every crackpot farm wife in the Musselshell. At the end of the day he appreciates what you boys done, but that don’t mean he’s about to gush about it—give you a medal or something. All right, get her fired.”
Ten minutes later he had the linkage adjusted and idle mixture tuned and the choke working again. He dropped the hood and disappeared for the washroom. When he returned, Huck had the truck backed into the sunlight.
Pop slid the bay door closed and walked to the driver’s door. “Slide over. No sense pushing it with Cyrus.”
They drove to the café and sat in a booth by the window. Huck had to recount the tale of the body and its discovery three times in fifteen minutes, once to Hannah, the waitress, and twice again to other diners, and he prayed to God that wherever Raleigh happened to be at the moment, he was sticking to a more or less compatible version of the same abridged sequence. Trouble was, Raleigh had a knack for embellishment even under ordinary circumstances.
“Reckon we’d better get out to the place for the next couple of nights.”
He’d seen this coming. “I was sort of hoping to get a little further on the wing.”
Pop stirred his coffee, pointlessly because he never put a thing in it. “Yeah, I guessed that. I don’t like having women out there alone, though, with that waterlogged rascal’s friends still around. No telling where they show up next. Anyways, I got the parts for the tractor and we need to get it back in business, on the off chance we get some water this season. And you ought to see your mother. And meet your cousin.”
That other source of dread.
Pop evidently sensed it. “You’ll like her, she’s a firecracker. And get this, she’s had flying lessons. So already you’ve got something in common.”
Now this did beat all. “You didn’t tell her about the dern airplane, did you?”
“No, but she’ll be starting school next week, which means she’ll be living here in town with us some, so she’s bound to find out. May as well get that in your head right now.”
“She will spill the dern beans.”
Pop looked at him. “Did you just hear what I said? Girl’s had flying lessons, Houston. That’s a big stroke of luck, seems to me.”
Huck stared at the bubbles climbing through his Coke bottle. He could feel the watch in his pocket. “You sure they’ll even let her into school?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Ain’t she . . . you know.”
Pop looked at him. “Ain’t she what?”
He thought of Raleigh, standing in the dusk with his dead fish. “Ain’t she ‘studying abroad’?”
Pop cracked a grin. He pulled the spoon out of his coffee and set it on the saucer. “No, sonny, she ain’t. Although I can see why you’d jump to the conclusion.”
“What on earth is she doing here, then? Isn’t that why girls get sent off?”
“Yeah, I guess so, most times. But this ain’t one of them times.”
He took an idle swallow and something else struck him. “I’m on at the Rialto tomorrow night.”
Pop looked at him. “Now who’s the rascal.”
“I just remembered. Honest.”
He stirred his coffee again. “Just remembered something myself. Probably is better for one of us to stick it here. I hired a new fella down in Billings the other day, and he’s due to show up sometime over the weekend.”
“He had flying lessons too?”
“Didn’t say. But he’s a hell of a smith. Welder and machinist. Young guy, but kind of a character. Name’s McKee.”
“How young?”
“Well, not real young. Twenty-two? From Utah. Worked at the Browning gun forge down there, actually. Didn’t seem Mormon, though.”
Huck forked succotash to the side of his plate. “Studying abroad, is he?”
Roy grinned. “You’re going to like her, Huck. She’s a pistol.”
7
Fig. 5-A shows the wing curve I use. I don’t know what to call it. I made it up myself after building a lot of wings . . .
When I had found out where the centers of lift were I could place them ahead or behind a little at a time until I had a flyin’ sweetheart.
—B. H. Pietenpol, 1932 Flying and Glider Manual
Huck fired the stove in the shop and busied himself in the fabrication bay past midnight, building wing ribs in the jig. He finally gave it up when he got out of sequence and tacked two gussets in a row without first applying the glue, and knew he’d gotten too tired and too sloppy to continue.
In the morning he roused himself early, boiled a pot of coffee to cut the fog and took both the coffee and the remains of the Texas hash straight back to the shop. He set another fire and ate the hash cold while the shop warmed, petted Lindy a time or two, and went back to the ribs.
By noon, with the last of them assembled, he stacked them off to the side of the fuselage frame in two columns: fourteen perfectly symmetrical full ribs in one, fourteen truncated aileron ribs in the other, each a single cross-sectional slice of perfect aerodynamic foil. He was close now to needing muslin to sheath the body and wings and in fact already had an order filled out for Sears and Roebuck. Pop would send it off once they collected for Old Man Neuman’s T, and Huck went out now and folded the hood open and tinkered a bit underneath. He finally conceded he had the old rattletrap as far along as he could without help.
He went back to the bay and mulled the options. Daylight shot through the clerestory at the top of the wall, weak yellow shafts filtered by a winter layer of coal soot and general grime. He knew he could just drag a ladder around and wash the windows in a legitimate gesture of progress, but one of the yellow beams happened to fall across the fuselage like a spotlight out of heaven itself. Huck found himself unable in the moment to accept a downgrade from airplane builder to gol dang window washer.
What he really wanted to do was lay the ribs out and attach them to the spars, which, along with the fuselage, would represent a nearly complete skeleton of the entire airplane. But the finished wing would span a full thirty feet, and the shop lacked space.
He settled on the flaps instead, to finish off the wing ribs. He went back to the plans pinned to the corkboard on the wall. He’d already partially modified the jig to build the shorter ribs but realized he’d have to fabricate the steel control horns before he could lay in the actual flap frames. He went back to the main part of the shop and rummaged around, found two remnant pieces of twenty-gauge cold sheet and took them back to the bay.
He wondered when this new smith of Pop’s would roll in, an intrusion he’d felt in a creeping dread since supper the evening before. McGee, or something. No. McKee, with a K. Outside of Huck, Pop hadn’t retained a hireling in quite a while and Lord knew he could use one, the way work had been picking up, but still. First this cousin, who in all
