Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER SIX

IT CAME TO US as all Midwest towns did, a clump of green trees way out in the middle of the countryside. At first it seemed trees only, and then the church steeples came in sight, and then the fringe-houses and then at last it was clear that under those trees were solid houses and potential airplane passengers.

The town lapped around two lakes and a huge grass runway. I was tempted to fly right on over it, because there were at least fifteen small hangars down there, and lights along the sides of the strip. This was getting pretty far away from the traditional hayfield of the true barnstormer.

But The Great American Flying Circus was low on funds, the strip was less than a block from town, and the cool lakes lay there and sparkled clear in the sun, inviting us. So we dropped down in, touching one-two on the grass.

The place was deserted. We taxied to the gas pit, which was a set of steel trapdoors in the grass, and shut the engines down into silence.

“What do you think?” I called to Paul as he slid out of his airplane.

“Looks good.”

“Think it’s a bit too big to work?”

“Looks fine.”

There was a small square office near the gas pit, but it was locked. “This is not my idea of a barnstormer’s hayfield.”

“Might as well be, for all the people around here.”

“They’ll be comin’ out about suppertime, like always.”

An old Buick sedan rolled out toward us from town, lurching heavily over the grass driveway to the office. It stopped, and a spare, lined man eased out, smiling.

“You want some gas, I guess.”

“Could use some, yeah.”

He stepped up on the wooden porch and unlocked the office.

“Nice field, you got here,” I said.

“Not bad, for bein’ sod.”

Bad news, I thought. When the owner doesn’t like sod, he’s looking for a concrete runway, and when he’s looking for a concrete runway, he’s looking to make money on business planes, not barnstormers.

“What were you boys doin’, tryin’ to see how close you could come without hitting?” He touched a switch that set the gas pump to humming.

I looked at Paul and thought I-told-you-so; we don’t want to have anything to do with this place.

“Just a bit of loose formation flying,” Paul said. “We do it every day.”

“Every day? What are you boys doing? You part of an air show?”

“Sort of. We’re just barnstormin’ around,” I said. “Thought we might stay here a few days, hop a few passengers, get people out to look at the airport.”

He thought about this for a while, considering implications.

“This is not my field, of course,” he said while we gassed the airplanes and added some quarts of oil to the engines. “Owned by the city and run by the club. I couldn’t make the decision by myself. I’d have to call a meeting of the directors. Could do that tonight and maybe you could come on down and talk to them.”

I couldn’t remember anything about barnstormers meeting with directors to decide whether or not to work a town. “It’s nothin’ that big,” I said. “Just us two airplanes. We do formation and a few aerobatics, and then Stu here does a little parachute jumpin’. That’s about it, and carrying passengers.”

“Still have to have the meeting, I’d think. How much do you charge?”

“Charge nothin’. It’s all free,” I said, reeling the gas hose into the pit. “All we’re tryin’ to do is make gas and oil and hamburgers on the passenger rides, three dollars a throw.”

Somehow I got the idea that the town had been hurt in the past by a troupe of roving sky gypsies. It was a completely different meeting than the normal cheer we had come to expect at smaller towns.

“Joe Wright’s the name.”

We introduced ourselves around, and Joe got on the phone and called a few of the directors of the Palmyra Flying Club. When he was done, he said, “We’ll be getting together tonight; like to have you come on down and talk. Meanwhile, I guess you’d like to get something to eat. Place is just down the way. Give you a ride, if you want, or there’s a courtesy car.

I would rather have walked, but Joe insisted and we piled into his Buick and drove. He knew the town well, and gave us a pretty little tour of it on the way to the café. Palmyra was blessed with beautiful grass places; a millpond that was still as a lily-pad and green-reflecting quiet like millponds should be; dirt roads through the country, arched overhead by tall curving trees, and quiet back streets with timeless lapstrake and stained glass and oval strawberry-glass front doors.

Every day’s barnstorming made the fact a little clearer… the only place where time moves is in the cities.

