Nothing by Chance

Gazing back at me in the morning from the gas station mirror was a horrible image, a scraggly rough-bearded Mr. Hyde so terrible that I drew back in alarm. Was that me? Was that what the farmers had seen whenever we landed? I would have run this monster off with a pitchfork! But the bearded image disappeared at last to my electric shaver, and I felt almost human when I walked again into the sunshine.

We had to make money at Walworth, or quit. We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.

It worked at once.

“Hi, there.”

I lifted my head at the voice and looked out from beneath the wing. “Hi.”

“You fly this airplane?”

“Sure do.” I got to my feet. “You lookin’ to fly?” For a fleeting moment, the man looked familiar, and he looked at me with the air of one who was trying to remember. “It’s a nice flight,” I said. “Walworth’s a pretty little town, from the air. Three dollars American, is all.”

The man read my name from the cockpit rim. “Hey! You’re not… Dick! Remember me?”

I looked at him again, carefully. I had seen him before, I knew him from … “Your name is …” I said. What was his name? He rebuilt an airplane. He and … Carl Lind rebuilt an airplane a couple of years ago … “Your name is … Everett… Feltham. The Bird biplane! You and Carl Lind!”

“Yessir! Dick! How the heck you been?”

Everett Feltham was a flight engineer for some giant airline. He had been brought up on Piper Cubs and Aeronca Champs, was an airplane mechanic, pilot, restorer. If it flew through the air, Everett Feltham knew about it; how to fly it and how to keep it flying.

“Ev! What are you doin’ here?”

“I live here! This is my home town! Man, you never can tell what kind of riff-raff gonna fall down on you from the sky! How’s Bette? The children?”

It was a good reunion. Ev lived only two miles north of the field we had landed in, and our friend Carl Lind kept a country house on Lake Geneva, ten miles east. Carl had flown airplanes in the late twenties, barnstorming around this very countryside. He quit flying when he married and raised his family, and he was now the president of Lind Plastic Products.

“A gypsy pilot,” Ev said. “Might have known it was you, doing a crazy thing like this, landing in a hayfield. You know there’s an airport just down the road.”

“Is there? Well, it’s too far out. You got to be close to town. We’re a bit in the hole after flyin’ around all week for nothin’. We got to get some passengers up in the air this afternoon or we’ll be starvin’ again.”

“I’ll call Carl. If he’s home, he’s gonna want to come out and see you, probably want you over to the house. You need anything? Anything I can bring you?”

“No, Rags, maybe—we’re runnin’ out of rags. If you got some around.”

Ev waved and drove away, and I smiled. “Funny thing about flying, Stu. You can never tell when you’re gonna run into some old buddy somewhere. Isn’t that somethin’? Go land in a hayfield, and there’s ol’ Ev.” Nothing by chance, nothing by luck, the voice, almost forgotten, reminded.

After suppertime, the passengers started coming. One woman said the last time she had flown was when she was six years old, with a barnstormer in a two-winger airplane, just like this one. “My boss told me you were here and I better not miss it.”

A young fellow with a fantastic mop of a haircut stopped and looked at the airplane for a long time before he decided to fly. As Stu fastened him into the front seat he said, “Will I see tomorrow?”

This was pretty strange sentence structure, coming from a fellow who proclaimed himself illiterate. (For shame, I thought, judging the man by his haircut!) In flight, he braced hard against the turns, fearful, and after we landed he said, “Wow!” He stayed for a long time after his ride, looking at the airplane almost in awe. I put him down as a real person, in spite of the haircut. Something about being above the ground had reached through to him.

A pair of pretty young ladies in kerchiefs put our account-book in the black for the day, and they laughed happy in the sky, turning over their home town.

I checked the fuel, and with ten gallons left I was at the end of my margin, and it was time to fill the tank even though passengers had to wait.

I took off at once for the airport that Ev had mentioned, and in five minutes was rolling to a stop by the gas pump. I was just topping the tank when a burly, bright-eyed business-man in a snap-brim straw hat brisked out to the airplane.

“Hey, Dick!”

“CARL LIND!” He was just as I remembered him, one of the happiest people in the world. He had survived a heart attack, and now enjoyed the very air he breathed.

He looked the airplane over with an appraising eye. “Is it good, Carl?” I said. “Is it the way you remember?”

“We didn’t have all that flashy gold paint, in my day, I can tell you. But the skid’s pretty nice, and the patches in the wings. That’s how I remember it.”

“Hop in, Carl, get in the front here, if you trust me. You got no controls in front. I’m goin’ back over to the field.”