He told her they were.
She turned suddenly and looked back once more at the cliff. Now with the wind, he realized they could no longer hear the tractor up above, and the air currents carried the rising dust in the other direction.
“A buffalo jump.” She looked at him with a crinkle at her eye. “It’s an odd name. Sounds like something more fun than it actually would’ve been.”
“Probably was fun, for the Indians. Exciting, anyway. More fun than tackling a dern mammoth, I bet.”
“This is a spooky place,” she said. “You know that?”
He told her he did.
“You know what else?” She made a theatrical wave at the cliff, a wave that seemed to take in the endless expanse of broken, rolling ground in every direction. “I never thought I’d see it this way, but this is magnificent. Truly.”
He knew what she meant about the eerie energy of the jump, as though the shields and the bones and the very rocks themselves still whispered and hummed with skulking spirits, actors from the past that couldn’t leave and never slept. But he’d never much thought about the endless land beyond. From this vantage he could see the jagged, snowbound teeth of the Absarokas to the west, rising in the haze.
“Are we really going to fly over all this?”
“Yes,” she told him. “We really are.”
Juno I
1
By the last week of May the ship had largely come together, right down to the gauges in the cockpit. The stick already controlled the flaps in the tail, although wing and fuselage were not yet mated given the confines of the shop. But they’d added aluminum pigment to the last batch of dope and colored the whole ship silver, in the manner of Colonel Lindbergh’s famous plane.
Or Miss Earhart’s latest Lockheed, as Annelise pointed out. Huck knew she was right—he’d seen a Movietone reel in the Rialto about the Honolulu crash and she was definitely flying an aluminum-bodied Electra, a state-of-the-art ship indeed. Just two days ago, the radio in the shop reported that she planned to resume her attempt around the equator, departing this time not from California but from Miami, Florida. But in Big Coulee, Montana, there wasn’t much left to do until an engine appeared.
McKee turned his attention to the Big Fifty Sharps. He’d badgered Pop for two months for the gun’s original kit, and Pop finally sent him out to the ranch to rummage through some crates stored in the barn. Sure enough, he came back with a bullet mold and forty empty brass cases.
“We’re in business.”
Huck was sharpening saw blades at the workbench. He jerked a thumb at the fuselage, angled jauntily on its front axle and taking up most of the shop floor. “Unlike that there old mothballed crate.”
“We’re on temporary hiatus, is all. Let’s get your mind off it.”
One thing not on his mind lately was the mysterious Detective Blank, or whoever he really was. Frustrating as the absence of an engine might be, that other fraught situation had tempered considerably when the calls to the shop ended. Raleigh hadn’t gotten any either since the day after the Spring Ball. That was nearly two weeks ago already.
Now the phone happened to sound in the office, where Annelise was listening for a radio update on Miss Earhart, and his blue mood seemed to revive that dormant dread, the folly of assuming they were totally in the clear simply because the guy had laid off calling for a spell. He heard her pick up.
McKee was at the scrap-lead bin, sorting through cutoff battery terminals and discarded wheel weights.
Huck shuffled over, just a hop and a skip now from the office door. He strained to hear Annelise on the phone, but her voice was a mere murmur and he couldn’t make out what she said. She went silent a moment and his heart hiccupped, then beat on when she started back up. Then she laughed, a real peal echoing out into the shop, and her voice became more animated. Evidently someone familiar on the line.
McKee was still rifling through the scrap.
“Did you really work for John Browning down in Utah?” said Huck.
“John Moses? Yeah, you bet. Right about your age when I started. We had power hammers, milling machines, lathes—the whole shootin’ match, so to speak.”
“So what was he like? John Browning?”
McKee gave him a sly look. “Truth of it? Dead, by the time I got there.”
“Oh. So you didn’t know him, know him.”
“I did not. Ain’t above letting people think so, though—makes a better story.” He rattled the scrap in the can. “Let’s hit it.”
