Stu and I slept in the airport office that night. There were no mosquitoes.
It plagued me all through the next day. We carried passengers well, until by seven o’clock we had flown eighteen rides, but the spirit of barnstorming was gone. We were just a couple of crazy guys selling airplane rides.
At seven, a man came to us as we sat under the wing.
“Hey, fellas, I wonder if you could do something a little special for me.”
“Speak special speak,” I said in archaic Air Force slang. Stu and I had been talking about Air Force life.
“I’m having a party over at my house … wonder if I could hire you to give us a little airshow. We’re just on the edge of town, right over there.”
“Doubt if you’d see much,” I said. “My minimum altitude is fifteen hundred feet above the ground, and I’d start at three thousand. Be just a little speck to you, is all.”
“That doesn’t make any difference. Could you give us a show for say … twenty-five dollars?”
“Sure thing, if you want it. But I’m not coming down less than fifteen hundred feet.”
“Fine.” He took two tens and a five-dollar bill from his wallet. “Could you be up at seven-thirty?”
“No problem. You keep your money, though. If you think it was worth it, you can stop by and give us the money tomorrow. If you don’t like it, don’t bother.”
At seven-thirty we were over the cornfields at the edge of town, and starting our first loop. By seven-forty the show was over, and we circled down over the park to watch the baseball game.
When we landed, Stu had two passengers ready to go.
“Give us a wild ride!” they said.
They got the Standard Wild Ride; steep turns, sideslips, with the wind smashing over them, dives and zooms. They were as gay and excited in the air as though the biplane was the biggest fastest roller-coaster in the world, and all of a sudden I was surprised at it. During the minutes we had been flying, I was thinking about moving out of Monmouth, and wondered where we might go next. I wasn’t seeing the ride as wild or the Parks as a roller-coaster. Fun, perhaps, in a mild sort of way, and interesting, but hardly exciting.
A revelation, that, and a warning of evil. The summer was beginning to go stale, I was taking even the strange and adventurous life of a gypsy pilot for granted, and as just another job.
I pulled the airplane up into a half-roll, which set them to clutching the leather cockpit-rim in fearful delight, and talked out loud to myself. “Hey listen, Richard! That’s the wind! Hear it through the wires, feel it on your face, beating these goggles! Wake up! This is here and now, and time for you to be alive! Snap out of it! See! Taste! Wake up!”
All at once I could hear again … the blast and concussion of the Whirlwind went from an unheard Niagara to the roar of a wild old engine again, a highspeed metronome firing dynamite with each beat of its blade.
That magnificent perfect sound … how long had it been since I had ceased to listen to it? Weeks. That sun, bright as incandescent steel in a blue-fire sky … how long since I had leaned back my head and held the taste of that sun in my mouth? I opened my eyes and looked right up into it and drank the heat of it. I took off one glove and grabbed a handful of wind, never breathed by anybody in ten billion years, and I grabbed it and snuffed it deep within me.
The people ahead of you, Richard, open your eyes! Who are they? Look at them! See! They changed at once from passengers into living people, a young man, a young woman, bright and happy and beautiful in the way that we are all beautiful when we are for a moment completely unconscious of ourselves, when we are looking out toward something that absorbs us completely.
We banked again, steeply, and they looked together down fifteen feet of brilliant lemon wings and nine hundred feet of hard transparent air and five feet of corn-plant sea and a tenth-inch of black loam, stuffed with minerals. Wings, air, corn, loam, minerals and birds and lakes and roads and fences and cows and trees and grass and flowers—every bit of it moved in a great sweeping stroke of colors, and the colors went in through the wide open eyes of these fellow-people of mine, and deep into their hearts, to surface in a smile or a laugh and the brave beautiful look of those who have not yet chosen to die.
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop tasting and feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and the sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask, if you must, to protect the kid from the world, but if you let that kid disappear, buddy, you are grown up and you are dead.
The tall old wheels rumbled and thumped on earth soft as a giant petrified pillow, and the flight, the first ride for my passengers and the thousandth for me, was over. They became conscious of themselves again and said thank you that was great and paid Stu six dollars and got into their automobile and drove away. I said thank you, it’s been nice flying with you, and I was absolutely dead certain that we would all remember our flight together for a very long time.
That night, Stu and I laid out the couch cushions into islands of soft on the office floor, cast mild and pleasant wrath upon the man who never returned to pay us for our $25 air-show, and settled down with strawberry soda pop in mosquitoless air. The only light in the room came from the sun, reflected off the moon bright enough to show the colors of the biplane outside.
“Stuart Sandy MacPherson,” I said. “Who the devil are you?”
The boy’s mask of solemn quiet was more and more clearly a pure fake, for quiet solemn people do not jump from the wings of airplanes a mile in the air, or travel half-way across the country to become a barnstormer. Even Stu realized that the question was in order, and didn’t dodge it.
“Sometimes I’m not too sure who I am,” he said. “I was on the varsity tennis team, in high school, if that helps you very much. I did some mountain climbing …”
I blinked. “You mean regular mountain climbing? With the ropes and pitons and crampons and rock walls and all that? Or do you mean just hills that you can walk up?”
