Nothing by Chance

“Stan! This thing’s a perfect fit! Perfect! She’ll drop right in there!”

“Will it? That’s fine. Why don’t you just take that, then, and looksee if there’s anything else here you can use.”

My hope came flooding back. This was beyond any coincidence. The odds against our breaking the biplane in a random little town that just happened to be home to a man with the forty-year-old parts to repair it; the odds that he would be on the scene when the breaking happened; the odds that we’d push the airplane right next to his hangar, within ten feet of the parts we needed—the odds were so high that “coincidence” was a foolish answer. I waited eagerly to see how the rest of the problem would be solved.

“You’re gonna need to pick this airplane up, somehow,” Stan said, “get the weight off the wheels while you weld those fittings. I got a big A-frame here, we can set up.” He clanked around some more in the back of his hangar and came out dragging a 15-foot length of steel pipe. “It’s all back in there; might as well bring it out now. It all fits together.”

In ten minutes we had assembled the pipe into a high overhead beam, from which we could hang a winch to lift the whole front half of the airplane. All we lacked was the winch.

“Think I got a block and tackle down at the barn … sure I do. You want to go down and pick it up?”

I rode along with Stan to his barn, two miles out of Palmyra. “I live for my airplanes,” he said as he drove. “I don’t know … I really get a kick out of airplanes. Don’t know what I’ll do when I flunk my physical… go on flying anyway, I guess.”

“Stan, you don’t know … you don’t know how much I thank you.”

“Heck. Those struts might as well help you as set out in the hangar. I advertise a lot of this stuff, and sell a lot to guys who need it. Any struts there you can have, but they’d be fifty bucks to a jockey that would just turn around and resell ’em. I got some welding tanks, too, and a torch, and a lot of other stuff there in the hangar that you might be able to use.”

We turned off the highway and parked by the side of an old flake-painted red barn. From one rafter hung a block and tackle.

“Thought it might be here,” he said.

We took i

t down, put it in the back of the truck and drove back to the airstrip. We stopped at the airplane, and in the last of the day’s sunlight fastened the block to the A-frame.

“Hey, you guys,” Stan said, “I got to get goin’. There’s a trouble light here in the hangar and an extension cord somewhere, and a table and whatever else you can use. Just lock the place up when you leave, OK?”

“OK, Stan. Thanks.”

“Glad to help.”

We went to work removing the bent struts. When they came away, the wings sagged more than ever and we propped the lower wingtips with sawhorses. By dark, we had the aileron fittings straightened again and the cowl hammered smooth.

After a while we knocked off work and went to supper, locking Stan’s hangar behind us.

“Well, Paul, I have to say you sure beat Magnaflux. ‘If there’s a weak place anywhere in your airplane, folks, Hansen’s Testing Service will find it and break it up for you.’ “

“No,” Paul said. “I just touched down, you know, and I said, Oh, boy, I got it down!’ and ka-pow! You know the first thing I thought? Your wife. ‘What will Bette think?’ First thing.”

“I’ll call her. Tell her you were thinking of her. ‘Bette, Paul was thinking about you today while he was tearing the airplane all up.’ “

We ate in silence for a while, then Paul brightened. “We made some money today. Hey, treasurer. How much money did we make today?”

Stu put down his fork and pulled out his wallet. “Six dollars.”

“But there’s some Great American money comes off the top,” Paul said. “I paid out the quarter to the boys who found the drift marker.”

“And I bought the crepe paper,” Stu said. “That was sixty cents.”

“And I got the oil,” I said. “This is gonna be interesting.”

Stu paid us our two dollars each, then I put in a claim for their share of the oil money, seventy-five cents each. But I owed Paul eight and a third cents for my share of the wind-drift recovery fee and I owed Stu twenty cents for the crepe paper. So Stu paid eight cents to Paul, deducted the twenty cents I owed him from his bill to me, and handed me fifty-five cents. Paul took my eight cents off his bill and owed me sixty-seven cents. But he didn’t have the change, so he gave me fifty cents and two dimes and I gave him two pennies. Tossed ’em into his coffee saucer, is what I did, clinking.

We sat at the table with our little piles of coins, and I said, “We all square? Speak now or forever hold …”

“You owe me fifty cents,” Stu said.

“Fifty cents! Where do I owe you fifty cents?” I said. “I owe you nothin’!”