Cloudmaker by Malcolm Brooks EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Malcolm Brooks
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Prologue
Scorpio slides down and Orion stalks up, and the stars in the October sky
otherwise align.
An eight-cylinder Buick roadster with out-of-state plates and nails in two
tires had limped in off the highway at dusk. She rests now nine hours later
in the wash of light from the open door of the shop, new tubes in place and
the convertible top down and the rightful owner in a boardinghouse not two
blocks away, unaware of his contribution to any of this.
The kid hits the ignition, and the cold car jolts and roars like a cat.
Withered leaves jump in a blast of exhaust, and he works the pedal, feels as
much as hears the engine’s high-tuned rumble. The leaves skitter again.
He’s endured months for hope of this moment exactly, and with the
Montana winter lurking just to the north he knows it’s either now or hold
off until spring. Eternity to a fourteen-year-old. Here is the fastest car to
appear in Big Coulee in at least a year. He’s actually gone so far as to pray
for such, and with the prize dropped right in his lap, he can’t help believing
he’s received not simply an answer but a bona fide green light from God.
Even Pop knows the score, put him on the pierced tires with a wink and a
nod and made himself conspicuously scarce.
He backs the car around the side of the shop, and Raleigh appears like a
red ghost in the taillights, behind him the wide wing of the glider a fainter
red blur against the night. Huck walks back and the two of them wordlessly
take opposite sides and roll the ship forward, tiny spoked wheels greased
and silent, the luminous sailcloth bobbing.
“Looks like a gol dern giant moth,” Raleigh mumbles, and he’s right, or
at least not wrong, or at least not wrong in this diffuse red light. Still, Glider
Number One looks to Huck entirely of a piece with the legendary
experimental fliers of Orville and Wilbur Wright from four decades past,
with its overhead wing and skeletonized rib section connecting the tail and
rear flaps to the operator’s chair, actually nothing more than a plank atop
the axle and a corresponding plank out front for a footrest. Only the cookiecutter wheels appear truly misfit, repurposed as they are from a baby buggy
and looking absurdly out of scale beneath twenty-three feet of wingspan. He
wonders if this occurs to Raleigh as well.
They hitch forty feet of hemp line to the bumper and attach the tag to
another ten of shock cord with a spliced steel ring at each end, the second of
which mates to a release on the ship’s footrest. Raleigh straightens up. “All
set?”
Huck weaves between cables, ducks beneath the wing. He settles to the
narrow plank and reaches for the leather helmet, on self-administered loan
from the high school football supply. He screws the helmet down and
cinches the strap. He peers up at Raleigh. “How do I look?”
“Like Tom Swift. In his Airship.”
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB