Читать книгу Cloudmaker - Malcolm Brooks - Страница 9

Annelise

1

Of course, I admit some elders have to be shocked for everybody’s good now and then.

—Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It

She felt like she hadn’t slept in days and in fact had tried to will herself into an outright vigil, tried to summon the same resolve A.E. achieved as a matter of course, up there solo in a ship above the water.

The North Atlantic twice, South Atlantic once. Honolulu to California next. Then nonstop overland, Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. A woman and her Lockheed like a steady red comet, covering continents in hours instead of months or years or eons. What a time to be alive, whether these nitwits around her realized it or not.

But still. What endless hours they must have become—dark much of the time, cold all of the time. Knocked around by air currents and light in the head from the reek of the gasoline sloshing right there behind her in the extra tanks. Even so, Annelise knew that Amelia used smelling salts to snap herself back when she needed to.

Annelise did not have smelling salts, and she certainly couldn’t smell diesel fuel from the sealed canister of a Pullman car, but she went ahead and drank coffee endlessly until her insides felt downright scoured. Her newspaper-shuffling father at first watched and pretended not to, and then tried to ignore her for real and couldn’t, and then attempted a conversation that she wouldn’t have, and finally resorted to pleading, which she both scorned and enjoyed in a manner exactly parallel to her own equal but opposite monosyllables.

“Are you sure you should be drinking that much coffee?”

“Yes.”

“But shouldn’t you get some rest?”

“No.”

A spell of silence. Then, “This wasn’t my idea. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Annie, can we stop this? You’re making the whole thing worse. Can you just say something real?”

“Would you like a warm-up, miss?” The porter, with a carafe and what could only be described as extraordinary timing.

“Why, yes, sir, I would.”

The man had his eyes either averted or steadied on her mug as he poured, but she flashed him her most angelic smile, showed him the little rows of teeth only recently liberated from an expensive set of metal braces and glinting white as a root laid bare. Definitely not coffee teeth. He gave his own small smile and moved along.

Her father tried again. “Hey. Can you just say something to me?”

Again she wouldn’t grace this with an actual answer, though she did cast her eyes upon him when she took yet another bitter sip. She’d always been able to punish him, even when she was supposedly the one being punished. She could play this game forever.

Eventually the sun came up over the alkaline flats of the desert. Her father had fallen off hours ago, slumped in his rumpled suit, with his rumpled newspaper, the sleeping berth still folded shut. Her own body had a bone weariness, but her brain rocketed with caffeine, and so she slumped in her seat, too, stretched to a fray by her own warring ends.

She tried to reconcile the two, tried to tell herself this was part of the point. She looked through the crack in the curtain at the dawn. Then she looked back at her father. His skewed neck would ache for a week. He was getting off easy.

Train travel. What a bore. The Burbank aerodrome and Grand Central in Glendale both routed passenger flights to Salt Lake City these days, although she doubted anyplace in Montana had regular service. She hadn’t been there since she was a girl, but she remembered the ranch as a bona fide jerkwater and couldn’t imagine much had changed, hence its selection for this whole medieval exercise.

Still. If her parents weren’t frozen in Victorian amber, they could at least have cut her father’s back-and-forth into something not straight out of the Rutherford B. Hayes era. She’d known better than to suggest air passage herself—Mother had gone so far as to confiscate A.E.’s book, citing it as the root of all the trouble. The Fun of It. Ironic, she knew. Practical or not, she’d have crushed the idea on principle.

She held her own against the seduction of sleep right on through to Salt Lake. She watched the pink of the rising sun bathe the toes of the mountains west of the city, watched the same pink wash move up the bare slopes and into the snow at the top. Her father stirred when the train slowed.

They killed a few hours in a diner waiting for her connection north. Annelise freshened up as best she could in the ladies’ room. She would be placed in the charge of a conductor who would see her to Butte, Montana, and then east a few hours to Billings. Her father would turn right back around on the next train home.

“You could’ve flown, you know,” she said to him. The first time she’d initiated a conversation in days, and he blinked at her across his hash and eggs as though he were not only hearing but also seeing her for the first time in a year. “We could have flown here even, out of Burbank or Grand Central. We could have saved ourselves a solid day, a day neither of us can ever get back. You know that, right?”

He resumed chewing, and he looked as exhausted to her in the moment as she herself felt. She couldn’t recall ever having seen him with stubble on his face before. Now he drained his own coffee and waved for more.

“I mean, isn’t that part of it? Not to dillydally your time away? Look alive, because no man knows the day or the hour?”

“Annelise, I own stock in Douglas. My firm negotiated a property dispute for Grand Central. For that matter, I’m the one who backed your flying lessons. I do not by any means regard myself as a Luddite. Remember I told you this was not my idea?”

“Then why do you go along with her? Why don’t you put your foot down?”

He shook his head. “Because Mother is not wrong, Annie. And as difficult as this might be for you to see, she has your heart and your soul and your safety and”—he halted, tripped over his own words—“and your reputation in mind.” He went so far as to point at her across the table. “She is not wrong.”

The night’s caffeine had run out of her blood like fuel from a tank, even the remnant fumes combusted and gone. She was still in the air but totally without power, and no place in sight to put down. She tried to hold a level gaze across the table and finally went to rubbing her eyes instead. “She called me ‘damaged goods,’ Daddy. You heard her.”

Not only that. They went so far as to haul her to the family doctor to have her put in the stirrups and examined, which she dodged only by finally copping en route to what they already suspected. Her father had practically driven off the road. “Is that what you believe, too?”

He could hardly look at her then, and he could hardly look at her now. “Eighteen is a puzzling age, I’m not going to pretend other­wise. And these are puzzling times we live in, for all of us. Mother included.”

“These are wonderful times, if you can see the fun in anything. The opportunity. And if it’s occurred to Mother even once that she might not have the answer to every little thing, she’s certainly never let on.”

He stirred his coffee, stirred and stirred. “You always were headstrong. Even when you were a little thing pulling a red wagon around. Selling books you’d outgrown to the neighbors. You and Mother are too much alike, that’s half the problem. Cut right out of the same cloth.”

“Too much alike? No, sorry, I live in 1937, not 1837.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“‘Damaged goods’ implies I’d actually stoop to accept a man who wants a piece of property to begin with. Anyone who thinks that doesn’t know the first thing about me.”

He glanced around, and she realized her voice had risen above the clatter from the kitchen, the clink and clank of plates and knives. A few of the other patrons appeared to notice.

