Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS ALL SIMPLE AND free and a very good life. The barnstorming pilots, back in the twenties, just cranked their Jennies into the air and they flew to any little town and they landed. And then they took passengers up for joy-rides and they earned great bales of money. What free men, the barnstormers! What a pure life that must have been.

These same sky gypsies, full of years, had closed their eyes and told me of a sun fresh and cool and yellow like I had never seen, with grass so green it sparkled under the wheels; a sky blue and pure like skies never come, anymore, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air. A land there was, in the old days, where a man could go in freedom, flying where he wanted to fly, and when; answering to no authority but his own.

I had asked questions and I had listened carefully to the old pilots, and way in the back of my mind I wondered if a man might be able to do the same thing today, out in the great calm Midwest America.

“On our own, kid,” I heard. “Aw, it used to be great. Weekdays we’d sleep late, and work on the airplanes till supper-time, then we’d carry folks up to sunset and beyond. Special times, pshaw, a thousand-dollar day was nothin’. Weekends we’d start flyin’ at sunup and we wouldn’t stop till midnight. Lines of people waitin’ to fly, lines of ’em. Great life, kid. Used to get up in the morning… we’d sew a couple blankets together, sleep under the wing… get up and say, ‘Freddie, where we goin’ today?’ And Freddie… he’s dead now; a fine pilot, but he never came back from the war… and Freddie’d say, ‘Where’s the wind?’

“‘Comin’ out of the west,’ I’d say. ‘Then we go east,’ Freddie’d say, and we’d crank up the old Hisso Standard and throw in all our junk and off we’d go, headin’ with the wind and savin’ gas.

“‘Course the times got rough, after a while. There was the Crash in ’29, and the folks didn’t have much money to fly. We were down to fifty cents a ride where we had been five dollars and ten dollars. Couldn’t even buy gas. Sometimes, two fellas workin’, we’d drain gas out of one plane to keep the other flyin’. Then the Air-Mail came along and after that the airlines started up, needin’ pilots. But for a while there, while it lasted, it was a good life. Oh, ’21 to ’29… it was pretty good. First thing out, when you’d land, you’d get two boys out, and a dog. First thing, before anybody…” Eyes were closed again, remembering.

And I had wondered. Maybe those good old days aren’t gone. Maybe they’re still waiting now, out over the horizon. If I could find a few other pilots, a few other old planes. Maybe we could find those days, that clear clear air, that freedom. If I could prove that a man does have a choice, that he can choose his own world and his own time to live in, I could show that highspeed steel and blind computers and city riots are only one side of a picture of living… a side we don’t have to choose unless we want to. I could prove that America isn’t all really so changed and different, at heart. That beneath the surface of the headline, Americans are still a calm and brave and beautiful people.

When my vague little dream was known, a few folk of differing opinion rushed to stamp it to death. Time and again I heard that this was not just a chancy impractical quest, but impossible, without hope of success. The good old days are gone… why, everybody knows that! Oh, maybe it used to be a slow and friendly place, this country, but nowadays people will sue a stranger—and like as not a friend—at the drop of a hat. It’s just the way people are, now. You go landing in a farmer’s hay field and he’ll throw you in jail for trespassing, take your airplane for damages to his land and testify that you threatened the lives of his family when you flew over the barn.

People today, they said, demand the best in comfort and safety. You can’t pay them to go up in a forty-year-old biplane all open-cockpit with wind and oil lashing back all over them… and you expect them to pay you for the pain of all that? There wouldn’t be an insurance company—Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t cover a thing like that, for a cent less than a thousand dollars a week. Barnstorming, indeed! Keep your feet on the ground, friend, these are the 1960’s!

“What do you think about a jump?” Stu asked, and snapped me back to afternoon Rio.

“Getting a bit late,” I said, and the gypsy pilot and doom voices faded. “But, heck, a good calm day for it. Let’s give it a try.”

