The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [141]
Annie hurried around the pool edge to the diving board. There was a cigarette crushed in the hotel’s black ashtray on a table. It was a Chesterfield, a small lipstick smear on the end of the paper. It was warm. Who would smoke unfiltered cigarettes anymore? Except her father and this sun-shadowed woman in his life.
***
At the same time, back in Emerald, Sam was instructing the high-school movie fan who worked for her at Now Voyager to “woman the store.” Sam retired to the editing room where she was supposed to be transferring old Super-8 films to DVD for a client. But what she actually did was to sit there in the dark, watching a film called “Annie.”
Over the years she’d been adding material to this loop, reorganizing its sequence of clips a dozen times. The movie now began with some poorly lit footage that Jack had shot decades ago on that surprise month-long visit to Pilgrim’s Rest with his one-year-old daughter. Anne Samantha Peregrine.
The first clip showed Sam running after the baby Annie who crawled at an amazingly fast pace over to the screen door, which she tried to push open with her head. Sam, laughing, opened the door and let her pull herself out onto the porch. In the next, Annie was careening along the hallway in a bright yellow plastic learning walker that Sam had bought her. It had a steering wheel, horn, radio buttons, a headlight, and turn signals. Annie was laughing in delight.
The next clip, shot at the end of the month’s visit, showed Sam on her knees in the morning room. She held her arms out to Annie a few feet away, standing unsteadily in little red overalls. Spike-haired, round-faced, irresistibly smiling, she held her arms tight around a table’s leg—the table on which, years later, the puzzle of the blue sky would sit. In the silent film, Sam kept calling to Annie to come on, come on, walk to her.
Suddenly letting go of the table, laughing, tipping, staggering in a joyful unbalance, Annie ran fast across that vast space between risk and safety and fell into her aunt’s outreached arms.
Alone in the editing room, Sam clicked the “Annie” DVD forward to later footage, shot with a camcorder sixteen years after those first steps of Annie’s. This footage had sound. It opened with a long shot of the Emerald High stadium as the school’s marching band came onto the field, playing “Johnny B. Goode.” Annie had just won the National Youth Speed Race, urging the King of the Sky to a speed of which D. K. Destin had not thought it capable. On the football field the band formed the shape of an airplane, while the bandleader stood on a platform beside cheerleaders who sang into a mike:
Her mama told her someday, though you are a girl,
You will be the fastest in the big old world.
Saying Annie P. Goode tonight.
Go Go
Go Annie Go
The camera then zoomed to a closeup shot of Clark, seated right beside Sam. Clowning, he pulled his bright green Emerald High tasseled ski cap down over his head. Then the camera zoomed back to Annie as she walked out onto the field, waving and smiling. She held up the trophy, and shook it at the sky.
In the edit room, Sam paused the film on the teenaged Annie’s face. She looked very much like the young woman who had so long ago broken Jack’s heart. Or so at least he’d claimed to his sister.
Sam studied the shot of Annie’s face until it went off “pause” and the screen turned as blank blue as the puzzle of the sky.
Chapter 39
Tonight Is Ours
That evening, taking the MPD desk officer’s advice, Annie drove to the bar named La Loca to look for Daniel Hart. A bartender there told her that Hart was indeed a daily, usually showing up around sunset. She promised to point him out when he arrived.
Half an hour passed. Young people arrived by twos, threes, dozens. Their voices grew quickly louder