Nothing by Chance

“Seemed to be.”

“Shows to go ya. You see how the helicopter finally gave up. The old Great American was really rackin’ ’em up, and I guess he finally just couldn’t stand the competition.”

It was silent for a while, then Paul spoke again. “You know, that girl flew with me three times.”

“What girl was that?”

“I don’t know. She never said a word, she never smiled, even. But she rode three times. Nine bucks. Where does a girl get nine bucks to throw away on airplane rides?”

“Throw away?” I said. “Throw away? Man, the girl’s flyin! Nine bucks is nothin’!”

“Yeah. But you don’t find too many like that, who think that way. And hey, you know what? Two autographs today. I signed two autographs!”

“Nice,” I said. “Knocked me over, too. I had one little fella came up and wanted me to sign his book. How about that, Stu? You are no longer the Star.”

“Poor Stu,” Paul said loftily. “Did you sign any autographs today … Star?”

Stu answered softly. “Twelve,” he said, and looked away.

By five o’clock we had the airplanes covered for the evening. We could have carried more passengers, but we were not in the mood for it, and closed our airplane-ride stand.

Duke and her friends arrived and drove us out to a house just across from Palmyra’s other lake. There was time for a swim, but Paul chose to stay on shore; the water was looking cold.

“Borrow your comb, Stu?” I said after an hour in the lake, when we were back at the house.

“Sure.” He handed me a fractured stick of plastic that had five teeth on one end, a long space, a brief forest of 18 teeth, and all the rest empty.

“Jumper’s comb, I guess,” Stu apologized. “A few hard landings kinda wiped it out.”

The comb was not too effective.

We returned to the gathering, a crowd of people in the living room, and munched on sandwiches and potato chips. They were quizzing Paul on what we were up to, barnstorming.

There was a certain wistfulness in the room, as though we had something that these people wanted, that they might have had a distant wish to say goodbye to everything in Palmyra and fly away into the sunset with The Great American Flying Circus. I saw it most of all in the girl Duke. And I thought: if they want to do something like this, why do they wait? Why don’t they just do it, and be happy?

Paul, talking with hard logic, had brought Duke around to the idea of a flight in the Luscombe.

“But it’s got to be at night,” she said.

“Why at night? You can’t see nearly so …”

“That’s just it. I don’t want to see. I get this urge to jump. Maybe I won’t get it at night.”

Paul stood up. “Let’s go.”

They went. It was solid black outside; an engine failure on takeoff would give him a busy few moments. We listened, and some time later we heard the Luscombe taking off, and then saw its navigation lights moving among the stars. They stayed over town and circled higher. Good for Paul. He wouldn’t be caught out of gliding distance to the field.

We talked for a while longer, back in the house, about what a strange girl Duke was; how long she had been afraid to go up in an airplane, and how there she was up there in the middle of the night where no one else would think of flying, first time.

Stu took his licks for not being very talkative, and I found an old ornamental guitar and began tuning it. The £ string broke at once, and I was sorry I ever saw the thing. A piece of fishline as an emergency string tuned way too high.

After a while the flyers came back.

“It’s beautiful,” Duke told us all. “The lights and the stars. But after five minutes I said, ‘Take me down, take me down!’ I could feel myself wanting to jump.”

“She couldn’t have jumped out of that airplane if she tried,” Paul said. “She couldn’t even open the door.”

Duke talked for a bit abo