“Mister, if Henry Ford were to walk up here and want this machine, I’d tell him, ‘Hank, you ain’t got enough money to buy that airplane.’”
“I believe you’d say that,” the man said, “I really believe you’d say that.”
We counted our money over breakfast. We had flown twenty-eight passengers, and we showed a handsome profit.
“You know, Stu, with the little fields like this, the little airstrips around the country, barnstorming can be a lot better business now than it was back then.”
“Makes you feel sort of powerful, doesn’t it?” he said.
We walked out of Pecatonica for the last time, past a dog sitting chained to his doghouse. He had barked at us before. “How many times is the dog going to bark, Stu?”
“The dog is going to bark two times.”
“I say the dog is going to bark four times. At least four times.”
We walked by him and he didn’t make a sound. He just sat there and watched our every move.
“Why, Stu, I believe the dog has come to know us!” I stopped in the road and looked the dog in the eye. “He is now our friend!”
At that, the dog burst into barking, and by the time we were over the bridge, we had counted twelve full, rapid barks.
Stu found a half-size comic book lying by the road and picked it up. It was an advertising thing for Wrangler jeans, and it was all about Tex Marshall, rodeo star. Stu read aloud as we walked, acting out the parts of young Tex, starting his career as a bulldogger on the rodeo circuit. The theme of the story was Stay In School, Kids, documented by Tex’s fierce will to get his college degree before turning full time to rodeo and earning a pile of money.
We wondered how that degree helped Tex hogtie Hereford calves in six seconds flat, but that was apparently something that all the guys take for granted. You get that degree, and you’ll make more money in any job.
Again I urged Stu to get out of school until he decided what he wanted to do in the world, that he was just postponing living until he found that out, that it was doom to ever become a dentist if he was an adventurer at heart. He remained unconvinced.
We said goodbye to Skeeter, telling him that he was a good horse and we would remember him, and loaded the airplane. The engine warmed for the next adventure, beating back the tall grass in fifth-second impulses. It looked like a 1910 movie of a biplane running in tall grass, jerky and flickering.
By ten o’clock we were on a long run crosswind, dragging our shadow like a giant salmon fighting and thrashing at the end of a thousand-foot line. We didn’t settle down to our next sight of Midwest America until the wheels touched and rolled on the grass of Kahoka, Missouri.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THERE WERE TWO BOYS and a dog, waiting.
“You in trouble, mister?”
“Nope, no trouble,” I said.
“D’ja see me wavin’ at you?”
“Didn’t you see us wavin’ back? You don’t think we’d fly over and not wave, do you? Geemanee, what do you think we are, anyway?”
We unloaded our supply mountain and carried it across the deep green grass into the shade of a crumbling hangar. By the time we had the signs up and were open for business, there were eleven boys and seven bicycles scattered across the airplane and the grass.
It was an uncomfortable time. We didn’t want to scare them all away, but neither did we want them walking through the fabric of the wings.
“Sure you can sit in the front seat, fellas, just stay on the black part of the wing, there, don’t walk on the yellow. Careful, there.” I turned to one boy looking soberly on. “How many people live in Kahoka, my friend?”
“Two thousand one hundred and sixty.” He knew the exact figure.
There was a sharp explosion near the tail of the airplane and a little spray of grass jerked into the air. “Hey, fellas, let’s keep the firecrackers away from the airplane, OK?”
There was some giggling and laughing from one knot of boys, and another explosion burst beneath the wingtip. More than anything at that moment, I felt like a junior-high teacher with a problem in discipline.
“NEXT GUY THROWS A FIRECRACKER BY THIS AIRPLANE I’M GONNA PICK UP AND THROW ACROSS THAT ROAD! YOU WANTA PLAY WITH THAT STUFF, YOU GET IT OUTA HERE!”
Violence worked at once. There were no more explosions in a hundred yards of the biplane.
Boys surged around us like pilot fish around sharks. When we walked clear of the airplane, everybody walked clear. When we leaned on the wing, everybody leaned on the wing. They were busy daring each other to fly… a giant challenge.