They melted the soft metal down in the forge out back. They tried casting a handful of bullets straight out of the pot, but the composition was so soft that the sprue cutter damaged the formed slugs before they were even out of the mold.
“What now?”
“Trial and error.”
They were back at the bench weighing a ratio of lead to tin when Annelise came in.
“That somebody calling with an engine?” McKee said.
“Nope. Totally unrelated.”
“Care to join our metallurgy tutorial?”
“Is it for the airplane?”
“Not directly.” McKee pincered an empty brass cartridge from the block on the bench. “We’ve gone into the ammo business.”
“Oh, brother. I’d rather do homework. And that’s saying something.”
“Now come on. You might learn something.”
She looked back and forth between the two of them. “Life’s short. Why spend it dabbling in the past?”
“Because you might stumble onto something that helps you in the here and now. Just stick around.”
They started with a one-to-sixteen ratio of lead to tin, which still proved too soft. McKee kept at it, working up the mix a bit at a time. Finally, with dusk starting to settle and sparks leaping above the forge, he got the hardness to cut a proper sprue.
“Progress,” he said. He set the still-warm slug in her palm.
“Holy moly. It’s like a railroad spike.”
“With a hell of a charge behind it. Designed to drop a one-ton buff at a thousand yards. A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.”
She shook her head. “I still don’t get it.”
The next day he bought a hundred rifle primers and a pound of coarse-grain Hercules gunpowder in the hardware store. After school he showed Houston how a paper-patched bullet went together and set him on wrapping the big projectiles while he primed the brass cases.
He worked up a spread of test loads, starting with a ninety-grain charge and increasing in five-grain increments to the one-ten maximum. Five rounds per sample. He seated a patched bullet into the mouth of the last case and asked Huck how the breeze looked outside.
Houston ran out and right back in again. “Dead calm.”
McKee pointed to the ceiling. “Somebody likes us.”
They drove out to the little homegrown rifle range by the town dump. “Ain’t the Butte Schuetzen house,” McKee said, “but I reckon she’ll suffice.”
He sent Huck downrange to the backer board with a sheet of paper and a stapler while he set a sandbag and assorted other gear on the bench. Houston jogged back and McKee handed him a wad of cotton. He gave one to Annelise as well. “Tear that in half and plug your ears. Then clamp your hands over that.”
Houston looked at him. “How loud is this thing?”
McKee was stuffing his own ears. “Like a stick of dynamite. Stay behind me.”
He started with the heaviest load first. Slid the big brass cartridge into the chamber and cranked the breech closed. He flipped the ladder off the tang, rested the forearm across the sandbag, and pulled the big hammer back. He settled into the rifle and peered through the aperture, set the trigger and seemed to sit and hold his breath a moment.
The roar of the rifle hit her in the body as though the actual air rippled with some
reactionary, concussive force. She jumped like a puppet with its strings yanked, watched McKee undulate hard with the recoil. Heavy white smoke drifted like a fallen cloud.
McKee came up out of the gun. He rolled his shoulder around. “Anybody says this rifle kicks has lace on his underpants.” He looked at Houston. “Your turn.”
“How bad is it?”
“One big thump. You’ll find out, but not right now—actually better to figure out the group with one shooter.”
He worked through the first three five-shot clusters, swamping the bore after each round with a cleaning rod, then left the last two loads for a different session altogether. He rubbed his shoulder.
They walked out to the paper. None of the groups looked bad, but the one-hundred-grain load showed the most promise—three holes in a cloverleaf, with the other two off by about an inch. He forked two fingers and put one each on the fliers. “That’s why I’m quitting. Could be the load, but more probably old-fashioned shooter’s fatigue.”
The next afternoon had a stiff wind off the plains, so they loaded more ammo and came back on the third morning with the breeze settled. McKee fired two more one-hundreds at the original group and clover-leafed those as well, then got slightly bigger spreads with the next two loads.
