Nothing by Chance

  By the time we got back to the airport, there were two cars of spectators on the field.

  Stu laid out his chute for packing, and I wanted to learn something about it, so Paul took the time to fly two young passengers in the Luscombe. It was a good feeling, to see Paul flying and making money for us while we worked with the thin nylon.

  For once Stu talked and I listened.

  “Pull out the line guide, will you … yeah, the thing with the angle-iron on it. Now we take all the lines from these risers …”

  The packing of a parachute was a mystery to me. Stu took great care to show how it all was done, the laying of the suspension lines (“… we don’t call them shroud lines anymore. I guess that’s too scary …”), the flaking of the panels into one long neat skinny pyramid, the sheathing of the pyramid into the sleeve, the folding of corners that somehow is supposed to prevent friction burns during opening, and the smashing of the whole thing down into the pack.

  “Then we just slip the ripcord pins in like… so. And we’re ready to jump.” He patted the pack and tucked in some loose flaps of material with the packing paddle. Then he was the laconic Stu once again, asking tersely if we might be running another jump again this afternoon.

  “I don’t see why not,” Paul said, walking into earshot and casting an appraising eye at the finished pack. I wondered if he was tempted to jump again. It had been years since he had quit, a battered sky-diver after some 230 jumps, grounded with injuries that kept him in a hospital for months.

  “Might as well go up right now,” he said, “if you promise to come a little closer to the target.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Five minutes later they were off in the Luscombe, and I was watching from the ground, holding Paul’s movie camera and charged with the job of getting some good shots of the jump.

  In the zoom-lens viewfinder, Stu was a tumbling black dot, stabilizing in a cross, turning a huge diving spiral one way, pausing, turning the other way. He was in complete control of his body in flight; he could go any direction, I thought, but up. He fell for nearly twenty seconds, then his arms jerked in, and out, pulling the ripcord, and the chute snapped open. The sound of the nylon firing open was a single shot from a 50-caliber pistol. As loud and sharp as that.

  Like every jumper, Stu lived for the freefall part of the jump, that bare twenty seconds in a twenty-four-hour day. He was now “under canopy,” which term must be spoken in a very bored tone, for the real jump is over, although there is 2000 feet yet to fall, and some delicate handling still to do of a cloth flying machine that is 28 feet wide and 40 feet tall.

  He was tracking well, coming right down toward me as I stood by the windsock. I filmed the last hundred feet of the jump and his touchdown, moving back to keep his boots out of Paul’s expensive lens.

  A jumper, I saw in the viewfinder, is moving at a pretty good clip at that moment he crashes into the ground. I felt the world shudder as Stu hit, 20 feet away. The canopy drifted down to catch me, but I dodged north. I was proud of Stu, suddenly. He was part of our little team, he had courage and skill that I didn’t have, and he worked like a professional, a seasoned jumper, though there were only twenty-five jumps in his log.

  “Pretty nice, kid.”

  “At least I didn’t get off in the rye-patch.” He slipped out of the harness and began gathering the suspension lines into a long braided chain. A moment later Paul landed and walked over to us.

  “Man, I really burned off the altitude,” he said. “What did you think of that slip? I really had her stood up on the wing, didn’t I? Coming down like a ROCK! What did you think of that?”

  “I didn’t see your slip, Paul. I was taking pictures of Stu.”

  At precisely that moment a girl of six or seven walked into our group, offered a small blank book, and shyly asked Stu for his autograph.

  “Me?” Stu said, stunned to be on stage and in the center of the spotlight.

  She nodded. He wrote his name boldly on the paper and the girl ran off with her prize.

  “The STAR!” Hansen said. “Everybody wants to watch the STAR! Nobody watches my great slip, because the old glory-hound is ON STAGE!”

  “Sorry about that, Paul,” said Stu.

  I made a note to get a box of gold stars at the dime-store and stick them all over everything Stu owned.

  The Star laid out his chute at once, and soon was lost in the task of repacking for tomorrow. I walked toward the biplane, and Paul followed.

