Nothing by Chance

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…

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 about 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.