She tried to turn the volume down. “I didn’t betray you, you know. It’s not even possible.”

“I know. I can see why you’d say so.”

“I’m not goods, and I am not damaged.”

“And I am sorry you had to hear that.”

“I mean, is a widow damaged? Is Sister Aimee damaged after divorce number two?”

“I know—”

“What utter hypocrisy.”

“I know. It’s just that boys don’t . . . always understand that the consequences, for girls, can be disastrous. Socially disastrous. And visible. And permanent. Boys will be boys, but girls . . . the expectations are something different. Because the consequences are different. Fair or not.”

Now Annelise did look at him. “Visible? Are you hearing yourself?” She felt the slap of her own hands, clapping at her cheeks with minds all their own. “Everyone knows why girls up and vanish midway through a school year, and it’s not for a mere . . . indiscretion, or a dalliance, or whatever polite terminology you choose.

“Daddy. People are going to think I’m sent off because I’m actually in a fix. Did this not occur to anyone?”

He slid out of the booth and walked toward the counter, and she could tell by his posture and gait how strained he was, by travel in part but mostly by circumstance. She read this like she could read her own name. She wished she could resent whatever pain or exhaustion or judgment he felt, because she was the one with no say in the matter, and no power. But the fire seemed to have gone out of her.

He came back with a fresh newspaper and laid down the front page for her to see: earhart is off around the globe.

She looked up at him. “That could be me. Someday.”

“I believe you.”

“This whole thing is a vast waste of my time. I’ve already started soloing, and now all this.”

He eased into the booth again. “I’m aware.”

Something else had occurred to her, too, a subject she hadn’t dared broach with her mother around. But she was pretty sure she was right. And as a lawyer and a Christian, wasn’t he obligated to tell her the truth? “Is this even legal?”

She saw him blink and knew she had him. “That’s a bit of a . . . gray area, let’s say.”

“But if I’d really put my foot down? Refused to go along with this? You’d have done what, kick me out to the street?”

“Lord, of course not.”

“But that’s the only real recourse you could have had. Am I right?”

He rubbed his bloodshot eyes with fingers and thumb, probably, she imagined, to avoid having to face her. She was yet again in no mood for mercy.

“I became a legal adult clear back in November, didn’t I? On my eighteenth birthday. California’s one of those states, isn’t it?”

“You are . . . not entirely wrong. It’s one of those states. One of those few states . . . Most are a, ah, sensible twenty-one.”

“And now you’re sending me to one of them, against my adult will.” Her stinger was coming up by the second, her scorpion’s defense. “By the standards of the state in which I actually reside. Do I have this right?”

He shook his head at the ceiling, let out a breath. Gotcha.

“Because that’s the way it appears. Are you actually breaking the law with this?”

He was still looking at the ceiling. “Not one that any prosecutor would argue before a judge. Or that any judge would enforce, for that matter.”

“Why? Because I happen to still be in high school and under your roof?”

“Something like that, yes. Sure. Like I said, gray area.”

“And when you wanted to have the doctor examine me against my own free will? Would that have been a gray area, too?”

People at other tables were definitely looking now, and he knew it, too, and she didn’t give one solitary fig.

“It never got to that point, Annie.”

“That’s not the question.”

“No, you’re right. That would have been wrong. Maybe criminal.”

“Thank you.”

He managed to look at her again without blinking, as though the actual logistics of this punitive circus were finally dawning and he realized he’d better hold her with his eyes while he still had the chance. “Frankly, it probably would’ve gone better where your mother’s concerned if you’d come totally clean and given her a name.”

Her one nearly Pyrrhic triumph. Bleary or not, she felt her ire rise even more. “She couldn’t beat it out of me. I don’t expect you to sympathize.”

His own bleary gaze didn’t waver. “All right, then. If I can give you one bit of advice beyond that? Going forward, the parole board generally favors model behavior.”

“Ha ha.”

A little later he kissed her stiff cheek on the platform and put her back on the train. A little after that the train lurched forward, and with the station falling away, she rummaged in her satchel and found the travel kit she’d put together. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Napkins. A perfectly white and perfectly innocent pair of spare underpants, which she unfolded now inside the satchel.

She took out Blix’s flight watch, which he’d jokingly let her steal from his wrist that last time. “Careful, now,” he’d told her while she undid the buckle. “That’s where I get my magic powers.”

She let the watch sway in front of him, baited a swipe from his hand, which she neatly dodged. “I’m Delilah,” she’d said. She teased and twirled the watch back into his reach, danced a little with her shoulders and neck like a cat about to pounce.

He shook his head, approval in reverse and she knew it. “You’re trouble, is what you are.”

She held the watch now in her palm, studied again the mysterious dials, the arcane calibrations and elegant blue hands. Blix himself had little practical use for it, outside the few times a year he flew down into Mexico, but he always wore it anyway, as a token. Or a talisman.

She wondered if he regretted letting her take it home on her own wrist that night. Surely he must. She had promised to return it at her next lesson two days later, before fate and her mother elbowed in. Now she tried to tell herself that fate as well had entrusted her to keep it, until finally she could navigate her way back to its rightful place. To her own rightful place.

She thought again of A.E., likely in the air at this very instant and just as likely wearing her own second-setting Longines flight watch. She’d left out of Oakland bound for Honolulu, so hers would be set to the same originating time as the one Anneliese held now. She took some comfort in this even though they were heading in opposite directions. In more ways than one.

She buckled the ticking device in place, the enormous face of the thing feeling more like a clock than a watch against the slim circumference of her wrist. Maybe it could be her talisman, too.

2

He bounced down the washboard above the river and felt the tremor in the motor in the floorboards, distinct somehow from the shake of the road. A prewar Lizzie at least ten years older than Huck himself, all tired springs and tired drive bands and probably tired compression to boot. He hadn’t driven far enough to know.

He levered the throttle and felt the wind lift, thumbed the dust off the speedometer. The needle jumped like a live wire between thirty-five and forty. Could that be right? He looked up again and saw the edge of the flat, the road tilting off the plateau and down to the river bottom. He had a moment’s distraction at the green blaze along the bank, bright as springtime against winter’s remnant brown. He tipped over the lip of the grade and realized he wasn’t very dang sure of the brake band, either.

His heart dropped like a hammer with the plunge of the car, a kick to the groin from the inside out. The engine groaned against gravity and wound into a single backfire, then a pause and finally a whole banging barrage, like a pistol shot answered by a fusillade. Now he’d hit forty for sure, the needle when he glanced at it appearing to tremble in place like a setter on point.

