Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER TWELVE

I CHECKED THE TAILSKID SHOE first thing in the morning. It needed some extra wire to hold it in place and this meant lifting the tail back onto the oil cans.

Paul stood glumly by.

“Think you could give me a hand with lifting the tail?” I said. “Stu, you ready for us to lift?”

“Lift away,” said Stu from his oilcans underneath the tail.

Paul apparently hadn’t heard me, for he didn’t move to help. “Hey, Paul! Why don’t you stop sucking that cigarette for a minute and give us a hand here?”

Paul looked at me as though I was some kind of repugnant beetle, and moved to help. “All right, all right I’ll help you! Take it easy.”

We picked up the tail and set the skid on its oilcan jack. Later, we walked to town for breakfast and Paul trailed behind, saying nothing, the picture of depression. Whatever his problem is, I thought, it is none of my business. If he wants to be depressed, that’s his option. It was the quietest, most uncomfortable breakfast we ever had. Stu and I traded comments about the weather and the tail skid and the wagon jack, how it couldn’t possibly work, and all the time Paul said not a word, made no sound at all.

We all had separate places to go after breakfast, and for the first time since we began the summer, we did not walk together, but went three separate ways. It was an interesting sort of thing, but puzzling, for the same wave of depression hit us all.

Well, heck, I thought, walking alone back to the airplane, I don’t care. If the other guys want to do something else and feel bad, I can’t stop ’em. The only guy I can control is me, and I’m out here to barnstorm, not to waste time feeling bad.

I resolved to fly to the airport and change the biplane’s oil, and then I was pushing on. If the other guys wanted to come along, that was fine with me.

When I walked onto the hayfield again, Paul was sitting alone on his sleeping bag, writing a note. He said nothing.

“OK, buddy,” I said at last. “What you do is none of my business except when it starts to affect me. And it’s starting. What is bugging you?”

Paul stopped writing, and folded the paper. “You,” he said. “Your attitude has changed. You’ve been acting different ever since I got back. I’m leaving today. I’m on my way home.”

So that was the problem. “You’re free to go. You mind telling me just how my attitude has changed? I no longer want to fly with you, is that it, you guess?”

“I don’t know. But you’re just not there. I might as well be some brand new guy you never met before. You can treat other people like outsiders, but you can’t treat me that way.”

I scanned back over everything I had done or said since Paul returned. I had been a trifle stiff and formal, but I had been that way a thousand times since I had known Paul. I am stiff and formal with my airplane when we haven’t flown for a few days. It must have been my comment about the cigarette this morning. Even as I had said it, it sounded a bit harsher than it was meant to be.

“OK,” I said. “I apologize. I’m sorry for my crack about the cigarette. I keep forgetting you’re so darn sensitive…”

Heck of an apology, I thought.

“No, it’s not that only. It’s your whole attitude. It’s like you can’t wait to get rid of me. So don’t worry. I’m getting out. I was writing a note to leave for you, but you came back too quick to finish it.”

I stood there. Had I been so wrong for so long? Would this man, whom I considered among the very best friends I had in the world, judge me without listening for my defense, find me guilty and then leave without a word?

“The only thing I can think of…” I started slowly, trying to speak as truly as I could, “…is that I wish to goodness you would have been able to land in this field. I was mad at you when you didn’t land, because this is such a good field. But I wouldn’t land the Luscombe here myself, and I think you’d be dumb to try it. You did the right thing, but I just wished that the Lusk could be a little better barnstorming airplane, is all.” I began to roll my sleeping bag. “If you want to bug out, fine. But if you leave because you think I want to get rid of you, you’re wrong, and that’s your problem to overcome.”

We talked the trouble back and forth, and gradually we were talking like ourselves again, bridging a chasm that had been hidden under ice.

“Are you going to settle down now,” Paul said, “and treat your troops like they were human beings?”

“All this time I thought we had forgot about who was leader,” I said, “and you been thinking I was the honcho. I resign, I tell you, I resign!”