“I’d fly, if I had the money. I just don’t have the money.”
“If I loaned you three dollars, Jimmy, would you fly?”
“Nope,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t pay you back.”
Their fear of the airplane was staggering. Every boy spoke of crashing; what do you do when the wings fall off … what if you jump and the chute doesn’t open? There was going to be great disappointment in Kahoka if we didn’t dive into the ground with at least one fatality.
“I thought you were all brave guys,” Stu said. “And here nobody’s got the courage to go up one time.”
They gathered together, found that they could raise three dollars, and sent a spokesman. “If we paid you three dollars, mister, would you do some stunts for us?”
“You mean nobody goin’ for a ride?” I said. “You all just watchin’ from the ground?”
“Yeah. We’ll pay you three dollars.”
It was human society at work. If individual daring is ruled out, we can band together as spectators.
The boys all massed at the end of the strip, sitting down in the grass by the road. I taxied to the far end of the strip, so that we’d be taking off over their heads and toward town, all good advertising.
They were just little dots when the biplane’s wheels lifted off the grass, but instead of climbing, we stayed low, skimming the grasstops, picking up speed and pointing straight into the young crowd.
If the engine quits here, I thought, we pull up, turn right and land in the bean field. But the boys didn’t know this. All they could see was the biplane growing into a huge thing, roaring right straight at them, not turning, not climbing, coming bigger and louder than a five-ton firecracker.
They had just begun to scatter and dive for cover when we pulled steeply up and banked hard right, to keep the bean-field in gliding range.
We circled the town once for advertising, and then back over the strip we dropped down through loops and rolls and cloverleafs and a one-turn spin. The airshow lasted ten minutes, including the climb, and I waited to hear some general disappointment that three dollars could be shot up so fast.
“That was nice, mister!”
“Yeah! Gee, that part right at first, where you went zzzZZZZOOOOOOMM! right at us! That was scary!”
In a minute the first automobiles arrived, and we were glad to see them. Stu went into action, telling the joys of flying on a hot day like this, selling the idea of Kahoka from the cool, cool sky.
As Stu strapped him in, the first passenger said, “I want a thrill.” A man walked to the cockpit just as we began to taxi out, and said in a low voice, “This fella is sort of the town cut-up. Take ’im up and turn ’im upside down a few times/OK?”
In every town we worked, all summer long, the one dominating personality was the watertower. In fact, the watertower became as much the symbol Town to us as it had become for the people who lived in its shadow. But now, up in the sun and the wind and the leather and the wires of the biplane, our passengers were for the first time looking down on that tower and its great black town-name painted.
I watched my riders carefully, at Kahoka, and every one of them looked long and thoughtfully at the top of the water-tower, and then out to the road that led off over the horizon. It was part of the flight, when I saw this, to fly a separate little conquering circle over the shining four-pillared thing and its eight-foot letters KAHOKA. To
rise above that tower was an event unforgotten.
By sundown we had flown nineteen passengers.
“What do I keep telling us, Stu,” I said as we walked through the dark toward town. “We get right close in and we can’t lose!”
We finished our hamburgers at the Orbit Inn and walked into the town square in the dark. The stores were closed, and silence drifted like slow fog in the branches of the elm trees.
There was a bandstand in the park, slope-roofed and faced about by rows of quiet wooden benches, all peaceful and silent in the warm summer night. The Seyb Emporium was across the way, and the sundries store, the hotel, with its wooden fans turning in the high lobby air. If I gave a dollar for every change in this square since 1919, I would still have been rich from the day’s earnings.
We walked down the quiet sidewalks, back toward our field, listening to the faint strains of radio music rippling out from the yellow light of the houses.
The peace of Kahoka, however, did not extend to its mosquitoes. It was Erie all over again, and worse. At last I devised a Method D of Mosquito-Avoiding, which requires one to lie down fully clothed on a sleeping bag, throw a silken hammock over his head, and leave only a tiny hole for air. This worked fairly well, though it didn’t spare me the hypersonic hum of a thousand tiny wings.
