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He was a wide powerful man, a professional photographer, concerned because the world’s image wasn’t quite as beautiful as it should be. Under a carefully combed shock of black hair he had the look of a gangster trying hard to go straight.
“If it was me only, be no problem,” I said, taking the bags that Stu handed down from the biplane. “But pickin’ a place where your ground-hog airplane could fly from … yes sir, that was the problem.”
“What do you think,” Paul said, letting the slur about his airplane go by, “should we try a jump today, late as it is? If we want to eat, we’d better find some paying passengers.”
“I don’t know. Up to Stu. Up to you. You’re supposed to be leader today.”
“No, I’m not You know I’m not the leader. You’re the leader.”
“OK, then. If I’m the leader, I say let’s go up and do some aerobatics first and see what happens before we push poor Stu overboard.”
“That means I have to unload my airplane.”
“Yes, Paul, that means you have to unload your airplane.”
As he turned to his task, a red pickup truck rolled from the highway and onto the dirt road leading to the airport gas pump. There were red letters on the side: AL’S SINCLAIR SERVICE. And according to the name stitched on his pocket, it was Al himself aboard.
“Quite some airplanes there,” Al called, slamming the hollow steel door with a hollow steel slam.
“Sure are,” I said. “Kind of old.”
“I’ll bet. You want some gas, I guess?”
“In a little while, maybe. Just flyin’ through, barnstormin’ a bit Think it might be OK to try and hop a few passengers out of here? Folks see the town from the air?” A fifty-fifty chance. He could accept us or he could throw us off the field.
“Sure, it’d be OK! Glad to have you! Do a lot of good for the airport if we could get people to come out here, in fact. They’ve just about forgotten we have an airport, in town.” Al looked over the leather rim into the old cockpit. “Barnstorming, you say. Rio’s a big enough town for you?” He pronounced it Rye-O. “Population 776?”
“776 is just right,” I said. “We’ll go up for some aerobatics for a while, then come get gas. Stu, why don’t you get the signs up now, out on the road?”
Without a word, the boy nodded, picked up the signs, (red letters on white linen, FLY $3 FLY) and strode silently off toward the highway, earning his keep.
The only way for a barnstormer to survive, we knew, is for him to fly passengers. Many passengers. And the only way to get passengers is first to attract their attention.
We had to make it quite clear that there was suddenly something strange and wild and wonderful going on at the airstrip, something that hadn’t happened in forty years and might never happen again. If we could fire a spark of adventure within the hearts of townfolk we hadn’t even seen, we could afford another tank of gasoline, and perhaps a hamburger.
Our engines burst alive again, bouncing hard echoes off the tin-hangar walls, flattening the grass back in two loud mechanical windstorms.
Helmets buckled, goggles down, throttles ahead to wide open power, the two old airplanes rolled, thumped, and lifted from green into deep clear blue, hunting passengers as hungrily as wolves hunt deer.
I looked down as we climbed over the edge of town, watching the crowd at the baseball game.
A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have cared. A couple of years ago my cockpit was all steel and glass and electronic controls and a sweptwing Air Force fighter that burned 500 gallons of fuel per hour, that could outrun sound. No need for passengers then, and if there were, three dollars wouldn’t cover the cost of a flight, or a takeoff, or an engine start. It wouldn’t even cover the Auxiliary Power Unit cost, to feed the electricity for the start. To use a fighter-bomber for barnstorming, we’d need two-mile concrete runways, a corps of mechanics and a sign to say, “FLY $12,000 FLY”. But now, that three-dollar passenger was our entire livelihood; gas, oil, food, maintenance, salary. And at this moment we flew without any passengers at all.
At 3,000 feet over the cornfields we began our Death-Defying Display of Aerial Acrobatics. Paul’s white wing snapped up, I had a quick rolling glance at the bottom of his airplane, streaked in oil and dust, and then he was diving right straight down. A second later the smooth-cowled nose pulled up again, and up, until his airplane was flying out toward the afternoon sun, roaring up past my biplane, then over on his back until he was upside-down, wheels in the sky, then nose back down again to finish the stunt. If he had a smoke flare on board, he would have traced a full vertical loop in the sky.
Way down in the crowd, I imagined I saw a face or two upturned. If we could fly just half the people watching that game, I thought, at three dollars each …
The biplane and I rolled into a great diving turn to the left, pushing down until the wind screamed in the wires. The black-green earth lay full in front of our nose, the wind pounded my leather helmet and set the goggles vibrating in front of my eyes. Then quickly back on the control stick and the ground fell away and blue sky filled the way ahead. Straight up, looking out at the wingtips, I saw the earth sweeping slowly around behind me, and I leaned my helmet back on the headrest and watched the fields and tiny houses and cars moving up from behind until they all stood directly overhead.
Houses, cars, the church spires, the sea of green leaves, all there in tiny full-color detail while I watched it above the biplane. The wind went quiet while we were upside-down and moving slowly through the air. Say we flew a hundred people. That would be three hundred dollars, or one hundred dollars for each of us. Less gas and oil, of course. But maybe we wouldn’t fly that many. That would be one out of every eight people in town.
The world pivoted slowly to come back in front of the biplane’s nose, and then beneath it again, with the wind screaming in the wires.
Across the ai
r, Paul’s airplane was standing still in the sky, its nose pointing straight up, his whole machine a blue-white plumb-bob on a long string down from heaven. Then, abruptly, it broke its string, pivoted left, and pointed down just as straightly.
It wasn’t all quite as death-defying as our handbills had said; in fact, there’s nothing an airplane can do to be death-defying, as long as it stays in its own place, the sky. The only bad times come when an airplane tangles with the ground.
