—B. H. Pietenpol, 1932 Flying and Glider Manual
Huck fired the stove in the shop and busied himself in the fabrication bay past midnight, building wing ribs in the jig. He finally gave it up when he got out of sequence and tacked two gussets in a row without first applying the glue, and knew he’d gotten too tired and too sloppy to continue.
In the morning he roused himself early, boiled a pot of coffee to cut the fog and took both the coffee and the remains of the Texas hash straight back to the shop. He set another fire and ate the hash cold while the shop warmed, petted Lindy a time or two, and went back to the ribs.
By noon, with the last of them assembled, he stacked them off to the side of the fuselage frame in two columns: fourteen perfectly symmetrical full ribs in one, fourteen truncated aileron ribs in the other, each a single cross-sectional slice of perfect aerodynamic foil. He was close now to needing muslin to sheath the body and wings and in fact already had an order filled out for Sears and Roebuck. Pop would send it off once they collected for Old Man Neuman’s T, and Huck went out now and folded the hood open and tinkered a bit underneath. He finally conceded he had the old rattletrap as far along as he could without help.
He went back to the bay and mulled the options. Daylight shot through the clerestory at the top of the wall, weak yellow shafts filtered by a winter layer of coal soot and general grime. He knew he could just drag a ladder around and wash the windows in a legitimate gesture of progress, but one of the yellow beams happened to fall across the fuselage like a spotlight out of heaven itself. Huck found himself unable in the moment to accept a downgrade from airplane builder to gol dang window washer.
What he really wanted to do was lay the ribs out and attach them to the spars, which, along with the fuselage, would represent a nearly complete skeleton of the entire airplane. But the finished wing would span a full thirty feet, and the shop lacked space.
He settled on the flaps instead, to finish off the wing ribs. He went back to the plans pinned to the corkboard on the wall. He’d already partially modified the jig to build the shorter ribs but realized he’d have to fabricate the steel control horns before he could lay in the actual flap frames. He went back to the main part of the shop and rummaged around, found two remnant pieces of twenty-gauge cold sheet and took them back to the bay.
He wondered when this new smith of Pop’s would roll in, an intrusion he’d felt in a creeping dread since supper the evening before. McGee, or something. No. McKee, with a K. Outside of Huck, Pop hadn’t retained a hireling in quite a while and Lord knew he could use one, the way work had been picking up, but still. First this cousin, who in all possibility could at least have been kept out of the shop, and now a guy nobody knew from Adam.
On the other hand, Pop had said this McKee was a heck of a machinist, and welder, too. Huck’s own welding skills weren’t awful, but they weren’t professional, either. Pop was a dern sight better, but also busy. The airplane project had reached a point where a good bead hand might be of real use, provided the guy could otherwise keep mum. Huck prayed to God that this McKee wasn’t overly religious, or even particularly talkative.
He worked through the afternoon, laying out and cutting and filing four flat steel halves, two for each horn bracket. He clamped them one by one into the bench vise and hammered the cutaway ear on each to form a mounting strap, hammered a radiused nose on the leading edge where the halves would join.
The shafts from the clerestory climbed the wall behind him as he worked, daylight angling toward evening. He worked right up to requiring weld tacks to fuse the halves into a pair of laminated brackets, what would ultimately serve as the connecting linkage to raise and lower the ailerons, and so steer the ship.
He hauled the big Longines out of his coveralls and checked the time.
The main feature in the movie house turned out to be interesting indeed, given the events of the past few days. A show from six years back called The Public Enemy, easily the most violent picture he’d encountered, with machine gun ambushes and back-shootings and gangster hits galore. Women got slapped across the mouth for sass, and a gun moll had a grapefruit shoved in her face at breakfast by the main character, a bootlegger played by James Cagney. Earlier in the film, a mob boss’s floozy girlfriend got Cagney drunk and lured him into bed. A horse was tracked down and shot in retaliation for a riding accident. A horse, for crying out loud.
