Nothing by Chance

  “Hey, that was nice! There’s quite a few folks here want to fly the two-winger. You can take ’em up this afternoon, can’t you?”

  “Don’t think so,” I said. “We like to end the day with the parachute jump … leave ’em with something nice to watch. We’ll sure be here tomorrow, though, and love to have ’em come back.”

  What a strange thing to find myself saying. If that was our policy, I had just made it up. I would have been glad to fly passengers till sunset, but I couldn’t do it with the throttle linkage as it was and it would not do to have them see that their airplane had to be repaired after every little flight around the airport.

  Stu came in from the target, and the biplane captured quite a number of his young admirers. I stood near the airplane and tried to keep them from stepping through the fabric of the lower wings whenever they climbed up to look in the cockpits.

  Most of the grown-ups stayed in their cars, watching, but a few came closer to look at the aircraft, to talk with Paul polishing the Luscombe, and with me, shepherding children.

  “I was at the little league game when you guys flew over,” a man said. “My boy was going crazy; he didn’t know whether to look down at the game or up at the planes, so finally he sat on the roof of the car, where he could see both.”

  “Your jumper … he’s a pretty young guy, isn’t he? Couldn’t make me jump out of an airplane for all the money in the world.”

  “This all you do for a living, fly around places? You got a wife or anything?”

  Of course we had wives, of course we had families just as involved in this adventure as we, but that wasn’t something we thought people would want to hear. Barnstormers can only be carefree, footloose, fun-loving bright colorful people from another time. Who ever heard of a married sky gypsy? Who could imagine a barnstormer settled in a house? Our image demanded that we shrug the question aside and become the picture of gay and happy comrades, without a thought for the morrow. If we were to be shackled at all that summer, it would be by the image of freedom, and we tried desperately to live up to it.

  So we answered with a question: “Wife? Can you imagine any woman let her husband go flyin’ around the country in planes like these?” And we had lived a little more closely to our image.

  Rio was changed by our arrival. Population 776, with a tenth of the town on the airport the evening after we arrived. And the biplane was grounded.

  The sun was down, the crowd slowly disappeared into the dark and at last we were left alone with Al.

  “You guys are the best thing that happened to this airport,” he said quietly, looking toward his airplane in its hangar. He didn’t have to speak loudly to be heard in the Wisconsin evening. “Lots of people think about us flying our Cessnas, they’re not sure we’re safe. Then they come out here and see you throw those airplanes around like crazymen and jump off the wings and all of a sudden they think we’re really safe.!”

  “We’re glad we can help you out,” Paul said dryly.

  The tree-frogs set in to chirping.

  “If you want, you guys can stay in the office here. Give you a key. Not the best, maybe, but it beats sleepin’ out in the rain, if it rains.”

  We agreed, and dragged our mountain of belongings in to carpet the office floor in a jagged layer of parachutes, boots, bedrolls, survival kits, ropes, and toolbags.

  “Still don’t see how we get all this stuff into the airplanes,” Paul said, as he set down the last of his camera boxes.

  “If you guys want a ride in town,” Al said, “I’m goin’ in; be glad to take you.”

  We accepted the offer at once, and when the airplanes were covered and tied, we leaped into the back of the Sinclair pickup truck. On the way, wind beating down over us, we divided up our income for the day. Two passengers at $3 each.

  “It’s kind of good,” Stu said, “that all the airplanes from Prairie didn’t stay. By the time you cut six dollars ten ways, there wouldn’t be much left.”

  “They could have flown those other passengers, though,” I said.

  “I’m not worried,” Paul offered. “I have a feeling that we’re going to do pretty well, just by ourselves. And we made enough money for dinner tonight… that’s all that matters.”

  The truck rolled to a stop at the Sinclair station, and Al pointed down the block to the A & W root-beer stand. “They’re the last ones open and I think they close at ten. See you tomorrow out at the airport, OK?”

  Al disappeared into his dark service station and we walked to the root-beer stand. I wished for once that I could turn off the barnstormer image, for we were watched as closely as slow-motion tennis balls by the drive-in customers of the Rio A&W.

