Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