“One century it is.” He pointed at Annelise. “Want to learn how to shoot?”
She snorted. “Not with that cannon.”
McKee laughed. “Good answer.” He handed the big Sharps to Huck. “Brace yourself.”
2
School let out the first week of June, just in time for the carnival to arrive. Also the tent revival.
“Golly,” Annelise whispered to Huck when Pastor White first made the announcement from the pulpit. “What a coinkydink.”
Aunt Gloria heard her and glared.
Later, out in front of the bungalow, she said, “God doesn’t have time for coincidence, Annelise.” She had that disconnected glaze over her eyes that Annelise had come to recognize, even squinting as she was against the light. “But He does work in mysterious ways. This carnival will no doubt bring people from miles around, and the Good News will be right there to battle temptation and debauchery.”
“Temptation and debauchery,” McKee echoed. He shook his head like a matron at a temperance convention.
Aunt Gloria paused at the front door and looked back. “That is what I said, Mr. McKee. I’m sure you’ve seen a carnival before. Temptation and debauchery. The devil’s playground. It’s already giving me a headache.” She pulled the screen door shut behind her.
McKee lifted his eyebrows at Annelise. “The devil’s playground. I can hardly wait.”
The rides and booths and assorted personnel arrived in a regular caravan of stenciled and colored and festooned trucks and trailers, two days before the start of festivities. By Thursday evening the Ferris wheel and carousel were nearly together, along with another ride featuring miniature airplanes. Annelise and Huck walked down and took a gander when they finished dinner.
“Oooo, Houston. Gonna earn your wings with the kiddies?”
“Nope. I have a real airplane. Provided a dern motor ever turns up.” He saw her absently clicking the outer bezel of her watch around. “I’m glad you decided to stay on a little longer, even though you don’t really have to—wouldn’t feel right to get up in the air without you. If we ever get to that point.”
She’d done the high school graduation walk last Saturday, and when Huck saw her in her cap and gown he had the sobering realization that she probably wasn’t long for Big Coulee. But surprisingly, after three months in the boondocks, his cousin wasn’t as inspired to beat a hasty departure as they’d all expected—including her bemused parents. She’d already talked to Pop about staying on at least through the end of summer.
Now she looked up. “There’s no if about it. And when it happens, I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Well, it’s sure going to make it easier to, you know, earn my wings.”
He saw a grin tug at her mouth. “I’m sure you’d have figured it out somehow. Happy to help, though.”
“I thought you’d want to get back to your beau as soon as you could.”
“Oh, I’m still struggling over that, a bit. But time and distance, you know . . .” She held up the watch at her wrist. “I do wish I could get this back to him, but I’m sure not going to risk losing it in the mail. He knows it’s in good hands. Knows we have an airplane to launch, too.”
She shifted her eyes to him, and he saw that crystal-hard glint. “Besides, my mother may have been able to ship me off on a whim, but she can’t just order me back on another. She can’t make me do much of anything anymore.”
They’d kept walking on past the New Deal, could see the Foursquare church against the evening sky up ahead. He said, “Your own ma might not be able to make you do much, but I reckon mine’ll pretty much make the both of us go to the revival.”
The timing of which, it turned out, proved to be neither coincidence nor miracle. The meeting’s star attraction had gone to Bible school with Pastor White in Kentucky and answered the call to arms in direct response to the invading carnival. By Friday afternoon a great white tent had gone up on the ball field adjacent to the church, a bit of a controversy because the Miners’ Union team had planned to play a franchise out of Billings over the weekend and now had to reschedule. But the church owned the ball diamond, so that was the beginning and the end of it.
Mother ushered the lot of them across town at four o’clock, including McKee. In typical fashion, he seemed mainly amused about the whole thing.
“I haven’t had a dose of religion in a thousand years,” he said. He was walking just behind Pop and Mother and just ahead of Huck and Annelise. They could hear chortling from the rides and the looping, dizzy whirl of a calliope trickling up to Main Street from the fairgrounds.