Airborne, flying again as barnstormers in formation, we searched to the north first, without results. The land close to the towns was everywhere too rough and too short for both airplanes. I looked down again at the broad grass strip at Lake Lawn and thought that we could be an interesting diversion for the golfers, and probably make much money. But golfers were urban people, living way out ahead of us in time, concerned about unreal things… profit margins and credit ratings and the life of giant cities. We were looking to fly with the people of the world to which our airplanes belonged.

We followed the road west and south, and again crossed down into the heat of summer Illinois. We circled eight or ten little towns, left the road for a river, and finally rolled our wheels in the grass of an airstrip by the river. It was a good long strip. There was plenty of room for the Luscombe to work fully loaded, and we were one mile from a town. A little far out, but worth trying.

The field was surrounded by oats and corn, set low in the wide long valley of the river. There was a farmhouse at the end of the strip, and a small hangar.

Two minutes after we landed, a light twin-engine airplane touched down and taxied near the hangar.

“Sure,” the owner said. “You boys can work out of here if you want. Be nice to get some folks out to the airport.”

We were working again. Our first acquaintance with Pecatonica, Illinois, was a friendly one.

In long sheds near the farmhouse were a great number of pigs, snarkling and gorkling as we found that pigs are wont to do. A man and his wife came from the house to wonder who we were, shyly followed by a little girl who peeked around her mother’s skirts. The girl was stricken silent in awe. She was convinced that we were Martians landing in some strange sort of saucers, and goggled at us, set to dash screaming into the house at the first monster-word we said. Stu walked down the lane to post our signs, and the girl kept an eye on him, lest he creep up behind and devour her in one toothy gnash.

There were two hundred pigs in the shed, we learned, and wandering around somewhere were nine cats and a horse. The horse, at the moment, was kept in a grassy lot, and trotted over to talk with us when we walked near his gate.

“This is Skeeter,” the woman said. “Raised him from a colt. Skeeter is a wonderful horse… aren’t you, Skeeter?” She rubbed his velvet nose.

Skeeter made some comment, a low polite whinny, and nodded his head. He left us then, trotted once around the perimeter of his grass and came back to lift his head sociably over the gate. Skeeter had a very outgoing personality.

“Goin’ toward town… you boys want a lift?” the owner said. We did, and jumped into the back of a red pickup. As we turned down the lane and onto the highway, it was Paul who asked the question.

“How do you think it’s going to go?”

“Looks OK,” Stu said.

“Little far out, maybe,” I said, “but we’ll do all right.”

Pecatonica’s main street was high-curbed and lined with glass store fronts and wood facades. The center of town was one block long: hardware, cafés, the Wayne Feed Dealer, service station, dime store. We hopped down from the truck at the beginning of the block, called our thanks and walked to a café for lemonade.

It was full hot summer, with the round plastic advertising thermometers pointing 95 degrees. We ordered giant lemonades and looked at the ceiling and walls. It was the same long narrow room we had come to expect, with booths down one wall, and the counter and mirror and stacked glasses down the other, kitchen way at the back with a round order-wheel hanging from its pivot in the pass-through window. The ceiling was at least 15 feet high, tiled in green floral-stamped tin. It was all a clever electrical museum out of 1929, with animated people who could move and talk and blink their eyes.

Our waitress was a startlingly pretty girl who smiled as she brought our lemonade. She didn’t seem at all electrical.

“Are you going to come out and fly with us?” Paul asked.

“Oh! You’re the boys with the airplanes! I saw you fly over a little while ago. Two of you?”

“And a jumper,” I added.

It was beyond understanding. We had made only a half-circle of town, but surely half the people in Pecatonica knew about the two airplanes waiting at the airport.

We piled our lemonade money on the table.

“You’ll be out to fly with us?” Paul said.

“I don’t know. I might.”

“She won’t,” Paul said. “Why is it that waitresses never come out and fly with us?”

“Waitresses are the best judges of character in the world,” I told him. “They know never to fly with people who wear nutty green hats.”

