Nothing by Chance

  Even that was a struggle. Along one side of the strip was a fence, along the other side a sea of corn. It was harder to land on that airport than on any hayfield we had worked, and I thought that even if this place was swarming with passengers I wouldn’t fly one of them. It was all I could do to keep the biplane rolling straight between the solid obstacles, steering only by the high blur at each side of the cockpit and hoping that the path ahead was clear.

  Waiting in the rain at the end of the strip were five metal hangars, a dripping windsock, and a pickup truck with an interested family within, watching. The man stepped shirtless from the driver’s seat as I climbed from the cockpit, leaving the engine running.

  “Want some gas?”

  “No, thanks. Pretty good on gas. Looking for a place to fly.” I opened my road map and pointed to a town 20 miles southwest. “What do you know about Green City? Any place to land, there? Hayfield or pasture or somethin’ like that?”

  “Sure. They got a airport there. South of town, by the water reservoir. Whatcha doin’? Crop dustin’?”

  “Carryin’ passengers.”

  “Oh. Yeah, Green City might be nice. Probably a lot of people right here’d like to fly with you, though. You could stay right here, if you wanted.”

  “Bit too far from town,” I said. “You have to be close to town. Nobody comes out if you’re too far.”

  The rain slackened for a moment, and off to the southwest the sky didn’t look quite as dark as it had an hour before. To fly again was to use gasoline that couldn’t be replaced until we earned some money, yet if we stayed at the airport we would be jobless and hungry, both.

  “Well, I’d better get goin’. Might as well push on off while there’s light.”

  In a minute we were blurring between corn and fence, and then lifted above them and swung down into the south.

  The hills in this part of Missouri roll on like green sea-billows, cresting in a fine spray of trees, sheltering roads and tiny villages in their troughs. It is not the easiest kind of country for navigators. There are none of the precise north-south section lines that lattice the states to the north. I sighted the nose a bit to the south of the lighter gray spot in the sky that was the setting sun.

  Green City. What a name, what a poetic piece of imagery. I thought of tall wind-swayed elms, and streets of bright lawns, close-cut, and sidewalks in summer shade. I peered over the windscreen, looking for it. After a long moment, the town drifted in under the biplane’s nose. There the reservoir, there the tall elms, there the water tower, all silver with the black letters GREEN CITY.

  And there, good grief, the airport. A long strip along the crest of a ridge, narrower than the one I had just left. For a moment I wondered if the biplane would even fit in the width of it. At each edge, the ground dropped sharp and roughly away into tangled earth. The end was a row of barrels at the top of a cliff. Halfway down the strip was a metal building, almost overlapping the landing area. Green City was the most difficult airport to land upon that I had ever seen. I would not have picked that spot for a forced landing, even, if the engine stopped.

  But there was a windsock, and a hangar. On the approach was a set of telephone wires, and as I flew a low pass down the field I saw that the last half of the strip was rolling, and tilted first to the left, then to the right. The narrow twisting runway was edged every fifty feet with tall white wooden markers. The owner must have figured that if you ran off the path you were going to hurt your airplane anyway, and a few wooden posts smashing into your wings wouldn’t make that much difference. I saw that we’d have about eight feet clearance on each wingtip, and I swallowed.

  We made one last pass over the field, and as we did, two motorcycles sped out the dirt road and braked hard at the edge of the grass to watch. As our wheels touched, I lost sight of the strip ahead, held my breath, and watched the white markers blur past the wingtips. I held the airplane as straight as I had ever held it and pressed down hard on the brake pedals. After an agonizing fifteen seconds, we had rolled to walking speed, and with much power and brake, the biplane turned very carefully in her tracks and taxied back to the road and the motorcyclists.

  As I stepped out of the cockpit I wondered how much food and gasoline I could buy for eleven cents.

  “You fellas feel like flyin’? Green City from the air; a real pretty place. Give you an extra long ride, since you came out to meet me so nice. Three dollars each, is all.” I was aghast, listening to my own words. Carry passengers from this field? I am out of my mind!

  But I had landed here once, and I could do it again. What was this airplane built for, but to fly passengers?

