Nothing by Chance (5 page)

The bad thing about barnstorming, I thought, is that one sees only the swift surface, the sparkle in the dark eye, the brief glorious smile. Whether it’s all emptiness or an utterly alien mind behind those eyes and that smile, is something that takes time to discover, and without the time, one gives the benefit of the doubt to the being inside.

Mary Lou was a symbol, then. Without knowing it, knowing only that one of the men at Table Four has ordered French toast and two milks, she has become a siren upon a murderous shore. And the barnstormer, to survive, must lash himself to his machine and force himself to be spectator only as he drifts by.

I went all through breakfast in silence.

There is Wisconsin so deeply in her words, I thought, it’s almost Scottish. “Toast” was
toahst
, “two” was a gentle
too
, and my compadres’ hashbrowns were
poataytoahs.
Wisconsin is Scottish-Swedish American with long long vowels, and
Mary Lou, speaking that language as her native tongue, was as beautiful to listen to as she was to look upon.

“I think it’s about time for me to wash some clothes,” Paul said over his coffee.

I was shocked from my girl-thoughts.

“Paul! The Barnstormer’s Code! It breaks the Code to get all washed clean. A barnstormer is a greasy oily guy … you ever heard of a
clean
barnstormer? Man! What you tryin’ to do?”

“Look. I don’t know about you, but I’m going down to the Laundromat…”

“THE LAUNDROMAT! What are you, man, a big-city photographer or somethin’? We can at least go down to the river and beat our clothes out on some flat rocks! Laundromat!”

But I couldn’t move him from the heresy and he talked about it with Mary Lou as we left.

“… and on the drier, it works better on Medium than Hot,” she said in her language and with a dazzling smile. “It doesn’t shrink your cloathes. As much.”

“The Great American Flying Laundry,” Stu said to himself as he pushed our clothes into the machine.

While they thrashed around, we sauntered lazily through the market. Stu paused reflectively by the frozen-food locker at the rear of the wooden-pillared room.

“If we took a TV dinner,” he mused, “and wired it on the back of the exhaust manifold, and ran the engine up for fifteen minutes …”

“There would be gravy all over the engine,” Paul said.

We walked the blocks of Main Street under the wide leaves and deep shadow of daytime Rio. The Methodist church, white and lapstrake, pushed its antique needle-spire up out of sight in the foliage to anchor the building in the sky. It was a quiet day, and calm, and the only thing that moved
was an occasional high branch to shift some dark shadow across the lawn. Here, a house with window-halves of stained glass. There, one with an oval-glass door all rose and strawberry. Now and then a window framed a fringed cut-glass lamp. Man, I thought, there is no such thing as time. This is no dusty jerking Movietone, but here and now, slow and soft and full fragrant color softly swirling down the streets of Rio, Wisconsin, United States of America.

Another church, as we walked, and here children were tended on the lawn, singing. Singing in earnest,
London Bridge is Falling Down.
And holding hands and making the bridge and ducking under. All there on the lawn, not giving us a glance, as though we were people traveled back from another century and they could see right through us.

Those children had been playing London Bridge forever on that lawn, and would go on playing it forever. We were no more visible to them than air. One of the women tending the game looked up nervously, as a deer looks up, not quite scenting danger, not quite ready to disappear into the forest. She didn’t see us stopped and watching except in a sixth-sense way; no word was said, and London Bridge fell and claimed two more children, who in turn became another Bridge. The song went on and on, and we finally walked away.

At the airport, our airplanes waited just as we had left them. While Paul neatly folded his clothes in his very neat way, I stuffed mine into a bag and walked out to fix the throttle linkage on the biplane. It took less than five minutes of silent work in the slow quiet daytime hours that are a barnstormer’s weekday.

Paul, who had been a sky-diver himself, once, helped Stu lay his main parachute canopy in the calm air of the hangar. By the time I wandered over to them, they were kneeling at the end of the long loom of nylon, deep in thought. Nobody moved. They just sat and thought, and paid me no mind.

“I’ll bet you got problems,” I said.

“Inversion,” Paul said absently.

“Oh. What’s an inversion?”

Paul just looked at the nylon lines and thought.

“I let the canopy come down on top of me yesterday,” Stu said at last, “and when I got out from under I got the suspension lines mixed a little.”

“Ah.” I could see it. The smooth bundle of cords that ran from Stu’s harness to the edge of the canopy was marred by one pair, twisted.

“OK. Unhook your Capewell there,” Paul said suddenly, “and run it right through here.” He spread a set of cords apart hopefully.

Stu clicked the harness quick-release and did as Paul asked, but the lines were still twisted. It fell quiet again in the hangar, and the quiet was weighted down at the corners with very heavy thinking.

I couldn’t stand the atmosphere, and left. It was as good a time as any to grease the Whirlwind’s rocker boxes. Outside, there was no sound but sun and growing grass.

