Nothing by Chance

I pulled my sleeping bag from the front cockpit and turned to the other watcher.

“Ready to fly today? Three dollars, and Milan from the air. Pretty town it is.”

“I’d go, if I could keep one foot on the ground.”

“Can’t see much from that height.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be deluged with customers. My only hope had been that the biplane would be a strange enough thing in an airportless town to bring out the curious. Something had to happen soon. The fuel stick showed that we were down to 24 gallons of fuel. We’d need more gasoline before long, and we’d need passengers first, to pay for it. We had come from poor to rich to poor again.

A bright red late-model Ford sedan drove through the gate, purring in its mufflers. Instead of a license plate on its front bumper, it said CHEVY EATER. From the little crossed flags in chrome-on the fender, I thought it might have some kind of huge engine under the hood.

The driver was an open-faced young man, a sort of enlightened hot-rodder, and he walked over to look in the cockpit.

“Feel like flyin’ today?” I said.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m a coward.”

“Hey, what is with all this coward stuff? Everybody in Milan scared of airplanes? I just better pack up and move out.”

“No … there’ll be lots of folks out to fly with y’. They just don’t know you’re here yet. You want to ride in town, get somethin’ to eat?”

“No thanks. Might ride over to that place over there, though. What is it, a Buick place? Think they’d have a Coke machine?”

“Sure, they got one there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride over. I’m not doin’ anythin’ anyway.”

The pickup trucks had left and no one else appeared on the road. It seemed as good a time as any for breakfast.

The big engine was there in the Ford, and tires screeched all the way down the road.

“You flyin’ that airplane came in a while ago?” the Buick dealer asked when I walked into his shop.

“Sure am.”

“Not havin’ any trouble, are you?”

“Nope. Just flyin’ around givin’ rides.”

“Rides? How much do you get for a ride?”

“Three dollars. Trip over town. About ten minutes. You got a Coke machine?”

“Right over ’gainst the corner. Hey, Elmer! Stan! Go take an airplane ride with this guy. I’ll pay your way.”

I dropped a dime in the machine while the owner insisted that he was serious, and that his boys were to go out and fly.

Elmer put down his socket wrench at once. “Let’s go.” Stan wouldn’t budge. “No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t quite feel like it today.”

“You’re scared, Stan,” my Ford driver said. “You’re scared to go up with him.”

“I don’t see you flyin’, Ray Scott.”

“I told him. I’m scared. Maybe I’ll go up later.”

“Well, I’m not scared of any old airplane,” Elmer said.

I finished my Coke and we piled into the red Ford. “I was a special jumper in Korea,” Elmer said as we drove. “Used to go up in a Gooney Bird and jump out from three thousand feet, with a ten-foot chute. Ten foot eight inches. I’m not scared of no airplane ride.”

“A ten-foot chute?” I said. Elmer would have been hitting the ground at about forty miles an hour.

“Yeah. Ten foot eight inches. You know that I’m not afraid of no airplane ride.”