She moved to sit on the front fender of the car, a slim alien woman, not unpretty, looking at the sky. I went back to retouching an old patch on the wingtip.
“Here he comes,” someone said, and pointed.
They were wrong. The airplane flew right on over, heading toward Lake Michigan, out to the east.
Another airplane appeared after a while and it was the Luscombe. It glided down, touched its wheels to the grass and rolled swiftly by us. Paul was alone; there was no one else in the Luscombe. I turned around and looked at the welding torch. So much for the barnstorming.
“We have lots of airplanes, today,” Duke said.
It was an Aeronca Champion, following Paul, and in the cockpit was Johnny Colin. He had brought his own airplane. Johnny taxied right in close to us and shut his engine down. He stepped out of the airplane, unfolding, dwarfing it in his size. He wore his green beret, and he smiled.
“Johnny! Kinda nice to see you.”
He picked a box of tools from the back of the Aeronca. “Hi. Paul says he’s been workin’ on your airplane, keepin’ it all bent up for you.” He set the tools down and looked at the struts that waited for the torch. “I got to get out pretty early tomorrow, go down to Muscatine, pick up a new airplane. Hi, Stu.”
“Hi, Johnny.”
“So what’s wrong here? This wheel?” He looked down at a broken heavy-steel fitting, and the other work waiting. “That won’t be much.”
He slipped on a set of black goggles at once and popped his welding torch into life. The sound of that pop was a sound of sheer confidence, and I relaxed. All day long, till that second, I had been carrying myself tense, and now I relaxed. Praise God for such a thing as a friend.
Johnny finished the brake arm in three minutes, touching it with the long welding rod and the razor flame. Then he kneeled by the heavy wheel fitting and in fifteen minutes it was strong again, ready to hold the weight of the airplane. He set Paul to sawing the strut reinforcing pieces to size, while Stu walked through the dusk for food.
One strut was finished by the time Stu came back with hamburgers, hot chocolate and a half-gallon of milk. We all ate quickly, in the shadows of the trouble-light.
Then the torch popped into life again, hissing, the black goggles went down and the second strut was underway.
“You know what he said when I got to his house?” Paul said quietly. “It was right after work, he had just come in, his wife had dinner on the stove. He grabbed that box of tools and he said, ‘I’ll be back in the morning, I got a broke airplane to fix.’ How’s that, huh?”
Glowing white, the strut was laid aside, finished, in the dark. Two more jobs to go, and the most difficult of all. Here the torn metal was within inches of the fabric of the airplane, and the fabric, painted heavily with butyrate dope, would burn like warm dynamite.
“Why don’t you get some rags, and a bucket of water,” Johnny said. “Build us a dam around here. We’re workin’ pretty close.”
The dam was built of dripping rags, and I held it in place while the torch did its job. Squinting my eyes, I watched the brilliant heat touch the metal, turning it all into a bright molten pool, fusing it back together along what had been the break. The water sputtered on the rag dam, and I was tense again.
After a long time, one hard job had been done, and the last one was the worst. It was a heavy bolt carry-through, surrounded by doped fabric and oily wood. Ten inches above the 6,000 degrees of the welding torch, cradled in old dry wood, was the fuel tank. It held 41 gallons of aviation gasoline, just enough to blow the whole airplane about a thousand feet high.
Johnny put out the torch and looked at the situation for a long time, under the light.
“We better be careful on this one,” he said. “We’ll need the dam again, lots of water, and if you see a fire starting, yell, and throw some water on it.”
Johnny and I settled down underneath the airplane, between the big wheels. All the work and fire would be overhead, as we crouched on the grass.
“Stu,” I said, “Why don’t you get up in the front cockpit there, and watch for anything like a fire, under the gas tank. Take Stan’s fire bottle. If you see something, don’t be afraid to sing out, and shoot it with the bot
tle. If it looks like the whole thing is gonna go up, just yell and get the heck out of there. We can lose the airplane, but let’s not us get hurt.”
It was nearly midnight when Johnny popped the torch on again and brought it overhead, near my dripping dam. The steel was thick, and the work was slow. I worried about the heat going through the metal and firing the fabric beyond the dam.
“Paul, kind of watch over it all, will you, for any smoke or fires?”
The torch, close up, had a tremendous roar, and it sprayed flame like a rocket at launch. Looking straight up, I could see through a narrow slit into the little place beneath the fuel tank. If there was a fire there, we’d be in trouble. And it was hard to see, in the glare and the sound of the torch.
Every once in a while the flame popped back, a rifle-shot, spraying white sparks over us all. The torchfire was buried in smoke where it touched the airplane. It was our own private hell, there under the belly of the biplane.
There was a sudden crackling over my head and I heard Stu say something, faintly.
“PAUL!” I shouted. “WHAT’S STU SAYING? GET WHAT HE’S SAYING!”