she’s fixed. Nothing hard and fast.”

  “She sure ain’t that dern Buick we stole.”

  “Borrowed.”

  “Right. Borrowed.” Raleigh reached into the back and took up his fish again, the bloom indubitably gone even in the lowering light. “Reckon I better get to cleaning these morbid things. Tomorrow, hey?”

  Huck cut the motor. “You really think it’s a body?”

  Raleigh’s mother shouted his name from the house.

  “I think it’s a dern dead body.”

  Huck chewed his lip.

  “You in town or at the ranch tonight?”

  “Ain’t sure. Pop’s been gone all day to Billings, fetching my cousin from the train. That’s how come he put me onto this heap.”

  “Texas kin?”

  “California. My ma’s kin.”

  “He older’n us?”

  “Yeah, but he ain’t a he. He’s a she. Twelfth grade, I think.”

  “Whoa. One in the oven?”

  “What all?”

  “That’s why girls usually get sent off. What they call ‘studying abroad.’”

  “Huh. You mean a baby.”

  “Remember Fanny? Rube’s sis?”

  Raleigh’s mother again.

  “Hold on, I’m coming,” Raleigh hollered. “Gone all last year?”

  The door banged at the house.

  “Yeah, she had a sick aunt somewhere. What Rube said.”

  Raleigh snorted. “That’s old as the hills, too, Houston. This is your ma’s niece, right? Tell me, is your ma sick? I realize that’s a touchy subject, but all else being equal.”

  Huck looked at the moon, full or nearly so, half up now over the far rim of the coulee and blue white and so enormous as to look hardly distant at all. By dawn it would shrink to a speck.

  Raleigh squinted at his fish. “Some of us may be studying abroad. Others of us is more like innocents abroad.”

  Huck continued to look away. “Nobody said nothing about a dang baby.”

  They were quiet a minute, both of them watching the lavender sky and night coming on, lights at the edge of town winking a mile off, and Sirius, steady as time, in the far beyond. Raleigh changed the subject. “How’s the ship?”

  Huck nodded. “Starting to look like something. Frame’s all gusseted for the fuselage, and I’ve got about half the wing ribs, too.” He thumped the dashboard. “Pop’ll let me order the skin once we collect for this crate. Ought to get by to see her.”

  “I will.” His mother shouted again from the house, some threat about dinner. Raleigh started up the walk, then looked back. “Your ma still don’t know, hey?”

  Huck grinned at the dusk. “Pop says you tell ’em what they want to hear, and you do what you have to do.”

  “Good man, that pap of yours. Been some kinda day, hey?”

  “Shirley’s liable to kill us, we head out there and find something without him.”

  Raleigh turned and walked. “Shirley ain’t in a position to kill anybody. Plus he owes us. Don’t let on, but that scared the dern daylights out of me.”

  Raleigh’s mother shouted. Raleigh shouted back. Huck set the magneto switch and swung the spark lever. At the top of its arc he heard the snap in the cylinder, felt the engine turn once and wheeze and shudder and still again in the chill blue air. The magnetos whirred like bees swarming from a tree.

  Raleigh stopped. “Guess you ain’t pulling that stunt twice. Need me to crank?”

  3

  Much to her shock, her salt-of-the-earth uncle scooped her into a mighty hug on the platform of the Billings depot, squeezing her hard enough to knock the wind out of her.

  She barely remembered him from years ago, outside the recollection he’d rigged a little Indian-style headband for her with a couple of turkey feathers and put her in front of him on his saddle horse when he rode out to open an irrigation gate. She’d liked horses ever since, had even owned a little Hanoverian cross in junior high before the local stables suffered some zoning crisis and had to move too far out of San Marino to make regular riding practical.

  She supposed on some level she’d assumed Uncle Roy must not be all bad simply because she associated him with her horse, but her parents had said little about him over the years, and with everything else in such a stew, she really hadn’t given him a second’s consideration.

