Nothing by Chance

  “This is fun,” Spence said. “Not just the money, but talking to the people. You’re really doing something for ’em.”

  Stu and I saw it all again for the first time, through the other pilot’s eyes as he talked. It was good to see Spencer Nelson there in night Kahoka, carried away with the fresh new joys of barnstorming.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “I GOT AN OIL LEAK!” Spence was concerned, and pointed to a tiny line of clean oil from the engine cowl.

  “You want to trade oil leaks, Mister Nelson?” I said. “Now I’ve got a few nice leaks that you might find interesting …”

  “Your engine’s supposed to leak,” he said. “But a Continental’s supposed to be tight as a drum.” He was worried, and loosened the Travelair’s bottom cowl in the first rays of cool morning sunlight.

  Oh, well, I thought, if we have early passengers, I’ll do the flying. I dragged out my tool kit and we began checking over his big engine.

  “Everything’s so new,” he said. “Probably just some fittings working in, and they’re loose now.”

  Which was part of the trouble. Some of the oil-hose connections were loose enough to turn a full time around before snugging tight again.

  “That ought to do her up,” he said after half an hour’s work. “Let’s give her a try.”

  “I’ll crank it for you.” I set the starter crank into the side of the cowl and thought that it was a pretty light little fitting for the heavy crank.

  “It’s a bit flimsy there, that crank thing,” Nelson said, from the cockpit. “When I get back I’m gonna beef that up.”

  I turned the crank three turns, and the shaft snapped off under my hand.

  “What’s the matter?” he called.

  “Spence, kiddo, I think you’re gonna have to beef this thing up before you get back.”

  “It didn’t break, did it?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, I’ll find a place in town and get it all welded up. Just as soon get it out of the way now, huh?”

  He took the shaft loose and set off for town. If this was to be his only maintenance problem in two days, he would be doing well indeed as a gypsy pilot.

  A man drove up and looked at the airplanes. “You fly those?”

  “Sure do,” I said, walking over to the window of the Chevrolet. “You lookin’ to ride today?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, thoughtfully. Sitting next to him in the car was a completely beautiful young woman, with long black hair and very wide dark eyes.

  “Town’s awful pretty in the morning … air’s nice and still and smooth,” I said. “Cooler up there, too.”

  The man was interested, teetering on the brink of adventure, but the girl looked at me as a frightened doe would, and didn’t make a sound.

  “Think I should go up?” the man asked her.

  There was no reply, not a single word. She shook her head the tiniest bit no.

  “Never had a passenger who didn’t think the ride was great—your money back if you don’t like it.” I surprised myself with that. I really didn’t care if the man flew or not; there would be plenty of passengers later on. The money-back guarantee was a good stunt, but I hadn’t even considered it until that second. It was a clash of my world against the world of that girl, and the man was our battleground.

  “I think I’ll go. Take long?”

  “Ten minutes.” I had won, that quickly.

  “Be right back,” he said to the girl. She looked at him with her deep dark eyes, afraid, but still she didn’t say a word.

  We flew ten minutes, and because I was curious, I kept looking back and down, as we flew, at the Chevrolet. The car door did not open, there was no face looking up through the window. Something strange about that woman, and the bright summer day went eerie and uncomfortable.

  The landing was normal, every bit normal, like every landing we made those days. We were down and rolling along the grass, moving perhaps 40 miles per hour. Suddenly a voice spoke within me: “Move it over to the right, swing out to the right.” There was no reason to do it, but I did, wondering that I would.

  In that instant, as the biplane moved right, an airplane flashed past on our left, landing in the opposite direction on the grass, moving perhaps 50 miles per hour.

  For a second I was stunned, a sheet of cold went through me. I hadn’t seen the other plane, he clearly hadn’t seen me. If we hadn’t moved to the right, the biplane’s barnstorming days would have come to a very quick, spectacular end. The other plane turned, lifted again into the air, and disappeared. I thanked that voice, that angel-thought, and since the incident was all over I would best be very casual about it, or better, not speak of it at all.

