Illusions Read Free Page A

cup with him and stood by the propeller. "What do you want?"
                 "Hot and brakes. Pull it slow. The impulse will take it right out of your hand."
                 Always when somebody pulls the Fleet propeller, they pull it too fast, and for complicated reasons the engine won't start. But this man pulled it around ever so slowly, as though he had done it for ever. The impulse spring snapped, sparks fired in the cylinders and the old engine was running, that easy. He walked back to his airplane, sat down and began talking to the girl.
                 In a great burst of raw horsepower and flying straw the Fleet was in the air, climbing through a hundred feet (if the engine quits now, we land in the corn), five hundred feet (now, and we can turn back and land in the hay. . . now, and it's the cow pasture west), eight hundred feet and level, following the man's finger pointing through the wind southwest.
                 Three minutes airborne and we circle a farmstead, barns the color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in the back for food sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing.
                 The man in the front cockpit looked down through the air as we circled the farmhouse framed between the wings and through the flying wires of the Fleet.
                 A woman appeared on the porch below, white apron over blue dress, waving. The man waved back. They would talk later of how they could see each other so well across the sky.
                 He looked back at me finally with a nod to say that was enough, thanks, and we could head back now.
                 I flew a wide circle around Ferris, to let the people know there was flying going on, and spiraled down over the hayfield to show them just where it was happening. As I slipped down to land, banked steeply over the corn, the Travel Air swept off the ground and turned at once toward the farm we had just left.
                 I flew once with a five-ship circus, and for a moment it was that kind of busy feeling . . . one plane lifting off with passengers while another lands. We touched ground with a gentle rumbling crash
    rolled to the far end of the hay, by road.
                 The engine stopped, the man unsnapped his safety belt and I helped him out. He took a wallet from his overalls and counted the dollar bills, shaking his head.
                 "That's quite a ride, son."
                 "We think so. It's a good product we're selling."
                 "It's your friend, that's selling!"
                 "Oh ?"
                 "I'll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I'll wager, can't he now?"
                 "How come you say that ?"
                 "The girl, of course. An airplane ride to my granddaughter, Sarah!" As he spoke he watched the Travel Air, a distant silver mote in the air, circling the farmhouse. He spoke as a calm man speaks, noting the dead twig in the yard has just sprouted blossoms and ripe apples.
                 "Since she's born, that girl's been wild to death about high places. Screams. Just terrified. Sarah'd no more climb a tree than she'd stir hornets barehand. Won't climb the ladder to the loft, won't go up there if the Flood was rising in the yard. The girl's a wonder with machines, not too bad around animals, but heights, they are a caution to her! And there she is up in the air."
                 He talked on about this and other special times; he remembered when the barnstormers used to come through Galesburg , years ago. and Monmouth, flying two wingers the same as we flew, but doing all kinds of crazy stunts with them.
                 I watched the distant Travel Air get bigger, spiral down over the field in a bank steeper than I'd ever fly with a girl afraid of heights, slip over the corn and the fence and