Nothing by Chance (25 page)

I was surrounded by modern airplanes on the parking ramp, but for some reason as I walked back among them, I felt that it was they that were out of their time, and not I.

   
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
   

THE AFTERNOON SKY WAS LOW GRAY, light rain whipped across the windscreen, and The Great American Flying Circus was down to one man, one biplane, alone in the air.

I had one tank of gasoline, and eleven cents cash in my pocket. If I wanted to eat again, I had to find somebody down there with three dollars and a burning wish to fly in the rain.

Prospects did not look good. Kirksville, Missouri, canceled itself in rows on rows of alfalfa bales in the hayfields and flocks of sullen cows in the pastures. And in Kirksville the rain poured solid down, intent on turning the city into a major inland sea; the windscreen changed into a sheet of water bolted to the airplane. It was not comfortable flying.

As we turned from Kirksville, spraying rain, I remembered a town on the way north that was worth a try. But again it was the wrong moment to strike. One good field, a block from town, was covered in hay bales. Another was surrounded by a fence. A third lay at the bottom of a square maelstrom of high-tension lines.

We circled and thought, the biplane and I, ignoring the grass airstrip and hangars a mile south. It would be a good
town to work, but a mile away was too far. Nobody walks a mile in the rain to fly any airplane. At last, with the heavy Kirksville rains almost caught up with us again, we landed in the field with the fence, hoping there would be a gate. As the wheels touched, a fox leaped for cover in a neighboring stand of corn.

There was no break in the fence, but the two boys appeared, playing the part assigned them by destiny, rain or sun.

“Hey, where’s the gate?”

“Isn’t any gate. We climbed over. There’s an airport just down the way, mister.”

It was raining harder. “You boys know of any way a body could get in here, if I was to take ’em for an airplane ride?”

“Sure don’t know. Climb the fence, I guess.”

Another field crossed off the list. The airport, then. They might know there of some other place. Another two hours and it would be too dark to fly, with the rain and cloud hiding the sun. I chose the airport, because I didn’t know where else to go.

Even that was a struggle. Along one side of the strip was a fence, along the other side a sea of corn. It was harder to land on that airport than on any hayfield we had worked, and I thought that even if this place was swarming with passengers I wouldn’t fly one of them. It was all I could do to keep the biplane rolling straight between the solid obstacles, steering only by the high blur at each side of the cockpit and hoping that the path ahead was clear.

Waiting in the rain at the end of the strip were five metal hangars, a dripping windsock, and a pickup truck with an interested family within, watching. The man stepped shirtless from the driver’s seat as I climbed from the cockpit, leaving the engine running.

“Want some gas?”

“No, thanks. Pretty good on gas. Looking for a place to fly.”
I opened my road map and pointed to a town 20 miles southwest. “What do you know about Green City? Any place to land, there? Hayfield or pasture or somethin’ like that?”

“Sure. They got a airport there. South of town, by the water reservoir. Whatcha doin’? Crop dustin’?”

“Carryin’ passengers.”

“Oh. Yeah, Green City might be nice. Probably a lot of people right here’d like to fly with you, though. You could stay right here, if you wanted.”

“Bit too far from town,” I said. “You have to be close to town. Nobody comes out if you’re too far.”

The rain slackened for a moment, and off to the southwest the sky didn’t look quite as dark as it had an hour before. To fly again was to use gasoline that couldn’t be replaced until we earned some money, yet if we stayed at the airport we would be jobless and hungry, both.

“Well, I’d better get goin’. Might as well push on off while there’s light.”

In a minute we were blurring between corn and fence, and then lifted above them and swung down into the south.

The hills in this part of Missouri roll on like green sea-billows, cresting in a fine spray of trees, sheltering roads and tiny villages in their troughs. It is not the easiest kind of country for navigators. There are none of the precise north-south section lines that lattice the states to the north. I sighted the nose a bit to the south of the lighter gray spot in the sky that was the setting sun.

Green City. What a name, what a poetic piece of imagery. I thought of tall wind-swayed elms, and streets of bright lawns, close-cut, and sidewalks in summer shade. I peered over the windscreen, looking for it. After a long moment, the town drifted in under the biplane’s nose. There the reservoir, there the tall elms, there the water tower, all silver with the black letters GREEN CITY.

And there, good grief, the airport. A long strip along the crest of a ridge, narrower than the one I had just left. For a moment I wondered if the biplane would even fit in the width of it. At each edge, the ground dropped sharp and roughly away into tangled earth. The end was a row of barrels at the top of a cliff. Halfway down the strip was a metal building, almost overlapping the landing area. Green City was the most difficult airport to land upon that I had ever seen. I would not have picked that spot for a forced landing, even, if the engine stopped.

But there was a windsock, and a hangar. On the approach was a set of telephone wires, and as I flew a low pass down the field I saw that the last half of the strip was rolling, and tilted first to the left, then to the right. The narrow twisting runway was edged every fifty feet with tall white wooden markers. The owner must have figured that if you ran off the path you were going to hurt your airplane anyway, and a few wooden posts smashing into your wings wouldn’t make that much difference. I saw that we’d have about eight feet clearance on each wingtip, and I swallowed.