We were awake at the first cock-crow, about the time that the mosquitoes retired for the day.
I got up and poured a couple quarts of oil into the engine and looked it over well; we might have a busy day, close in. I had just closed the cowl when a car stopped by the field, sifting a cloud of fine flour-dust up from the dirt road.
“Are you flying yet, this morning?”
“Yes ma’am. All ready to start engines for you.”
“I missed you yesterday and I was afraid you might leave …” She was a schoolteacher, there was no question about it. She had that kind of confidence and control over the world that comes only from forty years of channeling American history into ten thousand high-school pupils.
The 90-mile wind over the morning town destroyed the set of her silver-blue hair, but she gave no heed. She looked down on Kahoka and out toward the horizon farms exactly as children did, without any consciousness of herself at all.
Ten minutes later she gave Stu three one-dollar bills, thanked us both, and left in a slow trail of summer dust.
There is America, I thought. There is real frontier America, reflected in daughters a hundred years removed from her pioneers.
“What do you think of that?” Stu said. “I think we’re in for a good day when they start coming out this early to fly.”
“What’s the estimate?” I began the walk toward town and breakfast. “How many passengers today?”
“I’ll say … twenty-five. We’ll fly twenty-five people today,” Stu said, falling into step.
“Aren’t we optimistic, this morning. Oh, it’ll be a good day, for sure, but not that good. We’ll fly eighteen people.”
We were joined at the restaurant by one of our passengers of the day before, one Paul, by name, who owned a drag strip on the road out of town.
“Have a cup of coffee with you, for just a minute here,” he said.
I was reflecting at the moment that there is nothing so horrible in the world as a stale glazed doughnut for breakfast.
“Always wanted to fly,” Paul said. “Always wanted to, but never got around to it. At first, my folks were against me flyin’, then my wife was thumbs down. But last night I kind of got the go-ahead to go again.”
The doughnut was modifying my thinking. What would the world be like if we all had to have permission from wives and family before we did anything that we wanted to do; if we were all required to committee-think our desires? Would it be a different world, or are we living in one that is pretty much that way right now? I refused to believe that we were, and put the doughnut into the ash tray.
“You should get old Kenny up. Man, he would just go wild in that thing! I’m gonna bring him out. Bring ’im out tonight! I’m gonna see you guys get a good crowd … it’s a fine thing, your comin’ here. That little old airport just sits out there and nobody cares about it. Used to have a flying club with a couple airplanes, but they all lost interest and now there’s just one plane left. You might get it goin’ again.”
Paul left in a few minutes, and we walked out into the sun-heat of July Missouri. A farm tractor drove swiftly by the square, its huge rear wheels singing on the pavement.
By ten-thirty business was going strong. One young man flew four times, firing rolls of color film through his Polaroid camera. He was leaving to join the Army in two weeks, and he spent his money as though he had to get rid of it all before the two weeks was up. I was reminded of the gay and happy lives of the young Kamikaze pilots a few years back … this poor fellow was going to be heartbroken if he somehow managed to survive his first week in the Army.
Next to fly was a giant of a man, and he was clutching a plastic bag full of candy bars. “Hey, Dick,” he said, reading my name on the cockpit rim. “How much you charge me to fly out over my farm, so I can toss these down to my kids? About nine miles north on State 81.”
“Gee. That’s 18 miles round-trip … ’d cost you … fifteen dollars. Awful steep price, but you see, whenever we go out of the local area …”
“Nothin’ wrong with that price. That’s fine. Kids’ll go crazy, see their ol’ dad comin’ over in an airplane …”
In five minutes we had left Kahoka behind and were chugging over the softly rolling hills and gentle farmland south of the Des Moines River. He pointed the way, and at last down to a white farmhouse set a half-mile back from the road.