  “You’re the fellows with the airplanes, aren’t you?” The waitress who set our wooden picnic table was awed, and I wanted to tell her to forget it, to settle down and pretend that we were just customers. I ordered a bunch of hot dogs and root beer, following the lead of Paul and Stu.

  “It’s going to work,” Paul said. “We could have carried twenty passengers tonight, if you weren’t so afraid of working on your airplane for a few minutes. We could have done well. And we just got here! Five hours ago we didn’t even know there was such a place as Rio, Wisconsin! We’re going to make a fortune.”

  “Maybe so, Paul.” As Leader for the day, I wasn’t so sure.

  Half an hour later we walked into the office and snapped on the light, blinding ourselves, destroying the night.

  There were two couches in the office, which Paul and I claimed at once for our beds, pulling rank as the senior members of The Great American. We gave Stu the pillows from the couches.

  “How many passengers are we going to carry tomorrow?” Stu asked, undisturbed by his low status. “Shall we have a little bet?”

  Paul figured we would carry 86. Stu guessed 101. I laughed them both to scorn and said that the proper number was 54. We were all wrong, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.

  We snapped out the lights and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WOKE UP HUMMING Rio Rita again; I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  “What’s the song?” Stu asked.

  “C’mon. You don’t know Rio Rita?” I said.

  “No. Never heard it.”

  “Ah … Paul? You ever stop to think that Stu, young Stu, probably doesn’t know any songs from the war? What were you … born about … nineteen forty-seven! Good grief! Can you imagine anybody born in NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN?”

  “We’re three caballeros …” Paul sang tentatively, looking at Stu.

  “… three gay caballeros …” I went on for him.

  “… three happy chappies, with snappy serappies …”

  Stu was mystified at the odd song, and we were mystified that he wouldn’t know it. One generation trying to communicate with another just half-way down, in that office-bunkhouse on a morning in Wisconsin, and getting nowhere, finding nothing but an uncomprehending smile from our parachute-jumper as he belted his white denim trousers.

  We tried a whole variety of songs on him, and all with the same effect. “… Shines the name … Rodger Young … fought and died for the men he marched among …”

  “Don’t you remember that song, Stu? My gosh where WERE you?” We didn’t give him a chance to answer.

  “… Oh, they’ve got no time for glory in the infantry … oh, they’ve got no time for praises loudly sung …”

  “What’s next?” Paul was hazy on the lyrics, and I looked at him scornfully.

  “… BUT TO THE EVERLASTING GLORY OF THE INFANTRY …”

  His face brightened. “SHINES THE NAME OF RODGER YOUNG! Shines the name … ta-ta-tata … Rodger Young …”

  “Stu, what’s the matter with you? Sing along, boy!”

  We sang Wing and a Prayer, and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, just to make him miserable for not being born sooner. It didn’t work. He looked happy.

  We began the hike to town for breakfast.

&nbs
p; “Can’t get over that,” Paul said at last.

  “What.”

  “Stu’s starting so young.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I responded. “It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.” Things come to you like that, barnstorming.

  The card in the café window said Welcome Travelers-Come In, and above it was a neon sign with the paint gone from its tubes, and so saying .

  It was a small place, and inside was a short counter and five booths. The waitress was named Mary Lou, and she was a girl from a distant and beautiful dream. The world went gray, she was so pretty, and I leaned on the table for support, before I sat down. The others were not affected.

  “How’s the French toast?” I remember saying.

  “It’s very good,” she said. What a magnificent woman.

  “Guarantee that? Hard to make a good French toast.” What a beautiful girl.

  “Guarantee. I make it myself. It’s good toast.”

  “Sold. And two glasses of milk.” She could only have been Miss America, briefly playing the part of waitress in a little Midwest village. I had been enchanted by the girl, and as Paul and Stu ordered breakfast, I fell to wondering why. Because she was so pretty, of course. That’s enough right there. But that can’t be—that’s bad! From her, and from our crowded opening at Prairie du Chien, I was beginning to suspect that there might be tens of thousands of magnificent beautiful women in the small towns across the country, and what was I going to do about it? Be entranced by them all? Give myself up to bewitchment by ten thousand different women?

