Nothing by Chance Read Online Free PDF

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, andMary 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 movedwas 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