He fiddled with the spark and got the backfiring down. The brake appeared near useless, so he pushed on the reverse pedal instead, let off and pushed again and got his speed down and his heart out of his belly and back in his chest where it belonged. He clattered across a rough span of washboard and veered around a buckle of frost heave and bottomed onto level ground.

Two other boys scrambled out of the willows along the river, rods in hand and a mess of fish on a peeled branch. One was a real lunker, Huck could see it even before he’d closed the distance. Raleigh and Shirley, no doubt coming to the racket from the motor. Huck rolled to a stop.

“Dodging the truant officer?” said Shirley. He was nearly eighteen, hadn’t made it past the first week of the ninth grade.

Huck twisted in the seat. “Seen one?”

“Ol’ Rolly here pulled this dern German brown out. You believe it? This dern far down. Gonna get it to town, sell it to the café. Care to give a lift? We’ll let you in on the haul.”

“That trout ain’t the only thing in this river today,” said Raleigh.

Shirley made a show of ignoring him. “Old Man Neuman’s rig, ain’t it? Been in the weeds two years at least. What’d you do, sweet talk him out of it? Trade a pie or something?”

“A jug, more like it,” said Raleigh. He held the dead fish at arm’s length to keep the drip off his dungarees. Whitefish and that single, magnificent brown.

Huck grinned. “Gas is down to five cents. Lots of cars coming out of the weeds.”

“Running like a real top, from the sound of it.” Shirley fancied himself a real wisecracker. “Thought maybe ol’ John Dillinger was up here, testing ordnance. Machine Gun Kelly.”

“Dillinger’s dead,” said Raleigh. “All them old boys is. Pushing daisies. Or locked up.”

“Yeah, I know that, Rolly.”

“I think we ought to get a second opinion.”

“Don’t need no second opinion. Five cents, you said? This trout’ll bring what, twenty? That’d buy some gas. Think this crate can get us to Billings? There’s a girl down there who likes me.”

Raleigh snorted. “This thing could be a supercharged Duesey and it wouldn’t matter a lick. I ain’t donating my trout to get you to Billings and back.”

“Didn’t say nothing about back. All I need is to get there. Worry about back later.” Shirley winked at Huck. He tapped the Ford’s battered bonnet with his cane pole. “What’d it take to get this trap running in the first place? I know you got a knack, but young Rolly here is right. For once.”

“Old Man Neuman tried to run hooch through it a few years back, when gas was pinched. Wrecked the floats in the carb. Ain’t done with her yet, but she’ll run smooth enough, I think.”

“You know what I think.” Raleigh studied his dead fish again. The red spots on the trout’s long body had already faded and streaks of gray defiled the pale of its belly. “I think we should get a second opinion.”

Shirley eyed the narrow tip of his bamboo, made it quiver in the air above his head. “Zane Grey here thinks there’s a body down there.”

Huck felt the tremor in the motor. “A what down where?”

“A body,” said Raleigh. “A dead dern body caught in a snag on the other side of the river. Couldn’t get to it with the water this high.”

Huck looked at Shirley, and Shirley shook his head. “It ain’t no body, it’s an inner tube. I promise. A black tire tube with about half the air out.”

“Second opinion,” said Raleigh.

“How far off we talking?”

Raleigh gestured with his swinging fish. “Two minutes. Right down there.”

“Not no two minutes, though. Ten, more like. Look, the blush is already going on this brown,” Shirley began, but Huck was already ratcheting the brake with one hand, cutting the magneto with the other. The engine dieseled a bit and shuddered still, and he heard the dull hum of the river all the way up here.

Shirley ran his eyes across the rusted shell of the T. “You sure this heap’s liable to start again?”

Huck fell even with Raleigh, flashed a snake-oil grin. “Nope.”

“Liar.”

“Want a second opinion?”

“Har har. You ladies is going to an awful lot of trouble for a gol dang truck tube.”

They went down off the roadway across a swath of cheatgrass greening through the dead stalks of winter, the bitterbrush and sagebrush greening up, too, and the meadowlarks trilling everywhere. The Bull Mountains loomed like a fortress a few miles off, snow glinting yet on the high northern rims. Otherwise the world had warmed.

They dropped into a wash and kicked out a cottontail, which raced ahead and cut and bounced pell-mell like a rubber ball and finally vanished down a hole. The rush of the water rose up louder with the close of distance, not a roar but a hiss, like midnight static after radio sign-off. Raleigh and Shirley walked upriver and cleared a willow brake and threaded their poles through the cottonwoods to get to the gravel along the bank.

The river had already come down from its peak—Huck could see the runoff line a foot or so up the rocks on the far bank—but ripped along anyway brown and fast and high. He saw a butterfly flash in the sun, saw it flit and dip and dart. Mourning cloak, first of the year. That line of azure jewels down each black wing, that yellow edge. Then he saw the body.

Half sunk and bobbing with the racing flow of the Musselshell, in a snarl of dead limbs and flotsam and jumbled planks lodged and upended, akimbo as the wreck of a raft. A torso in a dark suit with one swollen sleeve now visible, now not with the action of the water. A half-submerged cottonwood sweeper nodded and flexed, the root ball still partly attached to the bank.

“Could be a tire tube. A big one, out of a tractor.” Had to be. No, a sleeve—there it was again and now gone. Huck squinted and stared and tried to convince himself his first sense had been true. The longer he looked, the less he could swear to.

“Yeah, it could be a tire tube, but it ain’t. It’s a dern body.”

“Tube,” said Shirley.

“Corpse. Black suit.”

“Okay, look at it. Look. Right . . . now,” he said, when the convex edge of this conundrum lifted again with the water, breached again in its eddy of foam and debris. “That is an inner tube.”

“Huck? What say you?”

The figure again went under. A pair of mergansers rocketed down the corridor, careened and splashed crazily to a landing just downriver. The hen had a topknot like a woodpecker’s. “I can’t, either way. Could be a tube, yeah. But. It could be a dern body.”

“Now hold on already,” said Shirley. “This here’s enough of a goose chase.” He walked to the nearest cottonwood, eyed the crotch ten feet up. He leaned his cane against the trunk. “I’ll go up and shimmy out on that limb, get a topside look. Settle this nonsense once for all.”

“You’re gonna fall right in the dern drink. That’ll make two bodies in here.”

“Not likely. On either count.” He studied the crags in the heavy bark, found holds for fingers and toes, and started up. He missed a grip and dropped to the ground once, then tried again and dropped again. “Huck,” he said, “you’re bigger’n this runt. Why don’t you give a hoist.”

