The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [1]
Sliding from their car, she saw him, slender and fast-moving, his white shirt shimmery, as he ran toward her out of the barn and across the dusky yard.
“Annie!” Reaching her, her father dropped to his knees and hugged her so fiercely that her heart sped. “I’m in trouble. I’ve got to leave you here a little while with Aunt Sam and Clark. Okay?”
She couldn’t speak, could only shake her head. How often had he told her that the house where he had grown up, that Pilgrim’s Rest had been for him a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers?
He kept nodding to make her nod too. “Okay? I’ll be back. Just hang onto your hat.” Pulling a pink baseball cap from his pocket, he snuggled it down onto her head. Colored glass beads spelled ANNIE above its brim; a few beads were missing, breaks in the letters.
Across the driveway a tall woman with short thick hair banged open the large doors of the barn. She called out to Annie’s father. “Jack? Jack! Jack! Jack!”
Annie’s father turned her around to face the woman but kept talking with that nodding intensity that always meant they would need to move fast. “See my sister Sam over there? I told you how nice she is.” The sound of sharp thunder flung the child back into the man’s arms. “So’s Clark. They’ll take care of you. I’ll call you. Remember, you’re a flyer.” He yanked her small hard blue suitcase out of the convertible, dropping it onto the gravel beside her. “Give Sam the cash.”
“Stop it. Where are you going!”
“Annie, I know. It’s rotten.” A drop of rain fell on his face like a fat fake tear. Drops splattered on the suitcase’s shiny clasps. “Go look in the barn. There’s a present for you. ‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”
She kicked him as hard as she could. And then she kicked over the blue suitcase. “I want to go with you,” she said. “You!” But before she could stop him, her father had run to their car and was driving away.
She raced after the Mustang, down the pebble road between the dark rows of large oak trees. It was hard to make her voice work loudly but finally it flamed up her throat and she could shout at him to come back. She was already crying, already knowing she couldn’t run fast enough.
Behind her, the tall woman named Sam kept calling, “Jack! Jack!”
Annie echoed her, hoping it would help. “Dad! Dad!”
The convertible braked to a skidding stop, her father twisting around in the seat to call out, “Your birthday present’s in the barn, go look in the barn! Annie! Don’t forget. You’re a flyer!”
She screamed as loudly as she could, “You stop!”
The wind caught his scarf as he sped off; it flew into the air behind him. Then he was gone and the green silk scarf lay coiled near her feet. She ground it into the pebbled road with her small leather cowboy boots; they were as green as the scarf and stitched with lariats. She had wanted these boots so badly that only a week ago her father had turned their car around, drove them back fifty miles to some small town in the middle of a flat state; he took her to the store where she’d seen the boots in the window and he bought them for her. “Never wait to say what you want,” he told her. “It’s no fun to go back. And sometimes you can’t.”
But now she’d said what she wanted and he’d left her anyhow. Dust and rain stung Annie’s eyes shut and the world turned black. The tall woman’s voice was calling again. “Annie! Annie!”
Furious, the child flung herself into the gully beside the road, tumbling down a tangle of vines and underbrush; she lay there in the rain, hiding from the woman Sam until her voice, solicitous and worried, passed by, still shouting, “Annie! Annie!”
After a while, the woman’s voice faded and there were no sounds but the hard wind and rain. Annie decided to walk along the road in the direction her father had gone. Maybe he would stop for gas or food and she would find him again.
But suddenly her pink baseball cap blew off, whisking over the bank. She chased the cap onto a path that wound up to a hilltop, where it caught against