Nothing by Chance (4 page)

It was hard to believe that this courageous parachute artist was the same softspoken boy that had shyly joined The Great American a week ago when it opened in Prairie du Chien. I thought of a maxim learned in twelve years’ flying: Not what a man says, that matters, or how he says it, but what he does and how he does it.

On the ground, children popped like munchkins from the grass, and they converged on Stu’s target.

I circled the chute until it was 200 feet above the ground, then held my altitude while the mushroom went on down. Stu swung his feet up and down a few times, last-minute calisthenics before his landing.

He was one moment drifting peacefully on the gentle air, and the next instant the ground rose up and hit him hard. He fell, rolled, and at once was on his feet again as the wide soft dome lost its perfect shape and flapped down around him, a great wounded monster of the air.

The monster-picture deflated with the parachute and became just a big colored rag on the ground, unmoving, and Stu was Stu in a yellow jump suit, waving OK. The children closed in on him.

When the biplane and I circled to land, I found that we had problems. The Whirlwind wasn’t responding to its throttle. Throttle forward, nothing happened. A little farther forward and it cut back in with a sudden roar of power.
Throttle back and it roared on; full back, and it died away unnaturally. Something wrong with the throttle linkage, probably. Not a major problem, but there could be no passenger flying till it was fixed.

We came down rather unevenly to land, coasted over the hill and shut down the engine. Al, of AL’S SINCLAIR SERVICE, walked over.

“Hey, that was nice! There’s quite a few folks here want to fly the two-winger. You can take ’em up this afternoon, can’t you?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “We like to end the day with the parachute jump … leave ’em with something nice to watch. We’ll sure be here tomorrow, though, and love to have ’em come back.”

What a strange thing to find myself saying. If that was our policy, I had just made it up. I would have been glad to fly passengers till sunset, but I couldn’t do it with the throttle linkage as it was and it would not do to have them see that their airplane had to be repaired after every little flight around the airport.

Stu came in from the target, and the biplane captured quite a number of his young admirers. I stood near the airplane and tried to keep them from stepping through the fabric of the lower wings whenever they climbed up to look in the cockpits.

Most of the grown-ups stayed in their cars, watching, but a few came closer to look at the aircraft, to talk with Paul polishing the Luscombe, and with me, shepherding children.

“I was at the little league game when you guys flew over,” a man said. “My boy was going crazy; he didn’t know whether to look down at the game or up at the planes, so finally he sat on the roof of the car, where he could see both.”

“Your jumper … he’s a pretty young guy, isn’t he?
Couldn’t make me jump out of an airplane for all the money in the world.”

“This all you do for a living, fly around places? You got a wife or anything?”

Of course we had wives, of course we had families just as involved in this adventure as we, but that wasn’t something we thought people would want to hear. Barnstormers can only be carefree, footloose, fun-loving bright colorful people from another time. Who ever heard of a
married
sky gypsy? Who could imagine a barnstormer settled in a
house?
Our image demanded that we shrug the question aside and become the picture of gay and happy comrades, without a thought for the morrow. If we were to be shackled at all that summer, it would be by the image of freedom, and we tried desperately to live up to it.

So we answered with a question: “Wife? Can you imagine any woman let her husband go flyin’ around the country in planes like these?” And we had lived a little more closely to our image.

Rio was changed by our arrival. Population 776, with a tenth of the town on the airport the evening after we arrived. And the biplane was grounded.

The sun was down, the crowd slowly disappeared into the dark and at last we were left alone with Al.

“You guys are the best thing that happened to this airport,” he said quietly, looking toward his airplane in its hangar. He didn’t have to speak loudly to be heard in the Wisconsin evening. “Lots of people think about us flying our Cessnas, they’re not sure we’re safe. Then they come out here and see you throw those airplanes around like crazymen and jump off the wings and all of a sudden they think we’re
really
safe.!”

“We’re glad we can help you out,” Paul said dryly.

The tree-frogs set in to chirping.

“If you want, you guys can stay in the office here. Give you
a key. Not the best, maybe, but it beats sleepin’ out in the rain, if it rains.”

We agreed, and dragged our mountain of belongings in to carpet the office floor in a jagged layer of parachutes, boots, bedrolls, survival kits, ropes, and toolbags.

“Still don’t see how we get all this stuff into the airplanes,” Paul said, as he set down the last of his camera boxes.

“If you guys want a ride in town,” Al said, “I’m goin’ in; be glad to take you.”

We accepted the offer at once, and when the airplanes were covered and tied, we leaped into the back of the Sinclair pickup truck. On the way, wind beating down over us, we divided up our income for the day. Two passengers at $3 each.

“It’s kind of good,” Stu said, “that all the airplanes from Prairie didn’t stay. By the time you cut six dollars ten ways, there wouldn’t be much left.”