  He let her breathe again, held her at arm’s length and took her in. “Well then. Not the little thing I remember.”

  Crinkly blue eyes and a lopsided smile with one gold-edged tooth. Hat pushed back on his head. She felt her mouth twitch toward a smile for the first time in days, then a pang in her eyes that she fought like a weakness.

  The conductor silently handed over a form for Roy to sign, as though he knew exactly why she was here, and his job entailed not only delivery but a suitably solemn one. Damaged goods.

  Later in the truck he told her about a shootout a day earlier, outside someplace called Roundup. The very name conjured an image of horsemen in big hats ambushing each other with six-shooters. Then he said something about a getaway car and police blockades on the highways, and it occurred to her that Uncle Roy’s hat was a basic fedora, not some ten-gallon Tom Mix, so even a place with a handle like Roundup, Montana, nevertheless existed in the twentieth century.

  “Did they catch them? The robbers?”

  “Shot one of ’em. Right off the bridge and into the drink, evidently.”

  “Wow.”

  “Never a dull moment,” he said. “A few others got plumb away. They sent a few planes from the airfield here in Billings, to see if they could spot ’em thataway. Pretty slick idea, really.”

  This last got her attention. “It is a slick idea. Especially in places like this, where it’s so . . . you know, big, I guess. Empty. I have a good friend—my flight instructor, actually—who flies for the police sometimes, too.”

  She saw his eyes shift at her. “Well, it’s a new one in these parts, far as I know.”

  They waited through a stoplight, downtown Billings much more of a bustle than she would have guessed. She looked out the side window, saw what appeared to be an honest-to-God Indian curled up in a blanket on the sidewalk. The light went green and they started forward.

  “You said you have a flight instructor?”

  She felt herself nod, felt her lips go drum-tight.

  “Now that’s something. Houston, he’ll be green as that traffic light.” He chuckled. “Probably drive you up the wall with questions, too, so be warned. But he won’t mean to be a pest. He’s as good a kid as they come.”

  If he meant anything with this last, she couldn’t detect it. Couldn’t imagine it either, on an instant’s consideration. “Has he been up?”

  “Flown, you mean? Nah. Well—not in an airplane, anyway. There was this glider he built, but that’s a long story. You have your license?”

  She hooked a curl behind her ear, felt the weight of the watch when she lifted her wrist. “I was getting close. I’d just started soloing when all this . . . you know.”

  Uncle Roy fished out a pack and shook a Lucky loose and fired it. Smoke rose and swirled, and she realized she’d been smelling it on him all along. Another surprise. He cranked his window down. “Sorry,” he told her. “Old habit. Never have much wanted to give it up.”

  “It’s actually a relief. My mother donates to the Anti-Cigarette League, the Anti-Saloon League, the Temperance Union. It’s so . . . I don’t know, gauche, somehow.”

  “Not acquainted with that one, miss. Might have to paint me a picture.”

&nbs
p; “Would you think worse of me if I asked for one?”

  “Are you?”

  She smirked in spite of herself. “Worse?”

  He cracked his own sly grin right around his Lucky. “Asking.”

  “I guess so.”

  He handed her the pack, and she drew one out. He handed her his cigarette, and she lit hers from the glowing tip and passed it back. She put her window down. “You didn’t answer my question, you know.”

  He laughed and held up the smoldering V of his fingers. “Obviously I ain’t in a position to cast the first stone. Long as it stays between you, me, and the highway.”

  “Huh. Forgive my sass, but that’s a pretty spineless answer.”

  “I know it. You’re preaching straight to the converted.” He had his hand on the wheel, and he looked at the burning cigarette. “Used to roll my own, like everybody else in these woolly parts. These tailor-mades are a lot easier to sneak, though.” His eyes shifted back to her. “Half of getting by in life is choosing your battles. What your aunt Gloria don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.”

  Annelise held the heat in her lungs, felt the lift in her head. She’d been awake a long time now. “Sometimes I think I was accidentally switched in the hospital. I’m serious. Or adopted.” She blew smoke out the window and looked at him. “You can tell me if I was, it won’t hurt my feelings. It would explain a lot, really.”

