Nothing by Chance

  A few minutes after I had finally made it into sleep, Paul came over and woke me up. “What do you say to some watermelon? Wouldn’t that be great? Nice cold watermelon?”

  “Sounds keen. You go in and get it and I’ll help eat.”

  “No, c’mon. Let’s go get a watermelon.”

  “You’re out of your mind. It’s a mile to town!”

  “Stu! How about going in and us getting a watermelon?” Paul said. “Then we could bring it out here and eat it and not give Bach any.”

  “You go in and get it,” Stu said. “I’ll wait here for you.”

  “Aw. I just can’t wait around here doing nothing. I’m going to go up and do some flip-flops.”

  “Fine,” I said. Stu was already asleep.

  Paul took off a few minutes later and I watched some of his flying. Then I turned over and found a cooler place under the wing.

  I didn’t hear him taxi in and stop, but he woke us again. “Hey, we have to get some watermelon. Nobody’s coming out to fly.”

  “Tell you what, Paul,” I said. “You go in and get the watermelon, and I’ll let you use my knife to cut it. How’s that sound?”

  A few minutes later a truck pulled out from the hangar, headed for town, and Paul was aboard. He had a fixation about that watermelon. Well, I thought as I went back to sleep, if he wants a watermelon that much, he should get his watermelon.

  Half an hour later we heard Skeeter whinny hello and Paul was back, a watermelon under his arm. It was 100 degrees in the sun and he had lugged the thing all the way from town.

  “Hey you guys,” he called. “Watermelon!”

  It was hard to understand, I thought, munching on the cool goodness. If I was Paul, I would have let the lazy louts starve out there under the wing. At most, I might have thrown them a bit of rind. But share the first part of my watermelon with them? Never!

  “I guess I better bug on out,” Paul said. “We’re not going to have many passengers, at least till late. It’s a long way back to California, and I might as well get started on it today.” He began separating his belongings from the pile of equipment, and set them neatly into his airplane. Cameras, film cases, bedroll, clothes bag, maps. “I’ll leave you guys the watermelon,” he said.

  A car drove into the lane, and another.

  “We have discovered a delayed-action Method C,” I said as a third car parked across the grass.

  We started the Parks and Stu went over to talk to the people. First passengers were a man and his boy, and the man wore a set of goggles he had last worn in the tank corps in Africa. They said a few wind-blasted words and we were airborne, climbing toward the river up to the cool high air.

  “Hey, that’s really nice,” the man said, eleven minutes later, as Stu helped him out. “Really nice. You can really see a long way from up there, can’t you?”

  Stu closed the door after the next passengers and stopped by my cockpit. “You’ve got two first-timers and one’s a little scared.”

  “OK.” I wondered why he had said that. Most of our passengers were up for the first time, and most were a bit apprehensive, though they didn’t often show it. These must be more worried than usual about flying in the rachety old biplane. But as soon as we were halfway through the first circle of town, they had relaxed and were asking for steep banks. It is the unknown that worries our passengers, I thought. As soon as they see what flying is like, and that it is even a little bit pretty, then it becomes known and nice, and there’s no cause for fear. Fear is just a way of thinking, a feeling. Get rid of that feeling by knowing what is true in the world, and you aren’t afraid.

  Business was suddenly going strong. There were eight cars parked on the grass, and Stu was ready with two more passengers when I rolled to a stop.

  Paul walked to my cockpit. “Looks like a thunderstorm west. I’ll be doing good to make Dubuque by dark,” he said. “I’m pushing it, aren’t I?”

  “You’re never pushing it as long as you can control your airplane, remember,” I said. “If you don’t like the looks of things, just go down and land in a field and wait it out. You might as well stay one more night here, don’t you think, anyway?”

  “Nope. Better be on my way, get back home. You’ve got four passengers waiting for you, no need me waiting around to say goodbye. I’ll get right on out.”

  “OK, Paul. It’s been fun.”

  Stu closed the door on the new passengers and waved that they were ready to go.

