Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks
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