“The whole works. It was fun. Until I got hit on the head with a rock. Knocked me out for a while. I was lucky I was roped to the guy ahead of me.”
“You were just dangling there in space, at the end of a rope?”
“Yeah.”
“Boy.”
“Yeah. Well, then I quit mountain climbing and took up flying. Got my private license. Flying Piper Cubs.”
“Stu! Why didn’t you say you had your license? You know, my gosh! You’re supposed to tell us things like that!”
I thought, in the darkness, that he shrugged.
“I did a lot of motorcycle-riding. It’s fun, to try to be good with a machine …”
“Fantastic, kid!” The nice thing about not talking very much is that when you do talk, you can startle people so much that they listen. “Now. Look,” I said. “I’ve heard of some pretty dumb things, some people who really sold themselves down the river, but you take the cake, about. You have all these great things going for you, like a real live person, and yet there you are in Salt Lake at Dentist School. Please tell me… why?”
He set his pop bottle down with a heavy clink on the floor. “I owe it to my folks,” he said. “They’ve paid my way …”
“You owe it to your folks to be happy. Don’t you? They’ve got no right to force you into something where you aren’t happy.”
“Maybe.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s the trouble … it’s too easy to stay in the system, the way things are. If I did drop out, I’d get sucked up in the draft, and then where would I be?”
“Ah—Stu?” I said. I wanted to talk about his school, but the last words frightened me. “What’s patriotism, do you imagine? What do you think it means?”
There was the longest silence then, that I had heard all summer. The boy was trying, he was turning it over and over in his mind. And he was coming up with nothing. I lay there and listened to him think, wondering if the same emptiness was in the minds of all the other coll
ege youth around the country. If it was, the United States of America was facing some more difficult times.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t know … what… patriotism … is.”
“No wonder you’re scared of the draft, then, fella,” I snapped. “This patriotism stuff is three words: Gratitude. For. Country. You go out, climb your mountains, you drive your motorcycles; I can fly wherever I want, write what I want to write, and I can jump all over the government whenever it’s being stupid. How many guys do you think have been shot all to bits so you and I can run our lives the way we want? Hundred thousand guys? Million guys?”
Stu sat on the pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, looking across the dark room.
“So we take a year or two or five out of this fantastic freedom,” I said, “and we say, ‘Hey, country, thanks!’ “
At that moment I wasn’t talking to Stu MacPherson, but to all my poor vacant young countrymen who couldn’t understand, whining about the draft in the midst of sacred rare beautiful liberty.
I wanted to box them all up and ship them to some slave nation, and make them stay there until they were ready to fight their way back home. But if I nailed the crates down on them, I’d be destroying the very freedom I wished them to see. I had to let them whine, and pray they’d see the picture before they broke the country into jelly-blobs of self-pity.
Stu was silent. I didn’t want him to talk. I prayed, very deeply, that in the silence, he was listening.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING the oven Illinois was a kiln. The grass scorched beneath our feet. There was a very light hot breeze, a low oriental woodwind through the flying wires as we sat in the shade under the wing.
“OK, Stu-babe, here is a map. I shall take my knife and hurl it into the map. Wherever the knife hits, we go.”
I tossed the knife down end over end, and to my surprise, the blade struck hard and firm through the map. A good omen. We checked the slit eagerly.
“Great,” I said. “We are supposed to go land in the Mississippi River. Thanks a lot, knife.”
We tried again and again, and the only result was a map full of holes. There was a reason not to fly to any place the knife suggested.
A car stopped, and a man and two boys walked toward us.
“When they get out of the car, they are already sold,” Stu said. “Do we want to fly anybody today, or just get going?”
“Might as well fly ’em.”
Stu went to work. “Hi, folks.”
“You with the airplane?”
“Yes, sir!”
“We want to fly.”
“Glad to have you aboard. Why don’t you just step right over here …” He broke off in mid-sentence. “Hey, look, Dick. A biplane.”
It came small and quiet, whispering in from the west, easing down toward us through the sky.
“Stu, that’s a Travelair! That’s Spencer Nelson! He made it!”
It was a bomb set off in our midst. I leaped into the cockpit and tossed the starting crank to Stu.
“You don’t mind waiting a minute, folks, do you?” I said to the man and his sons. “This other airplane is all the way from California. I’ll go up and welcome him in, and then we’ll fly.”
They didn’t have a chance to protest. The engine, screaming from the inertia starter, burst into life and we were taxiing at once, gathering speed, lifting off the ground, turning toward the newcomer. He was swinging into the landing pattern when we caught him, and closed into formation alongside.
The pilot waved.
“HEY, SPENCE!” I shouted, knowing he couldn’t hear a word over the wind.
His airplane was beautiful. It was just out of the shop, finished by this airline captain who couldn’t get enough of flying. The machine shined and sparkled and flashed in the sunlight. There wasn’t a single patch, not one oil-streak or spot of grease down its whole length, and I blinked at its perfection. The big air-balanced rudder touched over and we turned for a low pass along the grass runway.
