The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [25]
“Everything will be okay,” said Clark, shaking his head, watching Annie race up the stairs two at a time. “No hurry.”
***
When Annie thought of her father, it was always scenes of perpetual motion and precipitate change. A measureless highway of mildewed motels.
It was not until she was flying jets for the Navy that memories of those road trips rushed out of the past at her as if they’d been waiting in the sky. The scenes were underscored with fragments of old songs.
“Meet Me in St. Lou-ee, Lou-ee,” he’d sung to her when they’d gone to that city once and had almost gotten killed in a motel there.
“Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” he’d sung in a white and gold hotel suite, marching in from the bathroom, carrying a cake with five sparkling candles, with a crowd of strangers in loud-colored clothes around her bed, laughing so loudly so close to her that she’d burst into tears.
“La Bamba” he’d sung in the shiny plastic booth of a Taco Bell while carefully cutting a burrito into small pieces. “This is all we’ve got for supper, Captain Kid, we’re busted. If money mattered, we’d need to ‘go back and get a shitload of dimes.’” She’d laughed with him at the reference to Blazing Saddles. That time they’d driven all night and then had slept in the red Mustang at a rest stop with the doors locked and with a can of Mace nearby. “Just spray it in their face,” he told her.
“Whose face?”
“Anybody that gets in this car.”
When she asked him why they were always speeding down the road, he made his arms into wings and glided around her in the parking lot. “Because we’re Peregrines! The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, Annie. It can do a 45-degree dive at 217 miles per hour! Imagine that. Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis could only go 117 miles per hour. So that little Peregrine bird is going 100 miles per hour faster than Lindbergh!” Years later, to her amazement, she was to discover that this fact about the diving speed of a peregrine hawk was one of the few true things he’d told her.
When she’d asked her father to identify the shadowy men from whom they were running so fast, and who’d occasionally almost caught them, he’d exasperatingly offer her cartoon names, like “Snidely Whiplash” or “The Penguin” or “The Man from Yesterday” or “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
Whenever she wanted to know who her mother was, he made up some romantic story: Her mother was a circus acrobat, her mother had the highest IQ ever recorded in her hometown, her mother was the heir in exile to the throne of some small country whose name he would change from one nonsense word to another.
Even as a child she’d noticed inconsistencies. He was a compulsive liar, in fact a professional one. The only constant in his remarks about her mother was the claim that this woman had always said how much she loved Annie and how wonderful she thought Annie was. But the truth was hard to avoid: It did not appear that her mother had wanted a daughter in her life, however wonderful she might have thought her. And when Annie asked why her mother had left them, the answer was always that she’d thought her child would be better off with her father. Even at five and six, Annie found this assumption, if true, culpably naïve on her mother’s part.
Whenever she asked Jack Peregrine about his own work (fathers on television had jobs), he told her that he “lived a Life of Art.” By five, she had decided that what he called “a Life of Art” was in fact a life of crime. With her small solemn face she had watched him with a skepticism that time only increased. He was always on the phone, sometimes in a language she didn’t understand—he said it was Shangri-lang—always meeting strangers in peculiar places, sending cryptic messages, getting envelopes