Nothing by Chance

  “Thank y’, sir.” We began to walk into town for our hamburgers, keeping to the right of the road, scuffing through the weeds.

  “What about his tractor?” Stu said. “Doesn’t his tractor have an exhaust?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t make any difference. He wants us out of here, we get out. No questions. It’s his land.”

  At sundown we went back to the plane and the sleeping bags. There were ten billion river-mosquitoes waiting for us. They cruised, humming gently, at low power, and all of them were quite eager to meet us.

  Stu, not quite so silent since Paul left, had suggestions. “We could put out a quart of blood for them, on the wing,” he said. “Or tether a couple hundred frogs around here. Or we could start the engine and fan them away …”

  “You’re very creative, my lad, but all that’s needed is that we come to an understanding with the mosquitoes. They have their place to live in the world, you see, and we have ours …”

  “We could go back into town and get some repellent stuff …”

  “… and as soon as we understand that they don’t have to conflict with our peace, why, they’ll just … go.”

  At ten o’clock we were walking to town. Every seven minutes, as we walked, a shiny new automobile, without muffler, came blazing out from town at something over 70 miles an hour, stopped, turned around and went blazing back in. “What the devil are these nuts doing?” I said, mystified.

  “Dragging Main.”

  “What?”

  “It’s called ‘Dragging Main,’ “Stu explained. “In little towns, the kids have nothing to do, so they just go back and forth, back and forth, in their cars, all night long.” He had no comment whether he thought it good or evil. He just told me it was.

  “This is entertainment? This is what they do for fun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  Another car went shrieking by. No. It was the same car that we had seen seven minutes ago.

  Good grief, I thought. Would we have had an Abraham Lincoln, a Thomas Edison, a Walt Disney, if everyone spent their non-school hours Dragging Main? I watched the split-second faces at the wheel, and saw that the young men passing by were not so much driving as being driven, by sheer and desperate boredom.

  “I eagerly await the contributions these guys are gonna make to the world.”

  It was a warm night. Stu knocked on a market door just as it was closing, explained about the mosquitoes, and paid fifty cents for a bottle of promises to keep them away. I bought a pint of orange sherbet, and we walked back to the airplane.

  “You want some of this stuff?” Stu asked.

  “Nope. All you need is an understanding …”

  “Darn. I was going to sell you a squirt of it for fifty cents.”

  Neither one of us reached a peace with the little creatures.

  At five-thirty in the morning we were airborne, ghosting southeast over calm rivermist, toward a black mark on a road-map that was supposed to be an airport. We had one hour’s fuel on board, and the flight would take 30 minutes.

  The air was still as the sun, pushing light up over the cool horizon, and we were the only moving thing in a thousand miles of sky. I could see how an old barnstormer might remember his days in gladness.

  We flew on through a difficult week, surprised at how few were the Illinois towns that could be good homes for gypsy pilots. Our Palmyran profits were gone.

  We landed in desperation once, at a grass airport near Sandwich. It was a soft green runway, many thousand feet long, and fairly close to town. We were tired from so much non-profit flying, and even though it wasn’t a hayfield, we thought this would be a good place to spend the evening.

  The airport office had just been remodeled, was panelled in deep-stained satin wood, and I began to wonder if we belonged here from the first moment that I saw the owner, by the window. He had watched this grease-spattered biplane land, he had worried about its oil dripping on his grass, and now its filthy occupants were going to step inside his new office!

  He tried to be polite, that much can be set down for him. But he welcomed The Great American Flying Circus about as warmly as he would have welcomed the Loch Ness Monster to his doorstep.

  I told him brightly what we were doing, how we had never carried a dissatisfied passenger, how we could bring many new customers to his field and increase his own passenger-flying business.

  “I’m a little on the conservative side,” he said when I was through. And then, cagily, “You do your own maintenance?”

