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There was a flicker of fire overhead. “HOLD IT, JOHNNY! FIRE!” I slammed a dripping rag hard up into the narrow crack overhead. It hissed, in a rolling cloud of steam.
“STU! DARN IT! SPEAK UP! YOU GOT A FIRE UP THERE?”
“OK, now,” came the faint voice.
The distance, I thought. The roar of the torch. I can’t hear him. Don’t be hard on him. But I had no patience with that. We’d all be blown to bits if he didn’t make us hear him when there was a fire.
“LISTEN TO ’IM, WILL YA, PAUL? I CAN’T HEAR A WORD HE SAYS!”
Johnny came back in with the torch, and the crackling began overhead, and the smoke.
“That’s just grease cookin’ off there,” he said, next to me.
We lived through three fires in our little hell, and stopped every one of them short of the fuel tank. None of us were sorry, at two a.m., when the torch snapped out for the last time and the gear was finished, glowing in the dark.
“That ought to do it,” Johnny said. “You want me to stick around and help you put it back together?”
“No. No problem, here on out. You saved us, John. Let’s get some sleep, OK? Man, I don’t want to live through that again.”
Johnny wasn’t noticeably tired, but I felt like an empty balloon.
At 5:30, Johnny and I got up and walked out to his dew-covered Aeronca. He fired the engine coldly awake and put his tools in the back seat.
“Johnny, thanks,” I said.
“Yeah. Nothin’. Glad I could help. Now take it easy, please, with that airplane?” He rubbed a clear space in the dew-beads on his windshield, then climbed aboard.
I didn’t know what else to say. Without him, the dream would have been twice vanished. “Hope we fly together again soon.”
“We’ll do it, sometime.” He pushed the throttle forward and taxied out into the dim morning. A moment later he was a dwindling speck on the horizon west, our problem was solved, and The Great American Flying Circus was alive again.
CHAPTER NINE
BY FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON, three days after her second crash of the season, the biplane was a flying machine right out of an old barnstormer’s scrapbook: silver patches on her fabric, welded plates on her cabane struts, scorched places and painted-over places.
We went around all the attach points, checking that safety wires and cotter keys were in place, doublechecking jam nuts tight, and then I was back again in the familiar cockpit, the engine ticking over, warming from the quick fires in the cylinders. This would be a test flight for the rigging and for the landing gear welds—if the wheels collapsed on the takeoff roll, or if the wings fell off in flight, we had failed.
I pushed the throttle forward, we rolled, we hopped up into the air. The gear was good, the rigging was good. She flew like a beautiful airplane.
“YA-HOO!” I shouted into the high wind, where no one could hear. “GREAT! LOVE YA, YA OL’ BEAST!” The beast roared back, happy.
We climbed on up to 2,000 feet over the lake and flew some aerobatics. If the wings wouldn’t fall off with the airplane pulling high G and flying upside-down, they never would. That first loop required a bit of courage, and I double-checked my parachute buckles. The wind sang in the wires like always, and up and over we went, as gently as possible the first time, looking up at the ground over our head, and smoothly back. Then a tighter loop, watching for the wires to start beating in the wind, or struts to bend, or fabric to tear away. She was the same old airplane she had always been. The tightest loop I could put on her, the quickest snap roll, she didn’t make a single cry.
We dived back down to the ground, and bounced the wheels hard on the grass during a high-speed run. This was not easy to do, but I had to make it harder on the wheels now than it would ever be with passengers aboard.
She passed her tests, and the last thing left was to see if the rewelding of the gear made any difference in her ground-handling. A tiny misalignment of the wheels could mean an airplane harder than ever to control.
We sailed down final approach, crossed the fence, and clunked down on the grass. I waited with glove ready on the throttle, boots ready on the rudder pedals. She made a little swerve, but responded at once to the touch of throttle. She seemed the faintest bit more skittish on the ground than she had been. We taxied back to Stan’s hangar, triumphant, and the propeller windmilled down into silence.
“How is she?” Paul said, the second the engine stopped.
“GREAT! Maybe just a shade on the dicey side, landing, but otherwise, just great.” I jumped down from the cockpit and said what I knew I had to say, because some things are more important than airplanes. “You ready to give her another try, Paul?”
“Do you mean that?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. If she’s bent again, we’ll fix her again. You ready to go?”
He thought for a long moment. “I don’t think so. We wouldn’t be getting much barnstorming done, if I hurt her again. And we’re supposed to be out here to barnstorm, not to fix airplanes.”
