Nothing by Chance (7 page)

The figure inside shook its head. “I like to see it from the ground.”

If this was typical modern barnstorming, I thought, we were dead; the good old days were truly gone.

At last, about 5:30 in the afternoon, a fearless old farmer drove in. “I got a place about two miles down the road. Fly me over and see it?”

“Sure thing,” I said.

“What’ll it cost me?”

“Three dollars cash, American money.”

“Well, what are we waitin’ for, young fella?”

He couldn’t have been less than seventy, but he lived the flight. Snowy hair streaming back in the wind, he pointed the way to fly, and then down to his house and barn. It was as neat and pretty as a Wisconsin travel poster; bright green grass, bright white house, bright red barn, bright yellow hay in the loft. We circled twice, to bring a woman out on the grass, waving. He waved back wildly to her and kept waving as we flew away.

“A good ride, young fella,” he said when Stu guided him
down from the cockpit. “Best three dollars I ever spent. First time I been up in one of these machines. Now you made me sorry I didn’t do it a long time ago.”

That ride started our day, and from then till sunset I stayed in the cockpit, waiting only long enough on the ground for new riders to step aboard.

Stu caught on to a nice bit of passenger psychology, and took to saying, “How’d you like it?” when the flyers deplaned. Their clear fun and wild enthusiasm convinced the doubtful waiting to go ahead and invest in flight.

A few passengers came back near my cockpit after their flight and asked where they might learn to fly, and how much it might cost. Al and Lauren had been right, thinking we could do something for Rio aviation. One more airplane hangared at the airstrip would increase the flying by 25 percent, three more airplanes would double it. But the nature of the barnstormer is to come and be gone again all in a day, and we never heard what happened at Rio after we flew away.

The sun dropped down around us. Paul and I went up for one last formation flight for fun and watched the lights slowly sparkle on, down in the dark streets. When we landed, we could hardly see to taxi, and we felt as if we had been working much longer than one afternoon.

We covered the airplanes, paid the gas bill and just as we were all cocooned in our sleeping bags, and as Stu had uncocooned at the request of his seniors to turn out the light, I saw a pair of beady black eyes watching me from under the toolkit, near the door.

“Hey, you guys,” I said. “We got a mouse in here.”

“Where do you see a mouse?” Paul said.

“Tool-kit. Underneath it.”

“Kill him. Get him with your boot, Stu.”

“PAUL, YOU BLOODTHIRSTY MURDERER!” I
shouted. “There will be no killing in this house! Pick up that boot and you got that mouse and me both to face, Stu.”

“Well, sweep him out, then,” Paul said, “if you’re going to be that way.”

“No!” I said. “The little guy deserves a roof over his head. How would you like somebody to sweep you out in the cold?”

“It’s not cold outside,” Paul said peevishly.

“Well, the principle of the thing. He was here before we came. This is his place more than ours.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Leave the mouse there! Let the mouse walk all over us. But if he steps on me, I’m gonna pound him!”

Stu obediently snapped out the lights and groped back to his couch-pillows on the floor.

We talked in the dark for a while about how kind our hosts had been, and the whole town, for that matter.

“But you notice we carried no women here, or almost none?” Paul said. “There was hardly one female passenger. We had all kinds of them at Prairie.”

“We made all kinds of money, and we didn’t quite do that here,” I said.

“How’d we do in all, by the way, Stu?”

He reeled off statistics, “Seventeen passengers. Fifty-one dollars. “’Course we spent nineteen for gas. That’s what…” he paused for figuring, “… ten bucks each, today, about.”

“Not bad,” Paul said. “Ten bucks for three hours’ work. On a weekday. That works out to fifty dollars a week with all expenses paid except food, and not counting Saturday and Sunday. Hey! A guy can make a living at this!”

I wanted very much to believe him.

   
CHAPTER FIVE
   

FIRST THING NEXT MORNING, Paul Hansen was on fire. He was all crushed up in his sleeping bag, and from the end of it, from just by his hatbrim, a veil of smoke curled up.

“PAUL! YOU’RE ON FIRE!”

He didn’t move. After a short aggravated pause, he said, “I am smoking a cigarette.”

“First thing in the morning? Before you even get up? Man, I thought you were on fire!”

“Look,” he said. “Don’t bug me about my cigarettes.”

“Sorry.”

I surveyed the room, and from my low position it looked more like some neglected trash-bin than ever. In the center of the room was a cast-iron wood-burning stove. It said
Warm Morning
on it, in raised iron, and its draft holes looked at me with slitted eyes. The stove did not make me feel very welcome.

