Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I WOKE UP at six-thirty in the morning, to the click of a Polaroid camera-shutter. A man was taking pictures of us sleeping under the wing.

“Mornin’,” I said. “Feel like flyin’ this mornin’?” It was more reflex than a hunger for three dollars.

“Maybe in a little while. Takin’ some pictures now. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.” I dropped my head down on my hammock-pillow and went back to sleep.

We woke up again at nine, and there was a crowd standing a discreet distance away, looking at the airplane.

One fellow looked at me strangely, and studied the name painted by the cockpit rim.

“Say,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t be the Dick Bach that writes for the flying magazines, would you?”

I sighed. Goodbye, Hull, Illinois. “Yeah. I do a little story, once in a while.”

“How do you like that. Why don’t you stand over by the cockpit, there, and I’ll get your picture.”

I stood, glad that he liked my stories, but no longer die anonymous barnstormer.

“Let’s pack up, Stu.”

Illinois in midsummer was a scenic green hazy oven, and we droned through the broiled air like a worried bee. We wandered north on the Illinois River for days, finding no profit. And then one afternoon a city flowed in from the horizon. Monmouth, Illinois. Population 10,000. Airport north.

Stu looked back at me as we circled the city and I shrugged. It was a sod field, anyway, we could say that much for it. The question was whether a city this size would be interested in barnstormers.

We’d find out, I thought. We’d work it just as if it was a little town. We landed, taxied to the gas pump and stopped the engine.

There was a row of nine airplanes parked, and a large brick hangar with an antique steam locomotive inside.

The man who drove out to unlock the pump was an old-timer who had worked at Monmouth Airport for thirty years. “I seen it when there was six, eight instructors here,” he said. “Thirty people here at one time, a whole big line of airplanes. Had another runway, then, too, out into where that cornfield is now. This is the oldest continuous-used airport in Illinois, you know. Since 1921.”

By the time he unloaded us at the restaurant, a half-mile from the airport, we had learned something about the way things were in Monmouth aviation. A glory that was past; once the stopping-place for the glittering names of flight, now the quiet resort of a few weekend pilots.

In the frosted air of the restaurant, the name “Beth” began our list of Monmouth Knowns. She was interested in the airplane, but she brought us little hope with our hamburgers.

“Summer’s the wrong time for you. All the kids from the college are gone home.” There was a long silence, and she smiled sadly for us and left us alone.

“So,” said Stu, tired. “No kiddies. Where do we go from here?”

I named some places, none of which were much more promising than Monmouth. “…and as a very last resort, we could try Muscatine.”

“Sounds too much like Mosquito.” That spiked Muscatine.

“Well, heck. Let’s just work Monmouth and see what happens. Give it a chance, you know. Might do a jump, maybe, see if we can get the people out.”

The jump was first priority. By the time we had the airplane unpacked and ready to work, it was five o’clock, the best time for crowd-attracting.

Stu jumped from 3500 feet, down into horizoriless haze, moving at meteor-speed toward the runway grass. His canopy snapped open in a great poof of white, the last of the King’s Ransom packed into the folded nylon, and now he drifted downward like a small tired cumulus cloud.

While we dived to circle him, I saw a few cars gathering, but not nearly so many as I expected from a town that size. We flew some mild aerobatics over the cornfields and landed. Stu had logged another good jump, and I taxied to find him working the cars, saying over and again how cool was the air at 3500 feet.

The people didn’t want to fly. “That thing state-inspected?” I heard one man ask, looking at the biplane.

We’re a long way from small-town flying, I thought. It sounds as if city people live in the present day, as if they live at modern speeds and expect modern guarantees for their safety. We carried two passengers by sundown.

The local pilots were very kind, and promised bigger crowds the next day. “We had a parachute meet here a month ago, and there were cars backed all the way up to the main highway,” they said. “Just takes a little while for the word to get around.”

By the time we walked into the restaurant for supper, I was having doubts all over again about Monmouth.

“Stu, what do you think about pressing on, tomorrow? This place feel right to you?”

“Two rides. That’s normal first-day, you know.”

“Yeah, but the place just doesn’t seem with it, you know? In the little towns, we’re a big thing, and people at least come out to look. Here we’re just another airplane. Nobody cares.” We ordered from Beth, who gave us a happy smile and said that she was glad to see us back.

