Nothing by Chance

  Over and over and over again.

  But once, the pattern changed, and while Stu was loading passengers, an angry man came to stand beside my cockpit. “I know you’re a hot pilot and all that,” he said venomously, “but you might be careful in the landing pattern for a change. I was coming down final in the twin there, the Apache, and you cut me right out, you turned right in front of me!”

  My first thought was to say how sorry I was to do such a thing, but then his attitude struck me. Would I act like that to a fellow pilot on a crowded day? For some distant reason I remembered a pilot named Ed Fitzgerald, back with the 141st Tactical Fighter Squadron, USAF. Fitz was one of the finest pilots I knew, and a staunch friend, but he was the fiercest man in the Air Force. He always frowned, and we said that he was spring-loaded to the explode position. If a man made the mistake of crossing Fitz in any tiny way, he had to be ready for hand-to-hand combat with a wild leopard. Even if he was wrong, Ed Fitzgerald wouldn’t wait a second to slap down a stranger that dared antagonize him.

  So I thought of Fitz then, and smiled within myself. I stood up in the cockpit, which made me a yard taller than this Apache pilot, and frowned down at him, furiously, as Fitz would have done.

  “Look here, buddy,” I said. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re flying the pattern in a way’s gonna kill somebody. You drag all over the country and then turn toward the airport and expect everybody to get out of your way ‘cause you got two engines on your crummy airplane. Look, buddy, you fly like that and I’ll cut you out of the pattern every time; you go up there now and I’ll cut you out again, you hear me? When you learn to fly an airplane and fly the pattern, then you come back and talk to me, huh?”

  Stu had finished strapping the passengers in and I pushed the throttle forward, to press the man off balance with the propeller-blast. He stood back, mad, and I pulled my goggles down and taxied off in a windstorm impossible to answer. I laughed all the way out to takeoff. Good ol’ Fitz, come back to help me.

  By three o’clock the field was just as empty and quiet as it had been all the rest of the year. There was not another airplane in sight, save the Luscombe and the biplane. We walked across the cornfield to lunch, and collapsed at our table.

  “Three hamburgers and three Barnstormer Specials, Millie.” Another aspect of security. You not only know the waitress, you have your own table and add things to the menu. Our table was for three, against the side wall, and the Barnstormer Special was strawberry sherbet with Seven-Up, whipped on the malt machine. Stu had even written it down, and it might still be there on a menu in Palmyra.

  After a long time, Paul spoke, rubbing his eyes. “What a day.”

  “Mm,” I agreed, unwilling to make the effort to open my mouth.

  “What’s with Duke?” Stu said, after a moment, and when it was clear that nobody was going to do much talking, he went on. “She was out there all day watching you guys fly, but she never bought a ticket. Says she’s scared.”

  “That’s her problem,” I said.

  “Anyway, we are invited over with her and some of her friends for dinner tonight. Right across from the lake. Do we want to go?”

  “Sure we want to go,” Paul said.

  “Said they’d be back at five, pick us up.”

  A silence again, which I finally broke. “Does it work? Can a barnstormer survive?”

  “If your bird could survive that groundloop and get flying again two days later,” Paul said, “disaster has been ruled out. And I don’t know how much money we made, but we made a pile of money. If a guy sat down and scheduled himself so he could make all the fly-in breakfasts, and all the county fairs and all the homecomings at little towns, he could buy out Rockefeller in about a week and a half.”

  “Long as you keep the airplanes flying, carrying passengers, you’re in business,” Stu said. He paused a moment. “Duke said today when I was selling tickets that they had a pool going in town, said the biplane would never fly again, after the crash.”

  “She was serious?” I asked.

  “Seemed to be.”

  “Shows to go ya. You see how the helicopter finally gave up. The old Great American was really rackin’ ’em up, and I guess he finally just couldn’t stand the competition.”

  It was silent for a while, then Paul spoke again. “You know, that girl flew with me three times.”

  “What girl was that?”

  “I don’t know. She never said a word, she never smiled, even. But she rode three times. Nine bucks. Where does a girl get nine bucks to throw away on airplane rides?”

  “Throw away?” I said. “Throw away? Man, the girl’s flyin! Nine bucks is nothin’!”

  “Yeah. But you don’t find too many like that, who think that way. And hey, you know what? Two autographs today. I signed two autographs!”

  “Nice,” I said. “Knocked me over, too. I had one little fella came up and wanted me to sign his book. How about that, Stu? You are no longer the Star.”

  “Poor Stu,” Paul said loftily. “Did you sign any autographs today … Star?”

  Stu answered softly. “Twelve,” he said, and looked away.

  By five o’clock we had the airplanes covered for the evening. We could have carried more passengers, but we were not in the mood for it, and closed our airplane-ride stand.

  Duke and her friends arrived and drove us out to a house just across from Palmyra’s other lake. There was time for a swim, but Paul chose to stay on shore; the water was looking cold.

