Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  She opened her eyes again, stared at the sky, with its powdered late-morning haze. The moon was still up over the long bench east of the farm, small and white and barely a ghost.

  The rooster crowed in his run, and she watched him chase down and pin a darting hen. He flapped atop her and went into a sort of brief if somewhat violent electric spasm, then hopped off and puffed up and preened. The hen shook dust in a burst from her plumage and went casually back to pecking. Annelise collected herself and stepped to the porch.

  She set the pail by the door and went to free a foot from its rubber boot.

  “Keep it on,” Gloria told her. She moved away from the stove and took a scarf from a hook by the door. She wrapped her head and ears and eased into a chair. “Hand me those other galoshes. Please.”

  Annelise looked down and saw what she’d taken earlier for a child’s pair of rubber rain boots, mud- and manure-flecked but much smaller than the ones she herself now wore. She stayed on the floor mat and stretched to pass them over.

  “Got chickens to feed now. Horses. A few other chores. Lord won’t have any lazy folks.”

  “Like the song says.”

  “Just like the song says. I’m glad you paid attention.”

  Annelise looked up at the bulb dangling from its wire in the ceiling and not aglow at the moment. “How exactly does the radio play? A battery or something?”

  Aunt Gloria beamed at her spattered galoshes. With her house slippers dropped away, her feet appeared tiny. “That Houston of mine. That’s his doing.” She slipped a foot into a boot, easy as a silk slipper. “Uncle’s too, but Houston—that boy’s a wizard. Three years ago, when he was just little.”

  She tugged on the other boot and creaked around in the chair to look at the squat Philco on the table. Sister’s voice had begun to garble, popping and snapping with static and suffering bursts of interference from another broadcast, what sounded like Benny Goodman or the Dorseys, Annelise couldn’t quite tell from the snippets. Gloria half stood and gripped the edge of the table with one hand, reached across and moved the tuner.

  Benny Goodman, loud and clear. “Moonglow,” a song Annelise loved. Gloria moved the dial back, into the stuttering overlap again, then farther yet, into a dead zone on the band. She came up into the clash once more, then once more into “Moonglow” and clarity.

  “Does this sometimes,” she said. “In the afternoons, usually. Devil’s the prince of the powers of the air, you know—says so right in the Word. Sometimes his music runs right over everything else.” She killed the radio completely.

  “I actually think that’s a really pretty song.”

  “Oh, Satan’s not ugly, sweetheart. That’s the worst lie of all—horns and a pitchfork. No. He’s beautiful. A charmer. Pretty on the surface, just like that song might seem to be. But it’s a thin surface, and a dangerous pretty.”

  Annelise had heard all this before, had run it over and over in her head, and for a couple of years now had kept up her end of an ongoing sparring match with her mother about the same subject exactly. Popular music wasn’t totally forbidden in the house, although her mother certainly maintained reservations.

  But she looked around this spare kitchen with its one bare bulb and its jumble of milk-carton shelving and mismatched chairs and soot-stained walls, and what mostly rang in her head was Uncle Roy telling her that half of getting by in life was simply choosing your battles.

  “Houston,” she said. “How exactly did he make the radio work?”

  Aunt Gloria straightened up and smiled. “The Lord’s got great plans for that one. We didn’t have the money for a store-bought wind charger, so he built one. Out of just . . . junk. Used a generator from a wrecked car, I think, and got the propeller from an electric fan, or something—I can’t remember. But he did that for me. Before that, Uncle would have to charge a battery at the shop in town, and it wouldn’t last the whole week. The Lord’s got great, great plans.”

  “It’s on the roof,” said Annelise. “Right? Like a cross between a weather vane and an airplane?”

  Still with that smile, that terse smile. She nodded. “That’s it. That’s the power.”

  “For the light, too, I guess.” Annelise shifted her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Yes. For the light, too. Enough for the radio and one bulb.”

  Annelise still stared at the ceiling. “I saw his airplanes upstairs.”