  To do one’s maintenance, without a license, is illegal, and he waited like a vulture for our answer, thinking of the price on our heads. He was disappointed, almost, to hear that the biplane was properly signed and provided for. Then he brightened. “I’m having the opening of the new building next month. I could use you then …”

  Being used did not sound like much fun. Stu and I looked at each other and moved to leave. At that instant, as in a motion-picture script, a customer walked in the door.

  “I want to have an airplane ride,” he said.

  The owner began a long apologetic explanation about how his flying license was not up to date and it wouldn’t be worth it to call out a pilot from town to give just one ride and his airplanes were all down for maintenance anyway. We didn’t say a word. We just stood there, and so did the customer. He wanted a ride.

  “Of course these fellows could ride you. But I don’t know anything about them …”

  Ah, I thought, the fraternity of the air.

  The customer was almost as frightened of the biplane as the airport manager had been, although in a more straight-forward way. “I don’t want any dadoes, now, no flip-flops. Just take it kind of easy, around town and back down again.”

  “Gentle as a cloud, sir,” I said, with a flourish. “STU, LET’S GET THIS THING FIRED UP!”

  The flight was gentle as a cloud, and the man even said that he liked it. A few seconds after we landed, he was gone, leaving me puzzled over why he wanted to go up in the first place.

  We were airborne again in fifteen minutes, glad to leave Sandwich and its gleaming new office behind. Droning on north again, aimless, looking down, some of the old doubts about surviving came back to mind.

  We landed at last at Antioch, a resort town a few miles south of the Wisconsin border. The grass field lay on the edge of a lake and we found that the owner sold rides on weekends in his Waco biplane. He charged five dollars the ride, and he was not interested in any competition, any time, and he would be happiest if we would leave. But before we could go, a modern Piper Cherokee landed and taxied to our side. A businesslike fellow in white shirt and tie walked purposefully toward us and smiled in the way of a man whose job forces him to meet many people.

  “I’m Dan Smith,” he said over the engine noise, “Illinois Aeronautics Commission.”

  I nodded, and wondered why he had made such a big thing of his title. Then I saw that he was looking for an Illinois State Registration tag on the biplane. He hadn’t found one. The tag is a mandatory thing in that state. It costs a dollar or so, which apparently pays the field worker’s salary.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  From anyone else, a normal, harmless question. From this man, it was sinister. If I’m from Illinois, I’m fined on the spot.

  “Iowa,” I said.

  Oh.”

  Without another word, he walked to the hangar across the way and disappeared within it, checking for hidden airplanes, without registration tags.

  What a way to make a living, I thought.

  Airborne again, we were getting desperate. In all this lake country, we could find no place to land near a lake. Simple criteria, we had: near town, near lake. But there was no such thing. We circled for more than an hour over a score of lakes, and found nothing. Thirst had a sharp edge, there in the high hot cockpits, and we flew north again, looking for any place to land.

  We crossed Lake Geneva and looked down thirstily
at all that water. Water skiers, sailboats, swimmers … drinking as much of the lake as they wanted.

  The first airstrip we saw, we landed. It was the wrong place. Lake Lawn, a bright sign said. The grass was immaculately trimmed, and we discovered that this was the private airstrip of the Lake Lawn Country Club.

  Parking the greasy biplane out of sight, we snuck out of the cockpits and walked down the road toward the Club after the manner of working gardeners. The guards at the gate caught us, but had compassion and showed us the way to water.

  “I’m beginning to doubt your method of finding fields,” Stu said.

  Then we were up again, grimly heading south in the third giant circle of the week. There is no such thing as chance, I thought, gritting my teeth, there is no such thing as luck. We were being led where it is best for us to go. There is a good place waiting, this minute. Just ahead.

  A long open summer field slanted beneath us, far from any town, but a fine place for airplanes to land.

