Over the course of a dead-still and blindingly bright subzero week in January, he called in and shot six beautifully prime coyotes and a like pair of red fox using a telescoped .250-3000 Pop had taken on trade for some machine work.
When trapping season closed, he sent the stretched hides to a fur buyer in Seattle and cashed a windfall of a check, and this went into the coffee can as well. He kept on at the movie house, and by March he had enough to buy a new set of Zenith flight gauges and a war-surplus prop through Modern Mechanics.
He built the opposing frame flat again on the floor to mirror the first, and with the casein fully cured a second time, he set the halves topside down on their upper longerons. He pinned them tight at the tail, cut and set the graduated connecting struts on layout, and mitered diagonal bracing into the back three bays. He covered the floor and sides of the cockpit with light plyboard and attached seatbacks and a forward firewall of the same.
The chalk lines from the longerons were scuffed and smudged but still visible on the floor, the arc of nails pulled, but the holes they left like dots properly connected. What he had now resting on the sawhorses and fairly glinting with fresh varnish was the skeleton of an honest-to-God airplane fuselage, sleek and tapered as a rocket. He couldn’t stop looking at it.
Lindy had followed him into the shop, and she weaved in and out of his shins. He could smell the high heady sheen off the ribs of the plane, smell also the gasoline and grease on his hands from wrenching on the flivv. His belly growled something fierce, and he knew his head had gone a little light. Hunger and fumes.
A week earlier he’d traced out a jig for the wing ribs. He built two of them the following evening, and by the third night he had a system down and built a half dozen more.
Now he’d been away from the whole project for a few days, and with twenty-two ribs to go, he wanted badly to log some time but knew as well he needed his head on straight. He rocked the fuselage frame a time or two in its berth atop the horses, marveled again at how little this geometric web of sticks actually weighed. Bones of a bird.
He knew by the door lamps and radio that Pop had already been by, that he’d no doubt driven this mystery cousin on to the ranch outside town. Huck had met her once, but too long ago to remember. Annelise, perpetually the sharp-featured little blonde girl with the Shirley Temple curls in the picture of the family gathering back in ’25, hanging on the wall at the farmhouse. She wore a sundress and a thin matching headband, although somebody had stuck a turkey feather straight up behind her head in the fashion of an Indian brave. Huck himself was still in a toddler’s smock, looking even then at the sky rather than the camera. He wasn’t the shaver in that picture anymore, which meant Annelise was not that little girl, either. But nobody had said a thing about a dang baby.
He reheated a leftover kettle of what Pop called Texas hash on the gas range and forked down about half of it at the table. The first mouthful hit the floor of his belly like a hay bale dead-dropped from a loft.
He still had the jitters. What a day it had been—Doc Lipton had stuck Shirley with two big hypodermics, and sure enough Shirley had quit gurgling and in four or five minutes lost about half the swelling in that balloon of a noggin, and he and Raleigh had started breathing again themselves. Doc Lipton told them they ought to get a medal, and he looked straight at Junior Joe when he said it. Such was the end of the story, other than Junior’s unconcealed sour grapes while he filled out his report.
Or so Huck figured. The more he thought about it, Shirley had to be right. Raleigh was known to have a wild imagination, and how in tarnation would a dern body in a black business suit wind up in the river in the first place? Tractor tube, no doubt. What a day, though. His gut churned like a cement mixer. They kept milk in the icebox mainly for the cat, but he went for it now, thinking it might settle the storm.
He spotted the note, there on the sideboard, scrawled on an envelope in Pop’s slanting script and with the terse cadence of a telegraph.
Sonny—Took yr. cous. to the ranch, 6:30, back late or in the a.m.? Tx hash in kettle. Big excitement over to Roundup—gang of stickup men busted, one man shot and washed downriver, others still loose. Lock doors and keep yr. powder dry. Pops
They made the train trestle with the sun yawning new and long over the coulees and breaks. Huck took his foot out of the pedal and idled down and stopped.
“You have the radio on out of Billings last night?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Hear any news from Roundup?”
Raleigh considered. “Not a thing. What is it?”
He fished the envelope out of his shirt pocket and handed it over. “Not any tire tube, be my guess.”
Raleigh took a gander at the note. “Looks like ol’ Shirley can pound sand.”
Huck turned onto the track and centered the wheels on either side of the left rail. He glanced down once midway across and saw the rip of the water thirty feet below, glimpsed it and glimpsed it again through the metered skip of the ties. He forced his eyes forward. “She cleared any?”
Raleigh had his head craned over the passenger door. “Hard to tell. She’s still plenty silty.”
He drove out past the plowed and furrowed table and down toward the water as far as the road could take him. He cut the motor and grabbed a rope coil and a shepherd’s crook he’d thrown in at the shop.
From a high swell in the shortgrass before the land dropped away to the river bottom, they could look out to the south and see the opposing bench, see the grade Huck had backfired down the day before. Fifteen minutes later they looked downstream at the snag.
The mergansers clattered again off the water, and the both of them jumped like pinched girls. “Glad it ain’t just me,” Raleigh said.
They walked through a glaze of frost on the green grass by the water where the cold air pooled. They came up onto the snag, and sure enough from a downstream angle they could look back up into the eddy and see the same solid-black bulk when it bobbed up and paused before sinking back again, just shy of the fallen cottonwood.
“We’ll have to get out on the sweeper to get a real look,” Huck said. “Was hoping we wouldn’t.”
“You and me both,” said Raleigh, but he walked back and climbed up and began to inch his way out against the log’s vibrating tremble, and Huck dropped rope and staff in the grass and found his balance and inched out behind him.
Raleigh made the first jutting limb, and with something to hold to, he sidestepped around as quickly as he dared so that Huck could reach for the same limb. They stood then on either side and looked goggle-eyed at each other as the trunk beneath began to lift with the flow like a whale breaching.
They looked down. The river swirled with silt, opaque as fog. The black bulk rolled with the action of the water and lifted and broke through, a human hand protruding and fish-pale by contrast and then the bloated face, assembling through murk and flow and suddenly a half-lidded, blue-tinted ghoul. The dark wreath of hair pulsed around his head like sea wrack.
“Dam-nation,” Raleigh breathed, and he clutched the limb with both hands and convulsed once or twice and vomited like a firehose, right out across the water.
Huck clutched the limb. The sweeper dipped and his own gorge heaved.
He choked it back. The face