“Might as well give the place a try,” Stu said. “We hunted a long time, remember. Some other places looked bad, too, at first.”

“OK. We’ll stay.” Another day, at least, would confirm my fears about big-city barnstorming. It just did not feel comfortable; we were out of our element, out of our time.

Stu and I slept in the airport office that night. There were no mosquitoes.

It plagued me all through the next day. We carried passengers well, until by seven o’clock we had flown eighteen rides, but the spirit of barnstorming was gone. We were just a couple of crazy guys selling airplane rides.

At seven, a man came to us as we sat under the wing.

“Hey, fellas, I wonder if you could do something a little special for me.”

“Speak special speak,” I said in archaic Air Force slang. Stu and I had been talking about Air Force life.

“I’m having a party over at my house… wonder if I could hire you to give us a little airshow. We’re just on the edge of town, right over there.”

“Doubt if you’d see much,” I said. “My minimum altitude is fifteen hundred feet above the ground, and I’d start at three thousand. Be just a little speck to you, is all.”

“That doesn’t make any difference. Could you give us a show for say… twenty-five dollars?”

“Sure thing, if you want it. But I’m not coming down less than fifteen hundred feet.”

“Fine.” He took two tens and a five-dollar bill from his wallet. “Could you be up at seven-thirty?”

“No problem. You keep your money, though. If you think it was worth it, you can stop by and give us the money tomorrow. If you don’t like it, don’t bother.”

At seven-thirty we were over the cornfields at the edge of town, and starting our first loop. By seven-forty the show was over, and we circled down over the park to watch the baseball game.

When we landed, Stu had two passengers ready to go.

“Give us a wild ride!” they said.

They got the Standard Wild Ride; steep turns, sideslips, with the wind smashing over them, dives and zooms. They were as gay and excited in the air as though the biplane was the biggest fastest roller-coaster in the world, and all of a sudden I was surprised at it. During the minutes we had been flying, I was thinking about moving out of Monmouth, and wondered where we might go next. I wasn’t seeing the ride as wild or the Parks as a roller-coaster. Fun, perhaps, in a mild sort of way, and interesting, but hardly exciting.

A revelation, that, and a warning of evil. The summer was beginning to go stale, I was taking even the strange and adventurous life of a gypsy pilot for granted, and as just another job.

I pulled the airplane up into a half-roll, which set them to clutching the leather cockpit-rim in fearful delight, and talked out loud to myself. “Hey listen, Richard! That’s the wind! Hear it through the wires, feel it on your face, beating these goggles! Wake up! This is here and now, and time for you to be alive! Snap out of it! See! Taste! Wake up!”

All at once I could hear again… the blast and concussion of the Whirlwind went from an unheard Niagara to the roar of a wild old engine again, a highspeed metronome firing dynamite with each beat of its blade.

That magnificent perfect sound… how long had it been since I had ceased to listen to it? Weeks. That sun, bright as incandescent steel in a blue-fire sky… how long since I had leaned back my head and held the taste of that sun in my mouth? I opened my eyes and looked right up into it and drank the heat of it. I took off one glove and grabbed a handful of wind, never breathed by anybody in ten billion years, and I grabbed it and snuffed it deep within me.

The people ahead of you, Richard, open your eyes! Who are they? Look at them! See! They changed at once from passengers into living people, a young man, a young woman, bright and happy and beautiful in the way that we are all beautiful when we are for a moment completely unconscious of ourselves, when we are looking out toward something that absorbs us completely.

We banked again, steeply, and they looked together down fifteen feet of brilliant lemon wings and nine hundred feet of hard transparent air and five feet of corn-plant sea and a tenth-inch of black loam, stuffed with minerals. Wings, air, corn, loam, minerals and birds and lakes and roads and fences and cows and trees and grass and flowers—every bit of it moved in a great sweeping stroke of colors, and the colors went in through the wide open eyes of these fellow-people of mine, and deep into their hearts, to surface in a smile or a laugh and the brave beautiful look of those who have not yet chosen to die.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop tasting and feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and the sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask, if you must, to protect the kid from the world, but if you let that kid disappear, buddy, you are grown up and you are dead.

