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At sundown we went back to the plane and the sleeping bags. There were ten billion river-mosquitoes waiting for us. They cruised, humming gently, at low power, and all of them were quite eager to meet us.
Stu, not quite so silent since Paul left, had suggestions. “We could put out a quart of blood for them, on the wing,” he said. “Or tether a couple hundred frogs around here. Or we could start the engine and fan them away …”
“You’re very creative, my lad, but all that’s needed is that we come to an understanding with the mosquitoes. They have their place to live in the world, you see, and we have ours …”
“We could go back into town and get some repellent stuff …”
“… and as soon as we understand that they don’t have to conflict with our peace, why, they’ll just … go.”
At ten o’clock we were walking to town. Every seven minutes, as we walked, a shiny new automobile, without muffler, came blazing out from town at something over 70 miles an hour, stopped, turned around and went blazing back in. “What the devil are these nuts doing?” I said, mystified.
“Dragging Main.”
“What?”
“It’s called ‘Dragging Main,’ “Stu explained. “In little towns, the kids have nothing to do, so they just go back and forth, back and forth, in their cars, all night long.” He had no comment whether he thought it good or evil. He just told me it was.
“This is entertainment? This is what they do for fun?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
Another car went shrieking by. No. It was the same car that we had seen seven minutes ago.
Good grief, I thought. Would we have had an Abraham Lincoln, a Thomas Edison, a Walt Disney, if everyone spent their non-school hours Dragging Main? I watched the split-second faces at the wheel, and saw that the young men passing by were not so much driving as being driven, by sheer and desperate boredom.
“I eagerly await the contributions these guys are gonna make to the world.”
It was a warm night. Stu knocked on a market door just as it was closing, explained about the mosquitoes, and paid fifty cents for a bottle of promises to keep them away. I bought a pint of orange sherbet, and we walked back to the airplane.
“You want some of this stuff?” Stu asked.
“Nope. All you need is an understanding …”
“Darn. I was going to sell you a squirt of it for fifty cents.”
Neither one of us reached a peace with the little creatures.
At five-thirty in the morning we were airborne, ghosting southeast over calm rivermist, toward a black mark on a road-map that was supposed to be an airport. We had one hour’s fuel on board, and the flight would take 30 minutes.
The air was still as the sun, pushing light up over the cool horizon, and we were the only moving thing in a thousand miles of sky. I could see how an old barnstormer might remember his days in gladness.
We flew on through a difficult week, surprised at how few were the Illinois towns that could be good homes for gypsy pilots. Our Palmyran profits were gone.
We landed in desperation once, at a grass airport near Sandwich. It was a soft green runway, many thousand feet long, and fairly close to town. We were tired from so much non-profit flying, and even though it wasn’t a hayfield, we thought this would be a good place to spend the evening.
The airport office had just been remodeled, was panelled in deep-stained satin wood, and I began to wonder if we belonged here from the first moment that I saw the owner, by the window. He had watched this grease-spattered biplane land, he had worried about its oil dripping on his grass, and now its filthy occupants were going to step inside his new office!
He tried to be polite, that much can be set down for him. But he welcomed The Great American Flying Circus about as warmly as he would have welcomed the Loch Ness Monster to his doorstep.
I told him brightly what we were doing, how we had never carried a dissatisfied passenger, how we could bring many new customers to his field and increase his own passenger-flying business.
“I’m a little on the conservative side,” he said when I was through. And then, cagily, “You do your own maintenance?”
To do one’s maintenance, without a license, is illegal, and he waited like a vulture for our answer, thinking of the price on our heads. He was disappointed, almost, to hear that the biplane was properly signed and provided for. Then he brightened. “I’m having the opening of the new building next month. I could use you then …”
Being used did not sound like much fun. Stu and I looked at each other and moved to leave. At that instant, as in a motion-picture script, a customer walked in the door.
