The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [17]
Her father stood in the yard below the Nickerson windows, yelling up at her, “Hi, Annie!”
She didn’t answer but, with slim tanned arms leaning over the sill, stared out at the fields behind him.
“You look beautiful! Come on down, say hello.” He made his arms into wings.
She fought to ignore him.
“I hear you’re a flyer. Going to Annapolis. Good for you! Come on, let’s go to the airfield, take a ride in the King! Hey, look at you. I missed you so much!” Her father started doing a cha-cha dance, an imaginary partner in his arms.
Annie pulled her head back inside the window without replying, noticing as she did so that a brown car was coming toward them up the hill, red dirt blowing in spirals on the road, swirling closer.
“Come on, Annie! I owe you one!” She could hear her father calling her name like a chant.
Georgette was saying, “Go down there and talk to him!”
“No.”
Her friend tried tugging at her. “Go talk to him! I don’t mean like you’re lucky, but, God, my dad’s permanently dead. At least yours shows up every ten years. Plus my dad just owned a jewelry store. My mom just sells engagement rings and flexy watchbands. Boring! Your dad’s a criminal. Go over there!”
“No,” said Annie, staring again out the window, pressed against its frame so she couldn’t be seen from the yard. The swirls of dirt on River Hill Road swelled, rolling nearer.
Georgette gestured at a large, not very good oil painting on the wall, a “professional portrait” of her father George, aged twelve in blue blazer and tie, with his sister, aged fourteen, in pink summer dress and pearls. “All I’ve got’s my aunt Ruthie’s running off with a married man. Otherwise, the Nickersons were ‘a terminal snooze.’ You don’t even know who your mother is.”
“Lucky me.”
Annie heard tire noise and then Sam calling, “Jack!”
Both girls squeezed to lean out the window.
Georgette shrieked, “Oh my God!” as a brown state highway patrol car, with spinning lights, came skidding fast through the open gate.
Across the yard, Annie heard Sam shout, “Run!” She watched her father dash to the blue Corvette, which soon leapt forward spraying pebbles. The patrol car slewed around in a circle, almost hitting Aunt Sam as it roared back over the crest of the hill in pursuit of the Corvette.
On the TV screen, Jean-Paul Belmondo happened at that moment in the À bout de souffle subtitles to be saying to Jean Seberg, “Don’t use the brakes!” Georgette slapped her big creamy hands. “Merde! ‘Don’t use the brakes.’ I’d like to live my whole life like that, like your dad just drove out of here! Brakeless.”
“With the cops after you?” Annie shrugged, she hoped in a nonchalant Gallic way, but it was in fact hard to breathe. “No thanks.”
The two teenagers hurried back to Pilgrim’s Rest where a distraught Sam kept saying, “I’m going to kill him!” She could explain little more about Jack’s appearance than what they’d seen for themselves. According to Sam, Jack was the same selfish nut he’d always been. She wasn’t sure she could endure many more of these startling appearances of his, his flying at her out of nowhere like she was Janet Leigh in a shower.
Sam held up a small red dirty marble, saying that Jack had thrust it into her hand just before running off to his Corvette, and had yelled back at her, “Tell Annie happy birthday! Tell her to hang onto that baseball cap!” Then he’d disappeared.
“What else is new?” said Annie. “What baseball cap?”
“Oh, you know,” Sam said.
“I have no idea.”
Sam sat down, catching her breath. “That little pink hat you had on when you came here. I kept it.”
“You keep everything.”
“You never know,” Sam admitted. “Look how Jack wanted the King of the Sky back after all these years.”
Annie returned the dirty red marble to Sam with contempt. “Trust me, Sam, he’ll forget about the King by tomorrow.”
Chapter 5
Since You Went Away
The highway patrolman