By the time we arrived at the D&M Truck Stop Café, we were well appraised of the town, whose primary industry was a foundry sheltered back in the trees; and of Joe Wright, who was a kind-thinking volunteer airport-operator. He dropped us at the door and left to do some more calling and meeting-arranging.

“I don’t like it, Paul,” I said when we had ordered. “Why should we bother with a place if it’s gonna be no fun? We’re free agents, remember… go anywhere we want to. There’s eight thousand other places than here.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” he said. “What’s the matter with going to their little meeting? We just go there and act nice and they’ll say fine. Then we don’t have any problems and everybody knows we’re good guys.”

“But if we go to the meeting we hurt ourselves, don’t you see? We came out here to get away from committees and meetings, and to see if we could find real people, you know, in the little towns. Just being greasy old barnstormers, free in the air, goin’ where we please and when we please.”

“Now look,” Paul said. “This is a good place, right?”

“Wrong. Too many airplanes here.”

“It’s close in to town, it has lakes, it has people, OK?”

“Well…”

We left it at that, though I still wanted to leave and Paul still wanted to stay. Stu didn’t want to take sides, but I thought he leaned to the staying side.

When we walked back to the airplanes, we found a few cars parked, and a few Palmyrans looking into the cockpits. Stu unrolled the FLY $3 FLY signs and we went to work.

“PALMYRA FROM THE AIR, FOLKS! PRETTIEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE WORLD! WHO’S THE FIRST TO FLY?” I walked toward the parked cars when the cockpit-watchers said they were just browsing. “Are you ready for an airplane ride, sir?”

“Heh-heh-heh-heh.” That was the only answer I got, and it very clearly said you poor con man, do you really think I’m stupid enough to go up in that old crate?

The quality of that laugh stopped me cold, and I turned abruptly away.

What a crushing difference between this place and the other little places where we had been so welcome. If our search is for the real people and the true people of America, then we should get out of here now.

“Can you take me for a ride?” A man walking boldly from another car changed my attitude at once.

“Love to,” I said. “Stu! Passenger! Let’s go!”

Stu trotted over and helped the man into the front cockpit while I strapped into the rear one. I was very much at home in this little office, with the board of familiar dials and levers around me, and I was happy there. Stu began cranking the inertia-starter handcrank, the device recognized time and again by farm folk as a “cream separator.” Straining at the handle, turning it slowly at first, throwing heavy effort into the steel mass of the geared flywheel inside the cowl, Stu drained pure energy from his heart into the starter. At last, starter flywheel screaming, Stu fell away and called, “CLEAR!” I pulled the starter-engage handle and the propeller jerked around. But it turned for only ten seconds. The propeller slowed, and stopped. The engine didn’t fire one single time.

What’s wrong, I thought. This thing starts every time; it has never missed starting! Stu looked at me in a glazed sort of shock, that all his torture on the crank had gone for nothing.

I was just shaking my head, to tell him I couldn’t understand why the engine didn’t fire, when I found the trouble. I hadn’t turned the switch on. I was so familiar with the cockpit that I had expected the switches and levers to work by themselves.

“Stu… ah… hate to say this… but… I forgot to turn the switch on sorry that sure was a silly thing to do let’s crank her one more time OK?”

He closed his eyes, imploring heaven to destroy me, and when that didn’t work, he made to throw the crank at my head. But he caught himself in time and with the air of a church martyr, inserted the handcrank once again and began to wind it.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Stu,” I said, sitting back in my comfortable cockpit. “I owe you fifty cents for forgetting.”

He didn’t answer, as he had not the strength to talk. The second time I pulled the engage handle the engine roared awake at once, and the jumper looked at me as one looks at a poor dumb beast in a cage. I taxied quickly away and was airborne a moment later with my passenger. The biplane fell into a pattern for Palmyra at once, with a circling detour to look at one of the lakes and to climb a little higher, for there was no emergency landing field anywhere east of town.

The pattern took ten minutes exactly. Touching down, the biplane swerved for a second as I was thinking about what a pretty grass runway this was. Wake up! she was telling me. Every landing, every takeoff is different, every one! And don’t you forget it!