Taking our lemonade with us, we set out for the airport. It was a fifteen-minute walk, and by the time we reached the strip we were thirsty again. In the shed next to the pigs’ home there were several tractors and some bales of hay for Skeeter. The children were out in the yard, and no sooner had Stu laid himself down on the hay than they ran over and began burying him in kittens. There was a mother cat with them, and while Paul and I chatted with Skeeter, Stu was flat on his back in the hay, being trampled by a child-directed stampede of kittens. He was enjoying it greatly, and I was surprised. Stu was stepping out of character; this was not the sort of thing I had come to expect from our thoughtful, taciturn jumper.

Paul and I soon had the airplanes fired up and we flew one brief dogfight over the edge of town. There were four cars waiting when we landed, and a few passengers. We went to work flying.

At last I got a thumbs-down signal from Stu that there were no passengers waiting, and shut down the Whirlwind.

Paul had just come down, and his passenger, an attractive young lady of nineteen or twenty, in a rather low-cut summer dress, walked directly to me.

“Hello,” she said, “My name is Emily.”

“Hi, Emily.”

“I just got down from my very first airplane ride and it’s just wonderful! Everything’s so pretty! But Paul said that if I really wanted to have fun, I should ride with you!”

Paul thought I was off-balance whenever confronted by a pretty woman, and Emily could only be a part of his experimenting to prove it. I glanced at the Luscombe, and there was Paul, all right, polishing spots from his spotless engine cowl, all of a sudden looking very intently at his work.

I’d show him. “Why Emily, ol’ Paul was ’zackly right. You want to know what flying really is, you just pop right over to that young fella there in the yellow jumpsuit and get yourself a ticket, and we’ll go flying.”

She looked downcast for a moment, and moved to stand very close to me. “I’m all out of money, Dick,” she said softly.

“I don’t believe it! Three dollars is nothin’ for a ride in a biplane! Not many left, nowadays, you know.”

“I’d sure love to fly with you,” she cooed.

“Be worth it, too, ma’m. A beautiful day to fly. Well—as you know, if you were just up with Paul.”

She was in no hurry to rush off and pay Stu her three dollars and was happy just to stand and talk and let the sun reflect bright colors from her low summer dress.

Just then an earlier passenger was back, wanting another “wild ride.” I said a careful goodbye to the girl, started the Wright and taxied out. As I passed the Luscombe, I shook my head slowly at Paul, who was now quite vigorously polishing the propeller. We never saw Emily again.

The morning roadside on the walk back from breakfast was deep in purple flower.

“Hey, you guys,” I said, “Honey-clover!”

“Pretty.”

“No, it’s not pretty, it’s good to eat. Like when you were a kid, remember?” I picked a boll and tasted the hollow petals. There was a tenth of a drop of nectar in each one, a delicate sweet flavor of morning. Paul and Stu tried one each, as we walked.

“Tastes like eating a flower,” Stu said.

“Can’t figure you guys out.” I picked another handful of purple, and crunched on the tender petals. “This great stuff growin’ all over, and you walk right by.”

There was a concrete bridge between town and the airport, crossing the one straightest mile on the length of the Pecatonica River. We heard the sound of outboard motors, and a pair of tiny racing hydroplanes came buzzing full throttle down the river, battling for the lead. They roared echoing under the bridge and through in an instant. The drivers wore helmets and heavy lifejackets, and they were completely absorbed in their race. At the end of the straight they slowed, turned and came back again, tall arcs of spray leaping behind them. It was a sort of aquatic Dragging Main, but somehow it seemed a much cleaner sport.

We walked on across the bridge, and past a lawn where a boy was beating a rug with a twisted wire hoop.

“What’s the plan?” Paul said as we walked by Skeeter, who whinnied, and out to the airplanes. “You want to try for something during the day again? Might get somebody.”

“Anything you say.”

“I’m running out of time,” Paul said. “I should head back pretty soon. Take me three days to get home from here, about.”

