Nothing by Chance (15 page)

The signs were out in a flash, and we flew two free rides for the owner and his family. By sundown, we had flown three paying rides, as well. That evening, the treasurer informed me that on this day we had paid $30 for gasoline, but that we had taken in $12 from passengers. Clearly, our fortunes were changing.

Gazing back at me in
the morning from the gas station mirror was a horrible image, a scraggly rough-bearded Mr. Hyde
so terrible that I drew back in alarm. Was that me? Was that what the farmers had seen whenever we landed? I would have run this monster off with a pitchfork! But the bearded image disappeared at last to my electric shaver, and I felt almost human when I walked again into the sunshine.

We had to make money at Walworth, or quit. We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.

It worked at once.

“Hi, there.”

I lifted my head at the voice and looked out from beneath the wing. “Hi.”

“You fly this airplane?”

“Sure do.” I got to my feet. “You lookin’ to fly?” For a fleeting moment, the man looked familiar, and he looked at me with the air of one who was trying to remember. “It’s a nice flight,” I said. “Walworth’s a pretty little town, from the air. Three dollars American, is all.”

The man read my name from the cockpit rim. “Hey! You’re not… Dick! Remember me?”

I looked at him again, carefully. I had seen him before, I knew him from … “Your name is …” I said. What was his name? He rebuilt an airplane. He and … Carl Lind rebuilt an airplane a couple of years ago … “Your name is … Everett… Feltham. The Bird biplane! You and Carl Lind!”

“Yessir! Dick! How the heck you been?”

Everett Feltham was a flight engineer for some giant airline.
He had been brought up on Piper Cubs and Aeronca Champs, was an airplane mechanic, pilot, restorer. If it flew through the air, Everett Feltham knew about it; how to fly it and how to keep it flying.

“Ev! What are you doin’ here?”

“I live here! This is my home town! Man, you never can tell what kind of riff-raff gonna fall down on you from the sky! How’s Bette? The children?”

It was a good reunion. Ev lived only two miles north of the field we had landed in, and our friend Carl Lind kept a country house on Lake Geneva, ten miles east. Carl had flown airplanes in the late twenties, barnstorming around this very countryside. He quit flying when he married and raised his family, and he was now the president of Lind Plastic Products.

“A gypsy pilot,” Ev said. “Might have known it was you, doing a crazy thing like this, landing in a hayfield. You know there’s an airport just down the road.”

“Is there? Well, it’s too far out. You got to be close to town. We’re a bit in the hole after flyin’ around all week for nothin’. We got to get some passengers up in the air this afternoon or we’ll be starvin’ again.”

“I’ll call Carl. If he’s home, he’s gonna want to come out and see you, probably want you over to the house. You need anything? Anything I can bring you?”

“No, Rags, maybe—we’re runnin’ out of rags. If you got some around.”

Ev waved and drove away, and I smiled. “Funny thing about flying, Stu. You can never tell when you’re gonna run into some old buddy somewhere. Isn’t that somethin’? Go land in a hayfield, and there’s ol’ Ev.” Nothing by chance, nothing by luck, the voice, almost forgotten, reminded.

After suppertime, the passengers started coming. One woman said the last time she had flown was when she was six years old, with a barnstormer in a two-winger airplane, just like this one. “My boss told me you were here and I better not miss it.”

A young fellow with a fantastic mop of a haircut stopped and looked at the airplane for a long time before he decided to fly. As Stu fastened him into the front seat he said, “Will I see tomorrow?”

This was pretty strange sentence structure, coming from a fellow who proclaimed himself illiterate. (For shame, I thought, judging the man by his haircut!) In flight, he braced hard against the turns, fearful, and after we landed he said,
“Wow!”
He stayed for a long time after his ride, looking at the airplane almost in awe. I put him down as a real person, in spite of the haircut. Something about being above the ground had reached through to him.

A pair of pretty young ladies in kerchiefs put our account-book in the black for the day, and they laughed happy in the sky, turning over their home town.

I checked the fuel, and with ten gallons left I was at the end of my margin, and it was time to fill the tank even though passengers had to wait.

I took off at once for the airport that Ev had mentioned, and in five minutes was rolling to a stop by the gas pump. I was just topping the tank when a burly, bright-eyed business-man in a snap-brim straw hat brisked out to the airplane.

“Hey, Dick!”

“CARL LIND!” He was just as I remembered him, one of the happiest people in the world. He had survived a heart attack, and now enjoyed the very air he breathed.

He looked the airplane over with an appraising eye. “Is it good, Carl?” I said. “Is it the way you remember?”

“We didn’t have all that flashy gold paint, in my day, I can tell you. But the skid’s pretty nice, and the patches in the wings. That’s how I remember it.”

“Hop in, Carl, get in the front here, if you trust me. You got no controls in front. I’m goin’ back over to the field.”

“Are you going to let me go along? Are you sure I can go?”

“Get in or you make us late. We got passengers waiting!”

“Never let ’em wait,” he said, and stepped up into the front seat. We were airborne in less than a minute and it was good to see the man again in the sky he loved. He took off his hat, his gray hair blew in the wind, and he smiled hugely, remembering.

The biplane gave him a gentle landing in the hay, and I left the engine running while Carl stepped down.

“You go ahead and fly your passengers,” he said. “Then we’ll cover the airplane up and you come on over to the house.”

We flew riders steadily till the sun was below the horizon, and all the time Carl Lind watched the biplane fly, waiting with his wife, and with Ev. It was the best weekday yet; twenty passengers by sundown.

“I don’t know if this
is in the Barnstormer’s Code,” I said to Carl as we drove around the edge of Lake Geneva and wound among the estates there. “We’re supposed to get all dirty and always stay under the wing when we’re not flying.”

