The Four Corners Of The Sky (4 page)

D. K.’s cornrows shook as he blew away her father’s tale of sunken treasure with a loud puff of air. “Sugar Pie, the man was yanking your chain. There’s no ‘Queen of the Sea.’ He was as full of it as a mountain of guano under a pile of cow patties.”

“What’s guano?” she asked the cranky pilot.

“Shit.”

Annie giggled. “Guano. That’s a funny word.”

“It’s real.” He took her hand, slapped it at the control panel of the small Cessna. “This is no story. Wham! You’re shot down in the China Sea! You’re squiggling through a puckered pocket of metal and all of sudden your legs won’t work. What the fuck, your legs won’t work!”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Damn right. Your lungs are bustin’ in that cold black salty water and no air to breathe. Air’s so high up on top of you, you can’t even see it. And you know what? Swimming best I could up out of that water, if I’d spotted a little gold statue of the Virgin Mary with million dollar emerald eyes, right there in front of my nose on some fucking coral reef, I wouldn’t have stopped for
two seconds
of my dying breath to get that sucker loose. Not two seconds!”

“Amy Johnson wouldn’t have stopped for two seconds either.”

“Damn right,” he agreed. “Amy’s in the fuckin’ English Channel, poor thing, her plane’s down in the fog and all they come back up with was her pocketbook with her goddamn lipstick in it. In real life, you gotta make some choices.”

The dead World War II pilot Amy Johnson had recently become Annie’s idol. D. K. had told her about the beautiful young British flyer who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and who died at only thirty-eight in World War II while ferrying bombers for the
RAF
. Annie had Amy’s picture on her bedroom wall. D. K. was full of such lore about bygone pilots and their heroic deeds.

“Courage,” he told her. “That is the only thing worth guano. All the money in the world’s not worth shit.” He slapped her hand again on the panel. “What’s the only thing?”

“Courage.”

“That’s right. Give me that toothless smile of yours, Orphan Annie.”

She frowned, indignant, tightening her lips over her missing front teeth. “I’m not an orphan, I’ve got Sam and Clark. I’ve got parents.”

D. K. laughed. “You got too many! You got more than you know what to do with.”

She covered her mouth grinning. “You’re guano.”

“And love’s a game of give-and-take, baby. Me and your Uncle Clark. We both loved America, we gave it all we had and the U.S. took it all and look at us now.”

“What’s wrong with you and Clark?”

“Not a damn thing.” The old vet D. K. banked his plane and they headed home.

W
hen, at seven years old, Annie first heard her “uncle” Clark Goode calling to her as she hid in the barn beneath the airplane, she had to wipe her eyes on the knees of her jeans in order to see him. A tall, thin man in khakis and plaid shirt stepped through the big doors, closing them against the rain. Crouched on the dark dirt, the child hugged the wheel cover of the Piper single-engine plane, frightened by the sound of the doors and by the lightning that cracked across the sky, as if one of the fairy-tale giants in her father’s stories had broken open heaven with a sledgehammer.

The tall man ambled over to the lantern and when he saw her he tapped three reassuring pats on the plane’s wing. “Hi there, Annie,” he said. He had sandy hair and wore glasses with round tortoise-shell rims. Offering her a pair of little blue plastic sunglasses, he asked, “These yours? I found them in the yard…”

She took the glasses but didn’t speak.

“Sam’s out there looking for you…Want one?” He held out an unopened can of soda.

Annie, struggling to sound indifferent, quoted her father. “‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”

“That’s a good one.” The man had a slow soft accent that she later learned to identify as Tidewater. “That’s from an old movie called
Stagecoach
.”

“I know. My dad says it, ‘no silver cup.’”

“Your aunt Sam loves movies too, so I watch a lot of them. She’s out there driving up and down the road, calling for you, figuring you ran after your dad.”

“My dad drove too fast.”

He nodded. “Always did…Some storm, huh?” There were loud rattles of noise like giants stomping on the barn roof.

“Is it a hurricane?” She had seen those in movies on TV.

“Nope.” The man sat on the ground next to the plane, wiping reddish dirt from his hands, looping his arms around his knees, bending his head so it was in line with hers. “It’s hail. Ever seen hail?”

