Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  “You was brought up to believe, right?”

  “Was brought up to, yeah.”

  “Well, maybe God put us in this to get that watch in front of you. Think about it like that. This guy don’t need to know the time anymore. Don’t need to know his latitude, either.”

  “Longitude. Latitude’s a sight easier.”

  “Right, longitude. Look, you want to see that watch on Junior Joe’s wrist? ’Cause that’s exactly where it’ll end up.”

  A streak of a shadow came across the ground at the corner of his eye and passed over the corpse and on and then another in fast tandem, killer angels returning. Huck’s eyes flashed up and he beheld again the mergansers, banking and coming back around toward the river, flashing in the morning sun with their plumage and their long fish-killing beaks and that topknot on the hen, like a painted warrior in the Bodmer prints at school. They splashed down against the river.

  Huck watched the drake’s head go underwater and then his whole body dive. The hen’s head swiveled like a ratchet. “I reckon they need to make a living, too,” he said, and he reached out and seized the cold dead wrist in his grip and undid the buckle on the watch strap. He handed it to Raleigh and worked the bowline now with his fingers, tried to ignore the bruiselike impression the watch had left behind on the now bare wrist.

  He freed the rope and stood. Raleigh handed the Longines back. “Now that’s a watch.”

  “So we just, you know, keep mum about it? Tell ’em what they want to hear?”

  “And do what we have to do. Good as any blood oath.”

  They started back for the T. Raleigh toted the staff and the wet rope. Huck could feel the watch in his pocket, heavy against his thigh.

  “How long was the ol’ Lone Eagle in the air on that flight? All told?”

  “Thirty-three hours,” said Huck. “More or less.”

  Raleigh walked along a minute. “Awake the whole time.”

  “Reckon he had to be.”

  “All that dern way, one straight shot, over all that water. Far as the eye can see.”

  Huck put his hand in his pocket and gripped the watch. “When he could see. A lot of it was in the dern dark.”

  “Thirty-three hours.” They came upon the swell in the shortgrass and angled for the T, setting cockeyed in the sun. “You ever wonder, you know, what if he had to poop? I mean, he’s eighteen, twenty hours in, say, and he can’t help it, he’s just gotta take a crap so bad. What the heck would he do? What the heck did he do?”

  “You have to wonder. He don’t say nothing about it in the book.”

  “My old man saw him, you know. In Helena. On that big tour he took afterward.”

  “Yeah. I’ve met a few people saw him back then. My old man knows a guy who spent a few days with him in that Anaconda country where he holed up for a spell. Guy said he was pretty level, really. Didn’t act like a bigshot at all.”

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  They reached the T and Raleigh went around to crank. He set himself to lean into it but straightened up before he started, looking at Huck through the glass. “Wish we’d been big enough to see him back then.”

  “I know it. Ten years ago, though. We weren’t knee-high to nothing.”

  Raleigh nodded. “You never did talk to your pap yet, right?”

  “No. Not since all this. Why?”

  “Just remembered your cousin, is all. Just wondering what’s afoot.”

  “Ain’t seen her neither,” he said. And nobody had said a thing about a dern baby.

  5

  She finally let herself cry and finally let herself sleep, in the dark, low-ceilinged bedroom they’d put her in, up in the rafters of the farmhouse. Her cousin Houston’s room, ordinarily. Annelise remembered him as a baby years ago, and she could smell him, his basic boyness, in the blankets and pillowcase now.

  Not a bad smell—Brylcreem and something like aftershave, although she couldn’t imagine he was old enough yet to need it. And although he was her blood cousin and a mere kid, his scent was so reminiscent of Blix’s that she found herself sucking massive draughts out of the pillow, clutching the thing almost frantically and burying her face and breathing and breathing, and weeping and weeping at last.

  She didn’t expect to fall away but evidently she had, because the room was half alight from the narrow window when she opened her eyes.

  She could faintly hear voices from down below. Uncle Roy. Aunt Gloria. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. She blinked a time or two, studied in the wan light what she hadn’t fully processed in the dim glow of the kerosene lamp the night before.

