Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER FIVE

FIRST THING NEXT MORNING, Paul Hansen was on fire. He was all crushed up in his sleeping bag, and from the end of it, from just by his hatbrim, a veil of smoke curled up.

“PAUL! YOU’RE ON FIRE!”

He didn’t move. After a short aggravated pause, he said, “I am smoking a cigarette.”

“First thing in the morning? Before you even get up? Man, I thought you were on fire!”

“Look,” he said. “Don’t bug me about my cigarettes.”

“Sorry.”

I surveyed the room, and from my low position it looked more like some neglected trash-bin than ever. In the center of the room was a cast-iron wood-burning stove. It said Warm Morning on it, in raised iron, and its draft holes looked at me with slitted eyes. The stove did not make me feel very welcome.

Lapping all around its iron feet were our supplies and equipment. On the one table were several old aviation magazines, a tool-company calendar with some very old Peter Gow-land girl-shots, Stu’s reserve parachute, with its altimeter and stopwatch strapped on. Directly beneath was my red plastic clothes bag, zippered shut, with a hole chewed about the size of a quarter in the side… THERE WAS A HOLE IN MY CLOTHES BAG! From one crisis to another.

I sprang out of bed, grabbed the bag and zipped it open. There beneath shaving kit and Levi’s and a packet of bamboo pens were my emergency rations: a box of bittersweet chocolate and several packs of cheese and crackers. One square of chocolate had been half eaten and one cheese section of a cheese-and-crackers box had been consumed. The crackers were untouched.

The mouse. That mouse from last night, under the tool-kit. My little buddy, the one whose life I saved from Hansen’s savagery. That mouse had eaten my emergency rations!

“You little devil!” I said fiercely, through gritted teeth.

“What’s the matter?” Hansen smoked his cigarette, and didn’t turn over.

“Nothing. Mouse ate my cheese.”

There was a great burst of smoke from the far couch. “THE MOUSE? That mouse from last night that I said we’d better throw outside? And you felt sorry for him? That mouse ate your food?”

“Some cheese, and a little chocolate, yeah.”

“How’d he get at it?”

“He ate a hole through my clothes bag.”

Hansen didn’t stop laughing until quite a while later.

I drew on heavy wool socks and my boots with the survival knife sewn to the side. “Next time I see that mouse around my clothes bag,” I said, “he gets six inches of cold steel, I guarantee ya, no questions asked. Last time I stick up for any mouse. You think at least he’d eat your crazy hat, Hansen, or Stu’s toothpaste or somethin’, but my cheese! Man! Next time, baby, cold steel!”

At breakfast, we dined on Mary Lou’s French toahst for the last time.

“We’re on our way today, Mary Lou,” Paul said, “and you didn’t come out and fly with us. You sure missed a good chance. It’s pretty up there, and now you’ll never know what the sky is like, first hand.”

She smiled a dazzling smile. “It’s pretty up there,” she said, “but it’s a silly bunch that lives in it.” So that is what our enchantress thought of us. I was, in a way, hurt.

We paid our bill and said goodbye to Mary Lou and rode out to the airport in Al’s pickup.

“Think you guys could get back around this way July six-teen-seventeen?” he asked. “Firemen’s Picnic, then. Be lots of people here love to have an airplane ride. Sure like to have you back up here.”

We began packing our mountain of gear back into the airplanes. The wings of the Luscombe rocked as Paul tied his camera boxes firmly to the framework of the cabin.

“Never can tell, Al. We got no idea where we’re gonna be, then. If we’re anywhere around here, though, we’ll sure be back.”

“Glad to have you, anytime.”

It was Wednesday morning, then, when we lifted off, circling one last time over Al’s place and the Café. Al waved and we rocked our wings farewell, but Mary Lou was busy, or had no time for the silly bunch that lived in the sky. I was still sad about that.

And Rio was gone.

And spring changed to summer.