  “I can’t testify to any switch, but you sure weren’t adopted. You can bet the ranch on that. Plus, you may not see it, but you look just like her.”

  “That’s what everyone says. And you’re right, I can’t see it.”

  The truck went into a climb along the cliff at the edge of the city. The shafts of the sun shot low and yellow through bands of clouds above hazy tables in the distance, mile upon mile of rough, jumbled ground between here and the horizon. She wondered how on earth anyone would make an emergency landing out there.

  “She hates my hair, she hates my clothes, she hates my friends. She hates the things that interest me, the books I read. She even hates the look on my face.”

  “Sounds stressful.”

  She was smoking very quickly, half the cigarette already sucked down. In truth she could count on two hands the number of times she’d smoked in the past, each instance producing exactly the dizzying, borderline nauseating spin she felt now. She tapped the ash on the upper edge of the window.

  “My mother called me a whore. She called me a slut. Not my father, my mother. Aren’t those ugly words?”

  He shifted a little, tilted toward his own window and blew smoke.

  “I mean, I assume you know why I’m here.”

  “Yup. I sure do.”

  “She grabbed me by the hair, and she literally dragged me to the car so a doctor could examine me.”

  He looked over, took in her blonde crop. “You’ve barely got any hair to pull, miss.”

  “Trust me, there’s enough.”

  A coyote carrying a chicken crossed the road in front of them, out of the bar ditch and then a smooth streak across the gravel to the weeds on the other side, and gone.

  “Sneaky bastard,” Roy muttered, although he seemed somehow half pleased at the same time, or maybe half amused. He made a quick veer across the center line and back, as though to run down the sneaky coyote’s very memory. Annelise swayed with the veer and smirked again in spite of herself.

  “Ugly words, sure enough,” he told her.

  “Right? I don’t feel like either of those things. I don’t think those things even exist, except in the minds of people who need to believe in . . . believe in . . .”

  “Hogwash.”

  Now her head really did spin. “Right,” she said, and reached out her hand and dropped her cigarette to the roadway. “I was going to say rules.”

  “Fair bit of overlap, in my experience.”

  She tilted her head to the seatback and shut her eyes against the green fog in her mind, and the thought struck her and just popped right off her tongue. “If you’re born to fail, how can you be punished for a foregone conclusion?”

  He didn’t seem to have an answer.

  She opened her eyes again, took in the layer of dust on the ceiling. “As if it is some huge failure to act like a human. Even with that view of the world, though, where humans are born sinners, doesn’t the one thing just cancel the other out?”

  He chewed on this, or appeared to. Finally he said something.

  “Failure gets to looking downright epidemic, is the trouble. Look at that place, right out across the sage—that’s a bust homestead. Door hanging, paper flapping.” He shook his head. “I was only born in ’86 myself, and nowhere near here, but things have been a last-ditch gamble for most in this country since way back then, at least.

  “That’s the winter killed all the cows, you know. Or likely you don’t, but there’s old-timers around can tell you. Dead cattle stacked in the coulees, way the dern slaughtered buffalo must’ve been five years before. Slaughtered Injuns, for that.

  “No end to the troubles ever since, either. Drouth, winds to beat all, Mormon crickets chawing the wheat crop like some Egyptian Bible plague. Damn Spanish flu dropping people from here to Christmas­—­1918, that one.” He was shaking his head now, shaking and driving. “You see enough failure, you start to see it as the way of things. And I guess it does start to look like a dern curse, if you let it. And so I guess you start to tell yourself about heaven, and how on earth you might figure a way to get there.”

  The road made a bend, and as he steered around to the west, she caught a silver splinter in the last angle of the sun, lost it in a gauze of cloud, and then watched the speck of an airplane emerge. One of the ships looking for the holdup men maybe, but by sheer suggestion, she thought of Amelia’s new aluminum Lockheed. That silver-foil flash.

