Nothing by Chance Page 2

  I slipped in to land as the smoke stopped, and rolled free down hill to the gas pump. One advantage of being shot down every time, I thought, is that you always get to the gas pump first.

  Cold red fuel poured into the biplane’s tank as Paul landed. He shut down his engine as he came down the hill, and coasted the last hundred feet with the propeller still and silver in front of him. Above the sound of the gasoline pouring from the nozzle under my glove, I could hear his tires crunching on the gravel that edged pump and office.

  He waited for a moment in his cockpit, then slowly climbed out. “Boy, you sure take it out of me with all those turns. Don’t turn so tight, will you? I don’t have all that wing out there that you have.”

  “Only trying to make it look real, Paul. Wouldn’t want to make it look too easy, would you? Any time you want, we can tie the flare to your airplane.”

  A bicycle turned in from the highway—two bicycles, going full speed. They slid to a stop that smashed grass into the rubber of their rear tires. The boys were eleven or twelve years old and after all that pell-mell arrival they didn’t say a word. They just stood and stared at the airplanes, and at us, and back to the airplanes.

  “Feel like flying?” Stu asked them, working his first day as Seller of Rides. With the five-plane circus, we had had a barker, complete with straw hat and bamboo cane and a roll of golden tickets. But that was behind us, and now it was up to Stu, who was more given to a quiet intellectual kind of persuasion.

  “No, thanks,” the boys said, and they were silent again, watching.

  A car rolled onto the grass and stopped.

  “Go get ’em, Stu-babe,” I said, and made ready to start the biplane again.

  By the time the Wright was chugging around, soft and gentle as a huge Model T engine, Stu was back with a young man and his woman, each laughing at the other for being so mad as to want a ride in this strange old flying machine.

  Stu helped them up into the wide front cockpit, where he fastened them side-by-side under one seat belt. He called over the sound of the Model T for them to hold onto their sunglasses if they wanted to look out over the windscreen, and with that warning, stepped down and clear.

  If they had fears about riding in this clattering old machine, it was too late now for mind-changing. Goggles down, throttle forward. The three of us were engulfed in the sound of a Model T gone wild, blasting hundred-mile winds back over us, sweeping the world into a grassy blur, jouncing at first, a sort of long muffled crash as the tall old wheels sped along the ground. Then the crash fell away with the earth and it was pure engine sound and wind beating us, and the trees and the houses shrank smaller and smaller.

  In all that wind and engineblast and earth tilting and going small below us, I watched my Wisconsin lad and his girl, to see them change. Despite their laughter, they had been afraid of the airplane. Their only knowledge of flight came from newspaper headlines, a knowledge of collisions and crashes and fatalities. They had never read a single report of a little airplane taking off, flying through the air and landing again safely. They could only believe that this must be possible, in spite of all the newspapers, and on that belief they staked their three dollars and their lives. And now they smiled and shouted to each other, looking down, pointing.

  Why should that be so pretty to see? Because fear is ugly and joy is beautiful, simple as that? Maybe so. Nothing so pretty as vanished fear.

  The air smelled like a million grassblades crushed, and the sun lowered to turn it from silver air into gold. It was a pretty day and we were all three glad to be flying through the sky as if this were all some bright loud dream, yet detailed and clear as no dream had ever been.

  Five minutes above the ground, turning into the second circle of town, my passengers were relaxed and at home in flight, unconscious of themselves, eyes bright as birds’ for looking down. The girl touched her companion’s shoulder, one time, to point out the church, and I was surprised to see that she wore a wedding ring. It couldn’t have been too long ago that they had walked out the door of that church into a rice-storm, and now it was all a little toy place, a thousand feet below. That tiny place? Why, it had been so big then, with the flowers and the music. Maybe it was big only because it was a special time.

  We circled down lower, took one last long look at the town, and slid in over the trees, air going soft in the struts and wires, to land. As soon as the tires touched, the dream was broken in the clatter and rumble of hard ground holding us as we moved, instead of soft air. Slower, slower and stopped at last where we began, the Model T ticking quietly to itself. Stu opened the little door and cast loose the seat belt.

  “Thanks a lot,” the young man said, “that was fun.”

  “That was wonderful!” his wife said, radiant, forgetting to adjust the mask of convention about her words and her eyes.

  “Glad to fly with you,” I said, my own mask firm in place, my own delight well down within myself and under tight control. There was so much more I wanted to say, to ask: Tell me how that all felt, first time … was the sky as blue, the air as golden for you as it is for me? Did you see that deep deep green of the meadow, like we were floating in emerald, there after takeoff? Thirty years, fifty years from now, will you remember? I honestly wanted to know.

  But I nodded my head and smiled and said, “glad to fly with you,” and that was the end of the story. They walked away arm in arm, still smiling, toward their car.

