Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

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