Nothing by Chance (26 page)

“She’d go down sure enough if I got in there.”

I pulled my sleeping bag from the front cockpit and turned to the other watcher.

“Ready to fly today? Three dollars, and Milan from the air. Pretty town it is.”

“I’d go, if I could keep one foot on the ground.”

“Can’t see much from that height.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be deluged with customers. My only hope had been that the biplane would be a strange enough thing in an airportless town to bring out the curious. Something had to happen soon. The fuel stick showed that we were down to 24 gallons of fuel. We’d need more gasoline before long, and we’d need passengers first, to pay for it. We had come from poor to rich to poor again.

A bright red late-model Ford sedan drove through the gate, purring in its mufflers. Instead of a license plate on its front bumper, it said CHEVY EATER. From the little crossed flags in chrome-on the fender, I thought it might have some kind of huge engine under the hood.

The driver was an open-faced young man, a sort of enlightened hot-rodder, and he walked over to look in the cockpit.

“Feel like flyin’ today?” I said.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m a coward.”

“Hey, what is with all this coward stuff? Everybody in Milan scared of airplanes? I just better pack up and move out.”

“No … there’ll be lots of folks out to fly with y’. They just don’t know you’re here yet. You want to ride in town, get somethin’ to eat?”

“No thanks. Might ride over to that place over there, though. What is it, a Buick place? Think they’d have a Coke machine?”

“Sure, they got one there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride over. I’m not doin’ anythin’ anyway.”

The pickup trucks had left and no one else appeared on the road. It seemed as good a time as any for breakfast.

The big engine was there in the Ford, and tires screeched all the way down the road.

“You flyin’ that airplane came in a while ago?” the Buick dealer asked when I walked into his shop.

“Sure am.”

“Not havin’ any trouble, are you?”

“Nope. Just flyin’ around givin’ rides.”

“Rides? How much do you get for a ride?”

“Three dollars. Trip over town. About ten minutes. You got a Coke machine?”

“Right over ’gainst the corner. Hey, Elmer! Stan! Go take an airplane ride with this guy. I’ll pay your way.”

I dropped a dime in the machine while the owner insisted that he was serious, and that his boys were to go out and fly.

Elmer put down his socket wrench at once. “Let’s go.” Stan wouldn’t budge. “No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t quite feel like it today.”

“You’re scared, Stan,” my Ford driver said. “You’re scared to go up with him.”

“I don’t see
you
flyin’, Ray Scott.”

“I told him. I’m scared. Maybe I’ll go up later.”

“Well, I’m not scared of any old airplane,” Elmer said.

I finished my Coke and we piled into the red Ford. “I was a special jumper in Korea,” Elmer said as we drove. “Used to go up in a Gooney Bird and jump out from three thousand feet, with a ten-foot chute. Ten foot eight inches. I’m not scared of no airplane ride.”

“A
ten-foot
chute?” I said. Elmer would have been hitting the ground at about forty miles an hour.

“Yeah. Ten foot eight inches. You know that I’m not afraid of no airplane ride.”

The Ford stopped at the wing of the biplane and my passenger climbed aboard. In a minute we were airborne, engine and air thundering about us, the land piled in hills of crushed emerald below. We turned over town, trying to herd some passengers out to the hayfield. People on the ground stopped and looked up at us, and some boys on bicycles began wheeling out, and I had hope.

Elmer was not enjoying the flight. He braced himself hard against the side of the cockpit, and he didn’t look down. Why, the man was frightened! There must be quite a story behind the guy, I thought. We glided down to land and he got out before the engine had windmilled to a stop. “See? Nothing about an airplane ride can scare me!”

Wow, I thought, and wondered about that story.

“Ready to go for a ride now, Ray?” he said.

“Maybe this afternoon. I’m scared.”

“Ray, darn it,” I said, “why is everybody in this town so scared of airplanes?”

“I don’t know. Well, we had a couple pretty bad airplane crashes here this year, right around here. Guy got lost around Green City and went into a cloud and then crashed onto a hill. Then a little ways north a two-engine plane, brand new one, had the motors stop and hit a lot of trees and rocks. Killed everybody. People still worried, I guess. But you’ll get some out after work, today.”

