Nothing by Chance

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 good. 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.”

“Thank y’, sir.” We began to walk into town for our hamburgers, keeping to the right of the road, scuffing through the weeds.

“What about his tractor?” Stu said. “Doesn’t his tractor have an exhaust?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any difference. He wants us out of here, we get out. No questions. It’s his land.”

At sundown we went back to the plane and the sleeping bags. There were ten billion river-mosquitoes waiting for us. They cruised, humming gently, at low power, and all of them were quite eager to meet us.

Stu, not quite so silent since Paul left, had suggestions. “We could put out a quart of blood for them, on the wing,” he said. “Or tether a couple hundred frogs around here. Or we could start the engine and fan them away…”

“You’re very creative, my lad, but all that’s needed is that we come to an understanding with the mosquitoes. They have their place to live in the world, you see, and we have ours…”

“We could go back into town and get some repellent stuff…”

“…and as soon as we understand that they don’t have to conflict with our peace, why, they’ll just… go.”

At ten o’clock we were walking to town. Every seven minutes, as we walked, a shiny new automobile, without muffler, came blazing out from town at something over 70 miles an hour, stopped, turned around and went blazing back in. “What the devil are these nuts doing?” I said, mystified.

“Dragging Main.”

“What?”

“It’s called ‘Dragging Main,’ “Stu explained. “In little towns, the kids have nothing to do, so they just go back and forth, back and forth, in their cars, all night long.” He had no comment whether he thought it good or evil. He just told me it was.

“This is entertainment? This is what they do for fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.”

Another car went shrieking by. No. It was the same car that we had seen seven minutes ago.

Good grief, I thought. Would we have had an Abraham Lincoln, a Thomas Edison, a Walt Disney, if everyone spent their non-school hours Dragging Main? I watched the split-second faces at the wheel, and saw that the young men passing by were not so much driving as being driven, by sheer and desperate boredom.

“I eagerly await the contributions these guys are gonna make to the world.”

It was a warm night. Stu knocked on a market door just as it was closing, explained about the mosquitoes, and paid fifty cents for a bottle of promises to keep them away. I bought a pint of orange sherbet, and we walked back to the airplane.

“You want some of this stuff?” Stu asked.

“Nope. All you need is an understanding…”

“Darn. I was going to sell you a squirt of it for fifty cents.”

Neither one of us reached a peace with the little creatures.

At five-thirty in the morning we were airborne, ghosting southeast over calm rivermist, toward a black mark on a road-map that was supposed to be an airport. We had one hour’s fuel on board, and the flight would take 30 minutes.

The air was still as the sun, pushing light up over the cool horizon, and we were the only moving thing in a thousand miles of sky. I could see how an old barnstormer might remember his days in gladness.

We flew on through a difficult week, surprised at how few were the Illinois towns that could be good homes for gypsy pilots. Our Palmyran profits were gone.

We landed in desperation once, at a grass airport near Sandwich. It was a soft green runway, many thousand feet long, and fairly close to town. We were tired from so much non-profit flying, and even though it wasn’t a hayfield, we thought this would be a good place to spend the evening.

The airport office had just been remodeled, was panelled in deep-stained satin wood, and I began to wonder if we belonged here from the first moment that I saw the owner, by the window. He had watched this grease-spattered biplane land, he had worried about its oil dripping on his grass, and now its filthy occupants were going to step inside his new office!

He tried to be polite, that much can be set down for him. But he welcomed The Great American Flying Circus about as warmly as he would have welcomed the Loch Ness Monster to his doorstep.

I told him brightly what we were doing, how we had never carried a dissatisfied passenger, how we could bring many new customers to his field and increase his own passenger-flying business.

“I’m a little on the conservative side,” he said when I was through. And then, cagily, “You do your own maintenance?”

To do one’s maintenance, without a license, is illegal, and he waited like a vulture for our answer, thinking of the price on our heads. He was disappointed, almost, to hear that the biplane was properly signed and provided for. Then he brightened. “I’m having the opening of the new building next month. I could use you then…”

Being used did not sound like much fun. Stu and I looked at each other and moved to leave. At that instant, as in a motion-picture script, a customer walked in the door.

“I want to have an airplane ride,” he said.

The owner began a long apologetic explanation about how his flying license was not up to date and it wouldn’t be worth it to call out a pilot from town to give just one ride and his airplanes were all down for maintenance anyway. We didn’t say a word. We just stood there, and so did the customer. He wanted a ride.

“Of course these fellows could ride you. But I don’t know anything about them…”

Ah, I thought, the fraternity of the air.

The customer was almost as frightened of the biplane as the airport manager had been, although in a more straight-forward way. “I don’t want any dadoes, now, no flip-flops. Just take it kind of easy, around town and back down again.”

“Gentle as a cloud, sir,” I said, with a flourish. “STU, LET’S GET THIS THING FIRED UP!”

The flight was gentle as a cloud, and the man even said that he liked it. A few seconds after we landed, he was gone, leaving me puzzled over why he wanted to go up in the first place.

We were airborne again in fifteen minutes, glad to leave Sandwich and its gleaming new office behind. Droning on north again, aimless, looking down, some of the old doubts about surviving came back to mind.

We landed at last at Antioch, a resort town a few miles south of the Wisconsin border. The grass field lay on the edge of a lake and we found that the owner sold rides on weekends in his Waco biplane. He charged five dollars the ride, and he was not interested in any competition, any time, and he would be happiest if we would leave. But before we could go, a modern Piper Cherokee landed and taxied to our side. A businesslike fellow in white shirt and tie walked purposefully toward us and smiled in the way of a man whose job forces him to meet many people.

“I’m Dan Smith,” he said over the engine noise, “Illinois Aeronautics Commission.”

I nodded, and wondered why he had made such a big thing of his title. Then I saw that he was looking for an Illinois State Registration tag on the biplane. He hadn’t found one. The tag is a mandatory thing in that state. It costs a dollar or so, which apparently pays the field worker’s salary.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

From anyone else, a normal, harmless question. From this man, it was sinister. If I’m from Illinois, I’m fined on the spot.

“Iowa,” I said.

Oh.”

Without another word, he walked to the hangar across the way and disappeared within it, checking for hidden airplanes, without registration tags.

What a way to make a living, I thought.

Airborne again, we were getting desperate. In all this lake country, we could find no place to land near a lake. Simple criteria, we had: near town, near lake. But there was no such thing. We circled for more than an hour over a score of lakes, and found nothing. Thirst had a sharp edge, there in the high hot cockpits, and we flew north again, looking for any place to land.

We crossed Lake Geneva and looked down thirstily at all that water. Water skiers, sailboats, swimmers… drinking as much of the lake as they wanted.

The first airstrip we saw, we landed. It was the wrong place. Lake Lawn, a bright sign said. The grass was immaculately trimmed, and we discovered that this was the private airstrip of the Lake Lawn Country Club.

Parking the greasy biplane out of sight, we snuck out of the cockpits and walked down the road toward the Club after the manner of working gardeners. The guards at the gate caught us, but had compassion and showed us the way to water.

“I’m beginning to doubt your method of finding fields,” Stu said.

Then we were up again, grimly heading south in the third giant circle of the week. There is no such thing as chance, I thought, gritting my teeth, there is no such thing as luck. We were being led where it is best for us to go. There is a good place waiting, this minute. Just ahead.

A long open summer field slanted beneath us, far from any town, but a fine place for airplanes to land.

I thought about landing there and giving rides to the cows grazing about. For a half-second I was serious, wondering if it could work. It always came back to this. We had to prove it all over again, every day… we had to find human, paying passengers.