Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER EIGHT

WE DRAGGED THE AIRPLANE, all limp-winged, into the lee of a corrugated tin hangar, and barnstorming came to a sudden halt. The Great American Flying Circus was out of business again.

Not counting the bent struts and broken landing gear fitting, two other gear fittings had begun to tear away, a brake arm had been ripped off, the top of the cowl was bent, the right shock absorbers were broken, the left aileron fittings were twisted so that the control stick was jammed hard.

But the hangar next to us was owned by one Stan Gerlach, and this was a very special kind of miracle. Stan Gerlach had been owning and flying airplanes since 1932, and he kept spare bits and pieces of every plane he’d owned since then.

“Look, you guys,” he said that afternoon, “I got three hangars here, and in this one I think I got some old struts off a Travelair I used to have. You’re free to take anything you find in here can get you flying again.”

He lifted a wide tin door. “Over here are the struts, and some wheels and junk…” He banged and screeched his way into a waist-high stack of metal, pulling out old welded airplane parts. “This might do for something… and this…”

Struts were our biggest problem, since it would take weeks to send out for streamlined steel tubing and make up new pieces for the biplane. And the blue-painted steel that he piled on the floor looked almost like what we were looking for. On impulse I took one and measured it against the good interplane strut at the right wing of the Parks. It was a sixteenth of an inch longer.

“Stan! This thing’s a perfect fit! Perfect! She’ll drop right in there!”

“Will it? That’s fine. Why don’t you just take that, then, and looksee if there’s anything else here you can use.”

My hope came flooding back. This was beyond any coincidence. The odds against our breaking the biplane in a random little town that just happened to be home to a man with the forty-year-old parts to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the breaking happened; the odds that we’d push the airplane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the parts we needed—the odds were so high that “coincidence” was a foolish answer. I waited eagerly to see how the rest of the problem would be solved.

“You’re gonna need to pick this airplane up, somehow,” Stan said, “get the weight off the wheels while you weld those fittings. I got a big A-frame here, we can set up.” He clanked around some more in the back of his hangar and came out dragging a 15-foot length of steel pipe. “It’s all back in there; might as well bring it out now. It all fits together.”

In ten minutes we had assembled the pipe into a high overhead beam, from which we could hang a winch to lift the whole front half of the airplane. All we lacked was the winch.

“Think I got a block and tackle down at the barn… sure I do. You want to go down and pick it up?”

I rode along with Stan to his barn, two miles out of Palmyra. “I live for my airplanes,” he said as he drove. “I don’t know… I really get a kick out of airplanes. Don’t know what I’ll do when I flunk my physical… go on flying anyway, I guess.”

“Stan, you don’t know… you don’t know how much I thank you.”

“Heck. Those struts might as well help you as set out in the hangar. I advertise a lot of this stuff, and sell a lot to guys who need it. Any struts there you can have, but they’d be fifty bucks to a jockey that would just turn around and resell ’em. I got some welding tanks, too, and a torch, and a lot of other stuff there in the hangar that you might be able to use.”

We turned off the highway and parked by the side of an old flake-painted red barn. From one rafter hung a block and tackle.

“Thought it might be here,” he said.

We took it down, put it in the back of the truck and drove back to the airstrip. We stopped at the airplane, and in the last of the day’s sunlight fastened the block to the A-frame.

“Hey, you guys,” Stan said, “I got to get goin’. There’s a trouble light here in the hangar and an extension cord somewhere, and a table and whatever else you can use. Just lock the place up when you leave, OK?”

“OK, Stan. Thanks.”

“Glad to help.”

We went to work removing the bent struts. When they came away, the wings sagged more than ever and we propped the lower wingtips with sawhorses. By dark, we had the aileron fittings straightened again and the cowl hammered smooth.

After a while we knocked off work and went to supper, locking Stan’s hangar behind us.

“Well, Paul, I have to say you sure beat Magnaflux. ‘If there’s a weak place anywhere in your airplane, folks, Hansen’s Testing Service will find it and break it up for you.’ “

“No,” Paul said. “I just touched down, you know, and I said, Oh, boy, I got it down!’ and ka-pow! You know the first thing I thought? Your wife. ‘What will Bette think?’ First thing.”

“I’ll call her. Tell her you were thinking of her. ‘Bette, Paul was thinking about you today while he was tearing the airplane all up.’ “

We ate in silence for a while, then Paul brightened. “We made some money today. Hey, treasurer. How much money did we make today?”

Stu put down his fork and pulled out his wallet. “Six dollars.”

“But there’s some Great American money comes off the top,” Paul said. “I paid out the quarter to the boys who found the drift marker.”

“And I bought the crepe paper,” Stu said. “That was sixty cents.”

“And I got the oil,” I said. “This is gonna be interesting.”