I did quick penance by stomping on a rudder pedal to stop the swerve.

As we taxied in, Paul was taxiing out in the Luscombe with a passenger of his own. My spirits brightened a little. Maybe there was hope for Palmyra, after all.

But that was the end of it for the afternoon. We had watchers, but no more passengers.

Stu collected my rider’s money, and walked to the cockpit. “I can’t do anything with ’em,” he said over the engine-roar. “If they stop and get out of their cars, we get passengers. But if they stay in the cars, they’re watchers, and they just aren’t interested in flying.”

It was hard to believe that we could have all those cars and no more riders, but there it was. The watchers all knew each other, and soon a lively conversation was going on. And the Directors arrived to size us up on their own.

Paul landed, taxied in, and lacking more passengers, shut his engine down into silence. A fragment of talk drifted to us. “…he was right over my house!”

“He was right over everybody’s house. Palmyra isn’t that big.”

“…who told you we were having a meeting tonight?”

“M’wife. Somebody called her and got her all shook up…”

Joe Wright came over and introduced us to some of the directors, and we told our story again. I was getting tired of this becoming such a big thing. Why couldn’t they tell us right out that we were welcome or not? Just a simple thing like a couple of barnstormers.

“You have any schedule for your shows?” one man asked.

“No schedule. We fly when we please.”

“Your airplanes are insured, of course; how much would that be?”

“The insurance on these airplanes is what we know about flying,” I said, and I wanted to add, “fella!” sarcastically. “There is not one cent of any other kind of insurance; no property damage, no liability.” Insurance, I wanted to say, is not a signed scrap of paper. Insurance is knowing within us about the sky and the wind, and the touch of the machines that we fly. If we didn’t believe in ourselves, or know our airplanes, then there was no signature, no amount of money in the world that could make us secure, or make our passengers safe. But I simply said, again, “…not one penny of insurance.”

“Well,” he paused, startled. “We wouldn’t want to say that you’re not welcome… this is a public field…”

I smiled, and hoped that Paul had learned his lesson. “Where’s the map?” I asked him fiercely.

He had a there-there tone as I stalked to the biplane. “Now look. It’s dark almost, and they’re going to have their meeting, and we can’t go anywhere now so we might as well stay the night and move on tomorrow morning.”

“We no more belong here than we belong barnstorming at Kennedy International, man. We…”

“No, just listen,” he said. “They have a flight breakfast coming up here Sunday. They promised to have a Cessna 180 in here, carrying passengers. Little while ago I heard somebody say that the 180 cancelled out, so they have no one to carry passengers. And here we come. I think after this meeting they’re having now, they’re going to want us to stay. They’re in a bind, and we can help them.”

“Shame on ya, Paul. By Sunday we’ll be in Indiana. Sunday is four days away! And the last thing I want to do is help them out at their flight breakfast. I tell you, we don’t belong here! All they want around here is the little tricycle-gear modern airplanes that you drive like a car. Man, I want to be an airplane pilot! What the heck’s the matter with you, anyway?”

I took a grease rag and began wiping down the engine cowl in the dark. If the biplane had lights I would have flown away that minute.

After a while, the meeting in the office broke up and everyone was hearty and kind to us. I was immediately suspicious.

“Think you boys could stay over till Sunday?” a voice said, out of a crowd of directors. “We’re having a little flight breakfast then, be hundreds of airplanes here, thousands of people. You stand to make a lot of money.”

I had to laugh. So this is what it felt like to be judged by our vagabond appearance. For just a moment, I was sorry for these people.

“Why don’t you stay in the office tonight, boys?” another voice said, and then in a lower tone to someone close by, “We’ll take inventory of the oil in there.”

I didn’t catch the implication of the last sotto voce, but Paul did, at once. “Did you hear that?” he said, stunned. “Did you hear that?”

“I think so. What?”

“They’re going to count the oil cans before they trust us in the office. They’re going to count the oil cans!”

I replied to whoever had offered the office. “No thanks. We’ll sleep out.”