“I have been praying for you, Mr. McKee,” Mother told him.
“Oh, I need it, ma’am.”
The joint attractions had indeed pulled throngs from the outlands. Main Street was lined nose to tail with vehicles, a few later-model sedans and coupes but mainly rickety farm trucks and workaday jalopies that had clearly been bouncing over the county roads for years. Huck found himself clenching his fists over every Model A they passed, practically praying one would crack up on somebody’s dark ride home and thus provide him with a cheap motor.
They came level to the Rialto and heard the first sounds of wailing go up from the ball diamond, the voices blending at first with the fainter shrieks off the rides back at the fairground. Then what sounded like the dramatic flourish of an organ, also somehow bleeding into and back out of the calliope’s piping swirl.
“Is that an echo off the buildings or something?” Annelise asked.
The sounds from the fairground further receded a few steps along, and the wailing and blast of the voices ahead came on stronger. She looked sideways at Houston and whispered. “Steel yourself.”
Mother had Pop’s arm as they walked, and she did not look back, but her hearing could at times seem nothing short of supernatural. “You steel yourself, Annelise. God’s calling to you, too.”
Now she didn’t whisper at all. “I wasn’t talking to you, actually.”
Huck felt some constriction at his throat, like the anxious rise of his own gorge. He kept his eyes on Pop, who patted Mother’s hand on his arm but otherwise seemed to be looking at a banged-up Model A Tudor at the curb. Maybe he was praying for a wreck himself.
Mother kept her pace ahead now, as though she hadn’t heard after all, which somehow made Huck even more nervous. Worse, Annelise didn’t let it go.
“I said, I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Well, now that you are,” said Mother, “I’d like to remind you that you have a choice to make, Annelise. We all do.”
“None of this is my choice, actually. I
f you want to get right to brass, people like Houston and me? We’re hostages.” Huck couldn’t disagree with her, but now his gorge really rose.
“Train up a child in the way he should go,” Mother quoted. “That is my job, and I will not be caught sleeping.”
“By all means,” said Annelise, “give it a rest.”
McKee looked back at her, shaking his head with what Huck assumed was actual shock. “My, you’re a snippy thing this evening.”
She was mouthier than usual, maybe in simple reaction to the hue and cry coming off the ball field. The racket from the tent had supplanted the din of the carnival altogether. McKee was still in his stride but still looking at her.
“What?” she said. “I’m just trying to paint a picture.”
“I’ll paint you a picture,” McKee told her. “A portrait. Called Still Life, with Brat.”
Pop practically roared, which made Huck practically jump. But nervous or not, he felt his mouth twist into a grin. Annelise sneered, though he got the sense even this was a mask for a laugh.
“Why thank you, Mr. McKee,” Mother told him. “There may be hope for you yet.”
“Do you think, brothers and sisters, that the depression besetting this nation, that these dark and dire straits we have allowed ourselves to sail into, blind on bootleg booze and wanton lust, do you think these are unconnected one to another? Do you think our actions, our thoughts and our deeds and even our very national character, do you think these things play out with no consequence?”
“NO,” roared the crowd in response, with a few Amens and Tell it, brothers bursting up here and there like small geysers in the sea of congregants.
“NO!” the minister roared back, throwing a violent uppercut at the air as though breaking the insolent jaw of Lucifer himself. “And all God’s people said?”
“AMEN,” thundered the crowd.
They’d been in the tent for an hour now, and while it was full when they’d arrived, it had become increasingly so in the meantime. Annelise could feel the pressure of the throng at her back as much as she could see the density of the mass before her. More women than men but plenty of the latter, too, the former in tattered farmhouse shifts and some in their Sunday frocks, and most of the men in coveralls rather than town clothes. The air outside had the swelter of summer, but here in these packed confines with the pitch and agitation of the crowd and the utter lack of air, she felt as though she’d plunged right into the spuming heart of a caldera.
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