Stu was ready in a minute, tall and serious, shrugging into his main chute harness, snapping the reserve parachute across his chest, tossing his helmet into the front seat, making ready for his part of the quest. A bulky clumsy deep-sea diver, all buckles and nylon web over a bright yellow one-piece jumpsuit, he pulled himself into the forward cockpit and closed the little door.

“Allrighty,” he said, “let’s go.”

I had a hard time believing that this lad, filled with inner fires, had chosen to study dentistry. Dentistry! Somehow we had to convince him that there was more to life than the makeshift security of a dentist’s office.

In a moment, as we blasted off the ground and into the air, I was all of a sudden singing Rio Rita, making it Rye-o Rita. I knew only a part of the first line of the song, and it went over and over as we climbed to altitude.

Stu looked overboard with a strange faint smile, thinking about something way off in the distance.

Rita… Rye-o Ritah… noth… thing… sweetah… Rita… Oh-Rita. I had to imagine all the saxophones and cymbal-clashes over the thunder of the engine.

If I were Stu, I wouldn’t be smiling. I’d be thinking about that ground down there, waiting for me.

At 2500 feet, we swung around into the wind, and flew directly above the airport. Rye-o Ritah… la… dee… deedah… deedah… oh Ritah… My-baby-an’-me-o, Ritah…

Stu came back from whatever far land it was he saw, and peered down over the side of his cockpit. Then, looking, he sat straight up and carefully dropped a bright roll of crepe paper overboard. It just missed the tail, unfurled into a long yellow-red-yellow streak of color and snaked straight down. I circled, climbing, and Stu was intent, watching the color. When it hit the ground, he nodded and smiled briefly back at me. We turned back on course for the airport, level at 4500 feet. I shuddered at the thought of actually jumping out of an airplane. It was a very long way down.

Stu opened his cockpit door while I slowed the biplane to ease the windblast for him. It was an odd feeling, to watch my front-seat passenger climb out onto the wing and make ready to get off while we were a mile in the air. He was going to go through with it, and I was afraid for him. There is a gigantic difference between standing on the ground talking glibly about parachute-jumping, and the fact itself, when one is standing on the wing, fighting the wind, looking down through empty empty air at the tiny little trees and houses and filaments of roads laid flat on the ground.

But Stu was all business now. He stood on the rubber mat of the wing root, facing the tail of the airplane, watching for his target to slide into view. He held onto a wing-strut with one hand, the edge of my cockpit with the other. If anything, he was enjoying the moment.

Then he saw what he wanted to see; the center of the grass runway, and the windsock, barely visible in smallness. He leaned toward me. “GOIN’ DOWN!” he said. And then, as simply as that, he vanished.

On the wing root, where he had been standing, was nothing. One instant there, talking, next instant gone. I wondered for a second whether he had ever been in the airplane at all.

I looked down over the side and saw him, a tiny figure, arms outstretched, falling straight down toward the ground. But it was more than falling. It was much faster than falling. He blurred down, fired from a cannon, right at the ground.

I waited for a long time as he changed from a tiny cross into a round speck. No parachute opened. It was not a good feeling, to wait for that chute. After an agonizing long while I knew that it was not going to open at all.

The very first jump of our two-plane circus and his parachute failed. I felt a little bit cold. His body might be that leaf-shaped dot there by the grove of trees that bordered the the airport, or the one by the hangars. Darn. We had lost our jumper.

I didn’t feel sad for Stu; he knew what he was gambling when he began parachute jumping. But just a second ago he had been standing right there on the wing, and now there was nothing.

His main chute must have failed and he didn’t get the reserve open in time. I pulled back the throttle and spiraled down, watching the place where he had disappeared. I was surprised not be to shocked or remorseful. It was just a shame that it had happened this way, so early in the summer. So much for the dentistry.