“Love to have you stay in the office, really,” came the voice again.

“No,” Paul said. “We wouldn’t be safe there with all your oil cans. You wouldn’t want to trust us around all that expensive oil.”

I laughed again, in the dark. Hansen, our champion of Palmyra and its people, was furious now at their slur to his honesty.

“I leave fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of cameras unlocked in my plane while we go and eat, trusting these guys, and they think we’re going to steal a can of oil!”

Stu stood quietly by, listening, and said not a word. It was full dark over supper at the D&M before Paul was cool again.

“We’re trying to find an ideal world,” he said to Joe Wright, who was brave enough to join us. “All of us have lived in the other world, the cutthroat, cheap world, where the only thing that matters is the almighty buck. Where people don’t even know what money means. And we’ve had enough of that, so we’re out here living in our ideal world, where it’s all simple. For three bucks we sell something priceless, and with that we get our food and gas so we can go on.” Paul forgot his fried chicken, he was talking so hard to the Palmyran.

Why are we working on Joe, why are we justifying ourselves to him? I thought. Aren’t we sure, ourselves? Maybe we’re just so sure that we want to turn a few converts our way.

Our missionary effort, however, was wasted on Joe, who gave little sign that there was anything new or meaningful in what we said.

Stu did nothing but eat his supper. I wondered about the person within the boy, what he thought, what he cared about. I would liked to have met him, but for now, he was listening… listening… not saying a word, not offering a single thought to the roar of ideas going on about him. Well, I thought, he’s a good jumper and he’s thinking. There’s not much more we could ask.

“I’ll drive you back out to the office, if you want,” Joe said.

“Thanks, Joe,” Paul said. “We’ll take you up on that, but we’re not going to stay in that office. We’ll sleep under the wing. If somebody counted the oil wrong, and then counted it right, after we were gone, you see, we’d automatically be thieves. It’s better for us to have that place all locked up and us sleeping out under the wing.”

In half an hour, the biplane was a huge silent arrangement of black over our sleeping bags and above the black was the bright mist of the Milky Way.

“Center of the galaxy,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Milky way. That’s the center of the galaxy.”

“It makes you feel kind of small, doesn’t it,” Paul said.

“Used to. Not so much any more. Guess I’m bigger now.” I chewed a grass stem. “What do you think now? We gonna make money here or not?”

“We’ll just have to wait it out.”

“I think it’s going to work all right,” I said, an optimist under the stars. “Can’t imagine anybody not coming out to see old airplanes, even in this town.”

I watched the galaxy, with its northern cross like a big kite in a wind of stars, sparkling on and off. The grass was soft beneath me, my boots made a firm leathery pillow.

“We’ll find out tomorrow.” It fell silent under the wing, and the cool wind moaned low in the wires above us, between the biplane’s wings.

Tomorrow dawned in fog, and I woke to the slow cannon-boom of fog-drops falling from the top wing down onto the drum-fabric of the bottom one. Stu was awake, quietly rolling a new drift-streamer out of twenty yards of crepe paper. Paul was asleep, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

“Hey, Paul. You awake?”

No answer.

“HEY PAUL! YOU STILL ASLEEP?”

“Mmm.” He moved an inch.

“I guess you’re still asleep.”

“Mm.”

“Well, you go ahead and sleep, we won’t be flyin’ for a while.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Fog.”

The hat was raised by a hand snaking out of the green sleeping bag. “Mm. Fog. Up off the lakes.”

“Yeah. Burn off by ten o’clock. Betcha nickel.” There was no answer. I tried licking fog from some larger grassblades, but it wasn’t much of a thirst-quencher. I rearranged my boot-pillows and tried for a bit more sleep.

Paul came suddenly awake. “Ar! My shirt’s all wet! It’s soaking wet!”

“Man. City pilots. If I wanted to get my shirt just as wet as I could, I’d lay it out on the wing like you did. You’re supposed to put your shirt under your sleepin’ bag.”

I slid out of my bag and into the dry warm shirt that I had slept on and mashed all kinds of wrinkles into. “Nothing like a nice dry shirt, of a mornin’.”

