Nothing by Chance

  We sat at the table with our little piles of coins, and I said, “We all square? Speak now or forever hold …”

  “You owe me fifty cents,” Stu said.

  “Fifty cents! Where do I owe you fifty cents?” I said. “I owe you nothin’!”

  “You forgot to turn on the switch. After I cranked myself to death on the crank, you forgot to turn on the switch. Fifty cents.”

  Was that just this morning? It was, and I paid.

  Joe Wright had stopped by to insist that we sleep in the office. There would be no oil-can count.

  There were two couches, but we piled all our equipment inside the building, and our sleeping place again looked more like an airplane factory than an office bedroom.

  “You know what?” Paul said, lying in the dark, smoking a cigarette.

  “What?”

  “You know, I wasn’t ever scared that I was going to get hurt? The only thing I was scared of was that I might hurt the airplane. I sort of knew the airplane wouldn’t let me get hurt. Isn’t that funny?”

  The future of the Great American depended upon a pilot, jumper, mechanic, and friend, all of them named Johnny Colin, who had flown with us at Prairie du Chien and worked the miracle of repairing the biplane after its crash there.

  That next afternoon at three, Paul fired up the Luscombe and took off west, toward Apple River, where Johnny had his own airstrip. If everything worked to plan, he would be back before dark.

  Stu and I tinkered around the airplane, finishing everything we could before the welding had to be done, and at last there was nothing more to do. Everything turned on whether Paul would return with Johnny in the Luscombe.

  Stan came out after a time and wheeled out his Piper Pacer for an afternoon flight. A tricycle-gear Cherokee landed, turned around, took off again. It was a quiet afternoon at a little airport.

  A car stopped by the wingtip and some Palmyrans stepped out that we recognized from the day before.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Going OK. A little welding and she’ll be all ready to put back together again.”

  “Looks kind of bent, to me, still.” The woman who spoke smiled wryly, to say that she meant no hurtful thing, but her friends didn’t notice.

  “Don’t be so hard on ’em, Duke. They’ve been working out here all day long on this poor old airplane.”

  “And they’ll be flying it again, too,” said Duke.

  She was a strange woman, and my first impression was that she was a thousand miles away and that this part of her that was living in Palmyra, Wisconsin, was just about ready to speak some mystic word and disappear.

  When Duke talked, everyone listened. There was an aura of faintest sadness about her, as though she was of some lost race, captured as a child and taught in our ways, but always remembering her home on another planet.

  “This all you fellows do for a living, fly around and give airplane rides?” she said. She looked at me with a level gaze, wanting to know the truth.

  “That’s pretty well it.”

  “What do you think of the towns you see?”

  “Every one’s different. Towns have personalities, like people.”

  “What’s our personality?” she said.

  “You’re kind of cautious, steady, sure. Kind of careful with strangers.”

  “Wrong there. This town’s a Peyton Place,” she said.

  Stan came flying down in a low pass over the field and we all watched him whisk by, engine purring.

  By now Paul was an hour overdue and the sun was just a little way above the horizon. If he was going to make it, he’d have to be nearly here.

  “Where’s your friend?” Duke said.

  “He’s out getting a guy who’s a pretty good welder.”

  She moved to sit on the front fender of the car, a slim alien woman, not unpretty, looking at the sky. I went back to retouching an old patch on the wingtip.

  “Here he comes,” someone said, and pointed.

  They were wrong. The airplane flew right on over, heading toward Lake Michigan, out to the east.

  Another airplane appeared after a while and it was the Luscombe. It glided down, touched its wheels to the grass and rolled swiftly by us. Paul was alone; there was no one else in the Luscombe. I turned around and looked at the welding torch. So much for the barnstorming.

  “We have lots of airplanes, today,” Duke said.

  It was an Aeronca Champion, following Paul, and in the cockpit was Johnny Colin. He had brought his own airplane. Johnny taxied right in close to us and shut his engine down. He stepped out of the airplane, unfolding, dwarfing it in his size. He wore his green beret, and he smiled.

  “Johnny! Kinda nice to see you.”

  He picked a box of tools from the back of the Aeronca. “Hi. Paul says he’s been workin’ on your airplane, keepin’ it all bent up for you.” He set the tools down and looked at the struts that waited for the torch. “I got to get out pretty early tomorrow, go down to Muscatine, pick up a new airplane. Hi, Stu.”

