Nothing by Chance (18 page)

The morning roadside on the
walk back from breakfast was deep in purple flower.

“Hey, you guys,” I said, “Honey-clover!”

“Pretty.”

“No, it’s not pretty, it’s good to eat. Like when you were a kid, remember?” I picked a boll and tasted the hollow petals. There was a tenth of a drop of nectar in each one, a delicate sweet flavor of morning. Paul and Stu tried one each, as we walked.

“Tastes like eating a flower,” Stu said.

“Can’t figure you guys out.” I picked another handful of purple, and crunched on the tender petals. “This great stuff growin’ all over, and you walk right by.”

There was a concrete bridge between town and the airport, crossing the one straightest mile on the length of the Pecatonica River. We heard the sound of outboard motors, and a pair of tiny racing hydroplanes came buzzing full throttle down the river, battling for the lead. They roared echoing under the bridge and through in an instant. The drivers wore helmets and heavy lifejackets, and they were completely absorbed in their race. At the end of the straight they slowed, turned and came back again, tall arcs of spray leaping behind them. It was a sort of aquatic Dragging Main, but somehow it seemed a much cleaner sport.

We walked on across the bridge, and past a lawn where a boy was beating a rug with a twisted wire hoop.

“What’s the plan?” Paul said as we walked by Skeeter, who whinnied, and out to the airplanes. “You want to try for something during the day again? Might get somebody.”

“Anything you say.”

“I’m running out of time,” Paul said. “I should head back
pretty soon. Take me three days to get home from here, about.”

“Well, let’s give it a try; go up and fly a bit,” I said. “Might get a couple people out to fly. Be cool, anyway.”

We took off and climbed to 3,000 feet in formation over the summer town. The hydroplanes hadn’t stopped; their twin white wakes still ran neck-and-neck along the dark river. The boy was still beating the rug half a mile beneath us and I shook my head. It had been 20 minutes since we walked by. What a devoted young fellow that must be, beating a rug for 20 minutes. Three minutes of rug-beating used to be my outside limit. The world is an earnest place, in 1929.

Paul broke away in a wide sweeping turn and swung around toward me to begin the old familiar aerial battle. I pulled the biplane’s nose straight up in the air, hoping for the Luscombe to swish right on by beneath me and give me the chance of dropping down on her tail. The first part of our dogfights were never staged; we were trying our best to work into a firing position behind each other. It was only at the end that I had to let Paul win, because I had the smoke flare and was still the only one eligible to go down in flames.

The earth twisted around us in green, sky in blue, and for a while I didn’t care whether potential passengers were watching or not. It would not do, in this first part of our game, to let Paul get behind the biplane. I had Air Force training in this business long before he learned to fly; I had practiced air combat in front-line military fighters while Paul was still taking fashion pictures in his elegant studio.

Everyone else I knew began to fly in slow airplanes, little airplanes, old airplanes, and then went with the times. In a few years they were flying faster, bigger, more modern machines. It had been just the other way around for me.

First had come the seamless military trainers and fighters and air combat at transsonic speed, then the transports, then
modern businessplanes, then an aging lightplane, now this biplane locked firmly into the day before yesterday. From airborne weapons radar to modern electronics to a simple panel of radio to nothing at all—the biplane was not only without radio, she was entirely without electricity. She was back in the days when a pilot was his own man, with no links to ground-people to aid him or to annoy him. 1929 is a happy year, but sometimes, watching a contrail pulling along way up in the stratosphere, I had to admit to myself that I missed the power and speed and the high lonesome joy of the fighter pilot. Sometimes.

The Luscombe was beside me now, trying desperately to slow down, to fall behind the biplane’s tail. I pushed full throttle, held the nose up, looked across the air at Paul, and laughed. The little sportplane could stand it no longer; all at once it shuddered and fell away toward the ground, stalled out. I pressed full rudder as the Parks stalled a second later and dropped down on the Luscombe’s tail. My reputation was secure. No matter what happened now, I could tell Paul that I deliberately gave him the advantage, after once having been on his tail. He pulled up again, rolling inverted, dropped away, spinning the sky around us both as I rolled to follow.

Stu was already at work convincing the customers it was a great day for flying, and by noon we had flown five passengers. We spent the afternoon in the shade of the wings, trying to stay cool. It wasn’t an easy job.

A few minutes after I had finally made it into sleep, Paul came over and woke me up. “What do you say to some watermelon? Wouldn’t that be great? Nice cold watermelon?”

“Sounds keen. You go in and get it and I’ll help eat.”

“No, c’mon. Let’s go get a watermelon.”

“You’re out of your mind. It’s a mile to town!”

“Stu! How about going in and us getting a watermelon?”
Paul said. “Then we could bring it out here and eat it and not give Bach any.”

“You go in and get it,” Stu said. “I’ll wait here for you.”

“Aw. I just can’t wait around here doing nothing. I’m going to go up and do some flip-flops.”

“Fine,” I said. Stu was already asleep.

Paul took off a few minutes later and I watched some of his flying. Then I turned over and found a cooler place under the wing.

I didn’t hear him taxi in and stop, but he woke us again. “Hey, we have to get some watermelon. Nobody’s coming out to fly.”

“Tell you what, Paul,” I said. “You go in and get the watermelon, and I’ll let you use my knife to cut it. How’s that sound?”

