Nothing by Chance

There was a crowd waiting, and I settled down for a long run of flying. It didn’t work out that way. Only five people felt like flying, although one man handed Stu a ten-dollar bill and said, “Can you give me this much a ride?” We spent 20 minutes out over the countryside, and he still didn’t tire of looking down.

A farmer was last to ride that morning, and we flew over his house and lands, green and bright after the rain. He didn’t look at his land as much as he reflected upon it; I could see the thought in his face. So this is my land, so that is where I’ve spent my life. Sure, there’s fifty other places like it all around, but this is my land and it’s every acre good.

We broke for lunch when there were no passengers left to fly, and caught a ride to town with one young man who had flown and stayed to watch.

“I sure envy you guys,” he said as we turned onto the highway. “Bet you see a lot of girls, flying around.”

“Yep, we see a lot of girls, all right,” I said.

“Boy. I’d like to join you. But I got a job that ties me down.”

“Well, quit your job,” I said, testing him. “Come on and join us!”

“I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t quit my job …” He had failed his test. Not even girls could lure him away from a job that tied him down.

When we returned from lunch, I saw that the biplane was getting a little greasy. I selected a rag and began wiping the silver cowl.

“Why don’t you get the windshields, Stu? There’s so much grease on ’em the poor people can hardly see out.”

“Sure thing.”

We talked as we worked, and decided to stay in Pecatonica the rest of the day, and leave early next morning.

I backed off and looked at the airplane, and I was pleased. She was much prettier. Stu wiped the top of the cowl, which wasn’t necessary. But there was something about the rag that he was using…

“Stu? That rag IS MY T-SHIRT! THAT’S MY T-SHIRT YOU’RE USING!”

He opened his mouth in terror, and froze solid.

“It was with all the other rags,” he choked. “And it looked so … raggy.” He unfolded it, helplessly. It was no longer cloth, but a mass of gooey rocker-grease. “God knows I’m sorry,” he said.

“Aw, heck. Go ahead and use it for a rag. It was only my T-shirt.”

He debated for a moment, looked at the shirt, and went back to wiping grease with it. “I thought something was funny,” he said. “It was an awful clean rag.”

Method C picked up some passengers that afternoon, and the first was the man and his wife who lived at the airstrip. “We’ve been watching you, and you look pretty safe, so we decided to take the plunge.”

They enjoyed the plunge. We circled over their house on the strip before landing, and as we did a car drew up and a man got out and knocked on the door.

The woman smiled and pointed down at him, so her husband could see. Their caller waited patiently for the door to be answered, not thinking to look up in the sky for his friends, a thousand feet overhead.

We landed and the woman ran laughing to keep him from driving away from an empty house.

Then business died away, though there were still some people standing to look at the biplane. One lean gentleman walked up and looked in the cockpit after I shut the engine down. “You ever heard of Bert Snyder?” he said.

“Can’t say as I have … who’s Bert Snyder?”

“Used to be Bert Snyder Circus, in 1923. Used to come into this town for the county fair. He had a whole lot of airplanes, a whole lot of them. And I used to be the most envied kid in town. I’d go up in the front of one of them airplanes and throw handbills out, advertising, all over the place. He had quite a circus. This town would be so full of people come to see him and come to the fair you couldn’t turn around … old Bert Snyder.”

“Sounds like quite a guy.”

“Sure was … quite a guy. And you know, these kids you fly, they’ll remember this ride for the rest of their lives. Oh, they’ll fly jets all over the world, but they’ll tell their kids, ‘I remember when I went up, summer of ’66, it was, in an old open-cockpit…’ “

Of course he was right; sure he was right. We weren’t here just for ourselves, after all. In how many albums and scrap-books had The Great American already found immortality? In how many thoughts and memories did our images sleep this moment? I suddenly felt the weight of history and eternity upon us all.

At that moment another car arrived; our friend the tank driver. He had brought his wife out to fly, and as soon as she stepped from the car, she began laughing.

“Is this … the airplane … you wanted me to fly?”