The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [58]
Sam leaned into the car, upset. “We lost most of the hollyhocks and foxglove but for some reason those hideous orange irises of yours look pretty good.”
“Every cloud has a silver lining, as I learned when my cousin died and left me his classic GTO.” Clark pointed behind Sam. “Did you lock the front door? Go back and check the door.”
“Nobody’s going to rob us,” Sam said. “A tornado just went through here. People are busy.”
“Drug addicts don’t mind a little storm. Remember that burglar that broke into Georgette’s house in the ice storm?”
“That was nothing. She played her barking Doberman tape and he ran off.”
“I’m locking the door.” Clark loped up onto the porch to lock the front door and then returned to the car.
Annie checked her watch. “You want to drive me to the airfield or not?”
“I do not. Did I ever?” He started slowly forward.
From the backseat, Sam called, “Be careful, Clark. The drive’s flooded.”
“Wait’ll she gets to the sky.” Her uncle eased the station wagon out into the gravel road. “This cousin’s GTO, which I sold for two hundred bucks—”
Annie took a long breath. “—would be worth a fortune today.”
“Would be worth a fortune today.”
From the back seat Sam muttered, “I’ve got an Armageddon feeling. Like Tippi, being driven away from the doomed house at the end of The Birds.”
Annie turned around and repeated what her father had told her so often as he’d spun her in the air all those years ago. “Don’t worry. I’m a flyer.”
Clark pointed up at the car roof. “So proudly we hail.” Tiny pellets of hail were striking the car.
“Now, there you go,” smiled Sam. “We are actually hearing a new pun. You never know what life will bring.”
Chapter 17
The Great Waldo Pepper
Shortly after Annie’s birth, Jack Peregrine had won in a poker game in Key West, or so he’d told Sam, the old single-engine 1975 Piper Warrior, with engine troubles, that he’d brought to Emerald. In the barn at Pilgrim’s Rest he repainted its body. He planned to fix its engine and even burnt a crude landing strip into a long flat meadow behind the barn. But as far as Sam knew, Jack had never flown the little red and yellow Warrior on whose wing he had written, “King of the Sky.” Instead the plane waited unused in Emerald until the seven-year-old Annie began sitting in it alone for hours, hoping she could, by her stoicism in the cockpit, compel her father to return. She found an ignition key taped to the underside of the wheel cap, near where on her arrival she had huddled so long crying. She used this key to pretend to start the plane, although the motor was long dead.
One Sunday evening, as Sam, Clark, and she sat on the couch with Teddy, watching the movie The Great Waldo Pepper, the quiet little girl suddenly announced that she intended to fly the Piper Warrior herself. It was, after all, her airplane.
For the next two years, Annie spent daily hours in the barn playing at flying the single-engine plane, cleaning it, studying it. Since the birthday when Sam had given her that first ride with Georgette in a tethered balloon and the flying lessons in the Pawnee Cropduster at D. K. Destin’s airfield on the outskirts of Emerald (“Private Planes, Sell or Rent, Low Monthly Rates, Rides, Instruction, Groups or Single”) the small airport had become her favorite place, and D. K., one of the few African American naval combat pilots in Vietnam, had become for a while the most important person in her life. At every meal she asked in her solemn watchful way for flying lessons with the retired lieutenant. It was the first thing for which she asked her aunt and “uncle,” other than information about her missing parents.
Sam tried to assuage Clark’s concern about Annie’s flying mania. “It’s like horses, a phase.” But years passed and the phase didn’t. On rainy afternoons Annie read every book the school library had