Nothing by Chance (9 page)

In half an hour, the biplane was a huge silent arrangement of black over our sleeping bags and above the black was the bright mist of the Milky Way.

“Center of the galaxy,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Milky way. That’s the center of the galaxy.”

“It makes you feel kind of small, doesn’t it,” Paul said.

“Used to. Not so much any more. Guess I’m bigger now.”
I chewed a grass stem. “What do you think now? We gonna make money here or not?”

“We’ll just have to wait it out.”

“I think it’s going to work all right,” I said, an optimist under the stars. “Can’t imagine anybody not coming out to see old airplanes, even in this town.”

I watched the galaxy, with its northern cross like a big kite in a wind of stars, sparkling on and off. The grass was soft beneath me, my boots made a firm leathery pillow.

“We’ll find out tomorrow.” It fell silent under the wing, and the cool wind moaned low in the wires above us, between the biplane’s wings.

Tomorrow dawned in fog, and
I woke to the slow cannon-boom of fog-drops falling from the top wing down onto the drum-fabric of the bottom one. Stu was awake, quietly rolling a new drift-streamer out of twenty yards of crepe paper. Paul was asleep, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

“Hey, Paul. You awake?”

No answer.

“HEY PAUL! YOU STILL ASLEEP?”

“Mmm.” He moved an inch.

“I guess you’re still asleep.”

“Mm.”

“Well, you go ahead and sleep, we won’t be flyin’ for a while.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Fog.”

The hat was raised by a hand snaking out of the green sleeping bag. “Mm. Fog. Up off the lakes.”

“Yeah. Burn off by ten o’clock. Betcha nickel.” There was no answer. I tried licking fog from some larger grassblades, but it wasn’t much of a thirst-quencher. I rearranged my boot-pillows and tried for a bit more sleep.

Paul came suddenly awake. “Ar! My shirt’s all wet! It’s soaking wet!”

“Man. City pilots. If I wanted to get my shirt just as wet as I could, I’d lay it out on the wing like you did. You’re supposed to put your shirt under your sleepin’ bag.”

I slid out of my bag and into the dry warm shirt that I had slept on and mashed all kinds of wrinkles into. “Nothing like a nice dry shirt, of a mornin’.”

“Ha, ha.”

I pulled the cover from the cockpits and unloaded the toolkit and oil cans and FLY $3 FLY sign from the front cockpit. I ragged down the windshields, pulled the propeller through a few times, and in general made ready hopefully for a busy day of barnstorming. The fog was lifting already.

As he finished breakfast, Stu
sat back in his chair and stretched his legs. “Shall we try a day jump, see what happens?”

“If you want,” Paul said. “Better check with the Leader first.” He nodded at me.

“What do you mean? I am always winding up Leader! I’m no leader! No leader! I quit! As Leader, I resign!”

We decided together, then, that it would be good to try a midday jump, to see if anyone was about with time to come and fly.

“Let’s not waste any time with freefall stuff,” Paul said, “nobody will see you. How about a clear-and-pull from three thousand?”

Stu did not buy this idea. “Rather have time to stabilize a bit. Thirty-five hundred’s OK.”

“Sounds fine,” said Paul.

“If you don’t pull, Stu, or your chute doesn’t open,” I said, “we’ll just fly right on to the next town.”

“I’m sure it won’t make any difference to me,” he answered, with a rare smile.

By noon we were airborne, climbing in formation toward the top of the sky. Stu sat in the open door on the right side of Paul’s airplane, looking downward, his drift streamer in his hand. As we came near the jump altitude, I broke away and flew some loops and rolls and then clawed my way back up to altitude. There wasn’t a person moving anywhere in the streets below. The Luscombe was level on course over the airport, and the long crepe streamer plummeted overboard, slowed to the speed of an open parachute and twisted down toward the grass. It landed several hundred yards west of the target, in the wind.

Way up in Paul’s airplane, high over my head, Stu was picking his jump point to correct for the wind, to miss the trees and wires. I stopped cavorting and circled beneath the little sportplane, which by now had nearly reached jump altitude. Paul turned his airplane onto the jump run, into the wind, and we all waited. The Luscombe droned along at a walk; only if I watched carefully could I tell that it was moving at all. And then Stu MacPherson jumped.

A tiny black speck, moving instantly at high speed and straight down, his body turned left, stabilized, turned right, tumbled end over end. I blinked again at the speed of it. In seconds he was no longer a black speck, but a man streaking down through the air, a falcon striking.

Time stopped. Our airplanes were frozen in the air, the sound and the wind were still. The only motion was that sizzling speed of the man whom I last saw crushing himself into the tiny right seat of the Luscombe, and he was moving at least 150 miles per hour toward the flat unmoving earth. In the silence, I could hear him fall.

Stu was still above me when he brought both arms in close to his body, flung them out again, and the long bright rocket
of a parachute streamed from his back. It didn’t slow him a bit. The narrow line of the chute simply stopped in the air as the man went streaking on down. Then it caught him. All in an instant the chute burst wide open, closed again, and opened to a soft thistle-fluff under which the man floated, still above me.

Time fell back into gear at once, and Paul and I were airplanes flashing again through the sky, the earth was round and warm, and the only sound was the roar of wind and engine. The slowest thing in sight was the orange-and-white canopy drifting down.