Stu paid us our two dollars each, then I put in a claim for their share of the oil money, seventy-five cents each. But I owed Paul eight and a third cents for my share of the wind-drift recovery fee and I owed Stu twenty cents for the crepe paper. So Stu paid eight cents to Paul, deducted the twenty cents I owed him from his bill to me, and handed me fifty-five cents. Paul took my eight cents off his bill and owed me sixty-seven cents. But he didn’t have the change, so he gave me fifty cents and two dimes and I gave him two pennies. Tossed ’em into his coffee saucer, is what I did, clinking.

We sat at the table with our little piles of coins, and I said, “We all square? Speak now or forever hold…”

“You owe me fifty cents,” Stu said.

“Fifty cents! Where do I owe you fifty cents?” I said. “I owe you nothin’!”

“You forgot to turn on the switch. After I cranked myself to death on the crank, you forgot to turn on the switch. Fifty cents.”

Was that just this morning? It was, and I paid.

Joe Wright had stopped by to insist that we sleep in the office. There would be no oil-can count.

There were two couches, but we piled all our equipment inside the building, and our sleeping place again looked more like an airplane factory than an office bedroom.

“You know what?” Paul said, lying in the dark, smoking a cigarette.

“What?”

“You know, I wasn’t ever scared that I was going to get hurt? The only thing I was scared of was that I might hurt the airplane. I sort of knew the airplane wouldn’t let me get hurt. Isn’t that funny?”

The future of the Great American depended upon a pilot, jumper, mechanic, and friend, all of them named Johnny Colin, who had flown with us at Prairie du Chien and worked the miracle of repairing the biplane after its crash there.

That next afternoon at three, Paul fired up the Luscombe and took off west, toward Apple River, where Johnny had his own airstrip. If everything worked to plan, he would be back before dark.

Stu and I tinkered around the airplane, finishing everything we could before the welding had to be done, and at last there was nothing more to do. Everything turned on whether Paul would return with Johnny in the Luscombe.

Stan came out after a time and wheeled out his Piper Pacer for an afternoon flight. A tricycle-gear Cherokee landed, turned around, took off again. It was a quiet afternoon at a little airport.

A car stopped by the wingtip and some Palmyrans stepped out that we recognized from the day before.

“How’s it going?”

“Going OK. A little welding and she’ll be all ready to put back together again.”

“Looks kind of bent, to me, still.” The woman who spoke smiled wryly, to say that she meant no hurtful thing, but her friends didn’t notice.

“Don’t be so hard on ’em, Duke. They’ve been working out here all day long on this poor old airplane.”

“And they’ll be flying it again, too,” said Duke.

She was a strange woman, and my first impression was that she was a thousand miles away and that this part of her that was living in Palmyra, Wisconsin, was just about ready to speak some mystic word and disappear.

When Duke talked, everyone listened. There was an aura of faintest sadness about her, as though she was of some lost race, captured as a child and taught in our ways, but always remembering her home on another planet.

“This all you fellows do for a living, fly around and give airplane rides?” she said. She looked at me with a level gaze, wanting to know the truth.

“That’s pretty well it.”

“What do you think of the towns you see?”

“Every one’s different. Towns have personalities, like people.”

“What’s our personality?” she said.

“You’re kind of cautious, steady, sure. Kind of careful with strangers.”

“Wrong there. This town’s a Peyton Place,” she said.

Stan came flying down in a low pass over the field and we all watched him whisk by, engine purring.

By now Paul was an hour overdue and the sun was just a little way above the horizon. If he was going to make it, he’d have to be nearly here.

“Where’s your friend?” Duke said.

“He’s out getting a guy who’s a pretty good welder.”

She moved to sit on the front fender of the car, a slim alien woman, not unpretty, looking at the sky. I went back to retouching an old patch on the wingtip.

“Here he comes,” someone said, and pointed.

They were wrong. The airplane flew right on over, heading toward Lake Michigan, out to the east.

Another airplane appeared after a while and it was the Luscombe. It glided down, touched its wheels to the grass and rolled swiftly by us. Paul was alone; there was no one else in the Luscombe. I turned around and looked at the welding torch. So much for the barnstorming.

“We have lots of airplanes, today,” Duke said.

It was an Aeronca Champion, following Paul, and in the cockpit was Johnny Colin. He had brought his own airplane. Johnny taxied right in close to us and shut his engine down. He stepped out of the airplane, unfolding, dwarfing it in his size. He wore his green beret, and he smiled.

“Johnny! Kinda nice to see you.”

He picked a box of tools from the back of the Aeronca. “Hi. Paul says he’s been workin’ on your airplane, keepin’ it all bent up for you.” He set the tools down and looked at the struts that waited for the torch. “I got to get out pretty early tomorrow, go down to Muscatine, pick up a new airplane. Hi, Stu.”

“Hi, Johnny.”

“So what’s wrong here? This wheel?” He looked down at a broken heavy-steel fitting, and the other work waiting. “That won’t be much.”

He slipped on a set of black goggles at once and popped his welding torch into life. The sound of that pop was a sound of sheer confidence, and I relaxed. All day long, till that second, I had been carrying myself tense, and now I relaxed. Praise God for such a thing as a friend.

