Nothing by Chance

He had a there-there tone as I stalked to the biplane. “Now look. It’s dark almost, and they’re going to have their meeting, and we can’t go anywhere now so we might as well stay the night and move on tomorrow morning.”

“We no more belong here than we belong barnstorming at Kennedy International, man. We …”

“No, just listen,” he said. “They have a flight breakfast coming up here Sunday. They promised to have a Cessna 180 in here, carrying passengers. Little while ago I heard somebody say that the 180 cancelled out, so they have no one to carry passengers. And here we come. I think after this meeting they’re having now, they’re going to want us to stay. They’re in a bind, and we can help them.”

“Shame on ya, Paul. By Sunday we’ll be in Indiana. Sunday is four days away! And the last thing I want to do is help them out at their flight breakfast. I tell you, we don’t belong here! All they want around here is the little tricycle-gear modern airplanes that you drive like a car. Man, I want to be an airplane pilot! What the heck’s the matter with you, anyway?”

I took a grease rag and began wiping down the engine cowl in the dark. If the biplane had lights I would have flown away that minute.

After a while, the meeting in the office broke up and everyone was hearty and kind to us. I was immediately suspicious.

“Think you boys could stay over till Sunday?” a voice said, out of a crowd of directors. “We’re having a little flight breakfast then, be hundreds of airplanes here, thousands of people. You stand to make a lot of money.”

I had to laugh. So this is what it felt like to be judged by our vagabond appearance. For just a moment, I was sorry for these people.

“Why don’t you stay in the office tonight, boys?” another voice said, and then in a lower tone to someone close by, “We’ll take inventory of the oil in there.”

I didn’t catch the implication of the last sotto voce, but Paul did, at once. “Did you hear that?” he said, stunned. “Did you hear that?”

“I think so. What?”

“They’re going to count the oil cans before they trust us in the office. They’re going to count the oil cans!”

I replied to whoever had offered the office. “No thanks. We’ll sleep out.”

“Love to have you stay in the office, really,” came the voice again.

“No,” Paul said. “We wouldn’t be safe there with all your oil cans. You wouldn’t want to trust us around all that expensive oil.”

I laughed again, in the dark. Hansen, our champion of Palmyra and its people, was furious now at their slur to his honesty.

“I leave fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of cameras unlocked in my plane while we go and eat, trusting these guys, and they think we’re going to steal a can of oil!”

Stu stood quietly by, listening, and said not a word. It was full dark over supper at the D&M before Paul was cool again.

“We’re trying to find an ideal world,” he said to Joe Wright, who was brave enough to join us. “All of us have lived in the other world, the cutthroat, cheap world, where the only thing that matters is the almighty buck. Where people don’t even know what money means. And we’ve had enough of that, so we’re out here living in our ideal world, where it’s all simple. For three bucks we sell something priceless, and with that we get our food and gas so we can go on.” Paul forgot his fried chicken, he was talking so hard to the Palmyran.

Why are we working on Joe, why are we justifying ourselves to him? I thought. Aren’t we sure, ourselves? Maybe we’re just so sure that we want to turn a few converts our way.

Our missionary effort, however, was wasted on Joe, who gave little sign that there was anything new or meaningful in what we said.

Stu did nothing but eat his supper. I wondered about the person within the boy, what he thought, what he cared about. I would liked to have met him, but for now, he was listening … listening … not saying a word, not offering a single thought to the roar of ideas going on about him. Well, I thought, he’s a good jumper and he’s thinking. There’s not much more we could ask.

“I’ll drive you back out to the office, if you want,” Joe said.

“Thanks, Joe,” Paul said. “We’ll take you up on that, but we’re not going to stay in that office. We’ll sleep under the wing. If somebody counted the oil wrong, and then counted it right, after we were gone, you see, we’d automatically be thieves. It’s better for us to have that place all locked up and us sleeping out under the wing.”

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?”