  The bad thing about barnstorming, I thought, is that one sees only the swift surface, the sparkle in the dark eye, the brief glorious smile. Whether it’s all emptiness or an utterly alien mind behind those eyes and that smile, is something that takes time to discover, and without the time, one gives the benefit of the doubt to the being inside.

  Mary Lou was a symbol, then. Without knowing it, knowing only that one of the men at Table Four has ordered French toast and two milks, she has become a siren upon a murderous shore. And the barnstormer, to survive, must lash himself to his machine and force himself to be spectator only as he drifts by.

  I went all through breakfast in silence.

  There is Wisconsin so deeply in her words, I thought, it’s almost Scottish. “Toast” was toahst, “two” was a gentle too, and my compadres’ hashbrowns were poataytoahs. Wisconsin is Scottish-Swedish American with long long vowels, and Mary Lou, speaking that language as her native tongue, was as beautiful to listen to as she was to look upon.

  “I think it’s about time for me to wash some clothes,” Paul said over his coffee.

  I was shocked from my girl-thoughts.

  “Paul! The Barnstormer’s Code! It breaks the Code to get all washed clean. A barnstormer is a greasy oily guy … you ever heard of a clean barnstormer? Man! What you tryin’ to do?”

  “Look. I don’t know about you, but I’m going down to the Laundromat…”

  “THE LAUNDROMAT! What are you, man, a big-city photographer or somethin’? We can at least go down to the river and beat our clothes out on some flat rocks! Laundromat!”

  But I couldn’t move him from the heresy and he talked about it with Mary Lou as we left.

  “… and on the drier, it works better on Medium than Hot,” she said in her language and with a dazzling smile. “It doesn’t shrink your cloathes. As much.”

  “The Great American Flying Laundry,” Stu said to himself as he pushed our clothes into the machine.

  While they thrashed around, we sauntered lazily through the market. Stu paused reflectively by the frozen-food locker at the rear of the wooden-pillared room.

  “If we took a TV dinner,” he mused, “and wired it on the back of the exhaust manifold, and ran the engine up for fifteen minutes …”

  “There would be gravy all over the engine,” Paul said.

  We walked the blocks of Main Street under the wide leaves and deep shadow of daytime Rio. The Methodist church, white and lapstrake, pushed its antique needle-spire up out of sight in the foliage to anchor the building in the sky. It was a quiet day, and calm, and the only thing that moved was an occasional high branch to shift some dark shadow across the lawn. Here, a house with window-halves of stained glass. There, one with an oval-glass door all rose and strawberry. Now and then a window framed a fringed cut-glass lamp. Man, I thought, there is no such thing as time. This is no dusty jerking Movietone, but here and now, slow and soft and full fragrant color softly swirling down the streets of Rio, Wisconsin, United States of America.

  Another church, as we walked, and here children were tended on the lawn, singing. Singing in earnest, London Bridge is Falling Down. And holding hands and making the bridge and ducking under. All there on the lawn, not giving us a glance, as though we were people traveled back from another century and they could see right through us.

  Those children had been playing London Bridge forever on that lawn, and would go on playing it forever. We were no more visible to them than air. One of the women tending the game looked up nervously, as a deer looks up, not quite scenting danger, not quite ready to disappear into the forest. She didn’t see us stopped and watching except in a sixth-sense way; no word was said, and London Bridge fell and claimed two more children, who in turn became another Bridge. The song went on and on, and we finally walked away.

  At the airport, our airplanes waited just as we had left them. While Paul neatly folded his clothes in his very neat way, I stuffed mine into a bag and walked out to fix the throttle linkage on the biplane. It took less than five minutes of silent work in the slow quiet daytime hours that are a barnstormer’s weekday.