In that instant, a parachute snapped open, way down below me. It came as quickly as Stu had gone from the wing, a sudden orange-white mushroom floating softly in the air, drifting very gently with the wind.

He was alive! Something had happened. At the last instant he finally wrenched the reserve chute into the wind, with one second left he had untangled from death, had pulled the rip-cord, had lived. Any moment now he would be touching down with a wild terrible story to tell, and a word that he would never jump again.

But the fragile colored mushroom stayed long in the air, drifting.

We dived down toward it, the biplane and I, wires singing loud, and the closer we came to the parachute, the higher it was from the ground. We eased out of the dive at 1500 feet and circled a little man dangling by strings under a great pulsing dome of nylon.

He had altitude to spare. There never had been any trouble, there had never been any danger at all!

The figure swinging beneath the nylon waved across to me, and I rocked my wings in reply, grateful, puzzled that he should be alive.

And as we circled him, it wasn’t we that turned, but his parachute, spinning around and around the horizon. A strange dizzy feeling.

The angle, of course! That’s how he could be so high in the air now, when I was so sure he had hit the ground… the angle that I watched him from. I had been looking right down on top of him, and his only background was the wide earth all around. His death was an illusion.

He pulled one of the suspension lines and the canopy twisted swiftly around, one turn left, one turn right. He controlled the direction of the parachute at will; he was at home in his element.

It was hard to believe that this courageous parachute artist was the same softspoken boy that had shyly joined The Great American a week ago when it opened in Prairie du Chien. I thought of a maxim learned in twelve years’ flying: Not what a man says, that matters, or how he says it, but what he does and how he does it.

On the ground, children popped like munchkins from the grass, and they converged on Stu’s target.

I circled the chute until it was 200 feet above the ground, then held my altitude while the mushroom went on down. Stu swung his feet up and down a few times, last-minute calisthenics before his landing.

He was one moment drifting peacefully on the gentle air, and the next instant the ground rose up and hit him hard. He fell, rolled, and at once was on his feet again as the wide soft dome lost its perfect shape and flapped down around him, a great wounded monster of the air.

The monster-picture deflated with the parachute and became just a big colored rag on the ground, unmoving, and Stu was Stu in a yellow jump suit, waving OK. The children closed in on him.

When the biplane and I circled to land, I found that we had problems. The Whirlwind wasn’t responding to its throttle. Throttle forward, nothing happened. A little farther forward and it cut back in with a sudden roar of power. Throttle back and it roared on; full back, and it died away unnaturally. Something wrong with the throttle linkage, probably. Not a major problem, but there could be no passenger flying till it was fixed.

We came down rather unevenly to land, coasted over the hill and shut down the engine. Al, of AL’S SINCLAIR SERVICE, walked over.

“Hey, that was nice! There’s quite a few folks here want to fly the two-winger. You can take ’em up this afternoon, can’t you?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “We like to end the day with the parachute jump… leave ’em with something nice to watch. We’ll sure be here tomorrow, though, and love to have ’em come back.”

What a strange thing to find myself saying. If that was our policy, I had just made it up. I would have been glad to fly passengers till sunset, but I couldn’t do it with the throttle linkage as it was and it would not do to have them see that their airplane had to be repaired after every little flight around the airport.

Stu came in from the target, and the biplane captured quite a number of his young admirers. I stood near the airplane and tried to keep them from stepping through the fabric of the lower wings whenever they climbed up to look in the cockpits.

Most of the grown-ups stayed in their cars, watching, but a few came closer to look at the aircraft, to talk with Paul polishing the Luscombe, and with me, shepherding children.

“I was at the little league game when you guys flew over,” a man said. “My boy was going crazy; he didn’t know whether to look down at the game or up at the planes, so finally he sat on the roof of the car, where he could see both.”

“Your jumper… he’s a pretty young guy, isn’t he? Couldn’t make me jump out of an airplane for all the money in the world.”

“This all you do for a living, fly around places? You got a wife or anything?”