We made one last pass over the field, and as we did, two motorcycles sped out the dirt road and braked hard at the edge of the grass to watch. As our wheels touched, I lost sight of the strip ahead, held my breath, and watched the white markers blur past the wingtips. I held the airplane as straight as I had ever held it and pressed down hard on the brake pedals. After an agonizing fifteen seconds, we had rolled to walking speed, and with much power and brake, the biplane turned very carefully in her tracks and taxied back to the road and the motorcyclists.

As I stepped out of the cockpit I wondered how much food and gasoline I could buy for eleven cents.

“You fellas feel like flyin’? Green City from the air; a real pretty place. Give you an extra long ride, since you came out
to meet me so nice. Three dollars each, is all.” I was aghast, listening to my own words. Carry passengers from this field? I am out of my mind!

But I had landed here once, and I could do it again. What was this airplane built for, but to fly passengers?

“Let’s go, Billy!” one of the boys said. “I’ve never been up in one of these open jobs, and that’s the kind Dad learned on. Can you carry us both?”

“Sure can,” I said.

“Well, wait. I don’t think we have the money.”

They were leafing through their billfolds, picking sparse green bills. “Five-fifty is all we got between us. You fly us for that?”

“Well, since you came on out so quick … OK.” I took the five dollar-bills and two pieces of silver and suddenly felt solvent again. Food! I would have steak tonight!

I emptied the cargo from the front seat and strapped my two passengers aboard, unconsciously pulling their safety belt a bit tighter than usual.

Settled down into my cockpit, I lined carefully on the bent strip of grass, and pushed the throttle forward. In spite of all the signs that I was going too far out on a shaky limb, I was glad to be aloft with my passengers. I had this moment gained title to that cash in my pocket, and after a few minutes buzzing around, I would have only to land and eat. I searched again for other places to come down, but there were none. Hills, money-crops, too short, too far from town. The motorcycles were still at the airport, anyway; we had to make one more landing on the high trapeze.

In ten minutes we circled the strip again, and in the dimming light it did not look any easier to land upon. The passengers were curious to see over the nose as we landed, and they blocked what little view I had in the moment I cut the throttle.

We hit the ground and bounced, and it felt as if we moved to the right. I thought of the embankment on the right side of the strip, and pushed left rudder. Too much. The biplane swerved left, and her left wheel went off the runway. By the time I hit right rudder, the left wing was flashing a foot above jumbled grassy hillocks and harsh earth there, streaking toward a wooden marker and that metal building. I slammed full right rudder and hit the throttle, rolling thirty miles per hour. The airplane jumped back onto the runway an instant before the building flashed by, and we swung hard to the right. I came back with full left rudder and full brakes. We stopped just at the edge of the embankment, and I went limp. So this is what barnstormers did when they were desperate for cash.

“Hey, that was great! Did you see ’em come runnin’ out when we went over the house?”

My passengers couldn’t have been nearly as happy as I was to be down again, and I gratefully took a ride to town on the back of a motorcycle.

The town square was a small Kahoka. There were picnic tables in the park, a Liberty Bell on a stand, a home plate and pitcher’s mound, and a telephone booth with the glass broken out on the home-plate side. Square store fronts looked at the park from all four sides, and one of the squares was Lloyd’s Café. Lloyd was sweeping out, and the place was empty.

“I could fix somethin’ for you,” he said, “but you probably wouldn’t care much for my cookin’. Wife’s out shoppin’.”

The Town House Grill (Stop-N-Eat) was closed. Only Martha’s was left, across the corner from Lloyd’s. Martha’s was not only open, but had two customers inside. I took a table and ordered my hamburgers and chocolate shakes, feeling rich. How money can change! On a good day, six dollars was nothing, a tiny droplet in the great bucket of prosperity. Today, my $5.50 was wealth, because it was more than I
needed. Even after supper and corn chips and candy bars, I had four dollars clear.

Walking back to the biplane, I was an intruder in the town. Lights were coming on in the houses and voices drifted to the sidewalk. Now and then someone puttered in a dark flower garden, and looked up to watch me pass. The roofcrests of the houses carried strange ornaments, dragonlike, silhouettes of Viking ships, all cut from metal.

The reservoir was only a short walk from the biplane, and I turned aside. The ground was soft and hidden in deep grass. Flowers were tiny pure palettes strewn carelessly about. Reeds shuddered along the shore, more like arrows down from the sky than plants up from the water. Across the way a frog clacked like a Spanish castanet, and an invisible cow said, “mmMMMm,” loud, out in the distance. The reservoir was a tiny Walden, with only the smallest ripples across its dark-mirror face.

I crunched back through the grass to the biplane and unrolled the sleeping bag. The moon went in and out of the clouds while the evening melted into night. I ate a lemon-drop, and listened to the sound of the engine still roaring in my ears. Solitude, I decided, is barnstorming all by yourself.

At nine a.m. on a
day I didn’t know, we circled Milan, Missouri, trailing sound and color, and landed in a hayfield a half-mile away. Before I had the sign on the gatepost, the first townsfolk arrived. Two pickup trucks clattered down onto the furrows and the drivers stepped out looking.

“Have a little motor trouble, did y’?” He was an old fellow, in coveralls.

“Aw, no,” I said. “Flyin’ around, givin’ airplane rides.”

“What d’y know. She’s an old one, all right, too.”

“Feel like a ride today? Nice and cool up there.”

“Oh, no. Not me,” he said. “I’m scared.”

“Scared! This airplane been fly in’ since 1929! Don’t you think she might make one more flight without crashin’ all to flinders? I don’t believe you’re scared.”