  “Borrow your comb, Stu?” I said after an hour in the lake, when we were back at the house.

  “Sure.” He handed me a fractured stick of plastic that had five teeth on one end, a long space, a brief forest of 18 teeth, and all the rest empty.

  “Jumper’s comb, I guess,” Stu apologized. “A few hard landings kinda wiped it out.”

  The comb was not too effective.

  We returned to the gathering, a crowd of people in the living room, and munched on sandwiches and potato chips. They were quizzing Paul on what we were up to, barnstorming.

  There was a certain wistfulness in the room, as though we had something that these people wanted, that they might have had a distant wish to say goodbye to everything in Palmyra and fly away into the sunset with The Great American Flying Circus. I saw it most of all in the girl Duke. And I thought: if they want to do something like this, why do they wait? Why don’t they just do it, and be happy?

  Paul, talking with hard logic, had brought Duke around to the idea of a flight in the Luscombe.

  “But it’s got to be at night,” she said.

  “Why at night? You can’t see nearly so …”

  “That’s just it. I don’t want to see. I get this urge to jump. Maybe I won’t get it at night.”

  Paul stood up. “Let’s go.”

  They went. It was solid black outside; an engine failure on takeoff would give him a busy few moments. We listened, and some time later we heard the Luscombe taking off, and then saw its navigation lights moving among the stars. They stayed over town and circled higher. Good for Paul. He wouldn’t be caught out of gliding distance to the field.

  We talked for a while longer, back in the house, about what a strange girl Duke was; how long she had been afraid to go up in an airplane, and how there she was up there in the middle of the night where no one else would think of flying, first time.

  Stu took his licks for not being very talkative, and I found an old ornamental guitar and began tuning it. The £ string broke at once, and I was sorry I ever saw the thing. A piece of fishline as an emergency string tuned way too high.

  After a while the flyers came back.

  “It’s beautiful,” Duke told us all. “The lights and the stars. But after five minutes I said, ‘Take me down, take me down!’ I could feel myself wanting to jump.”

  “She couldn’t have jumped out of that airplane if she tried,” Paul said. “She couldn’t even open the door.”

  Duke talked for a bit abo
ut what it felt like, but in cautious, withdrawn words. I wondered what she really thought.

  In an hour we thanked our hosts, bid them goodbye, and walked through the night back to the airstrip.

  “I would have been in trouble if the engine quit on takeoff.” Paul said. “I knew the meadow was out there, but I sure couldn’t see it. Man, I was on instruments as soon as we broke ground … it was BLACK! I couldn’t even tell where the horizon was. That spooky feeling, you know, whether the stars are the town or the town is stars.”

  “’Least you stayed in gliding distance, once you got up,” I said.

  “Oh, once we were up it was no problem at all. Just that one little time right at liftoff.”

  We tramped into the office, and snapped on the light.

  “What a day.”

  “Hey, treasurer, how much money did we make today?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stu, and he smiled. “We’ll count it up tomorrow, boys.” Stu was older now than when he joined the circus. He knew us, was the difference, I thought, and I wished we could say the same of him.

  “The devil we count it up tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow we wake up and find our treasurer is on his way to Acapulco.”

  “Count ’er out, Stu,” Paul said.

  Stu began emptying his pockets onto the couch from the biggest day’s work we’d had all summer. There were great crushed wads of money in all pockets, and his wallet was stuffed with bills. The final pile on the couch was wrinkled and impressive.

  Stu counted it into fifty-dollar piles, while we watched. There were seven piles and some bills left over; three hundred and seventy-three dollars. “Not bad, for a day’s flyin’,” I said.

  “Just a minute.” Paul said, calculating. “That can’t be right. It is three dollars a ride, so how can we come out with a number like 373?”

  Stu patted his pockets. “Ah, here’s a whole wad I missed,” he said, and to a chorus of suspicious mutterings, he counted another seventeen dollars onto the last pile. “Don’t know how that could have happened.”

  “There’s our warning, Paul,” I said. “We gots to be careful of the treasurer.”

  There was $390 laid out now, a mirror of 130 passengers, most of whom had never flown before in their lives. You can destroy that pile of bills, I thought, or spend it right up, but you can never destroy the flights that those 130 people had today. The money is just a symbol of their wish to fly, to see far out over the land. And for a moment I, oily barnstormer, felt as if I might have done something worthwhile in the world.

  “What about gas and oil? What do we owe on that?”

  I checked the tally sheet on the desk and added the figures.

  “Comes out to $42.78. We used 129.4 gallons of gas and 12 quarts of oil. We should pay Stan for the stuff of his, too, that we used. Acetylene and oxygen and welding rod and stuff. What do you think? Twenty bucks sound right?” They agreed it did.

  Stu was figuring how to split the money four ways, keeping one pile for Johnny Colin. “OK. That makes $81.80 apiece with two cents left over. Anybody want to check my figures?” We all did, and he was right. We put the odd two cents on Johnny’s pile, for mailing the next day.

