Nothing by Chance (8 page)

“What were you boys doin’, tryin’ to see how close you could come without hitting?” He touched a switch that set the gas pump to humming.

I looked at Paul and thought I-told-you-so; we don’t want to have anything to do with this place.

“Just a bit of loose formation flying,” Paul said. “We do it every day.”

“Every day? What are you boys doing? You part of an air show?”

“Sort of. We’re just barnstormin’ around,” I said. “Thought we might stay here a few days, hop a few passengers, get people out to look at the airport.”

He thought about this for a while, considering implications.

“This is not my field, of course,” he said while we gassed
the airplanes and added some quarts of oil to the engines. “Owned by the city and run by the club. I couldn’t make the decision by myself. I’d have to call a meeting of the directors. Could do that tonight and maybe you could come on down and talk to them.”

I couldn’t remember anything about barnstormers meeting with directors to decide whether or not to work a town. “It’s nothin’ that big,” I said. “Just us two airplanes. We do formation and a few aerobatics, and then Stu here does a little parachute jumpin’. That’s about it, and carrying passengers.”

“Still have to have the meeting, I’d think. How much do you charge?”

“Charge nothin’. It’s all free,” I said, reeling the gas hose into the pit. “All we’re tryin’ to do is make gas and oil and hamburgers on the passenger rides, three dollars a throw.”

Somehow I got the idea that the town had been hurt in the past by a troupe of roving sky gypsies. It was a completely different meeting than the normal cheer we had come to expect at smaller towns.

“Joe Wright’s the name.”

We introduced ourselves around, and Joe got on the phone and called a few of the directors of the Palmyra Flying Club. When he was done, he said, “We’ll be getting together tonight; like to have you come on down and talk. Meanwhile, I guess you’d like to get something to eat. Place is just down the way. Give you a ride, if you want, or there’s a courtesy car.

I would rather have walked, but Joe insisted and we piled into his Buick and drove. He knew the town well, and gave us a pretty little tour of it on the way to the café. Palmyra was blessed with beautiful grass places; a millpond that was still as a lily-pad and green-reflecting quiet like millponds should be; dirt roads through the country, arched overhead by tall curving trees, and quiet back streets with timeless lapstrake
and stained glass and oval strawberry-glass front doors.

Every day’s barnstorming made the fact a little clearer … the only place where time moves is in the cities.

By the time we arrived at the D&M Truck Stop Café, we were well appraised of the town, whose primary industry was a foundry sheltered back in the trees; and of Joe Wright, who was a kind-thinking volunteer airport-operator. He dropped us at the door and left to do some more calling and meeting-arranging.

“I don’t like it, Paul,” I said when we had ordered. “Why should we bother with a place if it’s gonna be no fun? We’re free agents, remember … go anywhere we want to. There’s eight thousand other places than here.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” he said. “What’s the matter with going to their little meeting? We just go there and act nice and they’ll say fine. Then we don’t have any problems and everybody knows we’re good guys.”

“But if we go to the meeting we hurt ourselves, don’t you see? We came out here to get away from committees and meetings, and to see if we could find real people, you know, in the little towns. Just being greasy old barnstormers, free in the air, goin’ where we please and when we please.”

“Now look,” Paul said. “This is a good place, right?”

“Wrong. Too many airplanes here.”

“It’s close in to town, it has lakes, it has people, OK?”

“Well …”

We left it at that, though I still wanted to leave and Paul still wanted to stay. Stu didn’t want to take sides, but I thought he leaned to the staying side.

When we walked back to the airplanes, we found a few cars parked, and a few Palmyrans looking into the cockpits. Stu unrolled the FLY $3 FLY signs and we went to work.

“PALMYRA FROM THE AIR, FOLKS! PRETTIEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE WORLD! WHO’S THE FIRST
TO FLY?” I walked toward the parked cars when the cockpit-watchers said they were just browsing. “Are you ready for an airplane ride, sir?”

“Heh-heh-heh-heh.” That was the only answer I got, and it very clearly said you poor con man, do you really think I’m stupid enough to go up in that old crate?

The quality of that laugh stopped me cold, and I turned abruptly away.