  The man handed Stu three dollar bills and got back into his car. The girl had not moved, she had not spoken.

  “Thanks a lot,” my passenger said, happy, and with his strange strange person, drove away. We didn’t see them again.

  Spence came back with a welded starter shaft of solid iron, strong enough to hang his whole airplane from.

  “This ought to do the job,” he said. “Let’s try her again.”

  The engine fired at once and he was off for a test flight. When he returned ten minutes later, there was still a faint spray of oil from the crankcase breather.

  “Well, gee,” he said. “I’d sure like to get rid of that oil.”

  “Spence, that’s the breather! That is oil mist, you’re talking about. I don’t know too many barnstormers who worry about oil mist on their airplanes. All we care about here is that the wings are on good and tight, you know?”

  “OK. But still, I don’t like it on my pretty new Travelair.”

  Spence got the next two passengers, a man and his boy. When they were strapped aboard, he lowered his goggles, pushed the throttle forward and started his takeoff across the grass. I turned to Stu. “Sure is nice to have somebody else to do the work, so we …” I stopped in mid-sentence, stricken. The Travelair engine had quit on takeoff.

  “Oh, no.” This, I thought, in a tenth of a second, is not our day.

  The big airplane glided down again to the grass, rolling soundlessly toward the far end of the strip; the engine had stopped soon enough to allow a quick safe landing.

  In a second it cut in again, purring smoothly, but Spence didn’t try another takeoff. He taxied straight back toward us.

  “Wonder what the passengers think of that,” Stu said, with a faint smile.

  I opened the cockpit door for them when the biplane arrived. “Kind of a short ride, wasn’t it?” I said, sounding cool. It would have terrified me, if I were in the front seat when everything stopped.

  “Oh, it was long enough, but we didn’t get very high,” the man said, helping his son down to the grass. It was a remarkable thing to say, and I was proud of him.

  “You want to ride in Ship Number One?”

  “No, thanks. We’ll give you a chance to fix this one … be back tonight and fly.”

  I accepted this as a brave excuse, and crossed them off the list of passengers who would ever trust a biplane. When they had left, we got to work.

  “Clearly, the thing isn’t getting any gas, to stop like that,” I said.

  “Dirt in the gas?” Spence said.

  “Sounds good. Let’s give it a try.”

  The engine had been stored in Arizona, and there was a teaspoonful of sand in the fuel strainer.

  “That’s part of the problem, anyway,” Spence said. “Let’s try it again.”

  We tried again, but the engine would sputter and cough at full throttle, then cut out completely.

  “How’s your fuel?”

  “Oh, I got half a tank.” He thought of something and ran the engine up again. It worked perfectly. “Centersection tank,” he said. “It works fine if it’s running on gas out of the high tank.”

  He experimented with it and found that there was nothing he could do to make the engine quit as long as it was taking fuel out of the big overhead
tank buried in the middle of the top wing.

  “That’s it,” he said at last. “Float level or something in the carburetor isn’t quite right. She wants that extra pressure when she’s going full throttle.”

  The problem was solved and we celebrated with a parachute jump. Stu was anxious to enter a “Travelair Jump” in his sky-diver’s logbook, and we were airborne in midafter-noon, flying formation on the way up to jump altitude.

  I broke away at 2,500 feet and circled to wait for Stu to come down.

  We could expect heavy business if the parachute jump went as planned; the drags trip crowd was out in force. But it didn’t go quite as planned. Stu missed his target. I followed him down, knowing that from my angle I couldn’t tell where he was going to land. But the lower he got, the clearer it was that he wouldn’t make the runway, and that he might end up in the telephone wires across the weedlot to the south.

  He missed the wires by a few feet and was down in the weeds, then up again, waving that he was OK. Spence and I flew a formation advertising flight, broke apart and landed. There was a crowd waiting to fly, and Stu was just panting onto the field, carrying his parachute.