“Well, you’re bigger than the both of us,” said Raleigh. “Stouter, at least. Why don’t you hoist me?”

“Because it’s my idea. Plus I don’t trust your judgment.”

It was true Huck was big for his age, or tall anyway. Fourteen and he already stood above most men, certainly an inch or more over Shirley. Gangly as a sandhill crane, too—the only pants that fit for length were invariably agape at the waist, cinched into place with a belt that had additional holes in the tongue.

He could see this sparring going round and round, the shadows stretching longer, the day pinched shorter. He stepped over and wove the fingers of his hands into a basket. “You can both climb a tree, for all I care. Let’s just get somebody into the air.”

“You’d be the man to know, Slim,” said Shirley, and he put his foot in the web of Huck’s fingers and clambered up at the hoist, and Huck pivoted his shoulders and shifted his hands under Shirley’s heft and started to push, and Shirley no sooner got one grip on the crook of the tree than he let out a yowl like he’d been snakebit.

Or bee-stung. A handful of honeybees boiled out of the fork, and Shirley launched flailing and hit the ground scrambling. Huck both glimpsed and felt something thud against the bone near his eye while his breath caught for a jolt that never came, and he found himself pounding gravel right along with the others.

They stopped and caught their breath at the mouth of the wash.

“Left my rod,” Shirley croaked. “Jeez, look at my hand. Like a dern catcher’s mitt. Bastards got me in the neck, too.”

Shirley pulled his hand away and studied it as though the palm might reflect a duplicate of the wound at his nape, what showed to Huck as a rising red boil with an angry white center, the pinprick of the stinger like a bull’s-eye. “This ain’t good, boys. Last time I got stung I about choked to death. Swelled like that dern truck tube down there. Doc said I dodged a bullet.”

Raleigh had relaxed his hold with the fish and now the pale, skewered mess of them bled down the leg of his pants. “So what do we do?”

Shirley looked at him. “Cross our fingers and hope flyboy here can fire that Liz again. And get to it while I can still suck some dern air.”

They made their way up the draw. By the time they crossed the cheatgrass the red poison at his nape had worked around to his throat and up into his jowls, a mix of bruise and flush. His lips had ballooned, although his eyes appeared to shrink into slits. He looked like a pumpkin impaled on a barber pole.

Huck felt the anxious smack of his heart, felt a bead of sweat down his ribs. “Almost there,” he told Shirley. He pointed at the T, slouched in the lean of the sun. “I’ll run ahead, get her going. You want to keep walking?”

Shirley shook his head. He’d begun to wheeze like an engine sucking a vacuum. “Thung thwullen,” he said. He pawed at his eyes with his good hand. “Can’t thee thit.”

Raleigh’s peepers, on the other hand, were wide as moons, his mouth taut as a strop. Huck said, “You want to stay with him? Wait, no—come ahead. You’re gonna crank.”

They started to run, and the sprint went weirdly as if in a dream, seemed to occur in two cosmic places at once. On the one hand, he and Raleigh both ran and ran for what felt like agonizing eternity without ever closing the gap, the Ford always just ahead, just ahead, no closer and no closer and no farther away, either, with every long, desperate stride.

On the other, they seemed to appear at the car in an impossible jolting instant, as though they’d never made the physical dash at all but somehow catapulted not merely over the cheatgrass but also across the very plane of time itself.

Some trick of the mind, some distorted phase of panic. The rush of fear in the blood.

The fish hit the bed with a damp thud, and Raleigh went running for the front. Huck jolted back to himself, scrambled behind the wheel.

Raleigh looked at him across the hood. “Is he gonna die?”

“No.” He backed off the spark advance. “Crank it. Keep your thumb clear and get out of the dern way.” Raleigh gave him a look, and Huck said, “Wait, hold up. Hold up.”

Huck pulled the choke halfway out, experimentally advanced the spark. He and Raleigh watched each other through the cracked glass. The lever hit the top of its arc, and Huck heard the spark pop in the cylinder, saw Raleigh jump as the gas fired and the engine belched and shuddered awake.

“Hot start,” he yelled. “Didn’t think it would work.”

They bounced across the cheat, and Raleigh jumped free before Huck fully managed a stop, helped Shirley fumble into the bed, and then swung back in himself, and Huck stomped her right down into gear again.

Huck ground in low through the trace of his own wheels in the grass and swayed back up onto the roadbed, steered again around the frost buckle and over the corduroy at the base of the grade, and started up. After fifteen feet he thought better of it, let gravity and the brake lever bring them to a stop.

“What are you doing?”

Huck eased back down to level ground. “No way I’m coming down that hill bass-ackwards if the motor cuts on us.” He backed around and twisted to see over his shoulder. He glanced at Shirley, prostrate and gurgling in the back, and started up the hill in reverse.

“I thought you put gas in this heap.”

“I did. But she ain’t near full, and I don’t trust the carb yet anyway.”

Raleigh snorted. “That’s the least of it. Hate to stake my ol’ bee-stung hide on a dern jalopy, tell you that much.”

Huck gave it more throttle than he needed to and craned his head around to see. The T went up the grade in a steady shot, whining the whole way like the engine might blow a seal. They leveled on the flat up above and he swung around to face forward again and started for town. And a moment along when he stomped her into high, the Ford lunged like a hot-blooded horse and he felt a surge not of speed but of hope. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash in the air and he looked and beheld again the mergansers, circling and winging back toward the river, gliding like killer angels—

He caught himself from that same eerie distance, that same angle of refraction. Caught himself thinking, Please, God, please let there be gas. Please, God, please keep Shirley alive. Please, God, in Jesus’s name . . .

He pried his left hand loose from the wheel. He flexed and unflexed his rigid fingers, his frozen grip. Big Coulee was only two miles off, the tops of the elms showing above the rim at the west edge of town.

“How’s he looking back there?” He had to shout above the clatter of the motor, the jostle of loose fenders, and the open rush of air.

Raleigh took in Shirley over the back of the seat. “Not any dern better. Best put the spurs to her.”

Huck could still feel the spot on his cheek where the bee struck. A miracle he hadn’t been stung smack in the eye. The speedometer bounced and wagged in the general vicinity of forty. “She’s full gallop right now.”

They hit the macadam outside town, and the rumble of the gravel fell away. For all its roughshod rattles and rust, the T smoothed out across the skim of the pavement, and Huck remembered in a flash that this was how it felt to lift and level and properly soar. Even the raggedy sputter of the motor seemed to settle and glide. He forgot about Shirley, forgot about praying. He just drove and drove and let himself dream.