  Model airplanes, most of them lined in neat formation on a homegrown table at the far end of the room, and two more suspended from the ceiling overhead. A 1903 Wright Flyer, a Curtiss Jenny. What appeared to be a de Havilland Gipsy. Another that looked like an Avro training plane. A few others of apparently original design and detail, which meant he’d built them from scratch rather than kits. She heard a rooster crow outside.

  A voice murmured down below. Annelise pushed the wool blanket back, eased as silently as she could to her feet, and crossed the worn runner in her bare feet down the length of the room.

  The models were of a more or less uniform size, with eighteen or twenty inches of wingspan. He’d apparently built each as a true miniature with some sort of fabric, or maybe tissue paper, as a stand-in for muslin, stretched across a fuselage frame and wing ribs, or simply the latter in the case of the Wright plane. Toothpicks for wing struts, strands of thread for cables. Rubber wheels and axles apparently repurposed from toy trucks or other objects. Miniature engines cleverly mocked up out of a variety of things—macaroni noodles, thread spools, tinfoil. Amazing.

  She heard a door creak down below. The voice droned on. She realized she was hearing a radio broadcast. She looked back at the Gipsy Moth hanging at a banking angle from the ceiling. Blix had a friend who owned one, a rare plane in the States but famous in Britain and probably more so in Africa. Her cousin had apparently actually laminated thin strips of wood to carve the propeller, and he’d gotten the sinewy, twisting proportioning remarkably right. This kid was either totally obsessive or bored out of his mind, or both, and even in her appreciation for the work itself she realized the latter didn’t bode well for her. She wondered how on earth he’d fabricated the cowling behind the prop, bull-nosed manifold cover and all.

  The truck door slammed outside and slapped her back. She jumped to the window as the starter on the motor began to cycle, saw Uncle Roy’s square-block form behind the shine on the windshield. The starter ground on until finally he quit and popped the door and climbed out.

  The day before in Billings he’d had similar trouble and had to get under the hood and fiddle with the choke linkage. “Need to get Houston to fix this for keeps,” he’d said, but even so he had the truck started and running in no time, and no doubt would again now. Annelise found her barefoot and pajama-clad self catapulting across the room and taking the narrow staircase two rickety treads at a time. She ran through a wall of pipe organ music from the radio in the kitchen and right past her mother’s white-haired sister. The screen slammed behind her.

  Uncle Roy was back behind the wheel. The starter whined again, and this time the motor fired to life with a belch of exhaust. He hadn’t closed the hood yet. Annelise ignored the gravel beneath her feet and made a beeline.

  He reached the front of the truck about the same time she did. He leaned in and adjusted the choke back, then raced the motor a time or two with the throttle arm. The engine settled to a rough idle.

  “Cold as a Popsicle,” he said to her. He spoke loudly above the shake of the engine, the roar of the fan.

  She nearly shouted in response. “Don’t leave me out here. Please.”

  He shifted his eyes to her, blue as ice but kind around the corners. �
�I wouldn’t, if the blood ran the other direction. But it don’t, so it’s not my play. You’ve got to get through till Sunday, and then we’ll set you up in town for the school week. Right now I’ve got to get back into town to check on Houston, and we’ll likely both be back later today anyway. I don’t like the notion of women out here alone when there’s a passel of desperadoes on the loose.”

  Backwoods holdup men frankly seemed the least of her worries.

  “I put bathwater on the kitchen stove for you,” he told her. “Your aunt will show you the tub.”

  “I thought she said I had to wait until Saturday.”

  That gold-edged smile. “I reminded her that cleanliness is next to godliness. That one’s hers to begin with.”

  He looked right at her with those crinkling blue eyes, fedora pushed back on his head, the engine’s fan blowing her short curls around. He slammed the hood and the curls settled.

  “What if these gangsters show up while I’m in the bath?”

  Still with that grin. He gestured with his chin toward the house. “Sic Aunt Gloria on ’em. Tell her they’re smokers, drinkers, and gamblers.”

