We made one last pass over the field, and as we did, two motorcycles sped out the dirt road and braked hard at the edge of the grass to watch. As our wheels touched, I lost sight of the strip ahead, held my breath, and watched the white markers blur past the wingtips. I held the airplane as straight as I had ever held it and pressed down hard on the brake pedals. After an agonizing fifteen seconds, we had rolled to walking speed, and with much power and brake, the biplane turned very carefully in her tracks and taxied back to the road and the motorcyclists.
As I stepped out of the cockpit I wondered how much food and gasoline I could buy for eleven cents.
“You fellas feel like flyin’? Green City from the air; a real pretty place. Give you an extra long ride, since you came out to meet me so nice. Three dollars each, is all.” I was aghast, listening to my own words. Carry passengers from this field? I am out of my mind!
But I had landed here once, and I could do it again. What was this airplane built for, but to fly passengers?
“Let’s go, Billy!” one of the boys said. “I’ve never been up in one of these open jobs, and that’s the kind Dad learned on. Can you carry us both?”
“Sure can,” I said.
“Well, wait. I don’t think we have the money.”
They were leafing through their billfolds, picking sparse green bills. “Five-fifty is all we got between us. You fly us for that?”
“Well, since you came on out so quick … OK.” I took the five dollar-bills and two pieces of silver and suddenly felt solvent again. Food! I would have steak tonight!
I emptied the cargo from the front seat and strapped my two passengers aboard, unconsciously pulling their safety belt a bit tighter than usual.
Settled down into my cockpit, I lined carefully on the bent strip of grass, and pushed the throttle forward. In spite of all the signs that I was going too far out on a shaky limb, I was glad to be aloft with my passengers. I had this moment gained title to that cash in my pocket, and after a few minutes buzzing around, I would have only to land and eat. I searched again for other places to come down, but there were none. Hills, money-crops, too short, too far from town. The motorcycles were still at the airport, anyway; we had to make one more landing on the high trapeze.
In ten minutes we circled the strip again, and in the dimming light it did not look any easier to land upon. The passengers were curious to see over the nose as we landed, and they blocked what little view I had in the moment I cut the throttle.
We hit the ground and bounced, and it felt as if we moved to the right. I thought of the embankment on the right side of the strip, and pushed left rudder. Too much. The biplane swerved left, and her left wheel went off the runway. By the time I hit right rudder, the left wing was flashing a foot above jumbled grassy hillocks and harsh earth there, streaking toward a wooden marker and that metal building. I slammed full right rudder and hit the throttle, rolling thirty miles per hour. The airplane jumped back onto the runway an instant before the building flashed by, and we swung hard to the right. I came back with full left rudder and full brakes. We stopped just at the edge of the embankment, and I went limp. So this is what barnstormers did when they were desperate for cash.
“Hey, that was great! Did you see ’em come runnin’ out when we went over the house?”
My passengers couldn’t have been nearly as happy as I was to be down again, and I gratefully took a ride to town on the back of a motorcycle.
The town square was a small Kahoka. There were picnic tables in the park, a Liberty Bell on a stand, a home plate and pitcher’s mound, and a telephone booth with the glass broken out on the home-plate side. Square store fronts looked at the park from all four sides, and one of the squares was Lloyd’s Café. Lloyd was sweeping out, and the place was empty.
“I could fix somethin’ for you,” he said, “but you probably wouldn’t care much for my cookin’. Wife’s out shoppin’.”
The Town House Grill (Stop-N-Eat) was closed. Only Martha’s was left, across the corner from Lloyd’s. Martha’s was not only open, but had two customers inside. I took a table and ordered my hamburgers and chocolate shakes, feeling rich. How money can change! On a good day, six dollars was nothing, a tiny droplet in the great bucket of prosperity. Today, my $5.50 was wealth, because it was more than I needed. Even after supper and corn chips and candy bars, I had f
our dollars clear.
Walking back to the biplane, I was an intruder in the town. Lights were coming on in the houses and voices drifted to the sidewalk. Now and then someone puttered in a dark flower garden, and looked up to watch me pass. The roofcrests of the houses carried strange ornaments, dragonlike, silhouettes of Viking ships, all cut from metal.
The reservoir was only a short walk from the biplane, and I turned aside. The ground was soft and hidden in deep grass. Flowers were tiny pure palettes strewn carelessly about. Reeds shuddered along the shore, more like arrows down from the sky than plants up from the water. Across the way a frog clacked like a Spanish castanet, and an invisible cow said, “mmMMMm,” loud, out in the distance. The reservoir was a tiny Walden, with only the smallest ripples across its dark-mirror face.
I crunched back through the grass to the biplane and unrolled the sleeping bag. The moon went in and out of the clouds while the evening melted into night. I ate a lemon-drop, and listened to the sound of the engine still roaring in my ears. Solitude, I decided, is barnstorming all by yourself.
At nine a.m. on a day I didn’t know, we circled Milan, Missouri, trailing sound and color, and landed in a hayfield a half-mile away. Before I had the sign on the gatepost, the first townsfolk arrived. Two pickup trucks clattered down onto the furrows and the drivers stepped out looking.
“Have a little motor trouble, did y’?” He was an old fellow, in coveralls.
“Aw, no,” I said. “Flyin’ around, givin’ airplane rides.”
“What d’y know. She’s an old one, all right, too.”
“Feel like a ride today? Nice and cool up there.”
“Oh, no. Not me,” he said. “I’m scared.”
“Scared! This airplane been fly in’ since 1929! Don’t you think she might make one more flight without crashin’ all to flinders? I don’t believe you’re scared.”
“She’d go down sure enough if I got in there.”