  “Man! I thought I got those wires! I waited around too long before I did anything about the wind. Bad jump!” But that was it. We avoid disaster and we go on working.

  He dumped the chute on his sleeping bag and was selling rides at once. I nodded here-we-go to Spence and we got into the airplanes. Again we didn’t stop flying till sundown. To my great surprise, Spence’s engine-failure passengers, the man and his boy, came back to fly again. This time the Continental kept on running for them, and they saw Kahoka from the air, a town sailing serenely across the flat green sea of Missouri.

  I flew one clod who turned out to be drunk; after we were airborne he made as though to climb out of the front cockpit, and generally proved himself a fool. I gave him a few hard turns to smash him down in the seat, all the time wishing that it would be legal to let the blockhead throw himself out of the airplane.

  “You give me another passenger like that, Stu,” I said after landing, “and I will part your hair with a crescent wrench.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t know he was so bad.”

  The sun went down, but Spence kept hopping passengers. To each his own, I thought. The Parks and I quit as soon as we lost ground detail in the darkness.

  It was full dark when at last he shut down his engine. In fourteen years with Pacific Southwest Airlines he was conditioned to haul every person he could possibly fly.

  We collapsed on our sleeping bags and broke out the flashlight. “How’d we do, Stu?”

  Stu heaped up the money. “We’ve got quite a bit. Twenty, thirty, thirty-five, forty-five …” It did look like it had been a good day. “… one fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five … one hundred and fifty-six dollars. That is … fifty-two passengers today.”

  “We broke it!” I said. “We broke our hundred-dollar day!”

  “I tell you guys,” Spence said. “This is not a bad way to make a living! Man, I wish I didn’t have to get back so soon.”

  “We’ve got to get you some hayfield somewhere, Spence. Some little field for real barnstorming-type flying.”

  “There’s not much time,” he said. “Might have to wait till next year.”

  Stu’s time was running out, too, and he talked with Spence about hitching a ride home.

  I flew two leftover passengers the next morning, and we loaded our airplanes. Spence had one day left.

  We took off west, and idled down the road, looking for a field-bordered town. It was as bad as ever. The fields were beautiful between the little villages. The hay was mowed and raked and baled away, and the land stretched long and clear into the wind.

  But as soon as we approached a town, the telephone poles shot up like giant bamboo and the fields went short and rough and crosswind. We drifted down to look at a few borderline places, but nothing good came. We were not starving, and there was no need to work a difficult place.

  Finally, over Lancaster, Missouri, we saw a field. It would be none too good—ridge-top land with steep hillsides to go tumbling down if we didn’t roll straight out after landing—but it was long enough, and close to town.

  Just after I pointed it out to Spence and Stu, I saw that the darn thing was an airport. No hangars, no gas pump, but the wheel-marks were there to give it away.

  We were getting tired of wandering, so we landed. During the rollout I had doubts about carrying passengers out of there, even if it was an airport.

  I watched the Travelair land. Smooth as a river, it flowed down the strip; the sight of an old pro at work, no matter how much Nelson protested his amateur status at barnstorming.

  A low sign by a log in the grass said, “William E. Hall Memorial Airport.”

  “What do you think, Spence?” I said when he had shut down his engine.

  “Looks OK. Fun comin’ in. I went over town and revved the engine. I could see people down there, and they stopped, you know, and they were lookin’ up.”

  “Well, we’re close enough to town, but I don’t quite dig the airport. It’s a bit squirrelly for me, and if you lose the engine on takeoff you got no place to go without bending the airplane.”

  A car drove up and a man got out, carrying a movie camera. “Hi,” he said, “mind if I take some pictures?”

  “Go right ahead.” The rest of our meeting was recorded in living color, to the whir of a spring-wound camera.

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “We’re not far south of Ottumwa, and that’s home base for me. We need fuel anyway. Why don’t we hop up there and get gas and oil and you can check the weather going west. Make a decision then.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  We were airborne a few minutes later, heading north, and in half an hour we landed at Ottumwa, Iowa.

