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“Look. I don’t know about you, but I’m going down to the Laundromat…”
“THE LAUNDROMAT! What are you, man, a big-city photographer or somethin’? We can at least go down to the river and beat our clothes out on some flat rocks! Laundromat!”
But I couldn’t move him from the heresy and he talked about it with Mary Lou as we left.
“… and on the drier, it works better on Medium than Hot,” she said in her language and with a dazzling smile. “It doesn’t shrink your cloathes. As much.”
“The Great American Flying Laundry,” Stu said to himself as he pushed our clothes into the machine.
While they thrashed around, we sauntered lazily through the market. Stu paused reflectively by the frozen-food locker at the rear of the wooden-pillared room.
“If we took a TV dinner,” he mused, “and wired it on the back of the exhaust manifold, and ran the engine up for fifteen minutes …”
“There would be gravy all over the engine,” Paul said.
We walked the blocks of Main Street under the wide leaves and deep shadow of daytime Rio. The Methodist church, white and lapstrake, pushed its antique needle-spire up out of sight in the foliage to anchor the building in the sky. It was a quiet day, and calm, and the only thing that moved was an occasional high branch to shift some dark shadow across the lawn. Here, a house with window-halves of stained glass. There, one with an oval-glass door all rose and strawberry. Now and then a window framed a fringed cut-glass lamp. Man, I thought, there is no such thing as time. This is no dusty jerking Movietone, but here and now, slow and soft and full fragrant color softly swirling down the streets of Rio, Wisconsin, United States of America.
Another church, as we walked, and here children were tended on the lawn, singing. Singing in earnest, London Bridge is Falling Down. And holding hands and making the bridge and ducking under. All there on the lawn, not giving us a glance, as though we were people traveled back from another century and they could see right through us.
Those children had been playing London Bridge forever on that lawn, and would go on playing it forever. We were no more visible to them than air. One of the women tending the game looked up nervously, as a deer looks up, not quite scenting danger, not quite ready to disappear into the forest. She didn’t see us stopped and watching except in a sixth-sense way; no word was said, and London Bridge fell and claimed two more children, who in turn became another Bridge. The song went on and on, and we finally walked away.
At the airport, our airplanes waited just as we had left them. While Paul neatly folded his clothes in his very neat way, I stuffed mine into a bag and walked out to fix the throttle linkage on the biplane. It took less than five minutes of silent work in the slow quiet daytime hours that are a barnstormer’s weekday.
Paul, who had been a sky-diver himself, once, helped Stu lay his main parachute canopy in the calm air of the hangar. By the time I wandered over to them, they were kneeling at the end of the long loom of nylon, deep in thought. Nobody moved. They just sat and thought, and paid me no mind.
“I’ll bet you got problems,” I said.
“Inversion,” Paul said absently.
“Oh. What’s an inversion?”
Paul just looked at the nylon lines and thought.
“I let the canopy come down on top of me yesterday,” Stu said at last, “and when I got out from under I got the suspension lines mixed a little.”
“Ah.” I could see it. The smooth bundle of cords that ran from Stu’s harness to the edge of the canopy was marred by one pair, twisted.
“OK. Unhook your Capewell there,” Paul said suddenly, “and run it right through here.” He spread a set of cords apart hopefully.
Stu clicked the harness quick-release and did as Paul asked, but the lines were still twisted. It fell quiet again in the hangar, and the quiet was weighted down at the corners with very heavy thinking.
I couldn’t stand the atmosphere, and left. It was as good a time as any to grease the Whirlwind’s rocker boxes. Outside, there was no sound but sun and growing grass.
Around noontime, engine greased and parachute untangled, we walked the familiar road to the Café, sat down in booth Four for lunch and were charmed again by the enchantress Mary Lou.
“You get used to it all pretty quickly; you get known, don’t you?” Paul said, over his roast beef. “We’ve been here a day and we know Mary Lou and Al and most everybody knows who we are. I can see where we could feel pretty secure, and not want to go on.”
He was right; security is a net of knowns. We knew our way around town, we knew the main industry was the glove factory which shut down for the day at 4:30 and released potential customers for us.
We were safe here, and the fear of the unknown beyond Rio had begun to creep in upon us. It was a strange feeling, to begin to know this little town. I felt it, and rather moodily tasted my chocolate milkshake.
It had been the same way at Prairie du Chien, a week ago, when we opened. We were secure there, too, with $300 guaranteed just to appear for the Historical Days week
end, plus all the money we could make carrying passengers.
In fact, by Saturday afternoon, in great crowds of people emerging from winter, we had earned nearly $650. There was no denying it was a good start.
Part of the guarantee, though, was the Daring Display of Low-Altitude Stunt Flying, and in an hour quieter than the others, I thought I might as well run my Handkerchief Pickup.