  “Yeah. Been fun,” Paul said. “We should run it again next year, huh? Maybe a little longer.”

  “OK. Take it easy. Fly good, and set down if the weather gives you a hard time.”

  “Yeah. Put me on your postcard list.”

  I nodded and pulled my goggles down, pushed the throttle forward. What a brusque goodbye, after flying together for so long.

  We took off over the corn, and climbed up through the warm evening air, turning toward town, over the river. I saw the Luscombe airborne, turning my way. Paul fell into formation for a minute or so, to the delight of the passengers, each of whom aimed a camera and jotted the moment down on film.

  What did it mean, that this man who had flown with us, who was part of the risks and joys and work and trials, of the understanding and misunderstanding of barnstorming, was now leaving?

  Paul waved goodbye, kicked the Luscombe up into a sudden sharp breakaway and accelerated out into the west, where the sun was blocked by a giant thundercloud.

  It meant, strangely enough, not that he was leaving at all, but that he was there. That if the time ever came for another test of freedom, another plan to prove that we don’t have to live any way but the way we wish, it might not have to be a lonely time. How many others like him are left in the country? I couldn’t tell if there were ten or a thousand. But I did know there was one.

  “See you around, buddy,” I said. No one heard but the wind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE THUNDERSTORM HIT US at five in the morning, and we woke to raindrops clattering on the wing.

  “We are going to get wet,” Stu observed calmly.

  “Well, sir, yes. We can either stay under this wing or we can chicken out and run for the tractor shed.”

  We decided to chicken out, grabbed our sleeping bags and ran for the shed, pelted all the way by heavy drops. I settled down by a doorway in the shed, where I could watch both the storm and the windsock. The rain didn’t worry me, but it would have been nice to know whether or not there would be any hail. It would have to be large and sharp hail, and coming straight down, before it could hurt the airplane. I took some comfort in the thought that hail that bad would also hurt the corn and oats, and that corn and oats were rarely damaged by hail.

  The biplane didn’t seem at all concerned by the storm, and after a while I moved my sleeping bag over into the steel bucket of a Case 300 skip-loader. The heavy steel ridges of that bucket, covered by two layers of sleeping bag, made a comfortable bed. The only shortcoming was the rather noisy nearness of the pigs, with their ork-orking and clanging their metal feed-lids every few seconds. If I were a manufacturer of feed bins for hogs, I thought, I would glue big rubber strips on those lids to deaden the sound. Every 20 seconds … clang! I didn’t know how Skeeter could stand it.

  The rain stopped in an hour and Stu walked over to look at the animals eating. In a few minutes he walked back and began gathering his equipment from the shed. “Now I know where they get the expression ‘pushy pig,’ “he said.

  We had our breakfast at the other café, and looked over our Texaco road map for Eastern United States.

  “I’m getting tired of all this north stuff,” I said. “Let’s swing down into southern Illinois or Iowa or Missouri. Not Illinois. I’m tired of Illinois.”

  “Whatever you want,” said Stu. “We could try a jump here, see what happens. Yesterday was a good day. Haven’t had a chance to try out that flour, yet.”

  Later, Stu stood bulky on the wingwalk, holding to the strut
and looking down. His target was the center of the field, but the wind was blowing hard at altitude, and carried the drift indicator a half-mile east of the strip. I thought he might cancel the jump, but he stood on the wing and motioned corrections that would take him to his jump point. The first jump run was not where he wanted it, and to make it worse, a patch of clouds hid the runway. We swung around to try again.

  With Stu on the wing, the airflow over the tail of the biplane was broken all out of smoothness … the horizontal stabilizer bucked and jumped painfully, and the control stick shuddered in the force of the roiled wind. It was always a tense time, with him there, but this was even worse, swinging slowly around to try another pass in high winds aloft and with the stabilizer blurred under the strain of that shattered airflow.

