Nothing by Chance (12 page)

“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.

   
CHAPTER NINE
   

BY FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, three days after her second crash of the season, the biplane was a flying machine right out of an old barnstormer’s scrapbook: silver patches on her fabric, welded plates on her cabane struts, scorched places and painted-over places.

We went around all the attach points, checking that safety wires and cotter keys were in place, doublechecking jam nuts tight, and then I was back again in the familiar cockpit, the engine ticking over, warming from the quick fires in the cylinders. This would be a test flight for the rigging and for the landing gear welds—if the wheels collapsed on the takeoff roll, or if the wings fell off in flight, we had failed.

I pushed the throttle forward, we rolled, we hopped up into the air. The gear was good, the rigging was good. She flew like a beautiful airplane.

“YA-HOO!” I shouted into the high wind, where no one could hear. “GREAT! LOVE YA, YA OL’ BEAST!” The beast roared back, happy.

We climbed on up to 2,000 feet over the lake and flew some aerobatics. If the wings wouldn’t fall off with the airplane pulling high G and flying upside-down, they never
would. That first loop required a bit of courage, and I double-checked my parachute buckles. The wind sang in the wires like always, and up and over we went, as gently as possible the first time, looking up at the ground over our head, and smoothly back. Then a tighter loop, watching for the wires to start beating in the wind, or struts to bend, or fabric to tear away. She was the same old airplane she had always been. The tightest loop I could put on her, the quickest snap roll, she didn’t make a single cry.

We dived back down to the ground, and bounced the wheels hard on the grass during a high-speed run. This was not easy to do, but I had to make it harder on the wheels now than it would ever be with passengers aboard.

She passed her tests, and the last thing left was to see if the rewelding of the gear made any difference in her ground-handling. A tiny misalignment of the wheels could mean an airplane harder than ever to control.

We sailed down final approach, crossed the fence, and clunked down on the grass. I waited with glove ready on the throttle, boots ready on the rudder pedals. She made a little swerve, but responded at once to the touch of throttle. She seemed the faintest bit more skittish on the ground than she had been. We taxied back to Stan’s hangar, triumphant, and the propeller windmilled down into silence.

“How is she?” Paul said, the second the engine stopped.

“GREAT! Maybe just a shade on the dicey side, landing, but otherwise, just great.” I jumped down from the cockpit and said what I knew I had to say, because some things are more important than airplanes. “You ready to give her another try, Paul?”

“Do you mean that?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. If she’s bent again, we’ll fix her again. You ready to go?”

He thought for a long moment. “I don’t think so. We
wouldn’t be getting much barnstorming done, if I hurt her again. And we’re supposed to be out here to barnstorm, not to fix airplanes.”

It was still light, in the afternoon of a Saturday.

“Remember how you said if it was right for us to be here Sunday, nothing could keep us away?” Paul said. “Looks like it was right for us to be here Sunday, unless you want to bug out tonight.”

“Nope,” I replied. “Sunday here is fine. The only way I could have been forced to be here was just the way it happened. So I figure that something interesting is waiting for us tomorrow.”

Sunday morning was the Annual
Palmyra Flight Breakfast, and the first airplanes began arriving at seven a.m. By seven-thirty we had carried our first passengers, by nine we had both airplanes flying constantly and a crowd of fifty people waiting to fly. A helicopter was carrying passengers at the other side of the field. Our crowd was twice as large as his, and we were proud.

The air cluttered up with little airplanes of every modern kind, coming for the giant breakfast that was a tradition at the airport. The biplane and the Luscombe surged in and out of the traffic pattern, passing each other, working hard, snarling at the other airplanes, which were in no hurry to get back on the ground again.

We had learned that it is not wise to fly a landing pattern so far from the field that we could not glide to the runway if the engine stopped, but at Palmyra we were alone in our learning. There were long lines of aircraft all over the sky, and if all the engines stopped at once, there would be airplanes down everywhere except on the airport.

We flew constantly, drinking an occasional Pepsi-Cola in the cockpit while Stu strapped in more riders. We were making
money by the basket, and we were working hard for it. Around and around and around. Palmyrans were out in force; most of our passengers were women and most of them were flying for the first time.

I watched the high wind of flight buffet and blow forward over graceful sculptured faces and was astonished again that there could be so many attractive women in one small town.