The finale really sunk in. The Cagney character’s bullet-riddled corpse was delivered in a standing position on his mother’s front stoop, his dead and doughy mug looking for all the world like the one that surfaced through the water the day before.
He could hear already the hue and cry in tomorrow’s sermon. Pastor White could get nearly as worked up over movies and dance halls and worldly influence in general as Mother did. While he didn’t often refer directly to the Rialto or the downtown saloons from the pulpit, he wasn’t above pulling Huck aside from time to time, to suss out what exactly was on import this week from the Hollywood Gomorrah.
“Garbage in, garbage out, Houston,” he’d told him not long ago. “Beware of anything that makes bad behavior and corruption appear perfectly normal. Glamorous, even. And let me ask you something serious—is that really where you want to be when Jesus comes back? Is that where you want Him to find you?”
Unfortunately, this James Cagney fellow in particular seemed hell-bent on making the pastor’s case for him. A few weeks earlier the Rialto showed another of the star’s films, not a gangster tale but a musical spectacle, about a song-and-dance-show producer. Footlight Parade.
It was glamorous, all right—Pastor White was right about that. Scores of lissome, underdressed showgirls in all their plucked and silken elegance, long legs scissoring in kaleidoscopic dance numbers. They trickled in a waterfall, folded and opened and reconfigured one to another in unbelievable unison, formed orchestrated geometric patterns that reminded Huck of the magnificent structure of snowflakes.
Nothing cold about any of it, though. Those girls, with their shimmering skin—they looked downright ripe, like exotic fruit. Eve’s apple, in a way. Huck sat there in the projection booth not only entranced, but hard as a fence post inside his trousers. Then, midway through a swimming pool number with what must have been a hundred or more glistening beauties all gliding and diving, slipping and sliding, around and over and atop one another, the film snapped in two in the projector.
Huck jolted in his chair, heart clogging his very throat. He lunged for the snapping projector, shamefully, even painfully, aware of the tortured bulge behind his fly.
Catcalls and complaints from the audience down below. He fumbled to find the kill switch and couldn’t, bamboozled by the shaft of light blasting out of the projector and by the machine’s incessant clacking, the ribbon of celluloid lashing round and round on the reel like a whip. Huck had a panicked vision of the broken film catching on something and unspooling into even greater disaster, and finally he reached around behind the device and found the power cord and yanked it out of the wall.
The stark white shaft of the projection beam vanished. The room went black as ink, although the reel and the lashing celluloid continued to clack in the dark from momentum alone. The sounds of distress in the theater rose in pitch, what sounded to Huck like cries and groans out of the persistent fires of Hades.
He tried to hobble his way for the switch on the wall, keeping his hands on the projector to avoid stumbling into the thing. But even with the present crisis his condition simply would not abate, and halfway around the dark bulk of the machine he had to pause and adjust his own painful angle inside his britches. The whirling celluloid slapped at his head.
To his horror the door to the booth banged open and the overhead light shot on. The manager, Mr. Byers, pushed past and stopped the reel with the heel of his hand. “Quit yer jacking off up here, Houston,” he barked, “and grab me that splice kit.”
8
“I saw your airplanes. Out there on the farm.”
“Ranch. It’s more of a ranch.”
“Ranch, then,” she said. “But your models. They’re amazing. How on earth did you know what a Gipsy Moth is?”
They were walking down Main, just about level with the New Deal across the street, which Huck couldn’t pass anymore without seeing those upper windows flying toward him out of the dark.
Church had just let out. Pop had sent them home together. Huck was taller and he had no idea what to say to her, but for some reason it rankled that she could so much as name a de Havilland Gipsy.
“Shoot, everyone knows what that is. It’s a common ship.”
“Have you actually seen one?”
He felt the flush in his face. “Just pictures.”
“Well. You did an especially good job, then.”
“Thank you.”
They trudged a little farther.
He caved. “Have you seen one?”