  “You know,” I said, when we were all rolled up for the night, “maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t wind up with ten airplanes, or whatever, on this show. The only time we could keep ten airplanes busy flying passengers is a day like this. We’d have starved, ten of us; we couldn’t even pay our gas.”

  “You’re right,” Paul said. “Two airplanes be about it, maybe three, unless you want to get all organized and follow the county fairs and fly-in breakfasts.”

  “Can you imagine us organized?” I said. “’Today, men, we will all fly one eight zero degrees for eighty-eight miles to Richland, where we will all carry passengers from noon to two-thirty. Then we will proceed west for forty-two miles, where we will fly passengers from four o’clock to six-fifteen …’Bad news. Glad it’s just us.”

  “You probably say we’re being ‘guided,’ that the other airplanes just couldn’t make it?” Paul said. “And that all these crashes don’t stop us?”

  “You better believe it, we’re being guided,” I said. I was growing more confident of this, in the light of our miracles. Yet while Midwest America appeared both beautiful and kind, I still wondered what sudden adventures might next be guided across the path of The Great American Flying Circus. I wasn’t quite so eager for adventure, and hoped for a time of calm.

  I forgot that calm, for a gypsy pilot, is disaster.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WE SENT JOHNNY’S MONEY OFF to him the next morning, all cash in a bulky envelope, and a note saying thanks.

  Over a late breakfast at the D&M, Paul looked at the list of clients he had promised to photograph.

  “I have a company down in Chicago, on the outskirts there. I really should go down and shoot that. Then there’s one in Ohio, and Indiana … are we going to get to Indiana?”

  “You’re leader today,” I said.

  “No, come on. You think we’ll ever hit Indiana?”

  “Got me. Depends on how the wind is blowing, you know.”

  “Thanks. I do have to get this Chicago guy, then as long as I’m there I might as well hop over to Indiana. I could join up with you guys again later on, wherever you are.”

  “OK. I’ll leave word with Bette, tell her where we are. You call her, fly in and meet us when you can.” I was sorry to have Paul think more of his shooting than of barnstorming, but he was free to do whatever he wanted to do.

  We said goodbye to Millie, leaving monster tips on the table, and walked back to the planes. We took off together, stayed in formation up to 800 feet and then Paul waved and banked sharply away toward the distance of Lake Michigan and the 1960’s.

  We were alone. The Great American Flying Circus, was now one biplane and one pilot and one parachute jumper; destination, as always, unknown.

  The land below went flat. It began to look like Illinois, and after an hour’s flying we saw a river in the distance. There was no other airplane in the sky, and on the ground everyone was working at some kind of reasonable, respectable job. It was a lonely feeling.

  We followed the river south and west, the biplane trailing a little stream of roiled air behind it, above the stream of water.

  There were few places to land. The fields close to the towns were hemmed in by telephone wires or planted in corn and beans. We flew for several hours in random directions, staying close to the water, and at last, just as I was about to give up in disgust, we found a field at Erie, Illinois. It was short, it had trees across one end, it was half a mile from town. All of these things were bad, but down on the field the hay was being raked and baled and a wide strip had been left clear. We whistled down over a cornfield and landed in the adjoining hay, rolling to a stop not far from where a farmer was working over a huge rotary rake. He was having some trouble with it, and I shut down the engine.

  “Hi, there,” I said.

  “Howdy.”

  Stu and I walked to the rake. “Can we help you out at all?”

  “Maybe. I’m tryin’ to get this thing hooked up to the tractor, but it’s too heavy.”

  “Can’t be. We can lift that little thing up there.” Stu and I lifted the tongue of the rake, which was solid steel, set it in the tractor hitch, and dropped the locking pin down through.

  “Thank you kindly, boys,” the farmer said. He wore a denim jacket over his coveralls, a railroad engineer’s cap and a manner of unruffled calm at an airplane dropping down into his field.

  “You’ve got a nice hayfield here,” I said. “Mind if we fly out of here a bit, carry some passengers?”

  “Just one time?”

  “Lots of times, we hope.”

  “Well…” He was not sold on the idea, but at last he said it would be all right.

  I unloaded the airplane for some trial flights, to see how much clearance we’d have, over the trees. It didn’t feel g
ood. We cleared the top branches with much less margin than I had hoped for, and with the weight of passengers aboard, it would not be comfortable. But there was no other field in sight, all the way around town. Everything was corn.

  It was no use trying. Our field was just not good enough and we had to move on. By now the sun was low, and so was our fuel. We chose to stay overnight and move out early in the morning. The plan was firmed when the farmer stopped by just at dusk.

  “Just as soon you not fly much out of here, boys. Your motor exhaust might hurt m’hay.”

  “OK. Mind if we stay the night, here?”

  “Go right ahead. Just don’t want that exhaust to get to the hay, is all.”