  “No more passengers, this time,” he said.

  “Quiet before the storm.” I patted the biplane. “Want to fly her?”

  It was a loaded question. The old Detroit-Parks biplane, as I had told Paul over and over, was the most difficult airplane I had ever learned to fly.

  “There’s a bit of a crosswind,” he said cautiously, giving me a way to withdraw my invitation.

  “No problem, if you stay awake on landing,” I said. “She’s a pussycat in the air, but you got to stay pretty sharp on the landing. She wants to swerve, once in a while, and you have to be right there with the throttle and the rudder to catch her. You’ll do a great job.”

  He didn’t say another word, but climbed quickly into the cockpit and pulled on helmet and goggles. I cranked the inertia starter, called “CLEAR!” and fell back while the engine roared into life. It was a strange light feeling to see my airplane start engine with someone else in the cockpit.

  I walked around and leaned on the fuselage, by his shoulder. “’Member to go around and try again if you don’t like any landing. You got an hour and a half fuel, so no problem there. If she wants to swerve on you, just give her throttle and rudder.”

  Paul nodded, and in a burst of power swung the plane about and taxied to the grass strip. I went back and picked up his movie camera, focused down on him with the zoom lens, and watched his takeoff through the viewfinder. I felt as though it was my first solo in the biplane, not Paul’s. But there he was, smoothly off the ground and climbing, and I was struck with what a pretty sight the biplane made in the air, and the sweet soft chugging that the Whirlwind made in the distance.

  They climbed, turned, swooped gently through the sky as I walked with the camera to the far end of the strip, ready to film the landing. I was still nervous, and felt lonely without my airplane. That was my whole world this summer, circling around up there, and now it was all under the control of someone else. I had just four friends that I would allow to fly that airplane, and Hansen was one of them. So what, I thought. So he breaks the thing up to nothing. His friendship is more important to me than the airplane. The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren’t destructible.

  Paul now had the chance he had been awaiting for two years. He was a good pilot and he was measuring himself against the hardest machine he had ever heard of.

  The sound of the biplane went silent, high overhead, and as I watched, she flew through a series of stalls while Paul taught himself how she handled at low speeds. I knew what he would be feeling. The aileron control went to nothing, the elevator was very poor, the control stick was loose and dead now in his hand. The rudder was the best control he had left, but when he would need it most, rolling over the ground after landing, it was useless. It took a good firm rudder pedal and power, rudder and a great blast of wind over it, to make the biplane respond, to keep her from tearing herself to pieces in a twisting smashing groundloop across the grass.

  The engine roared back as he tested just how much wind he would need over that rudder. Good boy, I thought, take your time with her.

  The last of my nervousness vanished when I realized that what mattered was that my friend met his own special challenge, and found courage and confidence within himself.

  He swung around some wide soaring turns and came down low over the gra
ss at high speed. I filmed the pass with his movie camera and wished I could remind him that when he was ready to land, that big huge silver nose would be higher in front of him, so that he wouldn’t be able to see ahead. It was like trying to land blindfolded, and he had to do it right, first time out.

  How would I feel, in his place? I couldn’t tell. Somewhere, a long time ago as I flew airplanes, something clicked in me and I had won a confidence with them. I knew within myself that I could fly any airplane ever built, from glider to jetliner. Whether it was true or not was something that only trying would prove, but the confidence was there, and I wouldn’t be afraid to try anything with wings. A good feeling, that confidence, and now Paul was working out there for that same little click within himself.

  The biplane swept into the landing pattern, close enough to land on the strip no matter where the engine might fail. It turned toward the grass, slowing, settling gently, evenly, across the trees, across the highway, wires whistling softly with the engine throttled back, across the fence at the end of the strip, eased its glide, settled all smooth, under control. As long as he’s under control, he’s safe, I thought, and I watched him through the viewfinder, finger down on trigger, driving battery-power to turn the film sprockets.

