Nothing by Chance

ut what it felt like, but in cautious, withdrawn words. I wondered what she really thought.

In an hour we thanked our hosts, bid them goodbye, and walked through the night back to the airstrip.

“I would have been in trouble if the engine quit on takeoff.” Paul said. “I knew the meadow was out there, but I sure couldn’t see it. Man, I was on instruments as soon as we broke ground … it was BLACK! I couldn’t even tell where the horizon was. That spooky feeling, you know, whether the stars are the town or the town is stars.”

“’Least you stayed in gliding distance, once you got up,” I said.

“Oh, once we were up it was no problem at all. Just that one little time right at liftoff.”

We tramped into the office, and snapped on the light.

“What a day.”

“Hey, treasurer, how much money did we make today?”

“I don’t know,” said Stu, and he smiled. “We’ll count it up tomorrow, boys.” Stu was older now than when he joined the circus. He knew us, was the difference, I thought, and I wished we could say the same of him.

“The devil we count it up tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow we wake up and find our treasurer is on his way to Acapulco.”

“Count ’er out, Stu,” Paul said.

Stu began emptying his pockets onto the couch from the biggest day’s work we’d had all summer. There were great crushed wads of money in all pockets, and his wallet was stuffed with bills. The final pile on the couch was wrinkled and impressive.

Stu counted it into fifty-dollar piles, while we watched. There were seven piles and some bills left over; three hundred and seventy-three dollars. “Not bad, for a day’s flyin’,” I said.

“Just a minute.” Paul said, calculating. “That can’t be right. It is three dollars a ride, so how can we come out with a number like 373?”

Stu patted his pockets. “Ah, here’s a whole wad I missed,” he said, and to a chorus of suspicious mutterings, he counted another seventeen dollars onto the last pile. “Don’t know how that could have happened.”

“There’s our warning, Paul,” I said. “We gots to be careful of the treasurer.”

There was $390 laid out now, a mirror of 130 passengers, most of whom had never flown before in their lives. You can destroy that pile of bills, I thought, or spend it right up, but you can never destroy the flights that those 130 people had today. The money is just a symbol of their wish to fly, to see far out over the land. And for a moment I, oily barnstormer, felt as if I might have done something worthwhile in the world.

“What about gas and oil? What do we owe on that?”

I checked the tally sheet on the desk and added the figures.

“Comes out to $42.78. We used 129.4 gallons of gas and 12 quarts of oil. We should pay Stan for the stuff of his, too, that we used. Acetylene and oxygen and welding rod and stuff. What do you think? Twenty bucks sound right?” They agreed it did.

Stu was figuring how to split the money four ways, keeping one pile for Johnny Colin. “OK. That makes $81.80 apiece with two cents left over. Anybody want to check my figures?” We all did, and he was right. We put the odd two cents on Johnny’s pile, for mailing the next day.

“You know,” I said, when we were all rolled up for the night, “maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t wind up with ten airplanes, or whatever, on this show. The only time we could keep ten airplanes busy flying passengers is a day like this. We’d have starved, ten of us; we couldn’t even pay our gas.”

“You’re right,” Paul said. “Two airplanes be about it, maybe three, unless you want to get all organized and follow the county fairs and fly-in breakfasts.”

“Can you imagine us organized?” I said. “’Today, men, we will all fly one eight zero degrees for eighty-eight miles to Richland, where we will all carry passengers from noon to two-thirty. Then we will proceed west for forty-two miles, where we will fly passengers from four o’clock to six-fifteen …’Bad news. Glad it’s just us.”

“You probably say we’re being ‘guided,’ that the other airplanes just couldn’t make it?” Paul said. “And that all these crashes don’t stop us?”

“You better believe it, we’re being guided,” I said. I was growing more confident of this, in the light of our miracles. Yet while Midwest America appeared both beautiful and kind, I still wondered what sudden adventures might next be guided across the path of The Great American Flying Circus. I wasn’t quite so eager for adventure, and hoped for a time of calm.

I forgot that calm, for a gypsy pilot, is disaster.

CHAPTER TEN

WE SENT JOHNNY’S MONEY OFF to him the next morning, all cash in a bulky envelope, and a note saying thanks.

Over a late breakfast at the D&M, Paul looked at the list of clients he had promised to photograph.