Of course we had wives, of course we had families just as involved in this adventure as we, but that wasn’t something we thought people would want to hear. Barnstormers can only be carefree, footloose, fun-loving bright colorful people from another time. Who ever heard of a married sky gypsy? Who could imagine a barnstormer settled in a house? Our image demanded that we shrug the question aside and become the picture of gay and happy comrades, without a thought for the morrow. If we were to be shackled at all that summer, it would be by the image of freedom, and we tried desperately to live up to it.

So we answered with a question: “Wife? Can you imagine any woman let her husband go flyin’ around the country in planes like these?” And we had lived a little more closely to our image.

Rio was changed by our arrival. Population 776, with a tenth of the town on the airport the evening after we arrived. And the biplane was grounded.

The sun was down, the crowd slowly disappeared into the dark and at last we were left alone with Al.

“You guys are the best thing that happened to this airport,” he said quietly, looking toward his airplane in its hangar. He didn’t have to speak loudly to be heard in the Wisconsin evening. “Lots of people think about us flying our Cessnas, they’re not sure we’re safe. Then they come out here and see you throw those airplanes around like crazymen and jump off the wings and all of a sudden they think we’re really safe.!”

“We’re glad we can help you out,” Paul said dryly.

The tree-frogs set in to chirping.

“If you want, you guys can stay in the office here. Give you a key. Not the best, maybe, but it beats sleepin’ out in the rain, if it rains.”

We agreed, and dragged our mountain of belongings in to carpet the office floor in a jagged layer of parachutes, boots, bedrolls, survival kits, ropes, and toolbags.

“Still don’t see how we get all this stuff into the airplanes,” Paul said, as he set down the last of his camera boxes.

“If you guys want a ride in town,” Al said, “I’m goin’ in; be glad to take you.”

We accepted the offer at once, and when the airplanes were covered and tied, we leaped into the back of the Sinclair pickup truck. On the way, wind beating down over us, we divided up our income for the day. Two passengers at $3 each.

“It’s kind of good,” Stu said, “that all the airplanes from Prairie didn’t stay. By the time you cut six dollars ten ways, there wouldn’t be much left.”

“They could have flown those other passengers, though,” I said.

“I’m not worried,” Paul offered. “I have a feeling that we’re going to do pretty well, just by ourselves. And we made enough money for dinner tonight… that’s all that matters.”

The truck rolled to a stop at the Sinclair station, and Al pointed down the block to the A & W root-beer stand. “They’re the last ones open and I think they close at ten. See you tomorrow out at the airport, OK?”

Al disappeared into his dark service station and we walked to the root-beer stand. I wished for once that I could turn off the barnstormer image, for we were watched as closely as slow-motion tennis balls by the drive-in customers of the Rio A&W.

“You’re the fellows with the airplanes, aren’t you?” The waitress who set our wooden picnic table was awed, and I wanted to tell her to forget it, to settle down and pretend that we were just customers. I ordered a bunch of hot dogs and root beer, following the lead of Paul and Stu.

“It’s going to work,” Paul said. “We could have carried twenty passengers tonight, if you weren’t so afraid of working on your airplane for a few minutes. We could have done well. And we just got here! Five hours ago we didn’t even know there was such a place as Rio, Wisconsin! We’re going to make a fortune.”

“Maybe so, Paul.” As Leader for the day, I wasn’t so sure.

Half an hour later we walked into the office and snapped on the light, blinding ourselves, destroying the night.

There were two couches in the office, which Paul and I claimed at once for our beds, pulling rank as the senior members of The Great American. We gave Stu the pillows from the couches.

“How many passengers are we going to carry tomorrow?” Stu asked, undisturbed by his low status. “Shall we have a little bet?”

Paul figured we would carry 86. Stu guessed 101. I laughed them both to scorn and said that the proper number was 54. We were all wrong, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.

We snapped out the lights and went to sleep.