Huck let the motor wind out again, and the backfiring recommenced, and he backed off the spark, didn’t try to brake, just held tight to the wheel with his left hand and throttled up again with his right when they careened around the last bend and leveled onto Main. A dog trotted blithely down the center of the street, and Huck squeezed the bulb of the horn. The dog glanced back at the blare, tucked tail, and cut for the sidewalk like he’d been scorched. Then the siren started.

Raleigh twisted again in his seat. “Guess we had that coming.”

Huck took a quick glance himself and caught the grim red mug of the driver barely twenty feet behind, jaw set behind the windshield of the new black-and-white. Not Cy Gleason but his deputy, Junior Joe Candy. Hard to know which was worse.

“Thing’s a dern rocket,” said Raleigh. The siren wound up to an outright scream behind them, and Raleigh cautioned another look.

The hospital was two blocks down and a block over, and Huck set his jaw and didn’t slow a bit, and by the time he reached his turn, people were popping out along the walk like gophers out of their holes, all shop aprons and feather dusters and jaws uniformly agape. He took the turn too wide and skidded sideways, heard Shirley thump around like loose cargo. He fishtailed straight again and in a quick second veered past the line of elms into the circular drive and braked to a hard stop in the covered ambulance bay. The T backfired and stalled.

Out in the street, the cruiser overshot the entry and wailed on down to the exit, squealed in that way and roared on up like the champ to the chump in a Charles Atlas ad, all sinewy lines and gleaming chrome, the V8 badge on the grille like the sneer of a natural-­born winner.

Raleigh was already out of the car, already starting for the building. The cruiser braked nose-close, its siren winding down but still unnervingly loud beneath the canopy.

Huck said, “Hey.”

Raleigh looked back.

“Best not bring up that inner tube.”

Raleigh said, “No shit, Sherlock,” and vanished inside the hospital doors.

Huck got out and Junior Candy did, too, ambling around the T’s skewed fender. He walked up and stopped just to the inside of what a person with any sense might regard as a polite and sociable sphere, eyes still roving casually around the ceiling or out at the budding trees. He started a slow pink bubble at the precise moment he brought his wandering irises in from the beyond and trained them, like blue gun muzzles, directly on target. The bubble expanded, nearer and nearer. Junior’s gaze finally vanished behind the pink balloon.

The bubble popped. Junior worked his tongue and pulled pink spatter back into his maw. Same blue glare. “Houston Finn. We meet again.”

Huck could smell the aftershave, smell the hair tonic. His voice had not yet dropped, and to his horror, the first syllable when he found his tongue squeaked out like nails on a blackboard. In that instant, Shirley shot bolt upright in the pickup bed.

He looked like a hydrocephalic farmhouse killer from one of Raleigh’s detective magazines. Junior Joe did a double take and heaved out something along the line of “Gid-gadamighty,” and the door to the surgery banged open. Doc Lipton and Sonny the ambulance driver and Raleigh charged out with a gurney.

“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.”

“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.

Lindy had followed him into the shop, and she weaved in and out of his shins. He could smell the high heady sheen off the ribs of the plane, smell also the gasoline and grease on his hands from wrenching on the flivv. His belly growled something fierce, and he knew his head had gone a little light. Hunger and fumes.

A week earlier he’d traced out a jig for the wing ribs. He built two of them the following evening, and by the third night he had a system down and built a half dozen more.

Now he’d been away from the whole project for a few days, and with twenty-two ribs to go, he wanted badly to log some time but knew as well he needed his head on straight. He rocked the fuselage frame a time or two in its berth atop the horses, marveled again at how little this geometric web of sticks actually weighed. Bones of a bird.

He knew by the door lamps and radio that Pop had already been by, that he’d no doubt driven this mystery cousin on to the ranch outside town. Huck had met her once, but too long ago to remember. Annelise, perpetually the sharp-featured little blonde girl with the Shirley Temple curls in the picture of the family gathering back in ’25, hanging on the wall at the farmhouse. She wore a sundress and a thin matching headband, although somebody had stuck a turkey feather straight up behind her head in the fashion of an Indian brave. Huck himself was still in a toddler’s smock, looking even then at the sky rather than the camera. He wasn’t the shaver in that picture anymore, which meant Annelise was not that little girl, either. But nobody had said a thing about a dang baby.

He reheated a leftover kettle of what Pop called Texas hash on the gas range and forked down about half of it at the table. The first mouthful hit the floor of his belly like a hay bale dead-dropped from a loft.

He still had the jitters. What a day it had been—Doc Lipton had stuck Shirley with two big hypodermics, and sure enough Shirley had quit gurgling and in four or five minutes lost about half the swelling in that balloon of a noggin, and he and Raleigh had started breathing again themselves. Doc Lipton told them they ought to get a medal, and he looked straight at Junior Joe when he said it. Such was the end of the story, other than Junior’s unconcealed sour grapes while he filled out his report.

Or so Huck figured. The more he thought about it, Shirley had to be right. Raleigh was known to have a wild imagination, and how in tarnation would a dern body in a black business suit wind up in the river in the first place? Tractor tube, no doubt. What a day, though. His gut churned like a cement mixer. They kept milk in the icebox mainly for the cat, but he went for it now, thinking it might settle the storm.

He spotted the note, there on the sideboard, scrawled on an envelope in Pop’s slanting script and with the terse cadence of a telegraph.

Sonny—Took yr. cous. to the ranch, 6:30, back late or in the a.m.? Tx hash in kettle. Big excitement over to Roundup—gang of stickup men busted, one man shot and washed downriver, others still loose. Lock doors and keep yr. powder dry. Pops

They made the train trestle with the sun yawning new and long over the coulees and breaks. Huck took his foot out of the pedal and idled down and stopped.

“You have the radio on out of Billings last night?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Hear any news from Roundup?”

Raleigh considered. “Not a thing. What is it?”

He fished the envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it over. “Not any tire tube, be my guess.”

Raleigh took a gander at the note. “Looks like ol’ Shirley can pound sand.”

Huck turned onto the track and centered the wheels on either side of the left rail. He glanced down once midway across and saw the rip of the water thirty feet below, glimpsed it and glimpsed it again through the metered skip of the ties. He forced his eyes forward. “She cleared any?”

Raleigh had his head craned over the passenger door. “Hard to tell. She’s still plenty silty.”