  She said, “I don’t think humans are born failures. I think we’re born animals. The thing that sets us apart is, we can make things that are otherwise necessary into things that are also beautiful. Like . . . I don’t know, oysters Rockefeller. Or the Gamble House. It’s the opposite of gauche, actually.”

  He’d kept his eyes on the curve in the road. “I expect you already know this, but you need to brace yourself, miss. You’re about to go back in time a bit.”

  4

  When the first edition of the Flying and Glider Manual was published three years ago, it was inspired by the belief that thousands of young men throughout the country were intensely eager to own and fly their own airplanes.

  —“Introducing the 1932 Flying and Glider Manual”

  He came off the highway and took the first left he could to avoid Main, skulking along by the moon’s big blare, the idle tuned low as he dared. He turned east again and passed Cy Gleason’s side street, cautioned a glance and couldn’t make out either the constable’s blue Ford or the new county cruiser. He drove to the smithy at the end of the block.

  The bulb above the office door put out its usual weak haze, and the porch light on the bungalow next door had been switched on as well, but Pop’s REO did not appear to be around. Huck cut the motor and coasted to a stop, nose-in to the sliding shop door. He heard the low babble of the Zenith from inside, which Pop turned on at night for the cat.

  He felt like a famine victim out of the Old Testament and knew he should rustle some grub in the house. Instead he let himself into the office. Lindy the cat called to him in the dark, then jumped down from the shelf above the desk and into the wan glow around the radio. Amos ’n’ Andy. Huck hit the overheads and tsked at the cat and went into the shop.

  The ship, or what existed of it, rested on sawhorses in the fabrication bay in the back of the smithy. He’d built the frame for each side flat on the floor over the winter, first chalking out the patterns for longerons and struts and then driving nails to a half depth around the scribed lines to function
as a jig. The plans called for spruce, which he and Pop cut in the Bull Mountains in the fall and milled to spec over at the lumberyard across town. Huck bundled and strapped the sticks tight and let them cure for a seemingly interminable month while he read and reread and reread yet again the 1932 Flying and Glider Manual.

  He ran the projector and swept stray popcorn in the movie house when he stayed in town. He socked his pay away in an Arbuckles’ can and stashed the can in the smithy.

  Over Christmas holiday he popped the straps on his fir sticks and bent a lower longeron around the arc of nails in the floor. He laid the longeron’s upper mate into place and fit a row of struts between the two, then mitered diagonal bracing into each bay. He let the seat bracing into what would become the cockpit, fore and aft, and cut gusset plates out of eight-inch plywood. He checked and double-checked, and when he was sure he had his ducks in a row, he mixed a batch of casein glue and fused it all together with plates and glue and brads.

  He kept a trapline for muskrat and mink in the slough out on the ranch.

  Over the course of a dead-still and blindingly bright subzero week in January, he called in and shot six beautifully prime coyotes and a like pair of red fox using a telescoped .250-3000 Pop had taken on trade for some machine work.

  When trapping season closed, he sent the stretched hides to a fur buyer in Seattle and cashed a windfall of a check, and this went into the coffee can as well. He kept on at the movie house, and by March he had enough to buy a new set of Zenith flight gauges and a war-surplus prop through Modern Mechanics.

  He built the opposing frame flat again on the floor to mirror the first, and with the casein fully cured a second time, he set the halves topside down on their upper longerons. He pinned them tight at the tail, cut and set the graduated connecting struts on layout, and mitered diagonal bracing into the back three bays. He covered the floor and sides of the cockpit with light plyboard and attached seatbacks and a forward firewall of the same.

  The chalk lines from the longerons were scuffed and smudged but still visible on the floor, the arc of nails pulled, but the holes they left like dots properly connected. What he had now resting on the sawhorses and fairly glinting with fresh varnish was the skeleton of an honest-to-God airplane fuselage, sleek and tapered as a rocket. He couldn’t stop looking at it.