  The cloud crept slowly from over the field and the pass looked better to Stu. He waved me two degrees right, two more degrees right, and then slit the bag of King’s Ransom Flour. It trailed overboard in a great tunnel of white, our own contrail there at 4,000 feet. Then he jumped, still trailing flour.

  I cut the throttle, banked hard to keep him in sight, and followed him down. It would never be routine; I was already wishing that he would hurry up and pull the ripcord.

  Stu was a missile, launched in reverse. He had been still and waiting on the wing, he had fired down, and now he was going through his own sonic barriers and high-Q pressures.

  At last he stopped his turns and deltas, pulled the ripcord, and the canopy snapped out into the sky. It was a piece of cake. He tracked into the wind, centered over his grassy target, and came down dead center, falling and leaping up again at once to spill the canopy.

  By the time I landed he was ready to hop aboard for the short ride in.

  “Nice jump, Stu!”

  “Best one yet. Went just like I wanted it to go.”

  There was a crowd waiting, and I settled down for a long run of flying. It didn’t work out that way. Only five people felt like flying, although one man handed Stu a ten-dollar bill and said, “Can you give me this much a ride?” We spent 20 minutes out over the countryside, and he still didn’t tire of looking down.

  A farmer was last to ride that morning, and we flew over his house and lands, green and bright after the rain. He didn’t look at his land as much as he reflected upon it; I could see the thought in his face. So this is my land, so that is where I’ve spent my life. Sure, there’s fifty other places like it all around, but this is my land and it’s every acre good.

  We broke for lunch when there were no passengers left to fly, and caught a ride to town with one young man who had flown and stayed to watch.

  “I sure envy you guys,” he said as we turned onto the highway. “Bet you see a lot of girls, flying around.”

  “Yep, we see a lot of girls, all right,” I said.

  “Boy. I’d like to join you. But I got a job that ties me down.”

  “Well, quit your job,” I said, testing him. “Come on and join us!”

  “I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t quit my job …” He had failed his test. Not even girls could lure him away from a job that tied him down.

  When we returned from lunch, I saw that the biplane was getting a little greasy. I selected a rag and began wiping the silver cowl.

  “Why don’t you get the windshields, Stu? There’s so much grease on ’em the poor people can hardly see out.”

  “Sure thing.”

  We talked as we worked, and decided to stay in Pecatonica the rest of the day, and leave early next morning.

  I backed off and looked at the airplane, and I was pleased. She was much prettier. Stu wiped the top of the cowl, which wasn’t necessary. But there was something about the rag that he was using…

  “Stu? That rag IS MY T-SHIRT! THAT’S MY T-SHIRT YOU’RE USING!”

  He opened his mouth in terror, and froze solid.

  “It was with all the other rags,” he choked. “And it looked so … raggy.” He unfolded it, helplessly. It was no longer cloth, but a mass of gooey rocker-grease. “God knows I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Aw, heck. Go ahead and use it for a rag. It was only my T-shirt.”

  He debated for a moment, looked at the shirt, and went back to wiping grease with it. “I thought something was funny,” he said. “It was an awful clean rag.”

  Method C picked up some passengers that afternoon, and the first was the man and his wife who lived at the airstrip. “We’ve been watching you, and you look pretty safe, so we decided to take the plunge.”

  They enjoyed the plunge. We circled over their house on the strip before landing, and as we did a car drew up and a man got out and knocked on the door.

  The woman smiled and pointed down at him, so her husband could see. Their caller waited patiently for the door to be answered, not thinking to look up in the sky for his friends, a thousand feet overhead.

  We landed and the woman ran laughing to keep him from driving away from an empty house.

  Then business died away, though there were still some people standing to look at the biplane. One lean gentleman walked up and looked in the cockpit after I shut the engine down. “You ever heard of Bert Snyder?” he said.

  “Can’t say as I have … who’s Bert Snyder?”

  “Used to be Bert Snyder Circus, in 1923. Used to come into this town for the county fair. He had a whole lot of airplanes, a whole lot of them. And I used to be the most envied kid in town. I’d go up in the front of one of them airplanes and throw handbills out, advertising, all over the place. He had quite a circus. This town would be so full of people come to see him and come to the fair you couldn’t turn around … old Bert Snyder.”