He drove out past the plowed and furrowed table and down toward the water as far as the road could take him. He cut the motor and grabbed a rope coil and a shepherd’s crook he’d thrown in at the shop.

From a high swell in the shortgrass before the land dropped away to the river bottom, they could look out to the south and see the opposing bench, see the grade Huck had backfired down the day before. Fifteen minutes later they looked downstream at the snag.

The mergansers clattered again off the water, and the both of them jumped like pinched girls. “Glad it ain’t just me,” Raleigh said.

They walked through a glaze of frost on the green grass by the water where the cold air pooled. They came up onto the snag, and sure enough from a downstream angle they could look back up into the eddy and see the same solid-black bulk when it bobbed up and paused before sinking back again, just shy of the fallen cottonwood.

“We’ll have to get out on the sweeper to get a real look,” Huck said. “Was hoping we wouldn’t.”

“You and me both,” said Raleigh, but he walked back and climbed up and began to inch his way out against the log’s vibrating tremble, and Huck dropped rope and staff in the grass and found his balance and inched out behind him.

Raleigh made the first jutting limb, and with something to hold to, he sidestepped around as quickly as he dared so that Huck could reach for the same limb. They stood then on either side and looked goggle-eyed at each other as the trunk beneath began to lift with the flow like a whale breaching.

They looked down. The river swirled with silt, opaque as fog. The black bulk rolled with the action of the water and lifted and broke through, a human hand protruding and fish-pale by contrast and then the bloated face, assembling through murk and flow and suddenly a half-lidded, blue-tinted ghoul. The dark wreath of hair pulsed around his head like sea wrack.

“Dam-nation,” Raleigh breathed, and he clutched the limb with both hands and convulsed once or twice and vomited like a firehose, right out across the water.

Huck clutched the limb. The sweeper dipped and his own gorge heaved.

He choked it back. The face and its swimming fronds sank again into the murk. He wobbled for land.

Raleigh finished being sick and followed, stumbled down onto dry ground and walked off by himself, shaking his head and spitting bile. Huck gathered his wits and shouldered the coiled rope. He climbed up on the log and started back.

“Houston. Are you serious?”

Huck kept on. He made the upright limb and put it in the crook of his arm, slid the coil from his shoulder, and tied a running bowline in one end. He could see the black shape through the silt and swirl, was already getting a sense for the timing of the thing. He set a ten-inch loop and let the loop dangle about where the hand would emerge. He looked over at Raleigh. “River’s rising again. This body comes loose, no telling where it’ll end up.”

“Jeepers, who cares? It’s a dern dead crook.”

“Might be a reward. I need to buy an engine.”

Raleigh rubbed his eyes.

The body breached a moment later, the bleached hand with its purpled nails, and Huck dropped the loop and drew the rope taut and tried and failed not to glance again at the face. Eye sockets bruised as plums. The knot in his stomach tightened as well at the solid tug of a waterlogged body, this odd combination of deadweight and buoyancy.

“Now what?” said Raleigh.

Huck steadied himself against the limb when the body again went under. He thought for a moment, tried to work out a plan. He tied the rope to the limb and balanced his way back for the shepherd’s crook.

“Water’s below the bottom of the trunk in that stretch,” said Huck. “Just barely and probably not for long, way she’s coming up. I’ll send the rope under, snag it, and lead it back here.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’re going to reel while I crowbar him loose with the staff. Send him under the tree after the rope.”

“You’re gonna fall in and flipping drown.”

“You watch. I think I got it figured.”

“Houston. There is a fine line between calculated risk and famous last words.”

Huck looked at him. “I don’t think he’s stuck by much. I think it’s mainly water pressure holding him in that pocket. Some weird hydraulic. I got a way to keep from falling, too. You watch.”

Huck went back out to the limb with the staff, untied the rope, wound it back to a coil, and dropped it to the water. The body had again gone under. The rope passed beneath the tree on the current, and he turned and grabbed the limb, dipped the shepherd’s crook with his free hand, and snagged the rope where it trailed from the dead man’s wrist. He hung the crook overhead on a fork of the limb and walked the wet line back to Raleigh. “Anchor it to that bit-off alder. If the current gets him, this might be a real handful.”

Raleigh took the rope. “You know this is crazy?”

Huck didn’t answer, just headed back out. He made the limb, circled it with his arm, and undid the buckle on his belt. He pulled the long tongue back through three loops on his waistband, ran the leather around the limb, and cinched himself to the tree.

“Houston,” Raleigh shouted. “Remember English class? The Wreck of the Hesperus?”

“Christ save us all,” Huck shouted back, and when the body loomed up through the depth, he hooked his foot around the base of the branch and leaned into the bite of the belt. He held the staff in two hands and put the crook down into the water and watched it refract toward the dead man’s upper arm.

He tried to hook the arm and felt the crook deflect. He tried again while the dead man bobbed and got the same result, the arm evidently in a rigid lock against the torso. The body rolled a bit against the prod and drag of the staff, and those dead-lidded eyes seemed to divert their attention in a scan of the sky, then bring their fixed stare right back upon him as the body centered again.

He felt the dip of the tree and knew the pull of the water would take its claim again at any second. He thought to try for the dead man’s own belt with the crook, and he looked hard through the shimmer and saw only the flapping tail of the black jacket. And when the current began to pull him down, Huck looked full-on again at that ghoul’s face with its dancing hair, and he reached down and in one fluid motion set the hook behind the man’s neck. He felt the solid tug of contact, the stubborn resistance of a weight that wanted only to sink.

He heaved with both arms and felt something resist and then release below the surface, and the head and chest sat up into the air like a jack-in-the-box, wet wreath suddenly plastered to the skull and a blue bullet hole the size of a dime in the temple. And Huck heard again the words Christ save us and realized the wheezing voice that went with them was entirely his own.

He yelled for Raleigh to pull and the body did indeed jump with the current. He heard the rasp of fabric against the bark of the tree as the force of the staff shoved him into his belt, and he let go in reflexive panic and clawed for the limb. Staff and torso both dropped back for the water and slid under the tree, the staff at its skewed angle jutting and knocking against the trunk and torquing down with the heavy pull of the body, scraping under and springing back into the air on the other side.

The corpse floated with the current. Huck’s head snapped to Raleigh, struggling to pull against the water, and he forced his fingers from the limb and fumbled with his belt, got himself free, and with one hand clutching his waistband somehow nearly vaulted back to steady ground. He made it to Raleigh in three leaping strides, and the two of them moved downriver, walking and hauling the body toward shore. They reeled him to the shallows, his arm stiff and seized tight yet against his torso, despite the loop at his wrist and the force of the water. The staff jutted.