What a crushing difference between this place and the other little places where we had been so welcome. If our search is for the real people and the true people of America, then we should get out of here now.

“Can you take me for a ride?” A man walking boldly from another car changed my attitude at once.

“Love to,” I said.
“Stu!
Passenger! Let’s go!”

Stu trotted over and helped the man into the front cockpit while I strapped into the rear one. I was very much at home in this little office, with the board of familiar dials and levers around me, and I was happy there. Stu began cranking the inertia-starter handcrank, the device recognized time and again by farm folk as a “cream separator.” Straining at the handle, turning it slowly at first, throwing heavy effort into the steel mass of the geared flywheel inside the cowl, Stu drained pure energy from his heart into the starter. At last, starter flywheel screaming, Stu fell away and called, “CLEAR!” I pulled the starter-engage handle and the propeller jerked around. But it turned for only ten seconds. The propeller slowed, and stopped. The engine didn’t fire one single time.

What’s wrong, I thought. This thing starts every time; it has never missed starting! Stu looked at me in a glazed sort of shock, that all his torture on the crank had gone for nothing.

I was just shaking my head, to tell him I couldn’t understand
why the engine didn’t fire, when I found the trouble. I hadn’t turned the switch on. I was so familiar with the cockpit that I had expected the switches and levers to work by themselves.

“Stu … ah … hate to say this … but… I forgot to turn the switch on sorry that sure was a silly thing to do let’s crank her one more time OK?”

He closed his eyes, imploring heaven to destroy me, and when that didn’t work, he made to throw the crank at my head. But he caught himself in time and with the air of a church martyr, inserted the handcrank once again and began to wind it.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Stu,” I said, sitting back in my comfortable cockpit. “I owe you fifty cents for forgetting.”

He didn’t answer, as he had not the strength to talk. The second time I pulled the engage handle the engine roared awake at once, and the jumper looked at me as one looks at a poor dumb beast in a cage. I taxied quickly away and was airborne a moment later with my passenger. The biplane fell into a pattern for Palmyra at once, with a circling detour to look at one of the lakes and to climb a little higher, for there was no emergency landing field anywhere east of town.

The pattern took ten minutes exactly. Touching down, the biplane swerved for a second as I was thinking about what a pretty grass runway this was. Wake up! she was telling me. Every landing, every takeoff is different, every one! And don’t you forget it!

I did quick penance by stomping on a rudder pedal to stop the swerve.

As we taxied in, Paul was taxiing out in the Luscombe with a passenger of his own. My spirits brightened a little. Maybe there was hope for Palmyra, after all.

But that was the end of it for the afternoon. We had watchers, but no more passengers.

Stu collected my rider’s money, and walked to the cockpit. “I can’t do anything with ’em,” he said over the engine-roar. “If they stop and get out of their cars, we get passengers. But if they stay in the cars, they’re watchers, and they just aren’t interested in flying.”

It was hard to believe that we could have all those cars and no more riders, but there it was. The watchers all knew each other, and soon a lively conversation was going on. And the Directors arrived to size us up on their own.

Paul landed, taxied in, and lacking more passengers, shut his engine down into silence. A fragment of talk drifted to us. “… he was right over my house!”

“He was right over everybody’s house. Palmyra isn’t that big.”

“… who told you we were having a meeting tonight?”

“M’wife. Somebody called her and got her all shook up…”

Joe Wright came over and introduced us to some of the directors, and we told our story again. I was getting tired of this becoming such a big thing. Why couldn’t they tell us right out that we were welcome or not? Just a simple thing like a couple of barnstormers.

“You have any schedule for your shows?” one man asked.

“No schedule. We fly when we please.”

“Your airplanes are insured, of course; how much would that be?”

“The insurance on these airplanes is what we know about flying,” I said, and I wanted to add,
“fella!”
sarcastically. “There is not one cent of any other kind of insurance; no property damage, no liability.” Insurance, I wanted to say, is not a signed scrap of paper. Insurance is knowing within us about the sky and the wind, and the touch of the machines that we fly. If we didn’t believe in ourselves, or know our airplanes, then there was no signature, no amount of money in the world that could make us secure, or make our passengers
safe. But I simply said, again, “… not one penny of insurance.”

