Nothing by Chance

Stu closed the door on the new passengers and waved that they were ready to go.

“Yeah. Been fun,” Paul said. “We should run it again next year, huh? Maybe a little longer.”

“OK. Take it easy. Fly good, and set down if the weather gives you a hard time.”

“Yeah. Put me on your postcard list.”

I nodded and pulled my goggles down, pushed the throttle forward. What a brusque goodbye, after flying together for so long.

We took off over the corn, and climbed up through the warm evening air, turning toward town, over the river. I saw the Luscombe airborne, turning my way. Paul fell into formation for a minute or so, to the delight of the passengers, each of whom aimed a camera and jotted the moment down on film.

What did it mean, that this man who had flown with us, who was part of the risks and joys and work and trials, of the understanding and misunderstanding of barnstorming, was now leaving?

Paul waved goodbye, kicked the Luscombe up into a sudden sharp breakaway and accelerated out into the west, where the sun was blocked by a giant thundercloud.

It meant, strangely enough, not that he was leaving at all, but that he was there. That if the time ever came for another test of freedom, another plan to prove that we don’t have to live any way but the way we wish, it might not have to be a lonely time. How many others like him are left in the country? I couldn’t tell if there were ten or a thousand. But I did know there was one.

“See you around, buddy,” I said. No one heard but the wind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE THUNDERSTORM HIT US at five in the morning, and we woke to raindrops clattering on the wing.

“We are going to get wet,” Stu observed calmly.

“Well, sir, yes. We can either stay under this wing or we can chicken out and run for the tractor shed.”

We decided to chicken out, grabbed our sleeping bags and ran for the shed, pelted all the way by heavy drops. I settled down by a doorway in the shed, where I could watch both the storm and the windsock. The rain didn’t worry me, but it would have been nice to know whether or not there would be any hail. It would have to be large and sharp hail, and coming straight down, before it could hurt the airplane. I took some comfort in the thought that hail that bad would also hurt the corn and oats, and that corn and oats were rarely damaged by hail.

The biplane didn’t seem at all concerned by the storm, and after a while I moved my sleeping bag over into the steel bucket of a Case 300 skip-loader. The heavy steel ridges of that bucket, covered by two layers of sleeping bag, made a comfortable bed. The only shortcoming was the rather noisy nearness of the pigs, with their ork-orking and clanging their metal feed-lids every few seconds. If I were a manufacturer of feed bins for hogs, I thought, I would glue big rubber strips on those lids to deaden the sound. Every 20 seconds … clang! I didn’t know how Skeeter could stand it.

The rain stopped in an hour and Stu walked over to look at the animals eating. In a few minutes he walked back and began gathering his equipment from the shed. “Now I know where they get the expression ‘pushy pig,’ “he said.

We had our breakfast at the other café, and looked over our Texaco road map for Eastern United States.

“I’m getting tired of all this north stuff,” I said. “Let’s swing down into southern Illinois or Iowa or Missouri. Not Illinois. I’m tired of Illinois.”

“Whatever you want,” said Stu. “We could try a jump here, see what happens. Yesterday was a good day. Haven’t had a chance to try out that flour, yet.”

Later, Stu stood bulky on the wingwalk, holding to the strut

and looking down. His target was the center of the field, but the wind was blowing hard at altitude, and carried the drift indicator a half-mile east of the strip. I thought he might cancel the jump, but he stood on the wing and motioned corrections that would take him to his jump point. The first jump run was not where he wanted it, and to make it worse, a patch of clouds hid the runway. We swung around to try again.

With Stu on the wing, the airflow over the tail of the biplane was broken all out of smoothness … the horizontal stabilizer bucked and jumped painfully, and the control stick shuddered in the force of the roiled wind. It was always a tense time, with him there, but this was even worse, swinging slowly around to try another pass in high winds aloft and with the stabilizer blurred under the strain of that shattered airflow.

The cloud crept slowly from over the field and the pass looked better to Stu. He waved me two degrees right, two more degrees right, and then slit the bag of King’s Ransom Flour. It trailed overboard in a great tunnel of white, our own contrail there at 4,000 feet. Then he jumped, still trailing flour.

I cut the throttle, banked hard to keep him in sight, and followed him down. It would never be routine; I was already wishing that he would hurry up and pull the ripcord.

Stu was a missile, launched in reverse. He had been still and waiting on the wing, he had fired down, and now he was going through his own sonic barriers and high-Q pressures.

At last he stopped his turns and deltas, pulled the ripcord, and the canopy snapped out into the sky. It was a piece of cake. He tracked into the wind, centered over his grassy target, and came down dead center, falling and leaping up again at once to spill the canopy.

By the time I landed he was ready to hop aboard for the short ride in.

“Nice jump, Stu!”

“Best one yet. Went just like I wanted it to go.”