  I thought about landing there and giving rides to the cows grazing about. For a half-second I was serious, wondering if it could work. It always came back to this. We had to prove it all over again, every day … we had to find human, paying passengers.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE TOWN OF WALWORTH, Wisconsin, is a fine and friendly place. It showed that friendliness by spreading before us a smooth soft hayfield, all mowed and raked. The field was three blocks from the center of town, it was long and wide, and the approaches were good save for one set of low telephone wires. We landed, on our last reserves of money and morale.

  The owner of the field was kind, mildly amused at the old airplane and the strange people who came down from it. “Sure you can fly out of the field, and thanks for the offer of a ride. Take you up on it.” Hope stirred. Somebody had said we were welcome!

  The signs were out in a flash, and we flew two free rides for the owner and his family. By sundown, we had flown three paying rides, as well. That evening, the treasurer informed me that on this day we had paid $30 for gasoline, but that we had taken in $12 from passengers. Clearly, our fortunes were changing.

  Gazing back at me in the morning from the gas station mirror was a horrible image, a scraggly rough-bearded Mr. Hyde so terrible that I drew back in alarm. Was that me? Was that what the farmers had seen whenever we landed? I would have run this monster off with a pitchfork! But the bearded image disappeared at last to my electric shaver, and I felt almost human when I walked again into the sunshine.

  We had to make money at Walworth, or quit. We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.

  It worked at once.

  “Hi, there.”

  I lifted my head at the voice and looked out from beneath the wing. “Hi.”

  “You fly this airplane?”

  “Sure do.” I got to my feet. “You lookin’ to fly?” For a fleeting moment, the man looked familiar, and he looked at me with the air of one who was trying to remember. “It’s a nice flight,” I said. “Walworth’s a pretty little town, from the air. Three dollars American, is all.”

  The man read my name from the cockpit rim. “Hey! You’re not… Dick! Remember me?”

  I looked at him again, carefully. I had seen him before, I knew him from … “Your name is …” I said. What was his name? He rebuilt an airplane. He and … Carl Lind rebuilt an airplane a couple of years ago … “Your name is … Everett… Feltham. The Bird biplane! You and Carl Lind!”

  “Yessir! Dick! How the heck you been?”

  Everett Feltham was a flight engineer for some giant airline. He had been brought up on Piper Cubs and Aeronca Champs, was an airplane mechanic, pilot, restorer. If it flew through the air, Everett Feltham knew about it; how to fly it and how to keep it flying.

  “Ev! What are you doin’ here?”

  “I live here! This is my home town! Man, you never can tell what kind of riff-raff gonna fall down on you from the sky! How’s Bette? The children?”

  It was a good reunion. Ev lived only two miles north of the field we had landed in, and our friend Carl Lind kept a country house on Lake Geneva, ten miles east. Carl had flown airplanes in the late twenties, barnstorming around this very countryside. He quit flying when he married and raised his family, and he was now the president of Lind Plastic Products.

  “A gypsy pilot,” Ev said. “Might have known it was you, doing a crazy thing like this, landing in a hayfield. You know there’s an airport just down the road.”

  “Is there? Well, it’s too far out. You got to be close to town. We’re a bit in the hole after flyin’ around all week for nothin’. We got to get some passengers up in the air this afternoon or we’ll be starvin’ again.”

  “I’ll call Carl. If he’s home, he’s gonna want to come out and see you, probably want you over to the house. You need anything? Anything I can bring you?”

  “No, Rags, maybe—we’re runnin’ out of rags. If you got some around.”

  Ev waved and drove away, and I smiled. “Funny thing about flying, Stu. You can never tell when you’re gonna run into some old buddy somewhere. Isn’t that somethin’? Go land in a hayfield, and there’s ol’ Ev.” Nothing by chance, nothing by luck, the voice, almost forgotten, reminded.

  After suppertime, the passengers started coming. One woman said the last time she had flown was when she was six years old, with a barnstormer in a two-winger airplane, just like this one. “My boss told me you were here and I better not miss it.”

  A young fellow with a fantastic mop of a haircut stopped and looked at the airplane for a long time before he decided to fly. As Stu fastened him into the front seat he said, “Will I see tomorrow?”