The flights fell into a solid pattern, not only in the air, but in our thought.

Buckle the belt down tight on them, Stu, and don’t forget to tell them to hold their sunglasses when they look over the side. Taxi out here, careful of other airplanes, recheck the final-approach path for anyone else coming in. Swing onto the grass runway, stay sharp on the rudder here and see if you can lift off right in front of our crowd, so they can see the bright crosses on the wheels spin around, after the biplane is in the air. If we lose the engine now, we can still land on the runway. Now, and we shoot for the meadow beyond. Up over the farm, a little turn so they can look down on the cows and the tractor, if we lose the engine now there’s a fine little field across the road. Level at 800 feet, swing out to circle Blue Spring Lake. We sure are making a lot of money today. I have lost track of the passengers … at least two hundred dollars today, for sure. But you really work for it. Watch for other airplanes, keep looking around, lose the engine now and we land right across from the lake; nice flat place there to come down. Turn now so the folks can see the sailboats out in the breeze, and motorboats and skiers pulling white trails across the lake. A place to land over there on the left, one more circle here, throw that in for free to give them one last long look at the blueness of that lake, then down across the green meadow into the landing pattern and over town look out now there are all kinds of airplanes around. Fall into place behind the Cessna … poor guy doesn’t know what he’s
missing not having an open-cockpit airplane to fly; has to drive around in that milk-stool. Of course he can get places twice as fast as we can and that’s what he wants, so fine, I guess. Wish he would keep his pattern closer, though, someday his engine will stop in the pattern and he’s gonna feel pretty dumb, not able to glide to the runway. There he’s in, turn here, slip off some altitude, look at the wind again, cross-wind, but no problem. Aim for the right side of the runway and plan to cut in toward the center so we’ll be slow enough by our crowd and ready to pick up more passengers boy the old barnstormers worked for their keep, forget it, it’s time to land now and every landing’s different remember stay sharp and awake you sure would look dumb groundlooping in front of a crowd like this, even if you didn’t hurt the airplane. Wheels are stronger than ever, good ol’ Johnny can really weld, that guy, and a better friend you aren’t gonna find anywhere. Ease her down, now, across the fence, those cars better look out for airplanes, driving by there, and we’re down and this is the hardest part of the whole thing keep her straight, straight, wait on the throttle, on the rudder they’re glad they’re down but they liked the ride, too. Slow and swing around in toward Stu let ’em out careful boy and keep them from stepping on the fabric and two more ready to fly, the brave people overcoming their fears and trusting me just because they want to see what it looks like from the air. A mother and her daughter this time, they don’t know it yet, but they’re going to like flying, too. Buckle the belt down tight on them, Stu, and don’t forget to tell them to hold their sunglasses when they look over the side …

Over and over and over again.

But once, the pattern changed, and while Stu was loading passengers, an angry man came to stand beside my cockpit. “I know you’re a hot pilot and all that,” he said venomously, “but you might be careful in the landing pattern for a change.
I was coming down final in the twin there, the Apache, and you cut me right out, you turned right in front of me!”

My first thought was to say how sorry I was to do such a thing, but then his attitude struck me. Would I act like that to a fellow pilot on a crowded day? For some distant reason I remembered a pilot named Ed Fitzgerald, back with the 141st Tactical Fighter Squadron, USAF. Fitz was one of the finest pilots I knew, and a staunch friend, but he was the fiercest man in the Air Force. He always frowned, and we said that he was spring-loaded to the
explode
position. If a man made the mistake of crossing Fitz in any tiny way, he had to be ready for hand-to-hand combat with a wild leopard. Even if he was wrong, Ed Fitzgerald wouldn’t wait a second to slap down a stranger that dared antagonize him.

So I thought of Fitz then, and smiled within myself. I stood up in the cockpit, which made me a yard taller than this Apache pilot, and frowned down at him, furiously, as Fitz would have done.

“Look here, buddy,” I said. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re flying the pattern in a way’s gonna kill somebody. You drag all over the country and then turn toward the airport and expect everybody to get out of your way ‘cause you got two engines on your crummy airplane. Look, buddy, you fly like that and I’ll cut you out of the pattern every time; you go up there now and I’ll cut you out again, you hear me? When you learn to fly an airplane and fly the pattern, then you come back and talk to me, huh?”