They steered the body to the gravel and looked at each other. “Houston, your pants are falling down.”

“I saw the bullet hole, Rolly. Right in the side of his dern head.” Huck hoisted his trousers into place and buckled his belt. “It’s blue.”

“Aye, yi yi.” Raleigh spat a time or two. “My mouth tastes awful.”

They moved together toward the body on the bank, its legs trailing into the shallows. One foot was bare beneath the black pant leg, the skin pale as wax and weirdly hairless, the other clad yet in a wingtip shoe.

“He looks like a dern lawyer,” said Raleigh.

“Preacher.” The word popped out, and Huck immediately regretted it.

Raleigh took a good hard look at the bloated face. Huck could hear him breathing, saw his hands still tight around the rope. He took hold of the staff and twisted the head. “There’s where the bullet got him.”

“Ho-ly.” Raleigh looked away, swallowed hard and shook his head and looked back. “Dern thing must still be in his melon, otherwise he’d be missing half his head. That’s a .38 at least. Maybe bigger.” He seemed to notice his hands and the wet rope for the first time, and he half flung it at the ground, like a thing gone snake-alive in his grip. He looked at Huck. “Now what?”

“Reckon we’d better get to a phone and call Cy. This cuss’ll bloat quick out here in the sun.”

Raleigh seemed to gather his wits by the second. He looked upriver at the sweeper, then back to the body. “Let’s get the rope off him first.”

Huck said, “Don’t you think we ought to tie him off again? Make sure he don’t float away on us?”

“This here is a golden opportunity to get back on Cy’s good side after that stunt last fall, is what I think. Walking out on a sweeper and roping a dead guy ain’t gonna help your cause.”

Huck crouched by the corpse and realized his knees were still shaking. He took the rope close to the stiff white wrist, tried to work the cinched knot with his thumb and index finger only, tried not to make actual contact with cold flesh or sodden cloth.

The body really was stiff as a board. “I don’t know if I can get this loose. Dern knot’s like a turnbuckle.”

He pulled the rope in different directions against what felt for all the world like the permanent grip of death itself, tugged this way and that and round and round, hoping to flex the thing loose from the bite of the knot. The stiff arm jerked, and the wet black cuff of the jacket slouched farther down the wrist. Huck pivoted on his knee to get a better angle and found himself staring at the moving hand of a clock.

Not a clock but a wristwatch, a particularly enormous one, strapped to the inside of the dead man’s wrist. Huck watched the metered jump and stall of the second hand, the jump and stall, past the Roman XI and on again toward and then beyond the twelve o’clock apex. He watched the minute hand advance.

“Son of a bitch.”

He was not known to swear in the manner of most teenage boys, had in fact a sort of reverse notoriety for exactly the opposite. “Whoa,” said Raleigh. “You hurt?”

Huck shook his head. The watch had a gigantic glass face and a steel bezel around the outer rim marked in degrees, one through fifteen, with graduated minutes of angle between each numeral. A prominent onion-shaped winding crown protruded at three o’clock, with a smaller crown positioned at two. LONGINES, in bold if diminutive block lettering beneath high noon. Huck reached over and pincered the two o’clock crown and twisted. An inset dial at the center of the face marked with its own arcane graduations rotated independently of the main Roman dial.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What is it?”

Jump. Stall. Huck couldn’t peel his eyes away. “It’s a Lindbergh flight watch. First one I’ve ever gotten a real look at.”

Raleigh crouched beside him. “Holy—look at the size of it.”

“I know it. So a flier can work it with gloves. They also come with a special strap to fit over a flight jacket.”

“What all’s it do? With the dials and all?”

Jump.

Stall.

“It’s for calculating longitude. You set the watch to a radio signal from the prime meridian in England and then figure the hour angle of the sun by the settings on the watch, which gives you your location in the air. I don’t exactly know how it works. Colonel Lindbergh came up with it, after the Atlantic crossing. I can’t believe I’m actually seeing one.”

“So this guy’s a flyboy himself, then.”

The body. Huck pried himself from the jump and stall and started again at the distorted face of the deceased. He’d become fixated with numerology, with the steady blue momentum of time. He’d forgotten the body altogether.

He looked back to the watch. Worn on the inside of the wrist, like a proper aviator. “Yeah, I guess he must be. Or was.” He looked at Raleigh. “I’d give a lot to have enough time with this dern watch to figure out how it works.”

“So take it. Start figuring.”

Huck shook his head. “More complicated than that. I’d need to study up on the basic science, then figure out the watch after. Plus, I think you’re supposed to use it along with a sextant or something. And a radio signal. No way I’m going to make heads or tails before Cy gets here.”

“No, Houston, I mean take it. As in, take it with you.”

“Take it?” Huck watched the needle jump again past twelve, watched the long, pierced point of the minute hand advance. Eight past nine and no doubt dead-on. Sunrise that morning had been shortly before six, and he’d left the shop not long after to meet Raleigh. “You mean steal it?”

“Huck. He’s a dern dead crook with a bullet in his head who probably stole the thing himself. Or bought it with stolen loot at least. We hadn’t spotted him yesterday, and you hadn’t come along with Old Man Neuman’s rig when you did, no telling how this would’ve ended. Eventually he’d have come loose out of that snag and kept right on floating, watch and all. Or the fish would’ve eaten him. You believe in God, right?”

Huck looked at him.

“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 was 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.

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 one 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.

—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.

Lindy jumped onto the desktop. Huck picked her up and dropped her to the floor. Annelise moved beside him, and he flipped the manual open at the dog-ear, to a chapter titled “THE PIETENPOL ‘AIR-CAMPER’ . . . a Ford Powered 2-Seater Monoplane.”

“It’s this. Built around a Model A engine. But it’s a real airplane, homemade or not.” He swiveled his head toward her. “The glider was my own ideas, mostly. But this is proven to work. I ordered the plans directly from the designer, in Minnesota. Mr. Pietenpol.”

McKee had moved in and even he seemed to take some interest. “Model A’s a heavy damn engine.” He set his bottle down and started flipping pages. “Gravity-fed, too. I don’t know much about airplanes, I admit. But whoever figured this out, well. I doff my hat.” He stopped at the motor-conversion diagrams, pored over them for a moment. “If it actually works, I mean.”

“It does. There’s a bunch of them flying already. Two in Montana, that I know of.”