Worried, she shook her head, watching his face. “Maybe it’ll get my dad?”

He looked at her, thought about it. “No chance. Jack will be okay. I promise.” Tilting his head, he smiled. “Jack’s always okay, right? Just when you think he’s done for?”

She stared at the man squatting there beside her, wondering how he understood her father so well. As if he’d heard the question, he added, “Your dad and his sister Sam and I sort of grew up together. He was her little brother. Well, still is.” He took off his wet glasses, shaking the rain from them, cleaning them carefully on his shirtsleeve. “My name’s Clark Goode.” He held out his hand but Annie ignored it. “I live here with Sam. Your dad ever mention he had a big sister named Samantha, Samantha Anne?”

“That’s my name backwards. Mine’s Anne Samantha.” She scooted a few inches from behind the wheel cover. “My dad showed me Sam’s picture. On their bikes. He said he brought me here before. When I was a baby?”

“I believe he did.”

Annie tightened her arms around her jeans, leaning over her knees just as the man was doing, his hands clasped on his long arms. She considered pretending she personally recalled that earlier visit to Pilgrim’s Rest but decided to admit, “I don’t remember coming here.”

“I don’t remember when I was a baby either. I bet you’ll like Sam.”

Annie stared at him glumly.

“She’s nice,” he said.

There was a loud crack of rumbling noise. Annie slid herself a little nearer the man. “Thunder on the hill,” he said calmly and finding a small stick, drew circles with it in the dirt. “So Jack hit the road? Gold prospector but it never pans out.” Seeing her confusion, he added, “That’s a pun. Pun’s when a word means two things at once. Like a pan you find gold in or ‘pan out’ like something works out or it doesn’t.”

“I know,” she said, although she hadn’t heard of puns before.

“Did your dad mention where he was going or when he’d be back?”

She shook her head, dropping it with a sigh to her knees.

They sat together awhile, neither speaking. The hail stopped clattering. The barn grew darker and Annie inched forward again, closer to the man. They were quiet a few minutes longer. Finally she said, “His license plate is MJ87143. I can remember any numbers I see.”

“Amazing.”

She felt compelled to admit, “I can only remember for a while if it’s a lot of numbers.”

“Still.”

“This airplane has a number.” She pointed at the Piper. “NC48563.”

“Exactly right.”

“My dad said this plane’s my birthday present. Probably not true.”

The tall man stood up slowly, kicked the wheel. “Sure it’s true. Been sitting in the barn a long time waiting for you to get here.”

Surprised and pleased by his easy agreement, Annie scooted back to show him her father’s dragon tail of letters curled beneath the plane’s wing, spelling
King of the Sky
.

He admired the writing with her.

“I bet it’s fast,” she said.

“Probably. I’m kind of a slow-lane guy myself.” He suggested they leave the barn to look for Aunt Sam while there was still some light to see by. “Sam calls her movie store Now Voyager
.
What’s your favorite movie? We could watch one tonight and get some takeout. You like Chinese food?”

Annie’s favorite movies were
Top Gun
and
Blazing Saddles
but she wasn’t about to tell the stranger that. “Do I have to stay here?”

“You’re welcome to. Doc Clark is what my kids call me—I’m a kids’ doctor. Or just Clark’s fine.” Leaning down, he offered Annie his hand again but she still wouldn’t take it. “Fair enough,” he said. “Come on in when you feel like you want to. I’m not going anywhere. Neither is Sam. And well, Annie, this is a damn dumb thing Jack’s done but we’ll sort it all out.”

She hugged her legs, the small lavender jeans dirty and wet. “My dad’s in trouble again.”

Clark nodded at her, slow, unruffled. “But let’s look on the bright side. He enjoys it.”

“Annie! Annie!”

Suddenly the tall tanned woman she’d first seen on the porch came running through the barn doors, her clothes wet through. Holding Annie’s pink baseball cap, she crawled under the plane’s wing and pulled the child into her arms. Annie struggled backward, startled by the stranger’s closeness. But the woman nudged her gently toward her again. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m your aunt Sam. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m so sorry.” Slowly she rocked them back and forth together, huddled beneath the plane.