  “That’s it,” Stu said, approaching my cockpit. “Nobody else wants to fly.”

  I came back from my far thoughts. “Nobody to fly? Stu, there’s five cars out there! They can’t all be just lookin’.”

  “They’re going to fly tomorrow, they say.”

  If we had five airplanes, and more action going on, I thought, they’d be ready to fly today. With five airplanes, we’d look like a real circus. With two airplanes, maybe we’re just a curiosity.

  The old-timers, I thought, suddenly. How many of them ever survived, leading a gypsy-pilot’s life?

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS ALL SIMPLE AND free and a very good life. The barnstorming pilots, back in the twenties, just cranked their Jennies into the air and they flew to any little town and they landed. And then they took passengers up for joy-rides and they earned great bales of money. What free men, the barnstormers! What a pure life that must have been.

  These same sky gypsies, full of years, had closed their eyes and told me of a sun fresh and cool and yellow like I had never seen, with grass so green it sparkled under the wheels; a sky blue and pure like skies never come, anymore, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air. A land there was, in the old days, where a man could go in freedom, flying where he wanted to fly, and when; answering to no authority but his own.

  I had asked questions and I had listened carefully to the old pilots, and way in the back of my mind I wondered if a man might be able to do the same thing today, out in the great calm Midwest America.

  “On our own, kid,” I heard. “Aw, it used to be great. Weekdays we’d sleep late, and work on the airplanes till supper-time, then we’d carry folks up to sunset and beyond. Special times, pshaw, a thousand-dollar day was nothin’. Weekends we’d start flyin’ at sunup and we wouldn’t stop till midnight. Lines of people waitin’ to fly, lines of ’em. Great life, kid. Used to get up in the morning… we’d sew a couple blankets together, sleep under the wing … get up and say, ‘Freddie, where we goin’ today?’ And Freddie … he’s dead now; a fine pilot, but he never came back from the war … and Freddie’d say, ‘Where’s the wind?’

  “‘Comin’ out of the west,’ I’d say. ‘Then we go east,’ Freddie’d say, and we’d crank up the old Hisso Standard and throw in all our junk and off we’d go, headin’ with the wind and savin’ gas.

  “‘Course the times got rough, after a while. There was the Crash in ’29, and the folks didn’t have much money to fly. We were down to fifty cents a ride where we had been five dollars and ten dollars. Couldn’t eve
n buy gas. Sometimes, two fellas workin’, we’d drain gas out of one plane to keep the other flyin’. Then the Air-Mail came along and after that the airlines started up, needin’ pilots. But for a while there, while it lasted, it was a good life. Oh, ’21 to ’29 … it was pretty good. First thing out, when you’d land, you’d get two boys out, and a dog. First thing, before anybody …” Eyes were closed again, remembering.

  And I had wondered. Maybe those good old days aren’t gone. Maybe they’re still waiting now, out over the horizon. If I could find a few other pilots, a few other old planes. Maybe we could find those days, that clear clear air, that freedom. If I could prove that a man does have a choice, that he can choose his own world and his own time to live in, I could show that highspeed steel and blind computers and city riots are only one side of a picture of living … a side we don’t have to choose unless we want to. I could prove that America isn’t all really so changed and different, at heart. That beneath the surface of the headline, Americans are still a calm and brave and beautiful people.

  When my vague little dream was known, a few folk of differing opinion rushed to stamp it to death. Time and again I heard that this was not just a chancy impractical quest, but impossible, without hope of success. The good old days are gone … why, everybody knows that! Oh, maybe it used to be a slow and friendly place, this country, but nowadays people will sue a stranger—and like as not a friend—at the drop of a hat. It’s just the way people are, now. You go landing in a farmer’s hay field and he’ll throw you in jail for trespassing, take your airplane for damages to his land and testify that you threatened the lives of his family when you flew over the barn.

  People today, they said, demand the best in comfort and safety. You can’t pay them to go up in a forty-year-old biplane all open-cockpit with wind and oil lashing back all over them … and you expect them to pay you for the pain of all that? There wouldn’t be an insurance company—Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t cover a thing like that, for a cent less than a thousand dollars a week. Barnstorming, indeed! Keep your feet on the ground, friend, these are the 1960’s!

  “What do you think about a jump?” Stu asked, and snapped me back to afternoon Rio.

  “Getting a bit late,” I said, and the gypsy pilot and doom voices faded. “But, heck, a good calm day for it. Let’s give it a try.”

  Stu was ready in a minute, tall and serious, shrugging into his main chute harness, snapping the reserve parachute across his chest, tossing his helmet into the front seat, making ready for his part of the quest. A bulky clumsy deep-sea diver, all buckles and nylon web over a bright yellow one-piece jumpsuit, he pulled himself into the forward cockpit and closed the little door.

  “Allrighty,” he said, “let’s go.”