  Aunt Gloria did not skip a beat. “That’s his great temptation. His weakness.” She shook her head, still with that hint of a smile, and Annelise knew when she looked over that whatever disapproval Aunt Gloria owned, she couldn’t avoid the glint of simple pride, either.

  “He nearly killed himself sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with this outlandish glider he tried to fly. Boys, you know. None of us knew a thing about it, that’s how sneaky even an honest one can be. I told him you don’t have to open your mouth to tell a lie. Speaking, as we are, of lies.”

  “But he actually flew it? A glider?”

  “Evidently. Long enough to crash into the mercantile, anyway. Broke an expensive window in the process, which he had to work to pay off. Learned himself that lesson.”

  “Those models upstairs are really . . . intricate. Somewhat amazing, really—”

  “I cannot argue—”

  “—so it doesn’t seem so surprising that he could build a working glider, but how on earth did he ever launch it?”

  “He had an accomplice, obviously. Some partner in crime whom he’s taken every bit of the fall for, which should sound very familiar to your own . . . predicament. From what your mother’s told me.

  “But Houston, now. Apparently he used a car to tow the glider, a powerful car, which obviously didn’t drive itself. The sheriff said more than one person heard it that night, on Main Street, just about the time the glass smashed in the mercantile and set off the burglar alarm.”

  “Could it have been Uncle Roy?” The thought crossed her mind and popped from her mouth in the same instant, and already she’d started flogging herself. Stupid, stupid.

  “Lord Almighty. What kind of a question is that? Of course not. Not that he was any use nipping it in the bud, God love him. The sheriff’s best guess was the car actually came straight from his own shop that night. But your uncle Roy could snore his way through the Rapture itself. One of these days he’ll wake up already in glory, never even know how he got there.

  “Good Lord chose to preserve him, though. Houston, I mean. Not a scratch on him, broken window and all. Like I said, the Lord has big plans.”

  This time Annelise actually thought about stopping herself. But her stinger had already risen. “Maybe he’ll fly Bibles. To the children, in Africa?”

  Aunt Gloria smiled again. “You never do know. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.” She looked at Annelise dead-on now, and she held her gaze good and hard. “Part of me thinks that if God wanted us to fly, He’d have given us feathers. But I also know you can’t stop progress, and I’m not totally ignorant, regardless of how things around here might seem. Or how you may be inclined to think of me. Heavens, Orville and Wilbur Wright were a minister’s sons. Did you know that?”

  Annelise admitted she did not.

  “But you did know Sister drove an automobile across the entire country when hardly anyone had. So a car can be, well, stolen by that boy of mine and used to pull a glider in the middle of the night, or a car can be a vehicle for the work of the Lord. Same with an airplane, I should imagine. Sister’s been in one of those, too. Did you know that?”

  “The Heavenly Aeroplane,” said Annelise.

  “The very one. Your mother did her job, I should say. That’s a famous sermon, of course.”

  And an old one, from ten or twelve years back. Annelise had been a little girl the first time she’d heard it. Sister Aimee had chartered a ship to get from on
e revival to another, and in the usual fashion turned the departure into a publicity spectacle, only to crash and burst into flames on the runway. She got out unscathed and promptly, in the usual fashion, boarded a second plane that flew off without a hitch.

  And in the usual fashion, she turned the incident into a sermon the following Sunday. “One plane piloted by the devil,” Annelise remembered, “the other piloted by God.”

  “Gives me hope.”

  “The Heavenly Aeroplane?”

  “No, child. Your mother. She did her job.”

  Annelise remembered as well an entirely different spectacle, from just about the same time as the famous sermon. Aimee Semple McPherson had vanished while swimming off a Los Angeles beach. Initially feared drowned, she did eventually resurface—but weeks later and a thousand miles away, dragging herself out of the Mexican desert with claims she’d been chloroformed, spirited away, and held for ransom in a Sonoran hovel.

