Nothing by Chance

From loop to roll to snap roll, the airplanes tumbled over the edge of town, gradually losing altitude, every minute a few hundred feet closer to that multicolored earth.

At last the monoplane came whistling toward me like some fast smooth rocket and we fell into the Authentic Great-War Aerial Dogfight, snarling around in rolls and hard-turning spirals and dives and zooms and slowflight and stalls. All the while, as we flew, a white smoke flare waited, tied to my left wing strut We blurred the world about for a few minutes, juggling it all green and black and roaring wind from one hand to the other, the houses of the village now standing on this edge, now on that.

Say we made two hundred dollars clear, I thought. What would that be for each of us? What’s three into two hundred? I slid under the monoplane, turned to the left, watched as Paul fell into place behind the biplane’s tail. What the devil is three into two hundred? I watched him over my shoulder, rising and falling as he followed, turning hard to stay with the steep spiral of the biplane. Well, if it was $210, that would be $70 each. Seventy dollars each, not counting gas and oil. Say $60 each.

In that wild screaming hurricane of a power dive, I touched the button taped to my throttle. Thick white smoke burst from the left wing and I traced a death-spiral down to the airport, leveling just above the trees. As far as they could tell at the baseball game, that old two-winger had just been shot down in flames.

If it had worked with five planes, even for such a short while, it should work all summer with two. We don’t really need the $60 each, all we really need is the gas and oil, and a dollar a day left for food. We can survive all summer if we just make that.

I slipped in to land as the smoke stopped, and rolled free down hill to the gas pump. One advantage of being shot down every time, I thought, is that you always get to the gas pump first.

Cold red fuel poured into the biplane’s tank as Paul landed. He shut down his engine as he came down the hill, and coasted the last hundred feet with the propeller still and silver in front of him. Above the sound of the gasoline pouring from the nozzle under my glove, I could hear his tires crunching on the gravel that edged pump and office.

He waited for a moment in his cockpit, then slowly climbed out. “Boy, you sure take it out of me with all those turns. Don’t turn so tight, will you? I don’t have all that wing out there that you have.”

“Only trying to make it look real, Paul. Wouldn’t want to make it look too easy, would you? Any time you want, we can tie the flare to your airplane.”

A bicycle turned in from the highway—two bicycles, going full speed. They slid to a stop that smashed grass into the rubber of their rear tires. The boys were eleven or twelve years old and after all that pell-mell arrival they didn’t say a word. They just stood and stared at the airplanes, and at us, and back to the airplanes.

“Feel like flying?” Stu asked them, working his first day as Seller of Rides. With the five-plane circus, we had had a barker, complete with straw hat and bamboo cane and a roll of golden tickets. But that was behind us, and now it was up to Stu, who was more given to a quiet intellectual kind of persuasion.

“No, thanks,” the boys said, and they were silent again, watching.

A car rolled onto the grass and stopped.

“Go get ’em, Stu-babe,” I said, and made ready to start the biplane again.

By the time the Wright was chugging around, soft and gentle as a huge Model T engine, Stu was back with a young man and his woman, each laughing at the other for being so mad as to want a ride in this strange old flying machine.

Stu helped them up into the wide front cockpit, where he fastened them side-by-side under one seat belt. He called over the sound of the Model T for them to hold onto their sunglasses if they wanted to look out over the windscreen, and with that warning, stepped down and clear.

If they had fears about riding in this clattering old machine, it was too late now for mind-changing. Goggles down, throttle forward. The three of us were engulfed in the sound of a Model T gone wild, blasting hundred-mile winds back over us, sweeping the world into a grassy blur, jouncing at first, a sort of long muffled crash as the tall old wheels sped along the ground. Then the crash fell away with the earth and it was pure engine sound and wind beating us, and the trees and the houses shrank smaller and smaller.

In all that wind and engineblast and earth tilting and going small below us, I watched my Wisconsin lad and his girl, to see them change. Despite their laughter, they had been afraid of the airplane. Their only knowledge of flight came from newspaper headlines, a knowledge of collisions and crashes and fatalities. They had never read a single report of a little airplane taking off, flying through the air and landing again safely. They could only believe that this must be possible, in spite of all the newspapers, and on that belief they staked their three dollars and their lives. And now they smiled and shouted to each other, looking down, pointing.

Why should that be so pretty to see? Because fear is ugly and joy is beautiful, simple as that? Maybe so. Nothing so pretty as vanished fear.

The air smelled like a million grassblades crushed, and the sun lowered to turn it from silver air into gold. It was a pretty day and we were all three glad to be flying through the sky as if this were all some bright loud dream, yet detailed and clear as no dream had ever been.

Five minutes above the ground, turning into the second circle of town, my passengers were relaxed and at home in flight, unconscious of themselves, eyes bright as birds’ for looking down. The girl touched her companion’s shoulder, one time, to point out the church, and I was surprised to see that she wore a wedding ring. It couldn’t have been too long ago that they had walked out the door of that church into a rice-storm, and now it was all a little toy place, a thousand feet below. That tiny place? Why, it had been so big then, with the flowers and the music. Maybe it was big only because it was a special time.

We circled down lower, took one last long look at the town, and slid in over the trees, air going soft in the struts and wires, to land. As soon as the tires touched, the dream was broken in the clatter and rumble of hard ground holding us as we moved, instead of soft air. Slower, slower and stopped at last where we began, the Model T ticking quietly to itself. Stu opened the little door and cast loose the seat belt.

“Thanks a lot,” the young man said, “that was fun.”

“That was wonderful!” his wife said, radiant, forgetting to adjust the mask of convention about her words and her eyes.

“Glad to fly with you,” I said, my own mask firm in place, my own delight well down within myself and under tight control. There was so much more I wanted to say, to ask: Tell me how that all felt, first time … was the sky as blue, the air as golden for you as it is for me? Did you see that deep deep green of the meadow, like we were floating in emerald, there after takeoff? Thirty years, fifty years from now, will you remember? I honestly wanted to know.

But I nodded my head and smiled and said, “glad to fly with you,” and that was the end of the story. They walked away arm in arm, still smiling, toward their car.

“That’s it,” Stu said, approaching my cockpit. “Nobody else wants to fly.”

I came back from my far thoughts. “Nobody to fly? Stu, there’s five cars out there! They can’t all be just lookin’.”

“They’re going to fly tomorrow, they say.”

If we had five airplanes, and more action going on, I thought, they’d be ready to fly today. With five airplanes, we’d look like a real circus. With two airplanes, maybe we’re just a curiosity.