  This was pretty strange sentence structure, coming from a fellow who proclaimed himself illiterate. (For shame, I thought, judging the man by his haircut!) In flight, he braced hard against the turns, fearful, and after we landed he said, “Wow!” He stayed for a long time after his ride, looking at the airplane almost in awe. I put him down as a real person, in spite of the haircut. Something about being above the ground had reached through to him.

  A pair of pretty young ladies in kerchiefs put our account-book in the black for the day, and they laughed happy in the sky, turning over their home town.

  I checked the fuel, and with ten gallons left I was at the end of my margin, and it was time to fill the tank even though passengers had to wait.

  I took off at once for the airport that Ev had mentioned, and in five minutes was rolling to a stop by the gas pump. I was just topping the tank when a burly, bright-eyed business-man in a snap-brim straw hat brisked out to the airplane.

  “Hey, Dick!”

  “CARL LIND!” He was just as I remembered him, one of the happiest people in the world. He had survived a heart attack, and now enjoyed the very air he breathed.

  He looked the airplane over with an appraising eye. “Is it good, Carl?” I said. “Is it the way you remember?”

  “We didn’t have all that flashy gold paint, in my day, I can tell you. But the skid’s pretty nice, and the patches in the wings. That’s how I remember it.”

  “Hop in, Carl, get in the front here, if you trust me. You got no controls in front. I’m goin’ back over to the field.”

  “Are you going to let me go along? Are you sure I can go?”

  “Get in or you make us late. We got passengers waiting!”

  “Never let ’em wait,” he said, and stepped up into the front seat. We were airborne in less than a minute and it was good to see the man again in the sky he loved. He took off his hat, his gray hair blew in the wind, and he smiled hugely,
remembering.

  The biplane gave him a gentle landing in the hay, and I left the engine running while Carl stepped down.

  “You go ahead and fly your passengers,” he said. “Then we’ll cover the airplane up and you come on over to the house.”

  We flew riders steadily till the sun was below the horizon, and all the time Carl Lind watched the biplane fly, waiting with his wife, and with Ev. It was the best weekday yet; twenty passengers by sundown.

  “I don’t know if this is in the Barnstormer’s Code,” I said to Carl as we drove around the edge of Lake Geneva and wound among the estates there. “We’re supposed to get all dirty and always stay under the wing when we’re not flying.”

  “Oh, no. They used to do this. Someone who liked airplanes would take you home for dinner.”

  But not, I thought as we turned into his drive, in quite this manner. It was a scene clipped from a Fine House magazine, all in full color and with deep carpets and full-length glass facing the water.

  “This is our little place …” Carl began, apologetically.

  Stu and I laughed at the same time. “Just a little shack you keep out in the woods, Carl?”

  “Well… you like to have a place you can come and relax, you know?”

  We got a brief tour of the elegant house, and it was a strange feeling. We felt close to something civilized. Carl enjoyed his house immensely, and it was a glad place, because of this.

  “You fellows can change in here. We’ll go down for a swim. You will. I’ll catch two fish in the first five casts. Betcha, I will.”

  It was nearly full dark when we walked barefoot down the velvet sloping lawn to his dock. At one side of the white-painted wood was a boathouse, and an inboard speedboat hung there on winches.

  “The battery’s probably dead. But if we get it started, we’ll go for a ride.”

  He lowered the boat into the water on its electric winch and pressed the starter. There was only a hollow clank and silence.

  “I’ve got to remember to keep that battery up,” he said, and hoisted the boat back into the air.

  Carl had brought a little fishing pole with him and he began working for his Two Fish in the First Five Casts just at the moment that Stu and I hit the water in running dives off the dock. The lake was clear dark black, like pure oil that had been aged twenty years in ice. We swam furiously out to the light-float a hundred feet offshore and from there we watched the last sun fade from the sky. As it disappeared, so did every single sound in the Midwest, and a whisper from pur float carried easily to shore.