  Paul, who had been a sky-diver himself, once, helped Stu lay his main parachute canopy in the calm air of the hangar. By the time I wandered over to them, they were kneeling at the end of the long loom of nylon, deep in thought. Nobody moved. They just sat and thought, and paid me no mind.

  “I’ll bet you got problems,” I said.

  “Inversion,” Paul said absently.

  “Oh. What’s an inversion?”

  Paul just looked at the nylon lines and thought.

  “I let the canopy come down on top of me yesterday,” Stu said at last, “and when I got out from under I got the suspension lines mixed a little.”

  “Ah.” I could see it. The smooth bundle of cords that ran from Stu’s harness to the edge of the canopy was marred by one pair, twisted.

  “OK. Unhook your Capewell there,” Paul said suddenly, “and run it right through here.” He spread a set of cords apart hopefully.

  Stu clicked the harness quick-release and did as Paul asked, but the lines were still twisted. It fell quiet again in the hangar, and the quiet was weighted down at the corners with very heavy thinking.

  I couldn’t stand the atmosphere, and left. It was as good a time as any to grease the Whirlwind’s rocker boxes. Outside, there was no sound but sun and growing grass.

  Around noontime, engine greased and parachute untangled, we walked the familiar road to the Café, sat down in booth Four for lunch and were charmed again by the enchantress Mary Lou.

  “You get used to it all pretty quickly; you get known, don’t you?” Paul said, over his roast beef. “We’ve been here a day and we know Mary Lou and Al and most everybody knows who we are. I can see where we could feel pretty secure, and not want to go on.”

  He was right; security is a net of knowns. We knew our way around town, we knew the main industry was the glove factory which shut down for the day at 4:30 and released potential customers for us.

  We were safe here, and the fear of the unknown beyond Rio had begun to creep in upon us. It was a strange feeling, to begin to know this little town. I felt it, and rather moodily tasted my chocolate milkshake.

  It had been the same way at Prairie du Chien, a week ago, when we opened. We were secure there, too, with $300 guaranteed just to appear for the Historical Days week
end, plus all the money we could make carrying passengers.

  In fact, by Saturday afternoon, in great crowds of people emerging from winter, we had earned nearly $650. There was no denying it was a good start.

  Part of the guarantee, though, was the Daring Display of Low-Altitude Stunt Flying, and in an hour quieter than the others, I thought I might as well run my Handkerchief Pickup.

  Snagging the white square of silk from the ground with a steel hook on my lower left wingtip wasn’t all that difficult, but it looked very daring and so made a good air-circus stunt.

  The biplane had climbed like a shot into the wind, which had freshened to a brisk 20 miles per hour. The stunt felt right, in all the noise and engine-thunder, the wing was coming down at just the right instant; but each time I looked out to see an empty hook, and back over my shoulder I could see the handkerchief untouched on the grass.

  By the third try, I was annoyed at my bumbling, and concentrated wholly on the task, tracking the white silken spot directly down the line it should go, seeing nothing else but the green blur of ground a few feet below, moving 100 miles per hour. Then a full second ahead of time, I tilted the wing down, waited until the white had blurred into the hook and pulled up in what was planned to be a victorious climb.

  But I had missed it again. I sat tall in the seat and looked out at the wingtip, to make sure that the hook was still there. It was, and it was empty.

  Those people waiting on the ground must think this is a poor kind of flying circus, I thought grimly, that can’t even pick up a plain old handkerchief in three tries.

  The next time I turned hard down in a steep diving pass and leveled off just at the grasstops, a long way from that mocking handkerchief, and on a line directly into it. I will get it this time, I thought, if I have to take it ground and all. I glanced at the airspeed dial, which showed 110 miles per hour, and eased a tiny bit forward on the control stick. The grass flicked harsh beneath the big tires, and bits of wild wheat spattered against them. A tiny turn left, and just a little lower.

  At that instant, the wheels hit the ground, and they hit it hard enough to jerk my head down and blur my sight. The biplane bounced high into the air and I eased forward again on the stick and made ready to drop the wing for the pickup.