Travelair Aircraft Co., went the smooth professional letters on the tail, Wichita, Kansas. The airplane was a sleek eager dolphin in the sky, a much larger machine than the Parks, and much more elegant. We felt like a seamy tarstained little tugboat nosing the United States into harbor. I wondered if Spence knew what he was getting into, if his glossy blue airplane was going to look as pretty going home as it looked this minute.
We whistled once more through the pattern and landed, that queen of a biplane leading the way, taxiing to the passengers, shutting down into a stately silence.
I had never met the pilot, and knew him only through letters and telephone calls as he had struggled to get his airplane ready for the summer. When he took off his helmet and climbed down from the high cockpit, I saw that Spencer Nelson was a short quick man with the hawkish look of an old-time pilot: firm angled face, intense blue eyes.
“Mister Nelson!” I said.
“Mister Bach, I presume?”
“Spence, you nutty guy. You made it! Where you in from this morning?”
“In from Kearny, Nebraska. Five hours’ flying. I called your house, Bette said you had called from here.” He stretched, glad to be out of the cockpit. “That old parachute gets kind of hard to sit on after a while, don’t it?”
“Well, from here on out, you are in the land of happy barnstorming, Spence. But you come out here to stand ’round and talk, or you wanta do some work? We got passengers waitin’.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
He piled a mass of equipment from the front cockpit onto the ground, and Stu led two of the passengers to the big airplane. I helped the other one into the Parks, which was looking rattier every moment she stood alongside the Travelair.
“I’ll follow you,” Spence called, as Stu cranked his engine into blue smoke and roar.
We took off and fell into the Monmouth Barnstorming Pattern, one long turn around the city, a circle over a little lake west with sunsparkles on the water, and gliding turns to landing … ten minutes exactly. The Travelair was much faster than the Parks, and zoomed by her in the first turn after takeoff. Spence took far too long, making double turns and side excursions all over the place.
He landed five minutes after the Parks.
“Hey, what are you tryin’ to do?” I said. “The people are not paying to ride along while you break the biplane endurance record, you know. They’re paying to get a taste of the wind in the wires, and to see how it all looks from the air. I’d hate to have you for competition.”
“Was that too long? I’ll watch that. Just breakin’ in here, you know.”
We walked to the restaurant and heard his story of trials and frustration with officials and paperwork while he had put the finishing touches on the Travelair and raced across the country to catch us.
“I’ve only got five days left on my vacation, with all that delay at first. I’ll have to be gettin’ on home here in a couple days.”
“Spence! You come all the heck way out here for two days’ barnstorming? That is bad news! You are some kind of a nut, I hope to tell ya!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Never been barnstorming before.”
“Well, we sure got to get out of here, give you something a little more typical, and make you some money to get home on, anyway.”
“How about Kahoka?” Stu said. “Remember they said they had drag races or some big thing coming up. Lots of people. Close to town.”
“That’s an airstrip, though. We want a good hayfield.”
We thought it over for a while, and at last Stu prevailed. With just two days left for our new pilot, we couldn’t afford to wander aimlessly.
By three o’clock we were airborne, heading south and east into Missouri. Stu rode the Travelair front seat, and I had a cockpit full of baggage and parachutes.
We had a problem at once. The Travelair was too fast; Spence had to keep his power way back to fly slow enough for me to stay with him
. Every once in a while he would forget, and think about something else, and then turn around to find a tiny speck of a Parks trailing a mile behind. But by the time we crossed the Mississippi, we were working together and our shadows flicked over the brown water in good formation. It was a fine feeling, not to be alone, to have another biplane out there going the same way through the old sky. We felt happy, my airplane and I, and we did a little swooping and turning just for fun.
A barnstormer, I found, gets to know the country well. It wasn’t necessary to look once at the map. Head toward the sun till you hit the Mississippi. Fly down the river till you can see the Des Moines River coming in from the west. Cut north of Keokuk and angle a little south for ten minutes and there’s Kahoka.
The drag strip was overflowing with people. We flew one circle to let the world know that we had arrived, and turned to land.
“Hey, this looks nice,” Spence said as soon as we had landed. “Nice grass, town’s right here, this looks real nice.”
The passengers came at once and it was luxury to let the Travelair carry the first ones, just to sit on the ground and let Spence bring in the money.
We were big time now, with a Ship Number One and a Ship Number Two to work for us. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy the luxury long, for greasy old Ship Number One had customers walking toward her, ready to fly. I climbed into my familiar seat and we were on our way through the afternoon. There were just a few hours left till sundown, but we worked straight through, and carried twenty-three riders before the day was over.
I heard bits and pieces of passenger-talk, between takeoffs.
“I been twenty-five years trying to get my wife off the ground, and today she finally goes up in that blue plane.”
“This is real flying. The modern stuff is transportation, but this is real flying.”
“Sure glad you guys showed up—it’ll do a lot for this town.”
It was like coming home, Kahoka. The Orbit Inn was still there and going strong, with its juke-box music; and the young people sitting on the fenders of their cars in the warm night air.