So that was it. With airplanes falling like silly moths out of the air, no wonder the people were frightened.

When they left, in a screech of blue tire smoke, it was time for decision. I had $6.91 in my pocket, and 22 gallons of gasoline. If I waited there with no passengers, I’d be wasting time
and getting hungrier. I couldn’t spend money for lunch, or there would be nothing for gas. Later on, there might be passengers. And there might not. I wished Paul was there, or Stu or Dick or Spence, to be Leader for the Day, but I was stuck with Leader, and at last I decided to spend my money on gas, now. Maybe there would be a good town on the way north.

Centerville was 40 miles away, and there was an airport there. I loaded the front cockpit, started the engine with the crank, running back to the starter engage handle before the big whining wheel ground down, and took off north. It wasn’t until we had been in the air for ten minutes that I thought $6.91 wasn’t going to buy much aviation gasoline. Thirteen, fourteen gallons, maybe. I should have stayed to fly more passengers. But there was nothing to be done about it then, midway between Milan and Centerville. The best plan was just to pull the throttle back and use as little fuel as possible.

Car gas, I thought. The old engines were built for low-octane fuel. I knew antique-airplane pilots who used nothing but Regular auto gas in their engines. Someday I’ll try car gas, when I don’t have passengers to fly—see how it works.

Centerville swept serenely under the wing, and five minutes later we rolled to the 80-octane pump.

“What’ll it be?” the attendant said. “Want some gas?”

“Take some 80-octane from you.”

He pushed a lever that started the pump humming, and handed up the nozzle to where I stood in struts and wires over the gas tank. I rechecked my cash supply and said, “Tell me when I’ve got… six dollars and eighty-one cents’ worth.” I held back a dime for emergencies.

“Kind of a funny way to buy gas,” he said.

“Yep.” The nozzle poured fuel down into the black emptiness of the 50-gallon tank, and I was thankful for every second that it did. I had worked hard for that $6.81, and the fuel that
it bought was precious stuff. Every drop of it. When the pump stopped, I held the nozzle there so that the last thin droplets fell down into the blackness. There was still a distressing amount of emptiness down the filler hole.

“Comes to sixteen gallons.”

I handed down the hose and with it the money. Well, sixteen gallons was more than I thought I was going to get … now if I could go back to Milan at the lowest possible throttle setting, I might have a little more gas in the tank than I did when I left.

We chugged south with the engine turning 1575 revolutions per minute, nearly 200 rpm slower than low-cruise power. We crawled through the air, but the time that it took to get back to Milan was not so important as the amount of fuel we used. In 30 minutes we had covered 30 miles, and glided once again to land on the hay. No one waited.

Since I couldn’t afford fuel for aerobatics, since Stu and his parachute were 1500 miles away, I was left with Method C. I unrolled the sleeping bag under the right wing, and resolved to employ C for one hour. If there were no passengers by then, I’d move on.

I studied the hay stubble a few inches away. It was a huge jungle, with all kinds of beasts roaming it. Here was a great crack in the earth, wide enough to keep an ant from crossing. Here was a young tree of a hay-stem growing new, a half-inch tall. I pulled it up and ate it for lunch. It was tender and tasty, and I looked for others. But that was it, the other hay was all old and tough.

A spider climbed a tall grassblade and threatened to jump down onto my sleeping bag and torment me. Easily met, that challenge. I uprooted the blade and moved the spider two feet south. I rolled over and looked up at the bottom of the wing for a while, and drummed my fingers on its tightness.

One-thirty. In half an hour I’d be on my way … the people
here were just too frightened. That little town of Lemons, on the way to Centerville, might have some chances.

A pickup truck clattered down toward me. Like every pickup in every town, it had its owner’s name painted on the door.
William Cowgill, Milan, Mo.
I read upside down, under the wing. A black pickup truck.

I got up and rolled my sleeping bag; it was time to leave.

An interested sharp mind peered at me from under a shock of white hair, through quick blue eyes.

“Howdy,” I said. “Lookin’ to fly at all today? Nice and cool up there.”

“No thanks. How y’ doin’?” Next to him sat a boy of twelve or so.