“I have. A friend of mine owns one. Or a . . . friend of a friend, anyway.”
Huck knew people were looking at them as they walked along, from across the street and also from behind them after they’d nodded and helloed in passing, and he knew they weren’t looking because of the story in the Billings paper this morning. His cousin had a look to her. In a word, expensive.
She said, “I heard about the glider.”
That heat around his collar. “What exactly?”
“Oh. Not anything to speak of. I asked your dad if you’d been up, and he said you had. In a glider you’d built yourself.”
He’d expected Mother as the source, not Pop. “Yeah, I almost crashed it into the mercantile back there. The New Deal. Actually I sort of did crash it.”
“He didn’t mention that. Do you still have it? I’d love to see it. Not sure if your dad told you, but I’ve had some flying lessons myself.”
Even after nearly two hours at church and the duration of this walk, he could barely bring himself to look at her. “Actually I burned it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I burned it.”
“Oh.” She wore a short-waisted baby-blue jacket with two rows of brass buttons above a fairly snug skirt. A darker blue beret cocked at a backward angle on her head, similar to what Shirley Temple sometimes wore. She looked like springtime rising, but nothing at all like Shirley Temple. “Why did you do that?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t work right.” Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw her smile.
They turned the corner onto First and walked down the street in the warm air, the maples and elms already out of bud and showing new electric leaves. Early in the year to fill out so fully, though most of the snow had already blown out of the high country with the spring melt. No real rain yet to speak of. A full block from the shop Huck spotted the panel truck, backed up to the open slider door. A Stude, five or six years old. When they drew closer, he made out stenciling on the side, the legend yakima mckee blacksmith-machinist-fabricator. Hand-painted, though skillfully done.
The man himself slouched against the workbench inside the shop, perilously close to the fabrication bay. He held a folded newspaper in one hand, a bottle down against his leg in the other. He looked up and took in Annelise. “Hey, cowgirl. Want a beer?”
“McGee, I take it,” said Huck.
“I’d love one,” said Annelise. She stepped into the shop and crossed the floor toward the bench.
He reached behind for a fresh bottle. “McKee, with a K,” he said to Huck. “Highland clan. McGees are Lowland.” He set the paper down, grabbed a cold chisel off the bench and popped the cap. He handed the beer to Annelise, but he looked now at Huck. He tapped the newspaper. “Reckon you’d be the local hero. Heck of a write-up this morning.”
It was true. Pastor White had preached half a sermon on the events of the previous days, with a copy of the same morning paper for effect. He called Huck and Raleigh heroes, pointed to their God-given industriousness and tenacity and plain Christian courage to do right. Huck had sat there feeling like an idiot in a spotlight the entire time, the Lindbergh watch fairly burning in his pocket.
Annelise pulled on her beer. “I think he autographed twenty papers after church.”
He’d managed to scan a good bit of the article in the process. He and Raleigh came off like characters in a boys’ adventure novel, under the banner young sleuths stage daring recovery of gunshot baddie!
Although the both of them had glossed right over the most dangerous parts of the escapade, the newspaper managed to make the whole thing sound pretty sensational anyway. Raleigh, as usual, had the take-home quotes, one of which appeared in italics beneath the main headline: “The problem with putting two and two together is sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”
“They call you Huck, eh?” said McKee.
“Yeah, some people. Rolly does, that’s why it’s in the paper. He’s the one who started it, actually. On account of my last name.”
“He must be a real piece of work,” said Annelise. “That quote under the headline? It’s from a detective novel.”
“That would figure.”
He noticed something else. McKee had toted Pop’s ancient single-shot out from the office, had it lying now on the bench beside the beer. Usually the rifle hung high up on the wall in a blanket of dust, a token of what Pop called “them wild old days.” Nobody had fired it in years, or even taken it down in as long as he could recall. Now McKee had evidently cleaned and oiled it.
He’d looked back to Annelise. “So what do they call you, cowgirl?”