Lapping all around its iron feet were our supplies and equipment. On the one table were several old aviation magazines, a tool-company calendar with some very old Peter Gow-land girl-shots, Stu’s reserve parachute, with its altimeter and
stopwatch strapped on. Directly beneath was my red plastic clothes bag, zippered shut, with a hole chewed about the size of a quarter in the side … THERE WAS A HOLE IN MY CLOTHES BAG! From one crisis to another.

I sprang out of bed, grabbed the bag and zipped it open. There beneath shaving kit and Levi’s and a packet of bamboo pens were my emergency rations: a box of bittersweet chocolate and several packs of cheese and crackers. One square of chocolate had been half eaten and one cheese section of a cheese-and-crackers box had been consumed. The crackers were untouched.

The mouse. That mouse from last night, under the tool-kit. My little buddy, the one whose life I saved from Hansen’s savagery. That mouse had eaten my emergency rations!

“You little devil!” I said fiercely, through gritted teeth.

“What’s the matter?” Hansen smoked his cigarette, and didn’t turn over.

“Nothing. Mouse ate my cheese.”

There was a great burst of smoke from the far couch. “THE MOUSE? That mouse from last night that I said we’d better throw outside? And you felt sorry for him? That mouse ate your food?”

“Some cheese, and a little chocolate, yeah.”

“How’d he get at it?”

“He ate a hole through my clothes bag.”

Hansen didn’t stop laughing until quite a while later.

I drew on heavy wool socks and my boots with the survival knife sewn to the side. “Next time I see that mouse around my clothes bag,” I said, “he gets six inches of cold steel, I guarantee ya, no questions asked. Last time I stick up for any mouse. You think at least he’d eat your crazy hat, Hansen, or Stu’s toothpaste or somethin’, but
my cheese!
Man! Next time, baby, cold steel!”

At breakfast, we dined on Mary Lou’s French toahst for the last time.

“We’re on our way today, Mary Lou,” Paul said, “and you didn’t come out and fly with us. You sure missed a good chance. It’s pretty up there, and now you’ll never know what the sky is like, first hand.”

She smiled a dazzling smile. “It’s pretty up there,” she said, “but it’s a silly bunch that lives in it.” So that is what our enchantress thought of us. I was, in a way, hurt.

We paid our bill and said goodbye to Mary Lou and rode out to the airport in Al’s pickup.

“Think you guys could get back around this way July six-teen-seventeen?” he asked. “Firemen’s Picnic, then. Be lots of people here love to have an airplane ride. Sure like to have you back up here.”

We began packing our mountain of gear back into the airplanes. The wings of the Luscombe rocked as Paul tied his camera boxes firmly to the framework of the cabin.

“Never can tell, Al. We got no idea where we’re gonna be, then. If we’re anywhere around here, though, we’ll sure be back.”

“Glad to have you, anytime.”

It was Wednesday morning, then, when we lifted off, circling one last time over Al’s place and the Café. Al waved and we rocked our wings farewell, but Mary Lou was busy, or had no time for the silly bunch that lived in the sky. I was still sad about that.

And Rio was gone.

And spring changed to summer.

   
CHAPTER SIX
   

IT CAME TO US as all Midwest towns did, a clump of green trees way out in the middle of the countryside. At first it seemed trees only, and then the church steeples came in sight, and then the fringe-houses and then at last it was clear that under those trees were solid houses and potential airplane passengers.

The town lapped around two lakes and a huge grass runway. I was tempted to fly right on over it, because there were at least fifteen small hangars down there, and lights along the sides of the strip. This was getting pretty far away from the traditional hayfield of the true barnstormer.

But The Great American Flying Circus was low on funds, the strip was less than a block from town, and the cool lakes lay there and sparkled clear in the sun, inviting us. So we dropped down in, touching one-two on the grass.

The place was deserted. We taxied to the gas pit, which was a set of steel trapdoors in the grass, and shut the engines down into silence.

“What do you think?” I called to Paul as he slid out of his airplane.

“Looks good.”

“Think it’s a bit too big to work?”

“Looks fine.”

There was a small square office near the gas pit, but it was locked. “This is not my idea of a barnstormer’s hayfield.”

“Might as well be, for all the people around here.”

“They’ll be comin’ out about suppertime, like always.”

An old Buick sedan rolled out toward us from town, lurching heavily over the grass driveway to the office. It stopped, and a spare, lined man eased out, smiling.

“You want some gas, I guess.”

“Could use some, yeah.”

He stepped up on the wooden porch and unlocked the office.

“Nice field, you got here,” I said.

“Not bad, for bein’ sod.”

Bad news, I thought. When the owner doesn’t like sod, he’s looking for a concrete runway, and when he’s looking for a concrete runway, he’s looking to make money on business planes, not barnstormers.