There was something in the warm feel of the woman’s neck, in her arms, that was familiar. Her eyes were familiar too, like Annie’s father’s, green as emeralds, but sadder, with a small furrowing crease of worry between the eyebrows that, in Annie’s growing up, was never to go away.

On the first night of Annie’s arrival, in the large long hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest, Sam helped her unpack her blue suitcase; it was filled with her clothes, including her favorite dress and her white jacket with gold buttons. Tucked beneath the clothes was $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills, around which was wrapped, with a rubber band, a birth certificate from a hospital in Key West, stating that Anne Samantha Peregrine had been born there on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m., that she’d weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz., that Jack Peregrine was her father and Claudette Colbert was her mother. Looking at this certificate, Annie asked Sam to pronounce her mother’s name and Sam sounded upset when she did so. “Claudette Colbert.”

That first night, while Annie picked sadly at the Chinese takeout food, Sam told her about the time she’d been here before, when her father unexpectedly showed up with her in Emerald; how he brought the plane, the
King of the Sky
, on a rented flatbed truck, its wings dismantled, and parked it in the barn. Annie was only twelve months old then and they stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest only three weeks. But during their visit Annie took her first step, running into Sam’s arms.

Annie said nothing when she heard this story but she’d been intrigued. Then Sam had brought out a bright yellow birthday cake and put on a video of
The Wizard of Oz,
because[__] Annie, lying, had told her it was her favorite movie, figuring it would be a safer choice than
Top Gun.
When Judy Garland chanted, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” the child, to impress the two solicitous adults, made a joke—having first rehearsed the remark silently to herself—“Okay, I guess I’m in No Place now.”

Sam and Clark laughed, pleasing her despite her grief.

The next morning there was a card on the kitchen table that said, There’s No Place Like No Place. Welcome Home. Sam was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a dexterity that couldn’t but impress Annie. She even flipped one behind her back and caught it in the pan. “Tennis,” she explained. “You play?”

Annie shook her head.

“You want to?”

Annie shrugged.

“I’m going to practice today. You could help me out. I pay fifty cents an hour.”

Over breakfast Sam told her niece that Clark and she shared her family house but that they weren’t married, they were just friends. She added, “I don’t know why people say ‘just friends.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world to be.”

Annie stared at her aunt carefully. “Are you two gay?” She was trying to shock her.

Sam said, “I am but Clark’s kind of gloomy.” She held out the yellow birthday cake. “Double chocolate inside.”

“You shouldn’t eat cake for breakfast.”

Sam cut two pieces. “Of all the things we shouldn’t do in America, this is way down the list.”

The phone rang and hoping it was her father saying he was coming back for her, Annie held her breath until Sam returned from the hall. “Clark’s at the hospital. Says we should come there and have lunch with him. He’ll show you around his clinic.”

“Is my mother dead?” Annie asked abruptly. “If she is, can I see her grave?”

Sam said she didn’t know who Annie’s mother was; that, despite her frequent questions, Jack had never told her.

A few weeks later, Sam came home with a black and white female Shih Tzu puppy, tiny and imperious, whose sale had been advertised on the staff bulletin board of the pediatric clinic. She gave the dog to Annie, claiming it resembled Toto in
The Wizard of Oz
, which it did not. Annie named the Shih Tzu Teddy B, after a stuffed bear of similar size, the loss of which, in some motel on the road with her father, had left her for weeks inconsolable.

Like Annie, Teddy cried through most of her first night at Pilgrim’s Rest. After that, the little Shih Tzu pretty much took over the house.

Another present arrived in an express mail truck a week later. It advertised itself as “The World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle.” Clark, who had ordered it, set the puzzle out on a table by a bay window in a room called “the morning room,” although no one knew why it was so described. The jigsaw puzzle was a giant photograph of blue sky, nothing but blue, with—so its box claimed—20,000 tiny, nearly indistinguishable pieces. It was as large as the mahogany top of the fat spiral-legged table onto which Clark poured all its pieces.

Inviting Sam and a resistant Annie to help him assemble the sky, he told them, “We’ll get the corners first. Annie, see if you can find a corner.”

While she was still wary of these two strangers and did not yet return their smiles, she couldn’t resist proving how quickly she could locate in the huge pile of particles of blue cardboard a piece that had a 90-degree angle.