“Well, let’s give it a try; go up and fly a bit,” I said. “Might get a couple people out to fly. Be cool, anyway.”

We took off and climbed to 3,000 feet in formation over the summer town. The hydroplanes hadn’t stopped; their twin white wakes still ran neck-and-neck along the dark river. The boy was still beating the rug half a mile beneath us and I shook my head. It had been 20 minutes since we walked by. What a devoted young fellow that must be, beating a rug for 20 minutes. Three minutes of rug-beating used to be my outside limit. The world is an earnest place, in 1929.

Paul broke away in a wide sweeping turn and swung around toward me to begin the old familiar aerial battle. I pulled the biplane’s nose straight up in the air, hoping for the Luscombe to swish right on by beneath me and give me the chance of dropping down on her tail. The first part of our dogfights were never staged; we were trying our best to work into a firing position behind each other. It was only at the end that I had to let Paul win, because I had the smoke flare and was still the only one eligible to go down in flames.

The earth twisted around us in green, sky in blue, and for a while I didn’t care whether potential passengers were watching or not. It would not do, in this first part of our game, to let Paul get behind the biplane. I had Air Force training in this business long before he learned to fly; I had practiced air combat in front-line military fighters while Paul was still taking fashion pictures in his elegant studio.

Everyone else I knew began to fly in slow airplanes, little airplanes, old airplanes, and then went with the times. In a few years they were flying faster, bigger, more modern machines. It had been just the other way around for me.

First had come the seamless military trainers and fighters and air combat at transsonic speed, then the transports, then modern businessplanes, then an aging lightplane, now this biplane locked firmly into the day before yesterday. From airborne weapons radar to modern electronics to a simple panel of radio to nothing at all—the biplane was not only without radio, she was entirely without electricity. She was back in the days when a pilot was his own man, with no links to ground-people to aid him or to annoy him. 1929 is a happy year, but sometimes, watching a contrail pulling along way up in the stratosphere, I had to admit to myself that I missed the power and speed and the high lonesome joy of the fighter pilot. Sometimes.

The Luscombe was beside me now, trying desperately to slow down, to fall behind the biplane’s tail. I pushed full throttle, held the nose up, looked across the air at Paul, and laughed. The little sportplane could stand it no longer; all at once it shuddered and fell away toward the ground, stalled out. I pressed full rudder as the Parks stalled a second later and dropped down on the Luscombe’s tail. My reputation was secure. No matter what happened now, I could tell Paul that I deliberately gave him the advantage, after once having been on his tail. He pulled up again, rolling inverted, dropped away, spinning the sky around us both as I rolled to follow.

Stu was already at work convincing the customers it was a great day for flying, and by noon we had flown five passengers. We spent the afternoon in the shade of the wings, trying to stay cool. It wasn’t an easy job.

A few minutes after I had finally made it into sleep, Paul came over and woke me up. “What do you say to some watermelon? Wouldn’t that be great? Nice cold watermelon?”

“Sounds keen. You go in and get it and I’ll help eat.”

“No, c’mon. Let’s go get a watermelon.”

“You’re out of your mind. It’s a mile to town!”

“Stu! How about going in and us getting a watermelon?” Paul said. “Then we could bring it out here and eat it and not give Bach any.”

“You go in and get it,” Stu said. “I’ll wait here for you.”

“Aw. I just can’t wait around here doing nothing. I’m going to go up and do some flip-flops.”

“Fine,” I said. Stu was already asleep.

Paul took off a few minutes later and I watched some of his flying. Then I turned over and found a cooler place under the wing.

I didn’t hear him taxi in and stop, but he woke us again. “Hey, we have to get some watermelon. Nobody’s coming out to fly.”

“Tell you what, Paul,” I said. “You go in and get the watermelon, and I’ll let you use my knife to cut it. How’s that sound?”

A few minutes later a truck pulled out from the hangar, headed for town, and Paul was aboard. He had a fixation about that watermelon. Well, I thought as I went back to sleep, if he wants a watermelon that much, he should get his watermelon.

