Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

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.