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The big biplane taxied out to the runway, pointed into the increasing wind and swept along up into the air. There were two quick waves from the cockpits and I waved back, thinking of myself through their eyes, a lone figure down on the ground, getting smaller and smaller and finally lost in distance. I stood there and watched the Travelair until the sound of it was gone, then until the sight of it disappeared in the west. And then there was nothing left in the sky. Stu, and Spence, too, had joined Paul. Gone, but not gone. Dead, but not dead at all.
I was surrounded by modern airplanes on the parking ramp, but for some reason as I walk
ed back among them, I felt that it was they that were out of their time, and not I.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE AFTERNOON SKY WAS LOW GRAY, light rain whipped across the windscreen, and The Great American Flying Circus was down to one man, one biplane, alone in the air.
I had one tank of gasoline, and eleven cents cash in my pocket. If I wanted to eat again, I had to find somebody down there with three dollars and a burning wish to fly in the rain.
Prospects did not look good. Kirksville, Missouri, canceled itself in rows on rows of alfalfa bales in the hayfields and flocks of sullen cows in the pastures. And in Kirksville the rain poured solid down, intent on turning the city into a major inland sea; the windscreen changed into a sheet of water bolted to the airplane. It was not comfortable flying.
As we turned from Kirksville, spraying rain, I remembered a town on the way north that was worth a try. But again it was the wrong moment to strike. One good field, a block from town, was covered in hay bales. Another was surrounded by a fence. A third lay at the bottom of a square maelstrom of high-tension lines.
We circled and thought, the biplane and I, ignoring the grass airstrip and hangars a mile south. It would be a good town to work, but a mile away was too far. Nobody walks a mile in the rain to fly any airplane. At last, with the heavy Kirksville rains almost caught up with us again, we landed in the field with the fence, hoping there would be a gate. As the wheels touched, a fox leaped for cover in a neighboring stand of corn.
There was no break in the fence, but the two boys appeared, playing the part assigned them by destiny, rain or sun.
“Hey, where’s the gate?”
“Isn’t any gate. We climbed over. There’s an airport just down the way, mister.”
It was raining harder. “You boys know of any way a body could get in here, if I was to take ’em for an airplane ride?”
“Sure don’t know. Climb the fence, I guess.”
Another field crossed off the list. The airport, then. They might know there of some other place. Another two hours and it would be too dark to fly, with the rain and cloud hiding the sun. I chose the airport, because I didn’t know where else to go.
Even that was a struggle. Along one side of the strip was a fence, along the other side a sea of corn. It was harder to land on that airport than on any hayfield we had worked, and I thought that even if this place was swarming with passengers I wouldn’t fly one of them. It was all I could do to keep the biplane rolling straight between the solid obstacles, steering only by the high blur at each side of the cockpit and hoping that the path ahead was clear.
Waiting in the rain at the end of the strip were five metal hangars, a dripping windsock, and a pickup truck with an interested family within, watching. The man stepped shirtless from the driver’s seat as I climbed from the cockpit, leaving the engine running.
“Want some gas?”
“No, thanks. Pretty good on gas. Looking for a place to fly.” I opened my road map and pointed to a town 20 miles southwest. “What do you know about Green City? Any place to land, there? Hayfield or pasture or somethin’ like that?”
“Sure. They got a airport there. South of town, by the water reservoir. Whatcha doin’? Crop dustin’?”
“Carryin’ passengers.”
“Oh. Yeah, Green City might be nice. Probably a lot of people right here’d like to fly with you, though. You could stay right here, if you wanted.”
“Bit too far from town,” I said. “You have to be close to town. Nobody comes out if you’re too far.”
The rain slackened for a moment, and off to the southwest the sky didn’t look quite as dark as it had an hour before. To fly again was to use gasoline that couldn’t be replaced until we earned some money, yet if we stayed at the airport we would be jobless and hungry, both.
“Well, I’d better get goin’. Might as well push on off while there’s light.”
In a minute we were blurring between corn and fence, and then lifted above them and swung down into the south.
The hills in this part of Missouri roll on like green sea-billows, cresting in a fine spray of trees, sheltering roads and tiny villages in their troughs. It is not the easiest kind of country for navigators. There are none of the precise north-south section lines that lattice the states to the north. I sighted the nose a bit to the south of the lighter gray spot in the sky that was the setting sun.
Green City. What a name, what a poetic piece of imagery. I thought of tall wind-swayed elms, and streets of bright lawns, close-cut, and sidewalks in summer shade. I peered over the windscreen, looking for it. After a long moment, the town drifted in under the biplane’s nose. There the reservoir, there the tall elms, there the water tower, all silver with the black letters GREEN CITY.
And there, good grief, the airport. A long strip along the crest of a ridge, narrower than the one I had just left. For a moment I wondered if the biplane would even fit in the width of it. At each edge, the ground dropped sharp and roughly away into tangled earth. The end was a row of barrels at the top of a cliff. Halfway down the strip was a metal building, almost overlapping the landing area. Green City was the most difficult airport to land upon that I had ever seen. I would not have picked that spot for a forced landing, even, if the engine stopped.
But there was a windsock, and a hangar. On the approach was a set of telephone wires, and as I flew a low pass down the field I saw that the last half of the strip was rolling, and tilted first to the left, then to the right. The narrow twisting runway was edged every fifty feet with tall white wooden markers. The owner must have figured that if you ran off the path you were going to hurt your airplane anyway, and a few wooden posts smashing into your wings wouldn’t make that much difference. I saw that we’d have about eight feet clearance on each wingtip, and I swallowed.