  I had a hard time believing that this lad, filled with inner fires, had chosen to study dentistry. Dentistry! Somehow we had to convince him that there was more to life than the makeshift security of a dentist’s office.

  In a moment, as we blasted off the ground and into the air, I was all of a sudden singing Rio Rita, making it Rye-o Rita. I knew only a part of the first line of the song, and it went over and over as we climbed to altitude.

  Stu looked overboard with a strange faint smile, thinking about something way off in the distance.

  Rita … Rye-o Ritah … noth … thing … sweetah … Rita … Oh-Rita. I had to imagine all the saxophones and cymbal-clashes over the thunder of the engine.

  If I were Stu, I wouldn’t be smiling. I’d be thinking about that ground down there, waiting for me.

  At 2500 feet, we swung around into the wind, and flew directly above the airport. Rye-o Ritah … la … dee … deedah … deedah … oh Ritah … My-baby-an’-me-o, Ritah …

  Stu came back from whatever far land it was he saw, and peered down over the side of his cockpit. Then, looking, he sat straight up and carefully dropped a bright roll of crepe paper overboard. It just missed the tail, unfurled into a long yellow-red-yellow streak of color and snaked straight down. I circled, climbing, and Stu was intent, watching the color. When it hit the ground, he nodded and smiled briefly back at me. We turned back on course for the airport, level at 4500 feet. I shuddered at the thought of actually jumping out of an airplane. It was a very long way down.

  Stu opened his cockpit door while I slowed the biplane to ease the windblast for him. It was an odd feeling, to watch my front-seat passenger climb out onto the wing and make ready to get off while we were a mile in the air. He was going to go through with it, and I was afraid for him. There is a gigantic difference between standing on the ground talking glibly about parachute-jumping, and the fact itself, when one is standing on the wing, fighting the wind, looking down through empty empty air at the tiny little trees and houses and filaments of roads laid flat on the ground.

  But Stu was all business now. He stood on the rubber mat of the wing root, facing the tail of the airplane, watching for his target to slide into view. He held onto a wing-strut with one hand, the edge of my cockpit with the other. If anything, he was enjoying the moment.

  Then he saw what he wanted to see; the center of the grass runway, and the windsock, barely visible in smallness. He leaned toward me. “GOIN’ DOWN!” he said. And then, as simply as that, he vanished.

  On the wing root, where he had been standing, was nothing. One instant there, talking, next instant gone. I wondered for a second whether he had ever been in the airplane at all.

  I looked down over the side and saw him, a tiny figure, arms outstretched, falling straight down toward the ground. But it was more than falling. It was much faster than falling. He blurred down, fired from a cannon, right at the ground.

  I waited for a long time as he changed from a tiny cross into a round speck. No parachute opened. It was not a good feeling, to wait for that chute. After an agonizing long while I knew that it was not going to open at all.

  The very first jump of our two-plane circus and his parachute failed. I felt a little bit cold. His body might be that leaf-shaped dot there by the grove of trees that bordered the the airport, or the one by the hangars. Darn. We had lost our jumper.

  I didn’t feel sad for Stu; he knew what he was gambling when he began parachute jumping. But just a second ago he had been standing right there on the wing, and now there was nothing.

  His main chute must have failed and he didn’t get the reserve open in time. I pulled back the throttle and spiraled down, watching the place where he had disappeared. I was surprised not be to shocked or remorseful. It was just a shame that it had happened this way, so early in the summer. So much for the dentistry.

  In that instant, a parachute snapped open, way down below me. It came as quickly as Stu had gone from the wing, a sudden orange-white mushroom floating softly in the air, drifting very gently with the wind.

  He was alive! Something had happened. At the last instant he finally wrenched the reserve chute into the wind, with one second left he had untangled from death, had pulled the rip-cord, had lived. Any moment now he would be touching down with a wild terrible story to tell, and a word that he would never jump again.

  But the fragile colored mushroom stayed long in the air, drifting.

  We dived down toward it, the biplane and I, wires singing loud, and the closer we came to the parachute, the higher it was from the ground. We eased out of the dive at 1500 feet and circled a little man dangling by strings under a great pulsing dome of nylon.

  He had altitude to spare. There never had been any trouble, there had never been any danger at all!

  The figure swinging beneath the nylon waved across to me, and I rocked my wings in reply, grateful, puzzled that he should be alive.

  And as we circled him, it wasn’t we that turned, but his parachute, spinning around and around the horizon. A strange dizzy feeling.

  The angle, of course! That’s how he could be so high in the air now, when I was so sure he had hit the ground … the angle that I watched him from. I had been looking right down on top of him, and h
is only background was the wide earth all around. His death was an illusion.

  He pulled one of the suspension lines and the canopy twisted swiftly around, one turn left, one turn right. He controlled the direction of the parachute at will; he was at home in his element.

  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.