  “Hi, Johnny.”

  “So what’s wrong here? This wheel?” He looked down at a broken heavy-steel fitting, and the other work waiting. “That won’t be much.”

  He slipped on a set of black goggles at once and popped his welding torch into life. The sound of that pop was a sound of sheer confidence, and I relaxed. All day long, till that second, I had been carrying myself tense, and now I relaxed. Praise God for such a thing as a friend.

  Johnny finished the brake arm in three minutes, touching it with the long welding rod and the razor flame. Then he kneeled by the heavy wheel fitting and in fifteen minutes it was strong again, ready to hold the weight of the airplane. He set Paul to sawing the strut reinforcing pieces to size, while Stu walked through the dusk for food.

  One strut was finished by the time Stu came back with hamburgers, hot chocolate and a half-gallon of milk. We all ate quickly, in the shadows of the trouble-light.

  Then the torch popped into life again, hissing, the black goggles went down and the second strut was underway.

  “You know what he said when I got to his house?” Paul said quietly. “It was right after work, he had just come in, his wife had dinner on the stove. He grabbed that box of tools and he said, ‘I’ll be back in the morning, I got a broke airplane to fix.’ How’s that, huh?”

  Glowing white, the strut was laid aside, finished, in the dark. Two more jobs to go, and the most difficult of all. Here the torn metal was within inches of the fabric of the airplane, and the fabric, painted heavily with butyrate dope, would burn like warm dynamite.

  “Why don’t you get some rags, and a bucket of water,” Johnny said. “Build us a dam around here. We’re workin’ pretty close.”

  The dam was built of dripping rags, and I held it in place while the torch did its job. Squinting my eyes, I watched the brilliant heat touch the metal, turning it all into a bright molten pool, fusing it back together along what had been the break. The water sputtered on the rag dam, and I was tense again.

  After a long time, one hard job had been done, and the last one was the worst. It was a heavy bolt carry-through, surrounded by doped fabric and oily wood. Ten inches above the 6,000 degrees of the welding torch, cradled in old dry wood, was the fuel tank. It held 41 gallons of aviation gasoline, just enough to blow the whole airplane about a thousand feet high.

  Johnny put out the torch and looked at the situation for a long time, under the light.

  “We better be careful on this one,” he said. “We’ll need the dam again, lots of water, and if you see a fire starting, yell, and throw some water on it.”

  Johnny and I settled down underneath the airplane, between the big wheels. All the work and fire would be overhead, as we crouched on the grass.

  “Stu,” I said, “Why don’t you get up in the front cockpit there, and watch for anything like a fire, under the gas tank. Take Stan’s fire bottle. If you see something, don’t be afraid to sing out, and shoot it with the bot
tle. If it looks like the whole thing is gonna go up, just yell and get the heck out of there. We can lose the airplane, but let’s not us get hurt.”

  It was nearly midnight when Johnny popped the torch on again and brought it overhead, near my dripping dam. The steel was thick, and the work was slow. I worried about the heat going through the metal and firing the fabric beyond the dam.

  “Paul, kind of watch over it all, will you, for any smoke or fires?”

  The torch, close up, had a tremendous roar, and it sprayed flame like a rocket at launch. Looking straight up, I could see through a narrow slit into the little place beneath the fuel tank. If there was a fire there, we’d be in trouble. And it was hard to see, in the glare and the sound of the torch.

  Every once in a while the flame popped back, a rifle-shot, spraying white sparks over us all. The torchfire was buried in smoke where it touched the airplane. It was our own private hell, there under the belly of the biplane.

  There was a sudden crackling over my head and I heard Stu say something, faintly.

  “PAUL!” I shouted. “WHAT’S STU SAYING? GET WHAT HE’S SAYING!”

  There was a flicker of fire overhead. “HOLD IT, JOHNNY! FIRE!” I slammed a dripping rag hard up into the narrow crack overhead. It hissed, in a rolling cloud of steam.

  “STU! DARN IT! SPEAK UP! YOU GOT A FIRE UP THERE?”

  “OK, now,” came the faint voice.