Around noontime, engine greased and parachute untangled, we walked the familiar road to the
Café, sat down in booth Four for lunch and were charmed again by the enchantress Mary Lou.

“You get used to it all pretty quickly; you get known, don’t you?” Paul said, over his roast beef. “We’ve been here a day and we know Mary Lou and Al and most everybody knows who we are. I can see where we could feel pretty secure, and not want to go on.”

He was right; security is a net of knowns. We knew our way around town, we knew the main industry was the glove factory which shut down for the day at 4:30 and released potential customers for us.

We were safe here, and the fear of the unknown beyond
Rio had begun to creep in upon us. It was a strange feeling, to begin to know this little town. I felt it, and rather moodily tasted my chocolate milkshake.

It had been the same way at Prairie du Chien, a week ago, when we opened. We were secure there, too, with $300 guaranteed just to appear for the Historical Days weekend, plus all the money we could make carrying passengers.

In fact, by Saturday afternoon, in great crowds of people emerging from winter, we had earned nearly $650. There was no denying it was a good start.

Part of the guarantee, though, was the Daring Display of Low-Altitude Stunt Flying, and in an hour quieter than the others, I thought I might as well run my Handkerchief Pickup.

Snagging the white square of silk from the ground with a steel hook on my lower left wingtip wasn’t all that difficult, but it looked very daring and so made a good air-circus stunt.

The biplane had climbed like a shot into the wind, which had freshened to a brisk 20 miles per hour. The stunt felt right, in all the noise and engine-thunder, the wing was coming down at just the right instant; but each time I looked out to see an empty hook, and back over my shoulder I could see the handkerchief untouched on the grass.

By the third try, I was annoyed at my bumbling, and concentrated wholly on the task, tracking the white silken spot directly down the line it should go, seeing nothing else but the green blur of ground a few feet below, moving 100 miles per hour. Then a full second ahead of time, I tilted the wing down, waited until the white had blurred into the hook and pulled up in what was planned to be a victorious climb.

But I had missed it again. I sat tall in the seat and looked out at the wingtip, to make sure that the hook was still there. It was, and it was empty.

Those people waiting on the ground must think this is a
poor kind of flying circus, I thought grimly, that can’t even pick up a plain old handkerchief in three tries.

The next time I turned hard down in a steep diving pass and leveled off just at the grasstops, a long way from that mocking handkerchief, and on a line directly into it. I will get it this time, I thought, if I have to take it ground and all. I glanced at the airspeed dial, which showed 110 miles per hour, and eased a tiny bit forward on the control stick. The grass flicked harsh beneath the big tires, and bits of wild wheat spattered against them. A tiny turn left, and just a little lower.

At that instant, the wheels hit the ground, and they hit it hard enough to jerk my head down and blur my sight. The biplane bounced high into the air and I eased forward again on the stick and made ready to drop the wing for the pickup.

Then in that second there was a great snapping explosion, the world went black and the engine wailed up in a shriek of metal running wild.

The prop is hitting the ground I am crashing what happened the wheels must have torn off I have no wheels and now the propeller is hitting the ground hitting dirt we’re going over on our back way too fast dirt flying pull up pull up full power flying again but nothing I’m getting nothing out of the engine prop’s gone where land wires trees field wind… All at once that concussion of thought burst across me. And behind it, the dead knowing that I had crashed.

   
CHAPTER FOUR
   

I FELT THE TREMENDOUS POWER of the airplane smashing into the ground, clenched down tight in the cockpit, jammed full throttle and jerked the machine back into the air. The only thing I got from the throttle was a loud noise forward. There was no power at all. The biplane staggered back up on sheer momentum.

We were not going to make it over the telephone wires ahead. It was strange. They had been close, at 110 mph, but now they were not close. We turned into the wind by reflex, and at full throttle, engine screaming a hundred feet in the air, everything slowed down. I felt the airplane trembling on a stall and I was keen and aware of it, knowing that to slow any more would be to pitch nose-down into the ground. But I knew the biplane, and I knew that we would just hang there and come down slowly slowly into the wind. I wondered if the people on the ground were frightened, since it must all look pretty bad; a big burst of dirt and wheels flying off and the strange howling of the engine and the shuddering high in the air before it falls. Yet the only fear I felt was their fear, of how this all must look from the ground.

We came down in slow motion, facing the wind, into the
tall grass. Not a single obstacle to clear. The earth came leisurely up to meet us and at last it brushed us lightly with its green. In that moment the engine was of no further use, and I flicked the magneto switch off. We slid slowly through the weeds, less than 20 miles per hour, and with nothing else to do, I moved the mixture lever to Idle-Cutoff and the fuel selector to Off. There was no shock of touchdown, no lurching forward in the seat. All in very slow motion.

I was impatient to get out and see what had happened, and had my safety belt off and was standing up in the cockpit before we had slid to a stop.