“Not too good. Not too many people feel like flyin’, ’round here, I guess.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Think you’d probably get quite a few this evening.”

“This is too far out,” I said. “You got to be close to town, or nobody even sees you.”

“You might have better luck over at my place,” he said. “It’s not too far out.”

“Sure didn’t see it from the air. Where is it?”

The man opened the door of the truck, took a wide board from the back and drew a map. “You know where the cheese factory is?”

“No.”

“Lu-Juan’s?”

“No. I know where the school is, with the race track.”

“Well, you know the lake. The big lake, south of town?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“We’re just across the street from that lake, on the south. Ridge land. There’s some cows in the place now, but we want ’em out anyway and you can land there. Fact, I’ve been
thinking of making an airport out of it. Milan needs an airport.”

“Guess I could find that. Just across from the lake.” I was sure that the pasture wouldn’t work, but I had to be on my way anyway, and I might as well have a look at it.

“Right. I’m driving the truck, and Cully here’s got the jeep at the corner. We’ll go on over and meet you.”

“OK. I’ll look at it, anyway,” I said, “’f it don’t work out, I’ll be on my way.”

“All right. Cully, come on.” The boy was standing by the cockpit, looking at the instruments.

In five minutes, we were circling a strip of ridged pasture. A flock of cows clustered around the center, apparently eating the grass. We dropped down for a low pass, and the land looked smooth. The pasture was on the side of a long hill, and rose like a gentle roller-coaster to the crest. Just beyond the crest was a barbed-wire fence and a row of telephone poles and wires. If we rolled off the ridge-line, we’d be in trouble, but then if we did that it would be our own fault. Carefully used, this would be a good strip to work from. We could take off downhill and land uphill.

Best of all, there was a hamburger stand a hundred yards down the road. If I carried only one passenger, I could eat!

The cows galloped away after the first pass over their horns. There was one scrap of paper on the whole strip, a crushed newspaper just by a place where the ridge turned right. As soon as I saw that paper go by, I’d touch right rudder, just a little.

It was more difficult than it looked, and our first landing was not as smooth as I wanted it to be. But cars were already parking by the fence to watch the biplane fly, and passengers came out at once.

“How much do you want for a ride?”

“Three dollars. Nice and cool up there, too.” Passengers before the sign went up, I thought. A good omen.

“OK. I’ll fly with you.”

Haha, I thought, lunch. I emptied the front cockpit again, feeling that I had spent the whole day loading and unloading that front seat, and strapped my passenger aboard. The view from the ridge-top was a pretty one, rolling hills away off to the horizon, the trees and houses of the town they called “
My
-l’n” resting easy on a soft rise of ground. Taking off downhill, the biplane leaped ahead, was airborne in seconds, and climbed quickly over the fields.

We circled town, the passenger looking down at the square and the county courthouse centered there, the pilot thinking that he just might have found a good place to barnstorm. A circle to the left, one to the right, a turn over a private lake and boat dock, a gliding spiral down over the pasture, with a gathering row of automobiles waiting, and our second landing on the ridge-top. It went smoothly. The place would work. Finding this field was finding a diamond hidden in a secret green jewel-box.

It was a different town, here. The people were much more interested in the airplane, and they wanted to fly.

“You might go out east, over the golf course,” Bill Cowgill said as he arrived in the pickup, “get some folks out there, maybe.” He was more interested in making the flying a success than anyone we had worked with. Probably because he wanted to see how the land worked as an airport.

“How are you fixed for gas, Bill?” I said. “There a filling station around, have a five-gallon can of gas, regular car gas?”

“Got some down at the house, if you want. Got plenty.”

“Well, I might take you up on ten gallons, maybe.”

Two more men stepped from the cars. “You giving rides?” they said.

“Sure thing.”

“Well, let’s go.” We went..

Circling to land, I saw that the cars had parked exactly across the end of my strip. If we touched down too long, and rolled straight along the ridge-line, we’d run right into the middle of them all. I cut the throttle back and decided that if we were rolling too fast, I’d turn left, down the side of the ridge, up the side of the crest and then deliberately ground-loop right. If everything went well, I wouldn’t even damage the airplane. Still, I didn’t want to land long.