  “Let’s go, Billy!” one of the boys said. “I’ve never been up in one of these open jobs, and that’s the kind Dad learned on. Can you carry us both?”

  “Sure can,” I said.

  “Well, wait. I don’t think we have the money.”

  They were leafing through their billfolds, picking sparse green bills. “Five-fifty is all we got between us. You fly us for that?”

  “Well, since you came on out so quick … OK.” I took the five dollar-bills and two pieces of silver and suddenly felt solvent again. Food! I would have steak tonight!

  I emptied the cargo from the front seat and strapped my two passengers aboard, unconsciously pulling their safety belt a bit tighter than usual.

  Settled down into my cockpit, I lined carefully on the bent strip of grass, and pushed the throttle forward. In spite of all the signs that I was going too far out on a shaky limb, I was glad to be aloft with my passengers. I had this moment gained title to that cash in my pocket, and after a few minutes buzzing around, I would have only to land and eat. I searched again for other places to come down, but there were none. Hills, money-crops, too short, too far from town. The motorcycles were still at the airport, anyway; we had to make one more landing on the high trapeze.

  In ten minutes we circled the strip again, and in the dimming light it did not look any easier to land upon. The passengers were curious to see over the nose as we landed, and they blocked what little view I had in the moment I cut the throttle.

  We hit the ground and bounced, and it felt as if we moved to the right. I thought of the embankment on the right side of the strip, and pushed left rudder. Too much. The biplane swerved left, and her left wheel went off the runway. By the time I hit right rudder, the left wing was flashing a foot above jumbled grassy hillocks and harsh earth there, streaking toward a wooden marker and that metal building. I slammed full right rudder and hit the throttle, rolling thirty miles per hour. The airplane jumped back onto the runway an instant before the building flashed by, and we swung hard to the right. I came back with full left rudder and full brakes. We stopped just at the edge of the embankment, and I went limp. So this is what barnstormers did when they were desperate for cash.

  “Hey, that was great! Did you see ’em come runnin’ out when we went over the house?”

  My passengers couldn’t have been nearly as happy as I was to be down again, and I gratefully took a ride to town on the back of a motorcycle.

  The town square was a small Kahoka. There were picnic tables in the park, a Liberty Bell on a stand, a home plate and pitcher’s mound, and a telephone booth with the glass broken out on the home-plate side. Square store fronts looked at the park from all four sides, and one of the squares was Lloyd’s Café. Lloyd was sweeping out, and the place was empty.

  “I could fix somethin’ for you,” he said, “but you probably wouldn’t care much for my cookin’. Wife’s out shoppin’.”

  The Town House Grill (Stop-N-Eat) was closed. Only Martha’s was left, across the corner from Lloyd’s. Martha’s was not only open, but had two customers inside. I took a table and ordered my hamburgers and chocolate shakes, feeling rich. How money can change! On a good day, six dollars was nothing, a tiny droplet in the great bucket of prosperity. Today, my $5.50 was wealth, because it was more than I needed. Even after supper and corn chips and candy bars, I had f
our dollars clear.

  Walking back to the biplane, I was an intruder in the town. Lights were coming on in the houses and voices drifted to the sidewalk. Now and then someone puttered in a dark flower garden, and looked up to watch me pass. The roofcrests of the houses carried strange ornaments, dragonlike, silhouettes of Viking ships, all cut from metal.

  The reservoir was only a short walk from the biplane, and I turned aside. The ground was soft and hidden in deep grass. Flowers were tiny pure palettes strewn carelessly about. Reeds shuddered along the shore, more like arrows down from the sky than plants up from the water. Across the way a frog clacked like a Spanish castanet, and an invisible cow said, “mmMMMm,” loud, out in the distance. The reservoir was a tiny Walden, with only the smallest ripples across its dark-mirror face.

  I crunched back through the grass to the biplane and unrolled the sleeping bag. The moon went in and out of the clouds while the evening melted into night. I ate a lemon-drop, and listened to the sound of the engine still roaring in my ears. Solitude, I decided, is barnstorming all by yourself.