“Oh, no. They used to do this. Someone who liked airplanes would take you home for dinner.”

But not, I thought as we turned into his drive, in quite this manner. It was a scene clipped from a Fine House magazine, all in full color and with deep carpets and full-length glass facing the water.

“This is our little place …” Carl began, apologetically.

Stu and I laughed at the same time. “Just a little shack you keep out in the woods, Carl?”

“Well… you like to have a place you can come and relax, you know?”

We got a brief tour of the elegant house, and it was a strange feeling. We felt close to something civilized. Carl enjoyed his house immensely, and it was a glad place, because of this.

“You fellows can change in here. We’ll go down for a swim. You will. I’ll catch two fish in the first five casts. Betcha, I will.”

It was nearly full dark when we walked barefoot down the velvet sloping lawn to his dock. At one side of the white-painted wood was a boathouse, and an inboard speedboat hung there on winches.

“The battery’s probably dead. But if we get it started, we’ll go for a ride.”

He lowered the boat into the water on its electric winch and pressed the starter. There was only a hollow clank and silence.

“I’ve got to remember to keep that battery up,” he said, and hoisted the boat back into the air.

Carl had brought a little fishing pole with him and he began working for his Two Fish in the First Five Casts just at the moment that Stu and I hit the water in running dives off the dock. The lake was clear dark black, like pure oil that had been aged twenty years in ice. We swam furiously out to the light-float a hundred feet offshore and from there we watched the last sun fade from the sky. As it disappeared, so did every single sound in the Midwest, and a whisper from pur float carried easily to shore.

“Carl, you’ve got a pretty rugged life,” I said, from way out in the water.

“Two more years and then I’m going to retire. Quicker than that, if I get all this business done on my flying medical. Why, if I could fly alone, I’d retire this year! But if I can’t fly, and just had to stay around here, it would get pretty bad.”
He caught a fish on his second cast, and let it fall back into the dark water.

We cast off from the buoy and swam slowly to the dock. The wooden ladder-rungs were smooth and soft in moss, and when we stood again on the white planks, the air was warm as summer night.

“I lose my bet,” Carl said. “All your splashing scared my fish away. Five casts and only one fish.”

By the time we had returned to the house and changed into our least-greasy clothes, Everett had gone and come again, setting a huge steaming bag on the table. “I got twelve hamburgers,” he said. “That ought to be enough, don’t you think? And a gallon of root beer.”

We sat that evening around a table by the fireplace in Carl’s glass-walled den, eating hamburgers.

“I had to sell the Bird, you know,” Carl said.

“What? Why? That was your
airplane!”

“Yes, sir. But I couldn’t stand it. Going out there and washing her down and waxing her, and not-being able to fly by myself; this medical thing, you know. It wasn’t right for the airplane, it wasn’t right for me. So I sold her. Thelma still has her Cessna, and we go places now and then.” He finished his hamburger. “Hey, I have something I want you to see.” He left the table and went into the living room.

“I do hope that medical paper comes through,” Thelma Lind said. “It means a lot to Carl.”

I nodded, thinking it unjust that a man’s life be so much affected by what to all the rest of the world was only a scrap of paper. If I were Carl, I’d burn all the paper in the fireplace and go out and fly my airplane.

“Here’s something you’ll love to see,” Carl said, returning.

He unrolled a long photograph on the table and we looked down at a row of ten biplanes parked in front of a hangar.
White-ink letters at the lower right corner said
June 9, 1929.

“These are the boys I used to fly with. Look at those guys. What do you think of that?”

He named each one of the pilots, and they looked out at us proud and unfaded, arms folded, standing by their airplanes. There at one side stood a young Carl Lind, in white collar and tie and knickers, not yet president of Lind Plastic Products, not yet concerned about a medical certificate. He wouldn’t be thinking about that for another thirty-five years.

“Look here, huh? Long-Wing Eaglerock, Waco Ten, Canuck, Pheasant … now there’s some real airplanes, don’t you think? We used to go out to the Firemen’s Picnic …”

It was a good evening, and I was glad that my years had overlapped Carl’s. He had been flying and smiling up out of that photograph seven years before I was born.

“Be glad for your friends,” Carl said. “We know people, don’t we, Thelma, with millions of dollars, but without one friend in the world. Boys, be glad for your friends.” He was deadly sincere, and to break the gravity of the moment he smiled at Stu. “You having fun out here in the cow-pastures, flying around?”

“I’m having more continuous fun than I’ve ever had in my life,” the kid said, and just about startled me off my chair. He hadn’t said such a revealing thing all summer long.

It was midnight when we zipped ourselves into our hot sleeping bags and settled down under the wing of the biplane.

“It’s a tough life, isn’t it, Stu?”

“Yep. Mansions, chocolate cake, swimming in Lake Geneva … this barnstorming is rough!”

A farmer was out by
the huge Gothic cow-barn across the way at six a.m. He was a tiny dot by the base of the barn, dwarfed by the tremendous double-sloped roof with its four
giant ventilators lined along the rooftrees seventy feet in the air. He was a quarter-mile away, but his voice came clear across the calm morning hay.

“BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE! HURRY IT UP, BOSSY! C’MON C’MON C’MON!”

I woke and lay under the wing in the early light, trying to figure out what “Bide” meant. And “Bossy.” Do farmers still call their cows “Bossy”? But there was the call again, coming across the fragrance of the hay, making me feel guilty to be lying abed when there were cows to be gotten out.

A dog barked, and day began in America.

I reached for pen and paper, to remind me to ask about BIDE, and as I wrote, a tiny six-legged creature, smaller than my pen-point, came hiking across the blue-lined page. I added, “A very small pointy-nosed bug just walked across this page—purposefully, definitely going somewhere
. He stopped here.”