A few minutes later a truck pulled out from the hangar, headed for town, and Paul was aboard. He had a fixation about that watermelon. Well, I thought as I went back to sleep, if he wants a watermelon that much, he should get his watermelon.

Half an hour later we heard Skeeter whinny hello and Paul was back, a watermelon under his arm. It was 100 degrees in the sun and he had lugged the thing all the way from town.

“Hey you guys,” he called. “Watermelon!”

It was hard to understand, I thought, munching on the cool goodness. If I was Paul, I would have let the lazy louts starve out there under the wing. At most, I might have thrown them a bit of rind. But share the first part of my watermelon with them? Never!

“I guess I better bug on out,” Paul said. “We’re not going to have many passengers, at least till late. It’s a long way back to California, and I might as well get started on it today.” He began separating his belongings from the pile of equipment,
and set them neatly into his airplane. Cameras, film cases, bedroll, clothes bag, maps. “I’ll leave you guys the watermelon,” he said.

A car drove into the lane, and another.

“We have discovered a delayed-action Method C,” I said as a third car parked across the grass.

We started the Parks and Stu went over to talk to the people. First passengers were a man and his boy, and the man wore a set of goggles he had last worn in the tank corps in Africa. They said a few wind-blasted words and we were airborne, climbing toward the river up to the cool high air.

“Hey, that’s really nice,” the man said, eleven minutes later, as Stu helped him out. “Really nice. You can really see a long way from up there, can’t you?”

Stu closed the door after the next passengers and stopped by my cockpit. “You’ve got two first-timers and one’s a little scared.”

“OK.” I wondered why he had said that. Most of our passengers were up for the first time, and most were a bit apprehensive, though they didn’t often show it. These must be more worried than usual about flying in the rachety old biplane. But as soon as we were halfway through the first circle of town, they had relaxed and were asking for steep banks. It is the unknown that worries our passengers, I thought. As soon as they see what flying is like, and that it is even a little bit pretty, then it becomes known and nice, and there’s no cause for fear. Fear is just a way of thinking, a feeling. Get rid of that feeling by knowing what is true in the world, and you aren’t afraid.

Business was suddenly going strong. There were eight cars parked on the grass, and Stu was ready with two more passengers when I rolled to a stop.

Paul walked to my cockpit. “Looks like a thunderstorm
west. I’ll be doing good to make Dubuque by dark,” he said. “I’m pushing it, aren’t I?”

“You’re never pushing it as long as you can control your airplane, remember,” I said. “If you don’t like the looks of things, just go down and land in a field and wait it out. You might as well stay one more night here, don’t you think, anyway?”

“Nope. Better be on my way, get back home. You’ve got four passengers waiting for you, no need me waiting around to say goodbye. I’ll get right on out.”

“OK, Paul. It’s been fun.”

Stu closed the door on the new passengers and waved that they were ready to go.

“Yeah. Been fun,” Paul said. “We should run it again next year, huh? Maybe a little longer.”

“OK. Take it easy. Fly good, and set down if the weather gives you a hard time.”

“Yeah. Put me on your postcard list.”

I nodded and pulled my goggles down, pushed the throttle forward. What a brusque goodbye, after flying together for so long.

We took off over the corn, and climbed up through the warm evening air, turning toward town, over the river. I saw the Luscombe airborne, turning my way. Paul fell into formation for a minute or so, to the delight of the passengers, each of whom aimed a camera and jotted the moment down on film.

What did it mean, that this man who had flown with us, who was part of the risks and joys and work and trials, of the understanding and misunderstanding of barnstorming, was now leaving?

Paul waved goodbye, kicked the Luscombe up into a sudden sharp breakaway and accelerated out into the west, where the sun was blocked by a giant thundercloud.

It meant, strangely enough, not that he was leaving at all, but that he was there. That if the time ever came for another test of freedom, another plan to prove that we don’t have to live any way but the way we wish, it might not have to be a lonely time. How many others like him are left in the country? I couldn’t tell if there were ten or a thousand. But I did know there was one.

“See you around, buddy,” I said. No one heard but the wind.

   
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
   

THE THUNDERSTORM HIT US at five in the morning, and we woke to raindrops clattering on the wing.

“We are going to get wet,” Stu observed calmly.

“Well, sir, yes. We can either stay under this wing or we can chicken out and run for the tractor shed.”

We decided to chicken out, grabbed our sleeping bags and ran for the shed, pelted all the way by heavy drops. I settled down by a doorway in the shed, where I could watch both the storm and the windsock. The rain didn’t worry me, but it would have been nice to know whether or not there would be any hail. It would have to be large and sharp hail, and coming straight down, before it could hurt the airplane. I took some comfort in the thought that hail that bad would also hurt the corn and oats, and that corn and oats were rarely damaged by hail.

The biplane didn’t seem at all concerned by the storm, and after a while I moved my sleeping bag over into the steel bucket of a Case 300 skip-loader. The heavy steel ridges of that bucket, covered by two layers of sleeping bag, made a comfortable bed. The only shortcoming was the rather noisy nearness of the pigs, with their ork-orking and clanging their
metal feed-lids every few seconds. If I were a manufacturer of feed bins for hogs, I thought, I would glue big rubber strips on those lids to deaden the sound. Every 20 seconds …
clang!
I didn’t know how Skeeter could stand it.

The rain stopped in an hour and Stu walked over to look at the animals eating. In a few minutes he walked back and began gathering his equipment from the shed. “Now I know where they get the expression ‘pushy pig,’ “he said.