  “How about whoremongers?”

  “That would do it. Look, she can be difficult, but she ain’t the Antichrist. You’re going to find the rustic accommodations a whole lot more challenging.”

  “I don’t know. From what I can gather, she’s even more cuckoo than my mother.”

  “Crazies are generally pretty harmless. Now go take your bath before the water gets cold.”

  “Is she going to call me a slut?”

  He’d already started for the cab. “Not if you don’t behave like one, missy.”

  She smirked and tried to stick her tongue at him at the same time. She could only get the pink tip out.

  “Hold your cards close,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  Annelise watched him drive down the rough lane to the county road. Even from a distance she saw white exhaust on the early air. She hugged her arms, realized she was freezing in her bare feet and pajamas.

  The noise of the REO trickled away and she heard something else, some fanlike whirring. Too cold to be the wings of an insect, surely. She cocked her head and tried to locate the source. In another moment she heard a metallic creak at the house, assumed a hinge on the door, and assumed Aunt Gloria had come out on the porch. She felt something lift in pace with the rate of her heart, indignation or petulance, or both.

  But when she steeled herself and turned, no one was there. The door on the porch indeed gaped open, and the whine she’d heard came again, not from the door but from what she now identified as the source of the whirring. Some sort of elaborate weather vane mounted to the ridge of the roof. It looked from a distance like one of her cousin’s model airplanes, with a propeller spinning out front and a tail fin in back to turn the thing into the prevailing wind. Hence the whine.

  She could hear the murmur of the radio from inside. Maybe she’d at least catch an update on Amelia’s progress. Undoubtedly she’d left Honolulu by now. Annelise hugged her arms in her thin pajamas. She walked forward.

  “She’s a powerful, powerful woman. And that scares people, you know. Scares a lot of men, scares them to the soul, even if they’re drawn right to that power at the very same time, because it’s a force bigger than they are. Ordained to be so, before ever she was born. They have no power in the face of it, and they know it. That’s God’s honest truth.”

  Aunt Gloria in her house shift and limp buttoned sweater and tired slippers, creaking around the little kitchen. “They see that sort of passion, that sort of fire, and they envy it and resent it at the same time. They want to possess it and destroy it. Because it’s a mirror to their own weakness. That is the plain truth. Fetch me another pail?”

  Sister Aimee’s voice crackled out of the little Philco on the table beneath the window, half siren’s song and half rising tide even through the static, and as familiar to Annelise as the smell of the orange trees outside the windows of another, starkly better and starkly brighter kitchen, two days and half a continent away.

  This kitchen smelled of wood smoke. Or coal smoke. The house in San Marino had a gas range and modern plumbing and three or four radio sets, including a glimmering Zenith Stratosphere in the sitting room that made the entire lower floor seem like the nave of Angelus Temple itself, or maybe the orchestra pit of the Vienna Philharmonic.

  Annelise stood from the table. Her cropped curls had already dried from the roaring blast of the stove. Sister Aimee had a voice like no other, and she used it now to recall the days of her famous Gospel Car, to illustrate the two-sided sword of progress, with its treacherous roads and broad highways to sin, undercut nonetheless with unswerving opportunities for faith.

  “She was the first person to drive from one coast to the other,” Aunt Gloria told her. “Not to set a record or to gain for herself, but for the glory of Jesus. Your mother and I, we were touched by that car ourselves when we were girls. Moved by it, you might say, even though we never actually laid eyes on it.”

  “The first woman, you mean. She was the first woman to drive across the country.”

  To Annelise’s bafflement, Aunt Gloria had laid out a pair of her cousin’s overalls and a flannel work shirt after her bath, both heavily patched and smelling, like most everything in the house, of stove smoke and lamp oil. She had to roll the legs with cuffs the size of a bucket, and her slim form fairly swam in them otherwise. With her short hair, Annelise knew that from any distance, she must surely look more boy than girl.

