Different Circles

“I see,” she said with a nod, asking no questions. She shook hands with Jim and told him it was nice to meet him.

By this point, Celia had stepped forward. Matt took an even longer look at her. True, she was a bitch extraordinaire, but goddamn if she wasn’t hot! She was dressed in jeans and a white blouse that showed off that premium rack of hers like no fucking tomorrow. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and she had only a light coat of lip gloss on, but her face was still one that a man just wanted to nut on.

“Celia,” he greeted. “How are you today?”

“Feeling good,” she said, her face keeping its neutral expression. “Ready to get to work.”

“Fuckin A,” Matt said with a nod. He then made the official introductions between Celia and Jim. They shook hands.

“I really enjoy your music,” Jim told her.

“Thank you,” Celia said. She too asked no questions about why Matt had a paramedic traveling with him and staying with him in Oregon.

“Suckup,” Matt whispered to Jim when Celia turned away and headed back over to the plane.

“All right,” Jake said. “Let’s go over and get you two and your baggage weighed.”

Jake had explained yesterday that this was a necessary part of riding in his plane. “Let’s do it,” he said.

“I trust you adhered to my rule about cocaine in your baggage?” Jake asked him.

“Yes,” he said sourly. “There is no cocaine in my bag or in Jim’s.” And this was true. He had sent six grams of uncut Bolivian shit in one of his guitar cases that had gone on the equipment truck, but there was not so much as a flake in the bag he was flying with.

“Excellent,” Jake said.

“Do you want to check?” Matt asked defiantly.

Jake looked him up and down for a moment and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I trust you.”

Matt nodded. He then patted his shirt pocket. “I do have a couple of doobs with me though. Is it cool if we burn once we’re up in the air?”

“No,” Jake said without hesitation. “It is not cool.”

“Aww, come on, dude,” he pleaded. “I won’t be a Bogart! There’s enough for everyone.”

“The FAA frowns upon the hotboxing of an aircraft in flight,” Jake said. “And Laura’s OB frowns upon her being in a hotboxed aircraft in flight.”

“Oh ... yeah, I guess,” Matt said with a frown. When had Jake turned into such a fucking stickler for rules? “Well, is there somewhere around here that Jim and I can burn before we go up? If I’m going to fly in a badass plane like this, I gotta be stoned.”

Jake sighed. “Let’s do the weigh-in and then you can go around behind the hangar complexes and light up,” he said. “But make it fast. And don’t let anyone see you.”

“Right,” Matt said, happy again. “You got it.”

They put their bags on the scale and then themselves. Jake wrote down the readings on a piece of paper on a little clipboard and then he opened up the cargo compartment at the front of the plane and began loading the baggage in. Matt offered to help but Jake declined, telling him it had to be put in in a specific way. Something about balance and shifting or some shit like that. He and Jim then took their walk, finding a secluded haven behind the hangar complexes. They burned one of the joints down to the roach, which Matt then popped in his mouth and swallowed. By the time they made it back to the airplane, both of them were cataclysmically stoned and ready for adventure.

They boarded the plane and Jake directed them to the two forward-facing seats just behind the cockpit. The Valdez bitch was sitting in the copilot’s seat and Kingsley’s bitch was sitting in one of the rear-facing seats behind Jim and Matt’s seats. This was a bit surprising.

“You know how to fly the plane?” Matt asked Celia.

“I do not,” she said, “but this is where I always sit when I fly with Jake.”

“I see,” Matt said slowly, though he did not. He turned to Laura. “Don’t you want to sit up here though, close to your old man?”

“It doesn’t matter where I sit,” she said. “I’ll be asleep before we even hit cruising altitude.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Really,” she said. “I always sleep on planes. It’s a good way to pass the time.”

And, sure enough, she was right. They roared into the sky fifteen minutes later, climbing steeply and heading north. And before they even cleared the mountains north of the San Fernando valley, Kingsley’s bitch was sound asleep in her seat, her hands resting on her swollen stomach, her head bobbing up and down in the turbulence.

It was a little bumpy until they got out over the San Joaquin valley and then the ride smoothed out. By that point, they were at cruising altitude, which Jake said was thirty-two thousand feet. Far below, Matt could see the agriculture fields and the little thin black line that was probably I-5. Pretty cool shit. And then something else occurred to him.

“Hey, Jake,” he said. “It’s okay to talk now, right?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “We’re up above ten thousand and the autopilot has the plane. What’s up?”

“I noticed you have what appears to be a bar back there,” he said.