“Ha, ha.”

I pulled the cover from the cockpits and unloaded the toolkit and oil cans and FLY $3 FLY sign from the front cockpit. I ragged down the windshields, pulled the propeller through a few times, and in general made ready hopefully for a busy day of barnstorming. The fog was lifting already.

As he finished breakfast, Stu sat back in his chair and stretched his legs. “Shall we try a day jump, see what happens?”

“If you want,” Paul said. “Better check with the Leader first.” He nodded at me.

“What do you mean? I am always winding up Leader! I’m no leader! No leader! I quit! As Leader, I resign!”

We decided together, then, that it would be good to try a midday jump, to see if anyone was about with time to come and fly.

“Let’s not waste any time with freefall stuff,” Paul said, “nobody will see you. How about a clear-and-pull from three thousand?”

Stu did not buy this idea. “Rather have time to stabilize a bit. Thirty-five hundred’s OK.”

“Sounds fine,” said Paul.

“If you don’t pull, Stu, or your chute doesn’t open,” I said, “we’ll just fly right on to the next town.”

“I’m sure it won’t make any difference to me,” he answered, with a rare smile.

By noon we were airborne, climbing in formation toward the top of the sky. Stu sat in the open door on the right side of Paul’s airplane, looking downward, his drift streamer in his hand. As we came near the jump altitude, I broke away and flew some loops and rolls and then clawed my way back up to altitude. There wasn’t a person moving anywhere in the streets below. The Luscombe was level on course over the airport, and the long crepe streamer plummeted overboard, slowed to the speed of an open parachute and twisted down toward the grass. It landed several hundred yards west of the target, in the wind.

Way up in Paul’s airplane, high over my head, Stu was picking his jump point to correct for the wind, to miss the trees and wires. I stopped cavorting and circled beneath the little sportplane, which by now had nearly reached jump altitude. Paul turned his airplane onto the jump run, into the wind, and we all waited. The Luscombe droned along at a walk; only if I watched carefully could I tell that it was moving at all. And then Stu MacPherson jumped.

A tiny black speck, moving instantly at high speed and straight down, his body turned left, stabilized, turned right, tumbled end over end. I blinked again at the speed of it. In seconds he was no longer a black speck, but a man streaking down through the air, a falcon striking.

Time stopped. Our airplanes were frozen in the air, the sound and the wind were still. The only motion was that sizzling speed of the man whom I last saw crushing himself into the tiny right seat of the Luscombe, and he was moving at least 150 miles per hour toward the flat unmoving earth. In the silence, I could hear him fall.

Stu was still above me when he brought both arms in close to his body, flung them out again, and the long bright rocket of a parachute streamed from his back. It didn’t slow him a bit. The narrow line of the chute simply stopped in the air as the man went streaking on down. Then it caught him. All in an instant the chute burst wide open, closed again, and opened to a soft thistle-fluff under which the man floated, still above me.

Time fell back into gear at once, and Paul and I were airplanes flashing again through the sky, the earth was round and warm, and the only sound was the roar of wind and engine. The slowest thing in sight was the orange-and-white canopy drifting down.

Paul arrived in the Luscombe, at high speed, and we circled the open chute, one of us on each side of our jumper. He waved, spun his canopy around, slipped heavily into the wind, which was stronger than he had bargained for. He slipped again, pulling down hard on the risers and almost collapsing one side of his canopy.

All to no avail. We held our altitude at 500 feet while Stu went on down to smash into a tall field of rye that bordered the runway. It looked soft until the instant he crashed into the ground, and then it looked very hard indeed.

I circled and dived to make one low pass over his head, then followed Paul in to land. I taxied to the edge of the rye and got out of the cockpit, expecting to see the jumper at any moment. He didn’t appear. I got out of the airplane and walked into the shoulder-high grass, the sound of the engine fading away behind me. “STU?”

No answer. I tried to remember if I had seen him standing up and waving OK after he landed. I couldn’t remember.

“STU!”

There was no answer.