  Meanwhile, critics of religion in general, and Sister’s many ministerial rivals in particular, mounted a sort of strange-bedfellows’ assault on the entire tale. She faced accusations of everything from staging an elaborate publicity stunt to conducting a secret affair with her married radio technician.

  To her most ardent followers, the outcry and insinuations were little more than the devil’s usual sabotage of an otherwise righteous Christian soldier. Annelise’s mother, for example, had never wavered in her allegiance, although Annelise herself had long ago learned to use the whole flap as her own sort of sabotage, the surest bomb to send her mother writhing and clawing for defensive ground.

  Because even though Sister not only survived a grand jury inquiry but used it, in the usual fashion, to her advantage, no actual evidence ever surfaced to bolster the kidnapping story. Worse, the rumors of her dalliance with the radio man remained neither proven nor ­disproven—and as it turned out, he’d gone conspicuously missing himself during the same span of time. Annelise wasn’t afraid to wield any of it.

  Until now, when she was supposed to be choosing battles. Much as she hated to, she forced herself to avert her eyes from her aunt’s, forced herself to look at the dark bulb in the ceiling and the milk crates on the wall and finally down at the ridiculous cuffs in her overalls. Aunt Gloria may as well have read her mind.

  “She never was one of the lazy folks. Your mother, I mean. Energy to rival Sister’s, if that’s possible. That God-given fire, you know. Lord, I wish I had half of it.

  “That may be Sister’s greatest gift, actually. You can smother a lot, even the plain truth now and again, but a fire like that? That can’t be damped down. Not by any slandering panel of men, anyway.” Annelise could feel her aunt’s eyes upon her. “Although plenty enough have tried.”

  Annelise finally made eye contact, for the briefest moment only, but long enough to catch a clear challenge in Aunt Gloria’s gaze. She shifted her eyes back to the window, watched the daylight sparkle and flash on the bright plumage of another pheasant pecking at the edge of the trees. A handful of much plainer birds pecked in the same fashion, all mottled dun feathering, no white ringneck and no brilliant red comb around the eye. Hens, she realized. She said, “I remember. I live there.”

  “Oldest trick there is, with men. Especially the sanctimonious ones. Fastest way to kill a woman is by tarnishing her reputation. Throw judgment at her, bring judgment on her. That’s a thing you need to remember.”

  “Well,” said Annelise finally, “that’s no doubt true. But in my experience, some of the worst judges of women tend to be other women.”

  Now Aunt Gloria said nothing, and Annelise waited in the rising tick of the stove. She looked back from the window and the pheasants and saw that her aunt no longer glared at her, was not in fact watching her at all.

  Aunt Gloria had her head bowed. She pressed hard at her eyes with a finger and thumb.

  “We need to get chores done,” she said. “I’ve got a headache coming.”

  6

  “Cy’s hard to read, always has been. Cotter pin.”

  Huck shook the hubcap like a gold pan, watched the nuts and washers roll around and reshuffle until the pin revealed itself. He plucked it out.

  Pop leaned in under the hood.

  Afternoon was nearly gone, the body hauled in from the river and a Billings newsman already back to the city with his scoop. Huck and Raleigh stood to get their names and pictures in the paper, but the sheriff had seemed downright sour about the whole business.

  Pop had returned from the ranch and barely determined that neither Huck nor old Mr. Neuman’s rattletrap was anywhere to be found before Cy Gleason roared in waving his arms about a gunshot cadaver, and why in the hell weren’t those damn kids in school in the first place, and so on.

  “You’ll have to log some time in the classroom now, I’ll tell you what,” Pop told him. He’d pulled the linkage apart, rethreaded a stripped keeper, and about had it all together again.

  “We thought we were getting on his good side,” said Huck. The REO sat half in and half out of the shop, and it was colder inside at the moment than in the lean yellow sunlight beyond the bay door. He could feel the watch in his pocket, and all he wanted to do was put a fire in the stove and build wing ribs. “Maybe should’ve just left the thing to wash down the dern river. Saved ourselves the trouble.”