Johnny finished the brake arm in three minutes, touching it with the long welding rod and the razor flame. Then he kneeled by the heavy wheel fitting and in fifteen minutes it was strong again, ready to hold the weight of the airplane. He set Paul to sawing the strut reinforcing pieces to size, while Stu walked through the dusk for food.

One strut was finished by the time Stu came back with hamburgers, hot chocolate and a half-gallon of milk. We all ate quickly, in the shadows of the trouble-light.

Then the torch popped into life again, hissing, the black goggles went down and the second strut was underway.

“You know what he said when I got to his house?” Paul said quietly. “It was right after work, he had just come in, his wife had dinner on the stove. He grabbed that box of tools and he said, ‘I’ll be back in the morning, I got a broke airplane to fix.’ How’s that, huh?”

Glowing white, the strut was laid aside, finished, in the dark. Two more jobs to go, and the most difficult of all. Here the torn metal was within inches of the fabric of the airplane, and the fabric, painted heavily with butyrate dope, would burn like warm dynamite.

“Why don’t you get some rags, and a bucket of water,” Johnny said. “Build us a dam around here. We’re workin’ pretty close.”

The dam was built of dripping rags, and I held it in place while the torch did its job. Squinting my eyes, I watched the brilliant heat touch the metal, turning it all into a bright molten pool, fusing it back together along what had been the break. The water sputtered on the rag dam, and I was tense again.

After a long time, one hard job had been done, and the last one was the worst. It was a heavy bolt carry-through, surrounded by doped fabric and oily wood. Ten inches above the 6,000 degrees of the welding torch, cradled in old dry wood, was the fuel tank. It held 41 gallons of aviation gasoline, just enough to blow the whole airplane about a thousand feet high.

Johnny put out the torch and looked at the situation for a long time, under the light.

“We better be careful on this one,” he said. “We’ll need the dam again, lots of water, and if you see a fire starting, yell, and throw some water on it.”

Johnny and I settled down underneath the airplane, between the big wheels. All the work and fire would be overhead, as we crouched on the grass.

“Stu,” I said, “Why don’t you get up in the front cockpit there, and watch for anything like a fire, under the gas tank. Take Stan’s fire bottle. If you see something, don’t be afraid to sing out, and shoot it with the bottle. If it looks like the whole thing is gonna go up, just yell and get the heck out of there. We can lose the airplane, but let’s not us get hurt.”

It was nearly midnight when Johnny popped the torch on again and brought it overhead, near my dripping dam. The steel was thick, and the work was slow. I worried about the heat going through the metal and firing the fabric beyond the dam.

“Paul, kind of watch over it all, will you, for any smoke or fires?”

The torch, close up, had a tremendous roar, and it sprayed flame like a rocket at launch. Looking straight up, I could see through a narrow slit into the little place beneath the fuel tank. If there was a fire there, we’d be in trouble. And it was hard to see, in the glare and the sound of the torch.

Every once in a while the flame popped back, a rifle-shot, spraying white sparks over us all. The torchfire was buried in smoke where it touched the airplane. It was our own private hell, there under the belly of the biplane.

There was a sudden crackling over my head and I heard Stu say something, faintly.

“PAUL!” I shouted. “WHAT’S STU SAYING? GET WHAT HE’S SAYING!”

There was a flicker of fire overhead. “HOLD IT, JOHNNY! FIRE!” I slammed a dripping rag hard up into the narrow crack overhead. It hissed, in a rolling cloud of steam.

“STU! DARN IT! SPEAK UP! YOU GOT A FIRE UP THERE?”

“OK, now,” came the faint voice.

The distance, I thought. The roar of the torch. I can’t hear him. Don’t be hard on him. But I had no patience with that. We’d all be blown to bits if he didn’t make us hear him when there was a fire.

“LISTEN TO ’IM, WILL YA, PAUL? I CAN’T HEAR A WORD HE SAYS!”

Johnny came back in with the torch, and the crackling began overhead, and the smoke.

“That’s just grease cookin’ off there,” he said, next to me.

We lived through three fires in our little hell, and stopped every one of them short of the fuel tank. None of us were sorry, at two a.m., when the torch snapped out for the last time and the gear was finished, glowing in the dark.

“That ought to do it,” Johnny said. “You want me to stick around and help you put it back together?”

“No. No problem, here on out. You saved us, John. Let’s get some sleep, OK? Man, I don’t want to live through that again.”

Johnny wasn’t noticeably tired, but I felt like an empty balloon.

At 5:30, Johnny and I got up and walked out to his dew-covered Aeronca. He fired the engine coldly awake and put his tools in the back seat.

“Johnny, thanks,” I said.

“Yeah. Nothin’. Glad I could help. Now take it easy, please, with that airplane?” He rubbed a clear space in the dew-beads on his windshield, then climbed aboard.

I didn’t know what else to say. Without him, the dream would have been twice vanished. “Hope we fly together again soon.”

“We’ll do it, sometime.” He pushed the throttle forward and taxied out into the dim morning. A moment later he was a dwindling speck on the horizon west, our problem was solved, and The Great American Flying Circus was alive again.