Richard Bach: Nothing by Chance

“It’s going to work,” Paul said. “We could have carried twenty passengers tonight, if you weren’t so afraid of working on your airplane for a few minutes. We could have done well. And we just got here! Five hours ago we didn’t even know there was such a place as Rio, Wisconsin! We’re going to make a fortune.”

“Maybe so, Paul.” As Leader for the day, I wasn’t so sure.

Half an hour later wewalked into the office and snapped on the light, blinding ourselves, destroying the night.

There were two couches in the office, which Paul and I claimed at once for our beds, pulling rank as the senior members of The Great American. We gave Stu the pillows from the couches.

“How many passengers are we going to carry tomorrow?” Stu asked, undisturbed by his low status. “Shall we have a little bet?”

Paul figured we would carry 86. Stu guessed 101. I laughed them both to scorn and said that the proper number was 54. We were all wrong, but at that moment, it didn’t matter.

We snapped out the lights and went to sleep.

I WOKE UP HUMMING Rio Rita again; I couldn’t get it out of my head.

“What’s the song?” Stu asked.

“C’mon. You don’t know Rio Rita?” I said.

“No. Never heard it.”

“Ah… Paul? You ever stop to think that Stu, young Stu, probably doesn’t know any songs from the war? What were you… born about… nineteen forty-seven! Good grief! Can you imagine anybody born in NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN?”

“We’re three caballeros…” Paul sang tentatively, looking at Stu.

“…three gay caballeros…” I went on for him.

“…three happy chappies, with snappy serappies…”

Stu was mystified at the odd song, and we were mystified that he wouldn’t know it. One generation trying to communicate with another just half-way down, in that office-bunkhouse on a morning in Wisconsin, and getting nowhere, finding nothing but an uncomprehending smile from our parachute-jumper as he belted his white denim trousers.

We tried a whole variety of songs on him, and all with the same effect. “…Shines the name… Rodger Young… fought and died for the men he marched among…”

“Don’t you remember that song, Stu? My gosh where WERE you?” We didn’t give him a chance to answer.

“…Oh, they’ve got no time for glory in the infantry… oh, they’ve got no time for praises loudly sung…”

“What’s next?” Paul was hazy on the lyrics, and I looked at him scornfully.

“…BUT TO THE EVERLASTING GLORY OF THE INFANTRY…”

His face brightened. “SHINES THE NAME OF RODGER YOUNG! Shines the name… ta-ta-tata… Rodger Young…”

“Stu, what’s the matter with you? Sing along, boy!”

We sang Wing and a Prayer , and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition , just to make him miserable for not being born sooner. It didn’t work. He looked happy.

We began the hike totown for breakfast.

“Can’t get over that,” Paul said at last.

“What.”

“Stu’s starting so young.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I responded. “It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.” Things come to you like that, barnstorming.

The card in the café window said Welcome Travelers-Come In , and above it was a neon sign with the paint gone from its tubes, and so saying .

It was a small place, and inside was a short counter and five booths. The waitress was named Mary Lou, and she was a girl from a distant and beautiful dream. The world went gray, she was so pretty, and I leaned on the table for support, before I sat down. The others were not affected.

“How’s the French toast?” I remember saying.

“It’s very good,” she said. What a magnificent woman.

“Guarantee that? Hard to make a good French toast.” What a beautiful girl.

“Guarantee. I make it myself. It’s good toast.”

“Sold. And two glasses of milk.” She could only have been Miss America, briefly playing the part of waitress in a little Midwest village. I had been enchanted by the girl, and as Paul and Stu ordered breakfast, I fell to wondering why. Because she was so pretty, of course. That’s enough right there. But that can’t be—that’s bad! From her, and from our crowded opening at Prairie du Chien, I was beginning to suspect that there might be tens of thousands of magnificent beautiful women in the small towns across the country, and what was I going to do about it? Be entranced by them all? Give myself up to bewitchment by ten thousand different women?

The bad thing about barnstorming, I thought, is that one sees only the swift surface, the sparkle in the dark eye, the brief glorious smile. Whether it’s all emptiness or an utterly alien mind behind those eyes and that smile, is something that takes time to discover, and without the time, one gives the benefit of the doubt to the being inside.

Mary Lou was a symbol, then. Without knowing it, knowing only that one of the men at Table Four has ordered French toast and two milks, she has become a siren upon a murderous shore. And the barnstormer, to survive, must lash himself to his machine and force himself to be spectator only as he drifts by.

I went all through breakfast in silence.

There is Wisconsin so deeply in her words, I thought, it’s almost Scottish. “Toast” was toahst , “two” was a gentle too , and my compadres’ hashbrowns were poataytoahs. Wisconsin is Scottish-Swedish American with long long vowels, and Mary Lou, speaking that language as her native tongue, was as beautiful to listen to as she was to look upon.

“I think it’s about time for me to wash some clothes,” Paul said over his coffee.

I was shocked from my girl-thoughts.

“Paul! The Barnstormer’s Code! It breaks the Code to get all washed clean. A barnstormer is a greasy oily guy… you ever heard of a clean barnstormer? Man! What you tryin’ to do?”

“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.