  The touchdown was smooth as summer ice melting, the wheels slid on the grass before they began to roll. The man made me jealous. He was doing a beautiful job with my airplane, handling it as though it was built of paper-thin eggshells.

  They rolled smoothly along, the tail came down into the critical time of landing, when the passengers were wont to wave and turn and smile, and the plane tracked straight through the grass. He had made it. My sigh of satisfaction would no doubt show on the movie screen.

  At that moment the bright machine, huge in the zoom lens, began to swerve.

  The left wing dipped slightly, the airplane curved to the right. The rudder flashed as Paul slammed the left pedal down. “Power, boy, hit the power!” I said. Nothing. The wing dipped farther down, and in a second it touched the ground in a little shower of flying grass. The biplane was out of control.

  I looked away from the viewfinder, knowing that the film would show only a rocking picture of some close blurred grass, but uncaring. Maybe he could still survive, maybe the biplane would come out of the ground-loop in one piece.

  There was a very dull whump—the left wheel collapsing. The biplane slid sideways for a moment, bending first, then breaking. It pitched forward, and at last it stopped. The propeller swung through one last quick time and buried the tip of one blade in the dirt.

  I pointed the camera, still clicking, back onto the scene. Oh, Paul. How long would it be now, to win your confidence? I tried to think of how I would feel, breaking Paul’s Luscombe, when he had trusted it to me. It was a horrible feeling, and I stopped imagining at once. I was glad I was me, and not Paul.

  I walked slowly over to the airplane. It was worse than the crash at Prairie had been. The long trailing edge of the top wing rippled in wild anguished waves. The fabric of the lower left wing was deeply wrinkled again, the tip down in the dirt. Three struts were torn into angles of agony, screaming that a giant twisting force had grabbed and bent. The left wheel was gone, under the airplane.

  Paul hopped out of the cockpit and threw the helmet and goggles down into the seat. I searched for some telling understatement but could come up with nothing that told how sorry for him I was, that he should have to hurt the biplane.

  “Win a few, lose a few,” was all I could say.

  “You don’t know,” Paul said, “you don’t know how sorry…”

  “Forget it. Not worth worrying about. Airplane’s a tool for learning, Paul, and sometimes a tool gets a little bent.” I was proud to be able to say that in a calm voice. “All you do is straighten it out again and go back flying.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nothing happens by chance, my friend.” I was trying to convince myself more than Paul. “No such thing as luck. A meaning behind every little thing, and a meaning behind this. Part for you, part for me. May not see it all real clear right now, but we will, before long.”

  “Wish I could say that, Dick. All I can say now is I’m sorry.”

  The biplane looked like a total wreck.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WE DRAGGED THE AIRPLANE, all limp-winged, into the lee of a corrugated tin hangar, and barnstorming came to a sudden halt. The Great American Flying Circus was out of business again.

  Not counting the bent struts and broken landing gear fitting, two other gear fittings had begun to tear away, a brake arm had been ripped off, the top of the cowl was bent, the right shock absorbers were broken, the left aileron fittings were twisted so that the control stick was jammed hard.

  But the hangar next to us was owned by one Stan Gerlach, and this was a very special kind of miracle. Stan Gerlach had been owning and flying airplanes since 1932, and he kept spare bits and pieces of every plane he’d owned since then.

  “Look, you guys,” he said that afternoon, “I got three hangars here, and in this one I think I got some old struts off a Travelair I used to have. You’re free to take anything you find in here can get you flying again.”

  He lifted a wide tin door. “Over here are the struts, and some wheels and junk …” He banged and screeched his way into a waist-high stack of metal, pulling out old welded airplane parts. “This might do for something … and this …”

  Struts were our biggest problem, since it would take weeks to send out for streamlined steel tubing and make up new pieces for the biplane. And the blue-painted steel that he piled on the floor looked almost like what we were looking for. On impulse I took one and measured it against the good interplane strut at the right wing of the Parks. It was a sixteenth of an inch longer.

  “Stan! This thing’s a perfect fit! Perfect! She’ll drop right in there!”