“I am not a cowgirl. I’m an . . . aviatrix.”
“Oh ho.” He hooked a thumb toward the fabrication bay. “So that’s your build back there, I take it?”
Not good.
Annelise frowned. “Build? Why on earth would I have to build anything?”
“Strictly the flier, then. Reckon that leaves Junior here to be the shipwright.” He winked at Huck. “Already had that last part figured out, by the way.”
“I’m the builder and the dern dang flier.” The words just popped out and now he realized he needed a change of subject, pronto. He said, “That’s Pop’s rifle.”
This worked better than expected. McKee visibly lit up, in fact seemed to forget all mention of anything else. He pivoted and set his beer down and hoisted that beast of a gun from the bench. He cranked the breech open, looked down the bore like he was looking through a railway tunnel.
“Two-and-a-half-inch Sharps, Big Fifty. Not one you run across every day. Good solid bore, too, hard living or no.” He levered the breech block again, a sound like the clank of a vault. “See how the wood’s dished out in the fore-end? That’s from riding across a saddle.” He glanced up at Huck. “A lot. How long’s he had this baby?”
Annelise cut in before Huck could answer. “Speaking of a good solid bore, let’s stop living in the past, shall we? The future awaits.” She stepped straight for the fabrication bay.
Huck found his tongue. “Wait. You can’t go in there.”
She did pause, however briefly. “The cat’s out of the bag, Houston. Or it’s about to be, if I’m guessing right. I’m on your side, believe me.” She pushed through the door.
McKee shifted the rifle to one hand and retrieved his beer bottle with the other. “So. Pancho Barnes in there ain’t your sister, I take it.”
He knew he should follow her, but for some reason he thought to stave off the whole business, folly though it no doubt was. He looked at McKee. “Cousin. From California. I barely know her.”
McKee nodded. “Cousin. Well.” He winked and sauntered after her, rifle in hand.
“It’s a start, at least.” She was on the other side of the fuselage frame, eyeing the passenger compartment.
“Yeah, she’s
getting there,” Huck mumbled.
“I take it your mother doesn’t know.”
“No, and she ain’t gonna find out, either.”
Annelise fixed her own gun-barrel eyes on McKee. “Not from me she’s not, that’s for sure.”
McKee threw up his arm as though shielding a blow. “Mum’s the word, sister. I can be as tight-lipped as the next guy.”
“Hmm. Somehow you strike me as not quite able to help yourself. This is important, Mr. McKee.” She turned her stare to Huck. “Judging by your models, I have no doubt what you’re doing here is, well, extraordinary.”
“You actually flown anything before?” said McKee.
The sun angled again through the clerestory and struck the opposite wall lower down, struck in trapezoids and skewed quadrilaterals, and struck Huck in the moment square in the face. He was faintly aware of the radio, murmuring away in the office.
“He has, actually,” said Annelise. “He’s already built his own glider.”
She looked into her bottle a moment, swirled the contents as though to divine something in the deep brown glass. Highlander, Huck noticed, a Missoula brew from the west side of the state. Scotch plaid on the label. McKee not McGee, and no Lowlander with his beer choice, either. Annelise looked back up. “So what was wrong with the glider exactly?”
“Tail-heavy. I built it with old-fashioned wing warping, like the Wrights used, and at first I thought that was the problem. It wasn’t, though—ailerons wouldn’t have fixed it.”
“But you’re pretty sure about this?” She rocked the frame on the horses. “Pretty sure it’s right? I know what you can do. It just looks like an awful lot of work.”
He nodded. Mother and Pop would show up at any minute, he could practically smell it. He pointed at the plans on the corkboard, then turned for the office. “Come with me. And for the love of Mike, close the dern door.”
He wove through the machinery in the shop and went into the office, rummaged around on the desk and found the Flying and Glider Manual. The radio murmured with an ag broadcast, a forecast with no rain and the usual dire predictions of drought.
Cloudmaker Page 8
