Cloudmaker by Malcolm Brooks

Author:Malcolm Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2021-02-19T17:04:13+00:00

Juno II

Huck settled back with his spyglass in the limber pines atop the rim above the county road and scanned the country in the rising light. Horsethief Creek burbled yet, although barely, little more than a drought-choked trifle on the other side of the roadway. He panned the reef on the far side of the creek. Yak was forted up in there somewhere, although Huck couldn’t pick him out after twenty minutes of glassing.

He’d saddled the horses out back of the barn at five o’clock, and he and Annelise had cantered down the two-track and along the greened-up wheat in the rising light. The moon floated like an apparition in the west, mysterious as a silent veiled girl.

He moved up alongside her. “Think Yak’s already set?”

“I’m sure he is.” He’d wanted to get into position early, in case the other conniving bastards had the same idea.

They clipped fast where the track leveled south across the sage flat, past an old impoundment that hadn’t held a good reserve of water in ten years. The light came up steadily while they rode, the tattered edges of clouds limned with coral a half hour ahead of the strike of the sun.

They came up on the boundary fence and cut back to where the two-track exited the ranch through a poor man’s gate. Huck swung down and handed the reins to his cousin. He put his shoulder into the stave and took the tension off the keeper. He looked up at her. “This is a stupid idea, isn’t it?”

Her mouth twisted into a grimace, as though to acknowledge that he was only saying what she herself was thinking. She prodded the bay and passed through the gate with both horses. “Yeah, probably. Yak can be sort of . . . persuasive, I guess.”

“Maybe because he’s such a hand,” Huck mused. He left the gate open and swung back onto Pop’s sorrel. “I mean, the guy can do anything. He’s good at everything. Like some crazy genius.”

To his shock, Annelise leaned right off the starboard side of the bay and heaved a gush, straight at the ground. Mostly water, it looked like. She spat a few times, still leaning and also gripping the saddle horn. “Ugh,” she said, then retched and hacked again. Nothing else came up.

“Whoa. You okay?”

She nodded and gulped air. Finally she looked up at him. “He may be a genius, but that is no marker for basic good sense.” She spat again. “We should probably all have our heads examined.”

An hour later Huck found himself automatically reverting to the old Please, God, please from his perch on the rim. Please, God, please keep Annie safe. Please, God, please let this work. He hardly cared about the watch or the plane or anything else at the moment.

With the hour upon them he realized he’d had a sort of swashbuckling bravado over the past few days—like Annelise said, Mc­Kee’s general devil-may-care personality was nothing if not persuasive. Contagious, even. All that vanished like money once he watched her vomit from Wilbur’s back.

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