The tall old wheels rumbled and thumped on earth soft as a giant petrified pillow, and the flight, the first ride for my passengers and the thousandth for me, was over. They became conscious of themselves again and said thank you that was great and paid Stu six dollars and got into their automobile and drove away. I said thank you, it’s been nice flying with you, and I was absolutely dead certain that we would all remember our flight together for a very long time.

That night, Stu and I laid out the couch cushions into islands of soft on the office floor, cast mild and pleasant wrath upon the man who never returned to pay us for our $25 air-show, and settled down with strawberry soda pop in mosquitoless air. The only light in the room came from the sun, reflected off the moon bright enough to show the colors of the biplane outside.

“Stuart Sandy MacPherson,” I said. “Who the devil are you?”

The boy’s mask of solemn quiet was more and more clearly a pure fake, for quiet solemn people do not jump from the wings of airplanes a mile in the air, or travel half-way across the country to become a barnstormer. Even Stu realized that the question was in order, and didn’t dodge it.

“Sometimes I’m not too sure who I am,” he said. “I was on the varsity tennis team, in high school, if that helps you very much. I did some mountain climbing…”

I blinked. “You mean regular mountain climbing? With the ropes and pitons and crampons and rock walls and all that? Or do you mean just hills that you can walk up?”

“The whole works. It was fun. Until I got hit on the head with a rock. Knocked me out for a while. I was lucky I was roped to the guy ahead of me.”

“You were just dangling there in space, at the end of a rope?”

“Yeah.”

“Boy.”

“Yeah. Well, then I quit mountain climbing and took up flying. Got my private license. Flying Piper Cubs.”

“Stu! Why didn’t you say you had your license? You know, my gosh! You’re supposed to tell us things like that!”

I thought, in the darkness, that he shrugged.

“I did a lot of motorcycle-riding. It’s fun, to try to be good with a machine…”

“Fantastic, kid!” The nice thing about not talking very much is that when you do talk, you can startle people so much that they listen. “Now. Look,” I said. “I’ve heard of some pretty dumb things, some people who really sold themselves down the river, but you take the cake, about. You have all these great things going for you, like a real live person, and yet there you are in Salt Lake at Dentist School. Please tell me… why?”

He set his pop bottle down with a heavy clink on the floor. “I owe it to my folks,” he said. “They’ve paid my way…”

“You owe it to your folks to be happy. Don’t you? They’ve got no right to force you into something where you aren’t happy.”

“Maybe.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s the trouble… it’s too easy to stay in the system, the way things are. If I did drop out, I’d get sucked up in the draft, and then where would I be?”

“Ah—Stu?” I said. I wanted to talk about his school, but the last words frightened me. “What’s patriotism, do you imagine? What do you think it means?”

There was the longest silence then, that I had heard all summer. The boy was trying, he was turning it over and over in his mind. And he was coming up with nothing. I lay there and listened to him think, wondering if the same emptiness was in the minds of all the other college youth around the country. If it was, the United States of America was facing some more difficult times.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t know… what… patriotism… is.”

“No wonder you’re scared of the draft, then, fella,” I snapped. “This patriotism stuff is three words: Gratitude. For. Country. You go out, climb your mountains, you drive your motorcycles; I can fly wherever I want, write what I want to write, and I can jump all over the government whenever it’s being stupid. How many guys do you think have been shot all to bits so you and I can run our lives the way we want? Hundred thousand guys? Million guys?”

Stu sat on the pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, looking across the dark room.

“So we take a year or two or five out of this fantastic freedom,” I said, “and we say, ‘Hey, country, thanks!’ “

At that moment I wasn’t talking to Stu MacPherson, but to all my poor vacant young countrymen who couldn’t understand, whining about the draft in the midst of sacred rare beautiful liberty.

I wanted to box them all up and ship them to some slave nation, and make them stay there until they were ready to fight their way back home. But if I nailed the crates down on them, I’d be destroying the very freedom I wished them to see. I had to let them whine, and pray they’d see the picture before they broke the country into jelly-blobs of self-pity.

Stu was silent. I didn’t want him to talk. I prayed, very deeply, that in the silence, he was listening.