  The distance, I thought. The roar of the torch. I can’t hear him. Don’t be hard on him. But I had no patience with that. We’d all be blown to bits if he didn’t make us hear him when there was a fire.

  “LISTEN TO ’IM, WILL YA, PAUL? I CAN’T HEAR A WORD HE SAYS!”

  Johnny came back in with the torch, and the crackling began overhead, and the smoke.

  “That’s just grease cookin’ off there,” he said, next to me.

  We lived through three fires in our little hell, and stopped every one of them short of the fuel tank. None of us were sorry, at two a.m., when the torch snapped out for the last time and the gear was finished, glowing in the dark.

  “That ought to do it,” Johnny said. “You want me to stick around and help you put it back together?”

  “No. No problem, here on out. You saved us, John. Let’s get some sleep, OK? Man, I don’t want to live through that again.”

  Johnny wasn’t noticeably tired, but I felt like an empty balloon.

  At 5:30, Johnny and I got up and walked out to his dew-covered Aeronca. He fired the engine coldly awake and put his tools in the back seat.

  “Johnny, thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah. Nothin’. Glad I could help. Now take it easy, please, with that airplane?” He rubbed a clear space in the dew-beads on his windshield, then climbed aboard.

  I didn’t know what else to say. Without him, the dream would have been twice vanished. “Hope we fly together again soon.”

  “We’ll do it, sometime.” He pushed the throttle forward and taxied out into the dim morning. A moment later he was a dwindling speck on the horizon west, our problem was solved, and The Great American Flying Circus was alive again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BY FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, three days after her second crash of the season, the biplane was a flying machine right out of an old barnstormer’s scrapbook: silver patches on her fabric, welded plates on her cabane struts, scorched places and painted-over places.

  We went around all the attach points, checking that safety wires and cotter keys were in place, doublechecking jam nuts tight, and then I was back again in the familiar cockpit, the engine ticking over, warming from the quick fires in the cylinders. This would be a test flight for the rigging and for the landing gear welds—if the wheels collapsed on the takeoff roll, or if the wings fell off in flight, we had failed.

  I pushed the throttle forward, we rolled, we hopped up into the air. The gear was good, the rigging was good. She flew like a beautiful airplane.

  “YA-HOO!” I shouted into the high wind, where no one could hear. “GREAT! LOVE YA, YA OL’ BEAST!” The beast roared back, happy.

  We climbed on up to 2,000 feet over the lake and flew some aerobatics. If the wings wouldn’t fall off with the airplane pulling high G and flying upside-down, they never would. That first loop required a bit of courage, and I double-checked my parachute buckles. The wind sang in the wires like always, and up and over we went, as gently as possible the first time, looking up at the ground over our head, and smoothly back. Then a tighter loop, watching for the wires to start beating in the wind, or struts to bend, or fabric to tear away. She was the same old airplane she had always been. The tightest loop I could put on her, the quickest snap roll, she didn’t make a single cry.

  We dived back down to the ground, and bounced the wheels hard on the grass during a high-speed run. This was not easy to do, but I had to make it harder on the wheels now than it would ever be with passengers aboard.

  She passed her tests, and the last thing left was to see if the rewelding of the gear made any difference in her ground-handling. A tiny misalignment of the wheels could mean an airplane harder than ever to control.

  We sailed down final approach, crossed the fence, and clunked down on the grass. I waited with glove ready on the throttle, boots ready on the rudder pedals. She made a little swerve, but responded at once to the touch of throttle. She seemed the faintest bit more skittish on the ground than she had been. We taxied back to Stan’s hangar, triumphant, and the propeller windmilled down into silence.

  “How is she?” Paul said, the second the engine stopped.

  “GREAT! Maybe just a shade on the dicey side, landing, but otherwise, just great.” I jumped down from the cockpit and said what I knew I had to say, because some things are more important than airplanes. “You ready to give her another try, Paul?”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. If she’s bent again, we’ll fix her again. You ready to go?”

  He thought for a long moment. “I don’t think so. We wouldn’t be getting much barnstorming done, if I hurt her again. And we’re supposed to be out here to barnstorm, not to fix airplanes.”

  It was still light, in the afternoon of a Saturday.

