Nothing by Chance

The room where we had breakfast had been in town somewhat longer than the shopping center. The only thing that had changed since saloon days was they had replaced the bat-wing doors, turned the furniture into museum pieces, and mounted lifelike detail drawings of “Hamburger,’ “Cheeseburger,” and “French Fries” in wide glowing plastic cases over the mirror, and over at least a thousand glasses stacked upside down.

Hanging on the wall was a rough old triangle of oak, notched like a great blunt saw along one edge, and bolted to some other moving sections of wood. “Wagon Jack” was printed on a board a few inches beneath it.

“Stu.”

“Yeah.”

“The tail of the Parks weighs more than all the rest of the airplane put together. We’ve got to lift it to put on our new skid shoe.”

“We’ll lift it.”

“Do you figure we could maybe borrow that wagon jack over there, somehow, and use it?”

“That’s an antique wagon jack,” he said. “They’d never loan it out to pick up an airplane.”

“Won’t hurt to ask. But how do we make it work?”

We looked at the Jack, and it was dead quiet in our booth. There was no possible way that the Jack could have lifted anything. We couldn’t imagine how it might have picked up any wagón ever built. We sketched all over the backs of napkins and placemats, drawing little wagons and the way that the oaken triangle

might have done its work. At last Stu thought he understood, and tried to explain it to me, but it didn’t make any sense. We didn’t bother to ask about borrowing the Wagon Jack, and paid our bill mystified by that thing hanging on the wall.

“We could start the engine,” I said, “and pick up the tail with the propblast. ’Course it might get a little windy while you sit back under the tail and put the thing on. About a hundred miles an hour, the wind.”

“While I sit back there?”

We’d find some way to do it, I was sure.

Stu’s thought wandered from the immediate problem. “How about flour?” he said. “Should I try flour? Take a bag of flour and cut it open just before I jump, and leave a trail coming down?”

“Give it a try.”

So The Great American invested in 59 cents’ worth of King’s Ransom Pre-Sifted Flour. It was five cents cheaper than any other brand, is why we bought it.

The answer to the problem of holding the tail in the air was solved as soon as we returned to the biplane. It was simple.

“Just take a couple of those oil cans, Stu, that we haven’t opened yet. I’ll pick up the tail good as I can and you set those cans under the rudder post to hold it up. OK?”

“Are you putting me on? That big heavy tail on these cans of OIL? There’ll be oil all over the place!”

“A college man, and he says a thing like that. Have you never learned the Incompressibility of Fluids? I shall lecture upon that subject, if you wish. Or if you would rather, Mister MacPherson, you can just get down under the tail and stick those cans under the rudder post.”

“OK, professor. Ready when you are.”

With agonizing tremendous great effort, I lifted the tail a foot in the air for three full seconds, and Stu set the cans in place. They held, and I was as surprised as he was that they did.

“Now if you would like the mathematical details, Mister MacPherson, we can discuss them at length …”

The skid shoe was in place in ten minutes.

We stretched out under the wing to put Method C to the test, and sure enough, two cars stopped at the roadside before we were half asleep. Our passengers were girls on vacation from college, and they were goggle-eyed at the biplane.

“You mean it flies? Up in the air?”

“Yes ma’am. Guaranteed to fly. Look down on all the world. Three dollars a ride and a prettier day we couldn’t ask, could we?”

Jouncing out to the far end of the hayfield, and as we turned into the wind to begin the flight, my riders were overcome by second thoughts. They shouted quickly to each other, over the noise of the engine and the rattling of the hollow-drum flying machine. About the time they had decided that they had been out of their minds to even think of going up in this old dirty machine, the throttle came forward, they were engulfed in the great twisting roar of the engine, and we were clatterbanging over the hard ground, hurtling toward the highway and the cars and the telephone wires. They clutched the soft leather rim of the front cockpit and at the moment we left the ground they gasped and looked and held even tighter. Someone screamed. The wires flashed below and we climbed easily up into the sky.

They turned to look back at the ground and at me, quizzically. The realization swept over them that this madman sitting in the cockpit behind them now held the key to their entire future. He looked unshaven. He looked as if he didn’t have much money. Could he be trusted?