“Well,” he paused, startled. “We wouldn’t want to say that you’re not
welcome
… this is a public field …”

I smiled, and hoped that Paul had learned his lesson. “Where’s the map?” I asked him fiercely.

He had a there-there tone as I stalked to the biplane. “Now look. It’s dark almost, and they’re going to have their meeting, and we can’t go anywhere now so we might as well stay the night and move on tomorrow morning.”

“We no more belong here than we belong barnstorming at Kennedy International, man. We …”

“No, just listen,” he said. “They have a flight breakfast coming up here Sunday. They promised to have a Cessna 180 in here, carrying passengers. Little while ago I heard somebody say that the 180 cancelled out, so they have no one to carry passengers. And here we come. I think after this meeting they’re having now, they’re going to want us to stay. They’re in a bind, and we can help them.”

“Shame
on
ya, Paul. By Sunday we’ll be in Indiana. Sunday is four days away! And the last thing I want to do is help them out at their flight breakfast. I tell you, we don’t belong here! All they want around here is the little tricycle-gear modern airplanes that you drive like a car. Man, I want to be an
airplane
pilot! What the heck’s the matter with you, anyway?”

I took a grease rag and began wiping down the engine cowl in the dark. If the biplane had lights I would have flown away that minute.

After a while, the meeting in the office broke up and everyone was hearty and kind to us. I was immediately suspicious.

“Think you boys could stay over till Sunday?” a voice said, out of a crowd of directors. “We’re having a little flight breakfast
then, be hundreds of airplanes here, thousands of people. You stand to make a lot of money.”

I had to laugh. So this is what it felt like to be judged by our vagabond appearance. For just a moment, I was sorry for these people.

“Why don’t you stay in the office tonight, boys?” another voice said, and then in a lower tone to someone close by, “We’ll take inventory of the oil in there.”

I didn’t catch the implication of the last sotto voce, but Paul did, at once. “Did you hear that?” he said, stunned. “Did you hear that?”

“I think so. What?”

“They’re going to count the oil cans before they trust us in the office. They’re going to count the oil cans!”

I replied to whoever had offered the office. “No thanks. We’ll sleep out.”

“Love to have you stay in the office, really,” came the voice again.

“No,” Paul said. “We wouldn’t be safe there with all your oil cans. You wouldn’t want to trust us around all that expensive oil.”

I laughed again, in the dark. Hansen, our champion of Palmyra and its people, was furious now at their slur to his honesty.

“I leave fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of cameras unlocked in my plane while we go and eat, trusting these guys, and they think we’re going to steal a can of
oil!”

Stu stood quietly by, listening, and said not a word. It was full dark over supper at the D&M before Paul was cool again.

“We’re trying to find an ideal world,” he said to Joe Wright, who was brave enough to join us. “All of us have lived in the other world, the cutthroat, cheap world, where the only thing that matters is the almighty buck. Where people don’t even know what money means. And we’ve had
enough of that, so we’re out here living in our ideal world, where it’s all simple. For three bucks we sell something priceless, and with that we get our food and gas so we can go on.” Paul forgot his fried chicken, he was talking so hard to the Palmyran.

Why are we working on Joe, why are we justifying ourselves to him? I thought. Aren’t we sure, ourselves? Maybe we’re just so sure that we want to turn a few converts our way.

Our missionary effort, however, was wasted on Joe, who gave little sign that there was anything new or meaningful in what we said.

Stu did nothing but eat his supper. I wondered about the person within the boy, what he thought, what he cared about. I would liked to have met him, but for now, he was listening … listening … not saying a word, not offering a single thought to the roar of ideas going on about him. Well, I thought, he’s a good jumper and he’s thinking. There’s not much more we could ask.

“I’ll drive you back out to the office, if you want,” Joe said.

“Thanks, Joe,” Paul said. “We’ll take you up on that, but we’re not going to stay in that office. We’ll sleep under the wing. If somebody counted the oil wrong, and then counted it right, after we were gone, you see, we’d automatically be thieves. It’s better for us to have that place all locked up and us sleeping out under the wing.”