  The weather growing in the west was not encouraging, and Spence was worried. “They’ve got some pretty strong stuff coming down our way,” he said. “High winds and low ceilings. I think I better hold the barnstorming till next year, Dick. If I get caught out by the weather I won’t make my airline schedule. That wouldn’t be too good. I better get out today and try to beat this stuff.”

  “Stu, you make up your mind?” I asked. “Last chance for a free ride home, probably.”

  “I guess I’d better go back with Spence,” he said. “It’s been a pretty good time … I’d be stretching it a little if I stayed. School starting before too long.”

  They packed up the Travelair at once; parachutes and oil and clothes bags and shaving kits. I cranked the engine alive and handed one of the FLY $3 signs to Stu. “Souvenir, Mister MacPherson.”

  “You gonna autograph it for me?”

  “If you want.” I laid it out on the wing and wrote, SEE YOUR TOWN FROM THE AIR!, then signed it and handed it up to him as he made his place in the front cockpit.

  I shook hands with Spence. “Glad you could make it. You’re pretty nutty to come all the way across the country for two days’ barnstorming.”

  “It was fun! We’ll do it again next year, huh?”

  I stepped up on the wingwalk and nodded once to the young jumper, wondering how to say goodbye. “Good times, Stu,” I said at last. “Do what you want to do, remember.”

  “Bye.” Way down in his eyes, the glimmer of a signal that he was learning, and for me not to worry.

  The big biplane taxied out to the runway, pointed into the increasing wind and swept along up into the air. There were two quick waves from the cockpits and I waved back, thinking of myself through their eyes, a lone figure down on the ground, getting smaller and smaller and finally lost in distance. I stood there and watched the Travelair until the sound of it was gone, then until the sight of it disappeared in the west. And then there was nothing left in the sky. Stu, and Spence, too, had joined Paul. Gone, but not gone. Dead, but not dead at all.

  I was surrounded by modern airplanes on the parking ramp, but for some reason as I walk
ed back among them, I felt that it was they that were out of their time, and not I.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE AFTERNOON SKY WAS LOW GRAY, light rain whipped across the windscreen, and The Great American Flying Circus was down to one man, one biplane, alone in the air.

  I had one tank of gasoline, and eleven cents cash in my pocket. If I wanted to eat again, I had to find somebody down there with three dollars and a burning wish to fly in the rain.

  Prospects did not look good. Kirksville, Missouri, canceled itself in rows on rows of alfalfa bales in the hayfields and flocks of sullen cows in the pastures. And in Kirksville the rain poured solid down, intent on turning the city into a major inland sea; the windscreen changed into a sheet of water bolted to the airplane. It was not comfortable flying.

  As we turned from Kirksville, spraying rain, I remembered a town on the way north that was worth a try. But again it was the wrong moment to strike. One good field, a block from town, was covered in hay bales. Another was surrounded by a fence. A third lay at the bottom of a square maelstrom of high-tension lines.

  We circled and thought, the biplane and I, ignoring the grass airstrip and hangars a mile south. It would be a good town to work, but a mile away was too far. Nobody walks a mile in the rain to fly any airplane. At last, with the heavy Kirksville rains almost caught up with us again, we landed in the field with the fence, hoping there would be a gate. As the wheels touched, a fox leaped for cover in a neighboring stand of corn.

  There was no break in the fence, but the two boys appeared, playing the part assigned them by destiny, rain or sun.

  “Hey, where’s the gate?”

  “Isn’t any gate. We climbed over. There’s an airport just down the way, mister.”

  It was raining harder. “You boys know of any way a body could get in here, if I was to take ’em for an airplane ride?”

  “Sure don’t know. Climb the fence, I guess.”

  Another field crossed off the list. The airport, then. They might know there of some other place. Another two hours and it would be too dark to fly, with the rain and cloud hiding the sun. I chose the airport, because I didn’t know where else to go.