  “Remember how you said if it was right for us to be here Sunday, nothing could keep us away?” Paul said. “Looks like it was right for us to be here Sunday, unless you want to bug out tonight.”

  “Nope,” I replied. “Sunday here is fine. The only way I could have been forced to be here was just the way it happened. So I figure that something interesting is waiting for us tomorrow.”

  Sunday morning was the Annual Palmyra Flight Breakfast, and the first airplanes began arriving at seven a.m. By seven-thirty we had carried our first passengers, by nine we had both airplanes flying constantly and a crowd of fifty people waiting to fly. A helicopter was carrying passengers at the other side of the field. Our crowd was twice as large as his, and we were proud.

  The air cluttered up with little airplanes of every modern kind, coming for the giant breakfast that was a tradition at the airport. The biplane and the Luscombe surged in and out of the traffic pattern, passing each other, working hard, snarling at the other airplanes, which were in no hurry to get back on the ground again.

  We had learned that it is not wise to fly a landing pattern so far from the field that we could not glide to the runway if the engine stopped, but at Palmyra we were alone in our learning. There were long lines of aircraft all over the sky, and if all the engines stopped at once, there would be airplanes down everywhere except on the airport.

  We flew constantly, drinking an occasional Pepsi-Cola in the cockpit while Stu strapped in more riders. We were making money by the basket, and we were working hard for it. Around and around and around. Palmyrans were out in force; most of our passengers were women and most of them were flying for the first time.

  I watched the high wind of flight buffet and blow forward over graceful sculptured faces and
was astonished again that there could be so many attractive women in one small town.

  The flights fell into a solid pattern, not only in the air, but in our thought.

  Buckle the belt down tight on them, Stu, and don’t forget to tell them to hold their sunglasses when they look over the side. Taxi out here, careful of other airplanes, recheck the final-approach path for anyone else coming in. Swing onto the grass runway, stay sharp on the rudder here and see if you can lift off right in front of our crowd, so they can see the bright crosses on the wheels spin around, after the biplane is in the air. If we lose the engine now, we can still land on the runway. Now, and we shoot for the meadow beyond. Up over the farm, a little turn so they can look down on the cows and the tractor, if we lose the engine now there’s a fine little field across the road. Level at 800 feet, swing out to circle Blue Spring Lake. We sure are making a lot of money today. I have lost track of the passengers … at least two hundred dollars today, for sure. But you really work for it. Watch for other airplanes, keep looking around, lose the engine now and we land right across from the lake; nice flat place there to come down. Turn now so the folks can see the sailboats out in the breeze, and motorboats and skiers pulling white trails across the lake. A place to land over there on the left, one more circle here, throw that in for free to give them one last long look at the blueness of that lake, then down across the green meadow into the landing pattern and over town look out now there are all kinds of airplanes around. Fall into place behind the Cessna … poor guy doesn’t know what he’s missing not having an open-cockpit airplane to fly; has to drive around in that milk-stool. Of course he can get places twice as fast as we can and that’s what he wants, so fine, I guess. Wish he would keep his pattern closer, though, someday his engine will stop in the pattern and he’s gonna feel pretty dumb, not able to glide to the runway. There he’s in, turn here, slip off some altitude, look at the wind again, cross-wind, but no problem. Aim for the right side of the runway and plan to cut in toward the center so we’ll be slow enough by our crowd and ready to pick up more passengers boy the old barnstormers worked for their keep, forget it, it’s time to land now and every landing’s different remember stay sharp and awake you sure would look dumb groundlooping in front of a crowd like this, even if you didn’t hurt the airplane. Wheels are stronger than ever, good ol’ Johnny can really weld, that guy, and a better friend you aren’t gonna find anywhere. Ease her down, now, across the fence, those cars better look out for airplanes, driving by there, and we’re down and this is the hardest part of the whole thing keep her straight, straight, wait on the throttle, on the rudder they’re glad they’re down but they liked the ride, too. Slow and swing around in toward Stu let ’em out careful boy and keep them from stepping on the fabric and two more ready to fly, the brave people overcoming their fears and trusting me just because they want to see what it looks like from the air. A mother and her daughter this time, they don’t know it yet, but they’re going to like flying, too. Buckle the belt down tight on them, Stu, and don’t forget to tell them to hold their sunglasses when they look over the side …