  “That’s right. The first woman.” Aunt Gloria held her hands over the hot plate of the stove. The massive Angelus Temple pipe organ had started up behind Sister’s voice and, in a moment of simultaneous fadeaway and crescendo, replaced it altogether. “People accuse her of theatrics or sensation. But how do you question the results? She’s healed thousands. And saved probably millions.”

  She rubbed her hands over the heat, and Annelise realized that despite the kitchen’s swelter, her mother’s sister was actually cold. Something else struck her: Aunt Gloria was not so old as she appeared, although she may well have been exactly as frail. Though her hair had years ago turned snowflake white, she was younger than Annelise’s mother, herself just barely forty and though blonde-headed, a ringer for Myrna Loy.

  The pipe organ faded out in turn and the Angelus Temple choir started in. Annelise knew the song well—one of Sister’s originals called “I Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve.” Sister sang lead. Annelise gave up hope of hearing any news out of Hawaii. She took the pail and went out to the yard.

  She walked off the porch and around the side of the house to the well pump and its concrete pad. She heard that odd weather vane, humming and humming at the ridge of the roof.

  She’d already fetched one bucket earlier, to replenish the galvanized water dispenser in a corner of the kitchen. She noticed then that this side of the house, unlike the whitewashed front, was more weather-beaten, with paint peeling like sunburned skin and bare gray siding showing through in patches and streaks. But the pump handle levered and plunged with little more than a squeak, and she could see where grease had been applied to the joints and shaft not long before.

  Annelise had always had a vague notion of Gloria’s health troubles. Blinding headaches since she was a girl, problems with her back and hips. A near-deadly bout with the Spanish flu at age eighteen that, among other lingering effects, turned her hair permanently the color of raw cotton.

  Her sister, Annelise’s mother, was by contrast a study in Teutonic vigor, throwing herself tirelessly at luncheons and causes and committees and hardly seeming to sleep. Annelise worked the lever and watched the gush of water splash into the pail and considered with some irritation that under different circumstances, her mother would herself have made quite a distance flier, at least so far as general constitution went.

  It wa
s common family knowledge that Aunt Gloria had always been the frail one. The sisters were still close, in a fashion, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. They did write back and forth and spoke by telephone every month or so, always on a Sunday afternoon and no doubt, it occurred to Annelise only now, when Aunt Gloria went to Big Coulee for church and thus had available service.

  So how on earth could the Philco radio work? Kerosene lamps and a wood-burning stove, although now that she thought about it, a single bare bulb did hang from the kitchen ceiling. Annelise finished filling the pail and left it beneath the pump. She marched in Houston’s overalls around the back of the house.

  She faintly heard the pulse of the song again from indoors, the lyrics jingling in her head by familiarity more than anything truly audible through the walls.

  You can’t get to heaven in a rocking chair

  The Lord won’t have any lazy folks there . . .

  The outhouse stood a little way off, amid a cluster of thorn-­studded shrubbery. Earlier when she made her first inglorious trip to the thing, an enormous cock pheasant erupted out of the brush like a Chinese rocket, just about the time she mustered the resolve to reach for the door. She’d practically wet herself then, and the memory now made the pressure in her bladder balloon yet again. She ignored it and turned back to the house.

  She looked out the lane to the county road. A weathered barn with a tremendous pitch to the roof sat fifty yards or so north and a little east of the house, with two horses in a fenced lot. A squat chicken hutch slouched nearer still, with maybe twenty hens and an enormous copper-colored rooster pecking about in the run. Not a power pole anywhere, and no lines to the house from any direction. An island unto itself. She went back for the pail.

  The cold breeze had fallen off completely and the hum of the blades above the ridge of the roof fell, too. The sound of the radio carried on.

  Oh some of these mornings bright and fair,

  I’ll don my wings and fly the air . . .

  She stopped so abruptly the pail sloshed. She stood there with water on Houston’s overalls, water on his cast-off galoshes—stood there with her eyes clamped shut. She’d forgotten all about that line, and had she still believed in God, she would’ve taken it as a slap. She held the dripping pail against her leg until the song ended.