Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

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