  “No, you did the right thing, and Cy knows it. He’s a classical hard-ass, but put yourself in his position. Charged with the public safety when he’s got all you kids running around like wild hellions, not to mention a bunch of guys who spend all day in a coal seam and half the night in the tavern. Not to mention every crackpot farm wife in the Musselshell. At the end of the day he appreciates what you boys done, but that don’t mean he’s about to gush about it—give you a medal or something. All right, get her fired.”

  Ten minutes later he had the linkage adjusted and idle mixture tuned and the choke working again. He dropped the hood and disappeared for the washroom. When he returned, Huck had the truck backed into the sunlight.

  Pop slid the bay door closed and walked to the driver’s door. “Slide over. No sense pushing it with Cyrus.”

  They drove to the café and sat in a booth by the window. Huck had to recount the tale of the body and its discovery three times in fifteen minutes, once to Hannah, the waitress, and twice again to other diners, and he prayed to God that wherever Raleigh happened to be at the moment, he was sticking to a more or less compatible version of the same abridged sequence. Trouble was, Raleigh had a knack for embellishment even under ordinary circumstances.

  “Reckon we’d better get out to the place for the next couple of nights.”

  He’d seen this coming. “I was sort of hoping to get a little further on the wing.”

  Pop stirred his coffee, pointlessly because he never put a thing in it. “Yeah, I guessed that. I don’t like having women out there alone, though, with that waterlogged rascal’s friends still around. No telling where they show up next. Anyways, I got the parts for the tractor and we need to get it back in business, on the off chance we get some water this season. And you ought to see your mother. And meet your cousin.”

  That other source of dread.

  Pop evidently sensed it. “You’ll like her, she’s a firecracker. And get this, she’s had flying lessons. So already you’ve got something in common.”

  Now this did beat all. “You didn’t tell her about the dern airplane, did you?”

  “No, but she’ll be starting school next week, which means she’ll be living here in town with us some, so she’s bound to find out. May as well get that in your head right now.”

  “She will spill the dern beans.”

  Pop looked at him. “Did you just hear what I said? Girl’s had flying lessons, Houston. That’s a big stroke of luck, seems to me.”

  Huck stared at the bubbles climbing through his Coke bottle. He could
feel the watch in his pocket. “You sure they’ll even let her into school?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Ain’t she . . . you know.”

  Pop looked at him. “Ain’t she what?”

  He thought of Raleigh, standing in the dusk with his dead fish. “Ain’t she ‘studying abroad’?”

  Pop cracked a grin. He pulled the spoon out of his coffee and set it on the saucer. “No, sonny, she ain’t. Although I can see why you’d jump to the conclusion.”

  “What on earth is she doing here, then? Isn’t that why girls get sent off?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, most times. But this ain’t one of them times.”

  He took an idle swallow and something else struck him. “I’m on at the Rialto tomorrow night.”

  Pop looked at him. “Now who’s the rascal.”

  “I just remembered. Honest.”

  He stirred his coffee again. “Just remembered something myself. Probably is better for one of us to stick it here. I hired a new fella down in Billings the other day, and he’s due to show up sometime over the weekend.”

  “He had flying lessons too?”

  “Didn’t say. But he’s a hell of a smith. Welder and machinist. Young guy, but kind of a character. Name’s McKee.”

  “How young?”

  “Well, not real young. Twenty-two? From Utah. Worked at the Browning gun forge down there, actually. Didn’t seem Mormon, though.”

  Huck forked succotash to the side of his plate. “Studying abroad, is he?”

  Roy grinned. “You’re going to like her, Huck. She’s a pistol.”

  7

  Fig. 5-A shows the wing curve I use. I don’t know what to call it. I made it up myself after building a lot of wings . . .

  When I had found out where the centers of lift were I could place them ahead or behind a little at a time until I had a flyin’ sweetheart.