Paul arrived in the Luscombe, at high speed, and we circled the open chute, one of us on each side of our jumper. He waved, spun his canopy around, slipped heavily into the wind, which was stronger than he had bargained for. He slipped again, pulling down hard on the risers and almost collapsing one side of his canopy.

All to no avail. We held our altitude at 500 feet while Stu went on down to smash into a tall field of rye that bordered the runway. It looked soft until the instant he crashed into the ground, and then it looked very hard indeed.

I circled and dived to make one low pass over his head, then followed Paul in to land. I taxied to the edge of the rye and got out of the cockpit, expecting to see the jumper at any moment. He didn’t appear. I got out of the airplane and walked into the shoulder-high grass, the sound of the engine fading away behind me. “STU?”

No answer. I tried to remember if I had seen him standing up and waving OK after he landed. I couldn’t remember.

“STU!”

There was no answer.

   
CHAPTER SEVEN
   

THE RYE-FIELD WAS SET on rolling ground and the tops of the stalks made a waving unbroken carpet, hiding everything but the trees on the quarter-mile horizon. Darn me. I should have marked the place better where he went down. He could be anywhere in here. “Hey!
STU!”

“Over here …” It was a very weak voice.

I thrashed through the tall grain in the direction the voice had come and suddenly broke through to an unconcerned jumper, field-packing his chute. “Man, I thought we lost you there. You OK?”

“Oh, sure. Hit kind of hard. This stuff is deeper than it looks from the air.”

Our words were strange and oddly quiet; the grass was a sponge for sound. I couldn’t hear the airplane engine at all, and had it not been for the trail I had left, walking in, I would have had no idea where it was.

I took Stu’s reserve chute and his helmet and we beat our way through the Wisconsin Pampas.

“Jumper in the Rye,” Stu mused.

At last the engine-sound filtered in to us, and a minute later we broke out into the clear short grass of the strip. I
threw his gear into the front cockpit and he stood on the wingwalk while we taxied back.

There were four passengers waiting, and a small crowd of spectators wondering what we were going to do next. I flew the passengers, two couples, and that was the end of the midday jump experiment. Not bad, for the middle of a weekday.

We tired of the airstrip after a while and ambled through the silent day to Main Street, three blocks long. We were tourists on the sidewalk, looking in the shop windows. There was a poster in the dime-store:

The Firemen’s Picnic would be an exciting time. The wrestlers were shown, in their fighting togs. The Mask was a great mound of flesh, scowling through a black stocking mask. Gilbert was handsome, rugged. There was no question that the conflict between good and evil would be a colossal one, and I wondered if Sullivan, Wisconsin had a good hayfield, in close to the ring.

The dime-store itself was a long narrow room with board-wood floors, and the smell of popcorn and hot paper hung in the air. There were elements of forever: a glass-front counter with its chutes and trays of candy, a worn sheet-metal candy scoop half-buried in Red-Hots, a square glass machine filled with multicolored jawbreakers, and way down at the end of
the room, at the point where the long counters converged in the distance, a tiny voice sifted to us: “Can I help you boys?”

We felt almost apologetic for being there, travelers from another century, not knowing that folks don’t walk into dime-stores in the middle of the day.

“I need some crepe paper,” Stu said. “Do you have any wide crepe paper?”

The little tiny lady way off down the rows walked toward us, and walking, she grew. She was a full-size person by the time she reached the paper goods section, and there, surrounded by marble-paper composition folders and nickel Big Gun notebooks, was the material for Stu’s wind-drift indicator. The lady looked at us strangely, but said nothing more until she said thank you and we walked bell-jangling through the doorway and out into the sun again.

I needed heavy oil for the biplane, and Stu and I walked out a side street to the implement dealer’s. Paul went exploring down another street.

The implement dealer’s place was a rough-floored wooden cave, with stacks of tires, bits of machinery and old advertising scattered about. The place smelled like new rubber, and it was very cool inside.

The dealer was a busy man and it was twenty minutes before I could ask if he had any heavy oil.

“Sixty weight, you say? Might have some fifty, but sixty I don’t think. What you usin’ it for?”

“Got an old airplane here, takes the heavy stuff. Fifty’s OK if you don’t have sixty.”

“Oh, you’re the guys with the airplanes. Saw you flyin’ around last night. Don’t they have any oil at the airport?”

“Nope. This is an old airplane; they don’t carry the oil for it.”

He said he’d check, and disappeared down a flight of wooden stairs to the cellar.

I noticed, while we waited, a dusty poster stapled high on the planks of the wall: “‘We Can … We Will … We Must…’
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Buy US War Savings Bonds & Stamps NOW!” There was a picture in stark colored silhouette of an American flag and an aircraft carrier sailing over some precise scalloped water-ripples. It had been nailed to that wall longer than our parachute jumper had existed on the earth.

We browsed among the pulleys, the grease, the lawnmowers for sale, and at last our man returned with a gallon can of oil.

“This is fifty, best I could do you. That OK?”

“Fine. Sure do thank you.”

Then for $1.25 I bought a can of Essentialube, since there was none of the barnstormer’s traditional Marvel Mystery Oil available.
“The Modern Motor Conditioner—It Powerizes”
the label said. I wasn’t sure that I wanted the Wright to be powerized, but I had to have something for top-cylinder lubrication, and this promised that, as well.