“Well, I—”

“Shush,” said Annelise sharply.

They both looked at her, but she’d turned to the radio.

“. . . and in Honolulu, Miss Earhart’s silver Lockheed has crashed upon takeoff on the second leg of her attempt to circle the globe at the equator. Neither Lady Lindy nor her crew have been injured, but damage to the airplane will mean at least a month’s delay. In other news, tensions continue to rise in the northern regions in Spain, where . . .”

“Goddamn it,” said Annelise.

Huck and McKee both looked at her. Huck’s ears actually seemed to ignite, as though those words out of those lips held the very breath of the devil.

“What?” she said. Then, “First one of you makes a crack about women pilots, I swear I’ll come at you with this bottle.”

“So you do fly planes, then? That’s for real?”

She looked McKee smack in the eye like a mongoose at a cobra. Or a queen to a drone. “I’m working toward my license. Yes, I’ve flown. Quite a lot.”

He looked at Huck. “And you built all that back in there yourself, right? Plus your own glider?”

Huck nodded.

“You want help?”

He gave a start. “What all?”

McKee waved a hand at the manual on the desk. “You’re some hand, that much I can see, but this looks to be a whale of a lot of work. Now I got no earthly doubt you can manage it, but the three of us, together? We’d get this sucker off the ground in no time.”

“I’m in,” said Annelise. She turned to Huck. “If you want the help, I mean.”

Huck didn’t quite know what to think. The thing had been a sworn secret for months, and other than Pop and Raleigh, nobody had sussed out a thing. Now in the turn of an hour it was all this.

Pop’s REO rumbled up outside. “Better stash those bottles,” he said.

Annelise downed hers in a gulp and glanced around and finally just lowered the brown glass to the floor and rolled it under the desk with her foot. McKee for his part took another slow swig and went back to studying the engine schematics. Huck heard the doors clank on the truck, one then two, heard feet on the gravel.

He looked at Annelise. “What if she smells it on your breath?”

She gestured with her chin toward McKee. “I’ll tell her the new fabricator here kissed me full on the mouth.”

“Guilty as charged,” said McKee. “Even if I don’t know your name.”

“Annelise,” she said. “Or Miss Clutterbuck, to you.”

McKee tilted his bottle at her. “Annelise it is.” He shifted back to Huck. “You have the motor yet?”

Huck’s nerves were already up and whatever was happening between these other two wasn’t helping. “Nope.”

The door swung open and hit the transom bell, and Pop held the door for Mother. Her eyes went first to Huck, then to McKee’s beer, then to the rifle positioned with its muzzle on the toe of his boot, and finally back to Huck.

Pop mainly appeared amused. He said, “Working hard, or hardly working?”

“We’re working hard at hardly working,” said McKee. “This being the Lord’s day and all.” He looked at Mother. “Howdy-do, ma’am. Beer?”

“This is my new man,” Pop told her. “Mother, Enos McKee.”

“Call me Yakima,” he said.

“Enos?” said Annelise. “Really?”

“Sort of,” said McKee. He looked a little sheepish.

“I don’t imbibe,” said Mother.

“Enos,” Annelise repeated, as though the very combination of letters and syllables were some exotic if dubious flavor in her mouth. “Is that a, um, family name?”

“Annelise. Don’t tease the man. Besides, Enos is a good Christian name in the Word. A direct ancestor of Jesus, in fact.”

“Just call me Yakima,” McKee said. He glanced at Annelise. “My friends all do.”

“Well, what sort of a name is that?”

“It’s a place,” said Pop. “Out on the Palouse. By all means, call the man what he wants to be called. And keep your nose in your own business.”

She grinned at him. “Mea culpa. That’s a legal term.”

“That sounds about right,” Pop told her, with an unusual twinkle of his own, and Huck realized with an odd flash of chagrin that his cousin already had his old man wrapped right around her finger.

Mother seemed not to notice. She’d moved up beside him and taken his arm, and he felt himself tense the way he always did these days. What she said next made him feel some chagrin about that, too.

“I’m going to fix you a hero’s supper, Houston. Pastor was very proud of you. Why don’t you and Annelise bring the groceries from the truck for me? Let Papa and Mr. McKee have some grown-up time.”

Huck glanced at Annelise. Her blue-gray eyes looked like shards of ice above the sky-colored wool of her jacket, and when they made contact now with his own she widened and then narrowed them again in a way that made him think of signal lights, surging and dimming through a fog. He wondered if she was sending a message.

She winked and removed all doubt. Otherwise her face was a stone.

“Mr. McKee, will you be joining us?”

“Well, ma’am, I’m not one to impose. Or to insult a lady’s invitation, either.”

“How gallant of you,” said Annelise.

Everyone looked at her. She looked back at each in turn and finally blinked, and Huck realized that despite the steady coolness in her eyes, she really didn’t know quite what to do in the moment, either. She pushed her sleeve back to check the time, a gesture he took more as a cover for nerves than anything else.

He saw the watch on her wrist.

“Son of a—” he blurted, and caught himself in the nick of time. “—gun.” His hand shot in the same instant to his pocket, and Mother’s grip tightened on his arm. Reflex unto reflex. “That is one . . . big ol’ watch.”

“Speaking of guns,” said Roy mildly, “I see you’ve given ol’ Juno the once-over.”

McKee seemed to have momentarily forgotten the fourteen-pound howitzer balanced on the toe of his boot. He regarded it with fresh eyes. “Why, yes. I think I may be in love, in fact. Never have actually seen one before.”

“You can dance with her,” Pop said, “but she’s true to me.”

“You’re a lucky man. Get her off some old buffalo rounder or something?”

Mother still had Huck’s arm like a clamp. His hand still gripped the watch through the cloth of his trousers. Jump.

Stall. His eye caught the open manual on the desk. He needed to get her out of the shop altogether. Annelise stepped for the door as though she could read his mind.

“Son, that big Sharps belonged to my daddy, and I reckon he did some damage with it the way all them old boys done. I rode with it across my saddle clear from Texas when I was ten years old. Been in Montana ever since. Me and Miss Juno both.”

“Clear from Texas,” said McKee. He ran his hand over the concave dish in the fore-end, worn into the wood by the sway of a horse, mile after mile, state after state. “Now that is sure enough something. Reckon I’d like to hear that story one of these days.”

Roy winked at Annelise, still with her hand at the door. The big Longines had once again vanished into her sleeve. “Set a plate for him, Mother,” he said. “Reckon I might as well tell it.”