  At nine a.m. on a day I didn’t know, we circled Milan, Missouri, trailing sound and color, and landed in a hayfield a half-mile away. Before I had the sign on the gatepost, the first townsfolk arrived. Two pickup trucks clattered down onto the furrows and the drivers stepped out looking.

  “Have a little motor trouble, did y’?” He was an old fellow, in coveralls.

  “Aw, no,” I said. “Flyin’ around, givin’ airplane rides.”

  “What d’y know. She’s an old one, all right, too.”

  “Feel like a ride today? Nice and cool up there.”

  “Oh, no. Not me,” he said. “I’m scared.”

  “Scared! This airplane been fly in’ since 1929! Don’t you think she might make one more flight without crashin’ all to flinders? I don’t believe you’re scared.”

  “She’d go down sure enough if I got in there.”

  I pulled my sleeping bag from the front cockpit and turned to the other watcher.

  “Ready to fly today? Three dollars, and Milan from the air. Pretty town it is.”

  “I’d go, if I could keep one foot on the ground.”

  “Can’t see much from that height.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be deluged with customers. My only hope had been that the biplane would be a strange enough thing in an airportless town to bring out the curious. Something had to happen soon. The fuel stick showed that we were down to 24 gallons of fuel. We’d need more gasoline before long, and we’d need passengers first, to pay for it. We had come from poor to rich to poor again.

  A bright red late-model Ford sedan drove through the gate, purring in its mufflers. Instead of a license plate on its front bumper, it said CHEVY EATER. From the little crossed flags in chrome-on the fender, I thought it might have some kind of huge engine under the hood.

  The driver was an open-faced young man, a sort of enlightened hot-rodder, and he walked over to look in the cockpit.

  “Feel like flyin’ today?” I said.

  “Me? Oh, no. I’m a coward.”

  “Hey, what is with all this coward stuff? Everybody in Milan scared of airplanes? I just better pack up and move out.”

  “No … there’ll be lots of folks out to fly with y’. They just don’t know you’re here yet. You want to ride in town, get somethin’ to eat?”

  “No thanks. Might ride over to that place over there, though. What is it, a Buick place? Think they’d have a Coke machine?”

  “Sure, they got one there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride over. I’m not doin’ anythin’ anyway.”

  The pickup trucks had left and no one else appeared on the road. It seemed as good a time as any for breakfast.

  The big engine was there in the Ford, and tires screeched all the way down the road.

  “You flyin’ that airplane came in a while ago?” the Buick dealer asked when I walked into his shop.

  “Sure am.”

  “Not havin’ any trouble, are you?”

  “Nope. Just flyin’ around givin’ rides.”

  “Rides? How much do you get for a ride?”

  “Three dollars. Trip over town. About ten minutes. You got a Coke machine?”

  “Right over ’gainst the corner. Hey, Elmer! Stan! Go take an airplane ride with this guy. I’ll pay your way.”

  I dropped a dime in the machine while the owner insisted that he was serious, and that his boys were to go out and fly.

  Elmer put down his socket wrench at once. “Let’s go.” Stan wouldn’t budge. “No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t quite feel like it today.”

  “You’re scared, Stan,” my Ford driver said. “You’re scared to go up with him.”

  “I don’t see you flyin’, Ray Scott.”

  “I told him. I’m scared. Maybe I’ll go up later.”

  “Well, I’m not scared of any old airplane,” Elmer said.

  I finished my Coke and we piled into the red Ford. “I was a special jumper in Korea,” Elmer said as we drove. “Used to go up in a Gooney Bird and jump out from three thousand feet, with a ten-foot chute. Ten foot eight inches. I’m not scared of no airplane ride.”

  “A ten-foot chute?” I said. Elmer would have been hitting the ground at about forty miles an hour.

  “Yeah. Ten foot eight inches. You know that I’m not afraid of no airplane ride.”

  The Ford stopped at the wing of the biplane and my passenger climbed aboard. In a minute we were airborne, engine and air thundering about us, the land piled in hills of crushed emerald below. We turned over town, trying to herd some passengers out to the hayfield. People on the ground stopped and looked up at us, and some boys on bicycles began wheeling out, and I had hope.