Half an hour later we heard Skeeter whinny hello and Paul was back, a watermelon under his arm. It was 100 degrees in the sun and he had lugged the thing all the way from town.

“Hey you guys,” he called. “Watermelon!”

It was hard to understand, I thought, munching on the cool goodness. If I was Paul, I would have let the lazy louts starve out there under the wing. At most, I might have thrown them a bit of rind. But share the first part of my watermelon with them? Never!

“I guess I better bug on out,” Paul said. “We’re not going to have many passengers, at least till late. It’s a long way back to California, and I might as well get started on it today.” He began separating his belongings from the pile of equipment, and set them neatly into his airplane. Cameras, film cases, bedroll, clothes bag, maps. “I’ll leave you guys the watermelon,” he said.

A car drove into the lane, and another.

“We have discovered a delayed-action Method C,” I said as a third car parked across the grass.

We started the Parks and Stu went over to talk to the people. First passengers were a man and his boy, and the man wore a set of goggles he had last worn in the tank corps in Africa. They said a few wind-blasted words and we were airborne, climbing toward the river up to the cool high air.

“Hey, that’s really nice,” the man said, eleven minutes later, as Stu helped him out. “Really nice. You can really see a long way from up there, can’t you?”

Stu closed the door after the next passengers and stopped by my cockpit. “You’ve got two first-timers and one’s a little scared.”

“OK.” I wondered why he had said that. Most of our passengers were up for the first time, and most were a bit apprehensive, though they didn’t often show it. These must be more worried than usual about flying in the rachety old biplane. But as soon as we were halfway through the first circle of town, they had relaxed and were asking for steep banks. It is the unknown that worries our passengers, I thought. As soon as they see what flying is like, and that it is even a little bit pretty, then it becomes known and nice, and there’s no cause for fear. Fear is just a way of thinking, a feeling. Get rid of that feeling by knowing what is true in the world, and you aren’t afraid.

Business was suddenly going strong. There were eight cars parked on the grass, and Stu was ready with two more passengers when I rolled to a stop.

Paul walked to my cockpit. “Looks like a thunderstorm west. I’ll be doing good to make Dubuque by dark,” he said. “I’m pushing it, aren’t I?”

“You’re never pushing it as long as you can control your airplane, remember,” I said. “If you don’t like the looks of things, just go down and land in a field and wait it out. You might as well stay one more night here, don’t you think, anyway?”

“Nope. Better be on my way, get back home. You’ve got four passengers waiting for you, no need me waiting around to say goodbye. I’ll get right on out.”

“OK, Paul. It’s been fun.”

Stu closed the door on the new passengers and waved that they were ready to go.

“Yeah. Been fun,” Paul said. “We should run it again next year, huh? Maybe a little longer.”

“OK. Take it easy. Fly good, and set down if the weather gives you a hard time.”

“Yeah. Put me on your postcard list.”

I nodded and pulled my goggles down, pushed the throttle forward. What a brusque goodbye, after flying together for so long.

We took off over the corn, and climbed up through the warm evening air, turning toward town, over the river. I saw the Luscombe airborne, turning my way. Paul fell into formation for a minute or so, to the delight of the passengers, each of whom aimed a camera and jotted the moment down on film.

What did it mean, that this man who had flown with us, who was part of the risks and joys and work and trials, of the understanding and misunderstanding of barnstorming, was now leaving?

Paul waved goodbye, kicked the Luscombe up into a sudden sharp breakaway and accelerated out into the west, where the sun was blocked by a giant thundercloud.

It meant, strangely enough, not that he was leaving at all, but that he was there. That if the time ever came for another test of freedom, another plan to prove that we don’t have to live any way but the way we wish, it might not have to be a lonely time. How many others like him are left in the country? I couldn’t tell if there were ten or a thousand. But I did know there was one.

“See you around, buddy,” I said. No one heard but the wind.