  “Will it? That’s fine. Why don’t you just take that, then, and looksee if there’s anything else here you can use.”

  My hope came flooding back. This was beyond any coincidence. The odds against our breaking the biplane in a random little town that just happened to be home to a man with the forty-year-old parts to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the breaking happened; the odds that we’d push the airplane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the parts we needed—the odds were so high that “coincidence” was a foolish answer. I waited eagerly to see how the rest of the problem would be solved.

  “You’re gonna need to pick this airplane up, somehow,” Stan said, “get the weight off the wheels while you weld those fittings. I got a big A-frame here, we can set up.” He clanked around some more in the back of his hangar and came out dragging a 15-foot length of steel pipe. “It’s all back in there; might as well bring it out now. It all fits together.”

  In ten minutes we had assembled the pipe into a high overhead beam, from which we could hang a winch to lift the whole front half of the airplane. All we lacked was the winch.

  “Think I got a block and tackle down at the barn … sure I do. You want to go down and pick it up?”

  I rode along with Stan to his barn, two miles out of Palmyra. “I live for my airplanes,” he said as he drove. “I don’t know … I really get a kick out of airplanes. Don’t know what I’ll do when I flunk my physical… go on flying anyway, I guess.”

  “Stan, you don’t know … you don’t know how much I thank you.”

  “Heck. Those struts might as well help you as set out in the hangar. I advertise a lot of this stuff, and sell a lot to guys who need it. Any struts there you can have, but they’d be fifty bucks to a jockey that would just turn around and resell ’em. I got some welding tanks, too, and a torch, and a lot of other stuff there in the hangar that you might be able to use.”

  We turned off the highway and parked by the side of an old flake-painted red barn. From one rafter hung a block and tackle.

  “Thought it might be here,” he said.

  We took i
t down, put it in the back of the truck and drove back to the airstrip. We stopped at the airplane, and in the last of the day’s sunlight fastened the block to the A-frame.

  “Hey, you guys,” Stan said, “I got to get goin’. There’s a trouble light here in the hangar and an extension cord somewhere, and a table and whatever else you can use. Just lock the place up when you leave, OK?”

  “OK, Stan. Thanks.”

  “Glad to help.”

  We went to work removing the bent struts. When they came away, the wings sagged more than ever and we propped the lower wingtips with sawhorses. By dark, we had the aileron fittings straightened again and the cowl hammered smooth.

  After a while we knocked off work and went to supper, locking Stan’s hangar behind us.

  “Well, Paul, I have to say you sure beat Magnaflux. ‘If there’s a weak place anywhere in your airplane, folks, Hansen’s Testing Service will find it and break it up for you.’ “

  “No,” Paul said. “I just touched down, you know, and I said, Oh, boy, I got it down!’ and ka-pow! You know the first thing I thought? Your wife. ‘What will Bette think?’ First thing.”

  “I’ll call her. Tell her you were thinking of her. ‘Bette, Paul was thinking about you today while he was tearing the airplane all up.’ “

  We ate in silence for a while, then Paul brightened. “We made some money today. Hey, treasurer. How much money did we make today?”

  Stu put down his fork and pulled out his wallet. “Six dollars.”

  “But there’s some Great American money comes off the top,” Paul said. “I paid out the quarter to the boys who found the drift marker.”

  “And I bought the crepe paper,” Stu said. “That was sixty cents.”

  “And I got the oil,” I said. “This is gonna be interesting.”

  Stu paid us our two dollars each, then I put in a claim for their share of the oil money, seventy-five cents each. But I owed Paul eight and a third cents for my share of the wind-drift recovery fee and I owed Stu twenty cents for the crepe paper. So Stu paid eight cents to Paul, deducted the twenty cents I owed him from his bill to me, and handed me fifty-five cents. Paul took my eight cents off his bill and owed me sixty-seven cents. But he didn’t have the change, so he gave me fifty cents and two dimes and I gave him two pennies. Tossed ’em into his coffee saucer, is what I did, clinking.