  Elmer was not enjoying the flight. He braced himself hard against the side of the cockpit, and he didn’t look down. Why, the man was frightened! There must be quite a story behind the guy, I thought. We glided down to land and he got out before the engine had windmilled to a stop. “See? Nothing about an airplane ride can scare me!”

  Wow, I thought, and wondered about that story.

  “Ready to go for a ride now, Ray?” he said.

  “Maybe this afternoon. I’m scared.”

  “Ray, darn it,” I said, “why is everybody in this town so scared of airplanes?”

  “I don’t know. Well, we had a couple pretty bad airplane crashes here this year, right around here. Guy got lost around Green City and went into a cloud and then crashed onto a hill. Then a little ways north a two-engine plane, brand new one, had the motors stop and hit a lot of trees and rocks. Killed everybody. People still worried, I guess. But you’ll get some out after work, today.”

  So that was it. With airplanes falling like silly moths out of the air, no wonder the people were frightened.

  When they left, in a screech of blue tire smoke, it was time for decision. I had $6.91 in my pocket, and 22 gallons of gasoline. If I waited there with no passengers, I’d be wasting time and getting hungrier. I couldn’t spend money for lunch, or there would be nothing for gas. Later on, there might be passengers. And there might not. I wished Paul was there, or Stu or Dick or Spence, to be Leader for the Day, but I was stuck with Leader, and at last I decided to spend my money on gas, now. Maybe there would be a good town on the way north.

  Centerville was 40 miles away, and there was an airport there. I loaded the front cockpit, started the engine with the crank, running back to the starter engage handle before the big whining wheel ground down, and took off north. It wasn’t until we had been in the air for ten minutes that I thought $6.91 wasn’t going to buy much aviation gasoline. Thirteen, fourteen gallons, maybe. I should have stayed to fly more passengers. But there was nothing to be done about it then, midway between Milan and Centerville. The best plan was just to pull the throttle back and use as little fuel as possible.

  Car gas, I thought. The old engines were built for low-octane fuel. I knew antique-airplane pilots who used nothing but R
egular auto gas in their engines. Someday I’ll try car gas, when I don’t have passengers to fly—see how it works.

  Centerville swept serenely under the wing, and five minutes later we rolled to the 80-octane pump.

  “What’ll it be?” the attendant said. “Want some gas?”

  “Take some 80-octane from you.”

  He pushed a lever that started the pump humming, and handed up the nozzle to where I stood in struts and wires over the gas tank. I rechecked my cash supply and said, “Tell me when I’ve got… six dollars and eighty-one cents’ worth.” I held back a dime for emergencies.

  “Kind of a funny way to buy gas,” he said.

  “Yep.” The nozzle poured fuel down into the black emptiness of the 50-gallon tank, and I was thankful for every second that it did. I had worked hard for that $6.81, and the fuel that it bought was precious stuff. Every drop of it. When the pump stopped, I held the nozzle there so that the last thin droplets fell down into the blackness. There was still a distressing amount of emptiness down the filler hole.

  “Comes to sixteen gallons.”

  I handed down the hose and with it the money. Well, sixteen gallons was more than I thought I was going to get … now if I could go back to Milan at the lowest possible throttle setting, I might have a little more gas in the tank than I did when I left.

  We chugged south with the engine turning 1575 revolutions per minute, nearly 200 rpm slower than low-cruise power. We crawled through the air, but the time that it took to get back to Milan was not so important as the amount of fuel we used. In 30 minutes we had covered 30 miles, and glided once again to land on the hay. No one waited.

  Since I couldn’t afford fuel for aerobatics, since Stu and his parachute were 1500 miles away, I was left with Method C. I unrolled the sleeping bag under the right wing, and resolved to employ C for one hour. If there were no passengers by then, I’d move on.

  I studied the hay stubble a few inches away. It was a huge jungle, with all kinds of beasts roaming it. Here was a great crack in the earth, wide enough to keep an ant from crossing. Here was a young tree of a hay-stem growing new, a half-inch tall. I pulled it up and ate it for lunch. It was tender and tasty, and I looked for others. But that was it, the other hay was all old and tough.