We dropped lower and circled the house, and the chugging roar of the Whirlwind brought his wife and children running out to see. He waved hard at them, and they all waved back, two-handedly. “GO RIGHT OVER ’EM!” he shouted, holding up the candy-bag so I’d get the idea.
The biplane settled 50 feet above the cornfield, and came streaking in over the little crowd on the ground. His arm moved, the candy-bag hurtled down. Children were on it like mongeese, lightning-fast, and sprang up to wave again to their dad. We circled twice and he signaled to return.
I had never flown with a more satisfied customer. He had the smile of Santa himself, aloft in a red and yellow sleigh in the middle of summertime. He had come and gone as he had promised, the good little children were all happy, and now the story could come to a close.
But there was plenty of work waiting for the sleigh when we returned.
An elderly skeptic finally agreed to fly, but reminded me, “None of them dadoes, now, ’member. Keep ’er nice and smooth.”
It was a nice and smooth flight, until we were gliding down final approach to land. My passenger picked that time to suddenly begin waving his arms and shouting wildly.
I nodded and smiled, intent on landing, and didn’t hear him until we had rolled to a stop once again by the road. “What was the matter?” I said. “Something go wrong up there? What were you tryin’ to say?”
“HOO-EE!” he said, with the astonished smile of one who has cheated death. “Way we was comin’ down, there, all turnin’ and angled up … hoo-ee! I saw we was gonna land right in the pond, so I hollered, STRAIGHTEN ’ER OUT, BOY, STRAIGHTEN ’ER OUT! And you pulled ’er out just in time.”
The day was full hot, and as long as the engine was running, there was a flock of boys standing in the cool hurricane behind the tail of the biplane. They were all young trout in the river of air, flopping around happily whenever I pushed the throttle forward to taxi out. Between passengers, I put my goggles up and relaxed, myself, in the breeze over the cockpit.
Once, when I landed, Stu was talking with a pair of news reporters. They were interested in the airplane and in us; they asked questions, took pictures. “Thanks a lot,” they said as they left. “You’ll be on the ten-twenty local news.”
We flew passengers on and off all afternoon, but this was our second day at
Kahoka, and it was time to think about moving on.
“I’m torn between staying here and making money,” Stu said, “and moving on and making more.”
“Then let’s stay on tonight and push off tomorrow, early.”
“Hate to leave a good spot. But we can always come back, can’t we?”
We lay in the heated afternoon shade of the wing, trying to escape into the cool of sleep. There was a small sound in the sky.
“Airplane,” Stu said. “Hey, look. Doesn’t that look familiar?”
I looked. Way up overhead there was a yellow Cub circling, looking down. It turned, dropped swiftly down, pulled up in a loop and around in a roll. It was the same Cub that had flown with the five-plane Great American, at Prairie du Chien.
“That’s Dick Willetts!” I said. “That’s … now how did he know … sure, that’s him!”
A few minutes later the Cub was down on the grass, rolling to a stop beside us. A good sight. Dick was a tall, calm and very skillful pilot, a reminder of how lonely it was to barnstorm with one single airplane.
“Hi! Thought I might find you down this way, somewhere.”
“How’d you know where we were? You call Bette or something? How’d you find us?”
“I don’t know. Just thought you might be around here,” Dick said, sitting relaxed in the Cub’s cockpit, puffing slowly on his pipe. “This was the last place I was going to try, really.”
“Hm. That’s fantastic.”
“Yeah. How’s it goin’, barnstormin’?”
Dick stayed and flew through the afternoon with us, and carried five passengers. I had a chance to stay on the ground and listen to the people after they had flown, and discovered that there is a great driving force toward believing that the pilot that one flies with is the best pilot in the world.
“Could you feel it when he landed?” one man said. “I couldn’t feel when he landed. I could hear it, but I couldn’t feel it, it was so smooth.”
“Y’know, I have a lot of faith in him …”
“What do you think of your pilot, Ida Lee?” a coveralled farmer asked his wife, after she had flown with Dick.