  “Sounds like quite a guy.”

  “Sure was … quite a guy. And you know, these kids you fly, they’ll remember this ride for the rest of their lives. Oh, they’ll fly jets all over the world, but they’ll tell their kids, ‘I remember when I went up, summer of ’66, it was, in an old open-cockpit…’ “

  Of course he was right; sure he was right. We weren’t here just for ourselves, after all. In how many albums and scrap-books had The Great American already found immortality? In how many thoughts and memories did our images sleep this moment? I suddenly felt the weight of history and eternity upon us all.

  At that moment another car arrived; our friend the tank driver. He had brought his wife out to fly, and as soon as she stepped from the car, she began laughing.

  “Is this … the airplane … you wanted me to fly?”

  I did not see what was so funny about it all, but she was laughing so hard that I was forced to smile. Maybe it would look funny, to some people.

  The woman could not control herself. She laughed until there were tears in her eyes; she leaned against the side of the fuselage, buried her face in her hands and laughed. It wasn’t long before everyone was laughing; she made us a very happy group.

  “I admire your courage,” she said, choking on her words. After a long while she settled down and even said that she was ready to fly.

  We flew around town, made our turns and came back in to land, and she was still smiling when she got out of the airplane. I could only hope that the reason for the smile had changed.

  The sun dropped into low gold on the horizon, and there was a faint mist through the valley that caught the color and sprayed it across the countryside. We had a crowd of twenty people around us, but all had either flown or had no wish to fly.

  They had no idea what they were missing; this would be a magnificent sunset from the air.

  “Come along, folks,” I said. “Sunsets for sale this evening! The Great American Flying Circus guarantees a minimum of two sunsets this evening, but only if you act now! Watch the sun go down here, then up in the sky to watch her go down once more! A sight you will never see again, as long as you live! Prettiest sunset all summer! It’s a burnt-copper afternoon—right out of Beethoven’s heart! Who’s ready to step up there into the air with me?”

  One lady, sitting in a car nearby
, thought I was speaking all to her. Her words came clear in the soft air, louder than she meant. “I don’t fly unless I have to.”

  I was angry, sad. The poor people had no idea; with their caution, they were passing up paradise! How do you convince them of good? I made one last appeal, then, meeting no response, started the engine and took off alone, just to fly and to see the land from the air.

  It was more beautiful than I had promised. The haze topped out at less than a thousand feet, and from 2,000 feet the earth was a silent lake of gold, with a few brilliant emerald hilltops rising to be islands in the crystal air. The land was all a golden dream, where only good and beautiful lived, and it was spread out below us like a tale from Marco Polo, with the sky going deep-velvet black overhead. It was another planet, that Earth, one never seen by man, and the biplane and I held the splendor of it all to ourselves.

  We started our first roll a mile in the air, and the biplane did not stop rolling and soaring and diving and singing strong in her wires until the ground was dark and the mist was gone and the gold had disappeared from the sky.

  We whispered down into the grass and swung to park, shutting the engine into hot-ticking silence. I sat alone for a full minute, not wanting to talk to people or to hear them or to see them. I knew I’d never forget that flight, and I wanted a quiet moment to lay it carefully away in my thought, for I would be coming back here many times again, in the years ahead.

  Someone said low, in the crowd, “He has the courage of ten men, to fly that old crate.”

  I felt like crying. They didn’t understand … I… could …not make … them … understand.

  Gradually the cars drove away and the ground went very dark indeed. The hills on the horizon were powder-black against the last light of the sun; they stood with their trees and windmills and rolling fields in razor silhouette, like the skyline in a planetarium, just as the stars are being flashed upon the dome. Sharp and black and clear.

  The old timer was the last one left, and as he slid into his car to leave, he said, “Young fella, how much would you say that airplane’s worth, about?”