A Gift of Wings

While the engine chugs quietly and propeller blade spins easily, Stu escorts the next passengers into the front cockpit, fastens the safety belt on them, and closes the door. I put my goggles down, push the throttle forward, and a new experience begins for two more people.

Daytimes are quiet. We walk, Stu and I, through town, quiet in midday, and it’s a clever electric museum. Here is Franklin’s 5-10-250 Store, with a spring-dangled brass bell on the door and a glass front counter of rainbow candies waiting to be scooped into crackling white bags. Here are long narrow aisles floored in narrow strips of worn-down wood, and a fragrantly blended smell of cinnamon, glass, dust, and paper notebooks.

“Can I help you boys?” the proprietor says. Martin Franklin knows by name every one of the seven hundred thirty-three souls who live in this town, but it would take us twenty years to earn the same quality of his other greetings, and although our airplane from out of the past waits only a quarter mile down Maple Street, it can’t make a pilot and a parachute jumper part of an Illinois town. Pilots and parachute jumpers never are, never have been, never will be part of any town.

We buy a postcard each, and a stamp, and cross the hot empty street to Al and Linda’s Cafe.

We eat our hamburgers, delivered from the kitchen precisely wrapped in thin white paper, drink our milkshakes, pay our bill, and leave, not sure of the reality, but sure we had seen Al and Linda’s before, maybe in some dream.

With the end of the afternoon, the worlds change. We walk back to the dead end of Maple Street, and to our kind of reality. Here the unchanging people come to go back into time in our biplane, and from the past, look down upon the rooftops of their houses.

An unchanging summer. Clear sky in the morning, puffy clouds and distant thunderstorms in the evening. Sunsets that turn the land to misty gold, and later, fade to carbon black beneath the high glittering fireworks of the stars.

One day, we changed. We came out from the towns that never change, and tried to barnstorm and sell our rides to a city of ten thousand. The grass strip was an airport, the walls of its office covered with charts and flying rules. It wasn’t the same.

It doesn’t work. A biplane flying over a city is just another airplane. In a city of ten thousand, time is perking right along and we are unnoticed anachronisms. The people at the airport look at us strangely, thinking over and again that there must be something illegal about selling rides in such an old airplane.

Stu, wearing goggles and a hard hat, snaps into his parachute and lumbers into the front seat, looking as though he planned an assau

lt on Everest instead of a quick descent to a small city in Missouri. The jump is our last hope of bringing passengers out, and our future relations with cities depend upon its success. We circle up through four thousand feet, level at forty-five hundred as the five-o’clock whistles blow around the city, signaling the end of the workday. But for us, there are no whistles. Only the constant roar of the engine and the wind while we turn onto the jump run. Stu is looking overboard absently, and I wonder what he is thinking.

He moves, and as he does an uncomfortable time begins. We usually run seventy to one hundred passenger rides between jumps, and I can’t even get used to the idea of my front-seat passenger unfastening his safety belt, opening the door, and stepping out on the wing, and into the wind blast, a mile above the ground. That sort of thing just isn’t done, and yet here we are with nothing but a tremendous gulf of air between wing and ground, and my friend is carefully latching the door behind him and turning to grasp a wing strut and the cockpit rim as he watches the target approach.

The biplane doesn’t like these moments. It buffets and shakes heavily, its boxy streamlining broken by the awkward figure on the wing. I push hard on the right rudder pedal to hold us straight on course, and looking over my left shoulder, watch the stabilizer shudder. Mixed feelings. That’s an awfully long fall, but I wish he’d hurry up and jump, to save the airplane. The airport and the city are at least beneath us. If we flew only ten percent of the people in this town, at three dollars for each person …

Stu jumps. The shuddering leaves the airplane. He is gone instantly, his arms spread wide in a position he calls a “cross,” flicked off the wing into that big step down. As he falls, he spins, but no parachute opens.

I bank the biplane sharply and drop the nose down to follow, although he’s told me he falls at one hundred twenty miles an hour and I don’t have a chance of catching him now. A long time and he’s still going, a black-cross silhouette roaring straight down against a background of hard green earth.

We’ve kidded about it before. “Stu-babe, if your chute doesn’t open, I’ll just keep right on flying along to the next town.”

He is really smoking down. Even from directly above him, I can see that his rate of descent is fantastic. Still no chute. Something has gone wrong.

“Pull, Stu.” My words are swept overboard as quickly as my friend has been. The words can do no good, will never be heard, but I can’t help saying them. “Come on, kid, pull.”

He’s not going to do it. No main chute opens, no reserve. His body holds the same position, a little black cross spinning to the right, plummeting straight down. It is too late. I shudder with cold in the warm summer air.

In the last possible second, I see the familiar blue-and-white deployment sleeve break from the main chute pack. But too slowly, agonizingly slow. The sleeve trails out, the bright orange canopy helplessly flailing in the air, and then, quite suddenly, the chute is open and drifting serene and soft as a dandelion puff over a summer lawn.

I realize abruptly that the biplane is diving at great speed, engine roaring, wires screaming, controls stiff in the force of the wind. I ease it back into a spiral dive over the open parachute, and in half a minute have come level with it. He had room to spare … he’s still a thousand feet above the ground!

I circle the gay canopy and the goggled jumper dangling thirty feet beneath it. He waves, and I rock my wings in reply. Glad you made it, kid, but still, didn’t you pull a little late? I should talk to him about the pull.

I hold my circle in the air while he floats on down. He flexes his knees as he always does in the final fifty feet—a last bit of calisthenics before impact. Then it seems he drops the last twenty feet very quickly, as if someone has let the air out of his canopy, and he crashes to earth, rolling as he hits. The canopy waits above him for a long moment, then settles slowly down like a huge brilliant sheet in the air.

Stu is up again at once, pulling risers and waving OK, and the jump is over.

I fly one last wing-rocking pass over him, then turn to land and fly the passengers that unfailingly flock to us after a jump.

Today there are no passengers waiting. There are a dozen automobiles lining the edge of the airport, but not one person steps forward.

Stu hastily field-packs his chute and turns to approach the cars. “Still time to fly today. Air’s nice and smooth. Ready to see the town from the air?”

No.

I never fly.

Are you kidding?