“They could have flown those other passengers, though,” I said.

“I’m not worried,” Paul offered. “I have a feeling that we’re going to do pretty well, just by ourselves. And we made enough money for dinner tonight… that’s all that matters.”

The truck rolled to a stop at the Sinclair station, and Al pointed down the block to the A & W root-beer stand. “They’re the last ones open and I think they close at ten. See you tomorrow out at the airport, OK?”

Al disappeared into his dark service station and we walked to the root-beer stand. I wished for once that I could turn off the barnstormer image, for we were watched as closely as slow-motion tennis balls by the drive-in customers of the Rio A&W.

“You’re the fellows with the airplanes, aren’t you?” The waitress who set our wooden picnic table was awed, and I wanted to tell her to forget it, to settle down and pretend
that we were just customers. I ordered a bunch of hot dogs and root beer, following the lead of Paul and Stu.

“It’s going to work,” Paul said. “We could have carried twenty passengers tonight, if you weren’t so afraid of working on your airplane for a few minutes. We could have done well. And we just got here! Five hours ago we didn’t even know there
was
such a place as Rio, Wisconsin! We’re going to make a fortune.”

“Maybe so, Paul.” As Leader for the day, I wasn’t so sure.

Half an hour later we
walked into the office and snapped on the light, blinding ourselves, destroying the night.

There were two couches in the office, which Paul and I claimed at once for our beds, pulling rank as the senior members of The Great American. We gave Stu the pillows from the couches.

“How many passengers are we going to carry tomorrow?” Stu asked, undisturbed by his low status. “Shall we have a little bet?”

Paul figured we would carry 86. Stu guessed 101. I laughed them both to scorn and said that the proper number was 54. We were all wrong, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.

We snapped out the lights and went to sleep.

   
CHAPTER THREE
   

I WOKE UP HUMMING
Rio Rita
again; I couldn’t get it out of my head.

“What’s the song?” Stu asked.

“C’mon. You don’t know
Rio Rita?”
I said.

“No. Never heard it.”

“Ah … Paul? You ever stop to think that Stu, young Stu, probably doesn’t know any songs from the war? What were you … born about … nineteen
forty-seven!
Good grief! Can you imagine anybody born in NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN?”

“We’re three caballeros …” Paul sang tentatively, looking at Stu.

“… three gay caballeros …” I went on for him.

“… three happy chappies, with snappy serappies …”

Stu was mystified at the odd song, and we were mystified that he wouldn’t know it. One generation trying to communicate with another just half-way down, in that office-bunkhouse on a morning in Wisconsin, and getting nowhere, finding nothing but an uncomprehending smile from our parachute-jumper as he belted his white denim trousers.

We tried a whole variety of songs on him, and all with the
same effect. “… Shines the name … Rodger Young … fought and died for the men he marched among …”

“Don’t you remember that song, Stu? My gosh where WERE you?” We didn’t give him a chance to answer.

“… Oh, they’ve got no time for glory in the infantry … oh, they’ve got no time for praises loudly sung …”

“What’s next?” Paul was hazy on the lyrics, and I looked at him scornfully.

“… BUT TO THE EVERLASTING GLORY OF THE INFANTRY …”

His face brightened. “SHINES THE NAME OF RODGER YOUNG! Shines the name … ta-ta-tata … Rodger Young …”

“Stu, what’s the matter with you? Sing along, boy!”

We sang
Wing and a Prayer
, and
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
, just to make him miserable for not being born sooner. It didn’t work. He looked happy.

We began the hike to
town for breakfast.

“Can’t get over that,” Paul said at last.

“What.”

“Stu’s starting so young.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I responded. “It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.” Things come to you like that, barnstorming.

The card in the café window said
Welcome Travelers-Come In
, and above it was a neon sign with the paint gone from its tubes, and so saying
.

It was a small place, and inside was a short counter and five booths. The waitress was named Mary Lou, and she was a girl from a distant and beautiful dream. The world went gray, she was so pretty, and I leaned on the table for support, before I sat down. The others were not affected.

“How’s the French toast?” I remember saying.

“It’s very good,” she said. What a magnificent woman.

“Guarantee that? Hard to make a good French toast.” What a beautiful girl.

“Guarantee. I make it myself. It’s good toast.”

“Sold. And two glasses of milk.” She could only have been Miss America, briefly playing the part of waitress in a little Midwest village. I had been enchanted by the girl, and as Paul and Stu ordered breakfast, I fell to wondering why. Because she was so pretty, of course. That’s enough right there. But that can’t be—that’s bad! From her, and from our crowded opening at Prairie du Chien, I was beginning to suspect that there might be tens of thousands of magnificent beautiful women in the small towns across the country, and what was I going to do about it? Be entranced by them all? Give myself up to bewitchment by ten thousand different women?