Once You Go Back 33
NOTE FROM JENKS: This is a long chapter! While there are a couple of natural breaks and resting points, I felt like it needed to be one piece. Also, I have an odd week, so next week’s installment will be a short photo essay with no story. We’re coming to a close on this novella! As the narrator Buckey has said, he plans to take a vacation in August and return to the Dominican Republic — maybe I will, too!
“Joyce set up the flights, car, and Uhaul.” MissK said, “And for fun, she made reservations at the “trendy restaurant of the moment” called Float Away. But just the two of us…”
MissK was explaining her plan for our day as we drove to the tiny crop duster airport. I thought the whole day in Atlanta would be just us. But when we pulled up, there were two men and the pilots standing by the KingAir– the six-seater plane that was there just for us.
I had no idea Randy would be with us. Even from the car, I could see his wide-eyed excitement and engagement with the other guy. I’d never seen the other man, about my age, slender, dark-haired, and wearing an orange safety vest–a kind of sexy, blue-collar look. I parked right by them, right by the King Air 350. The convenience of this kind of air travel was crazy.
“Do you call them and tell them what plane to send?” I asked MissK.
“Joyce does all that,” MissK explained. “She gives them destination details, and they send the right plane and crew. If we were going to Dallas, it would be a jet. They charge my account by the hour, depending on the plane, crew, and destination. But, I’m easy, so with long flights, like tonight to Italy, I fly Delta.”
She changed the subject, “Randy’s going to Atlanta because he needs some hard-to-find hinges and supplies. Joyce got him a Uhaul. He’ll do his thing, and then he can go to the nurseries where we buy plants, load them, and drive back tonight.”
My assignment was to drop her off at the Atlanta airport for her flight to Italy, and then these pilots would fly me back to the Onion Field so I could drive her car back to her house.
Randy was still talking to an orange-construction-vest guy. MissK yelled from the plane’s doorway, “Come on now! I’ll leave you here with your new little friend.” I was curious and felt a pang of jealousy because Randy sported a huge smile. Even MissK noticed.
“What is it, Randy? You’re grinning like a possum eating sweet potatoes.” She loved those country sayings.
Randy blushed a little, “They’re surveying the airport. Super detailed, like micro surveying down to fractions of an inch. If the airport ever needs to be upgraded for bigger planes, all the data is there. MissK, if John Travolta ever wants to fly his jumbo in…”
She frowned. “Just because I live part-time in Los Angeles and work in the movie world doesn’t mean I know or like all the other people in that world.”
“I don’t know how you do it, moving from world to world like this,” Randy said as he pulled out the snack tray from under his seat and opened a canned espresso. “I get that personal planes to make it easier, but mentally, you go from country-fuck nowhere to Dallas and California and who knows where all. You have three places. That must make you feel like three people in your head. Shoot, I can hardly deal with two men in my head.”
Randy didn’t need that little can of espresso. And I didn’t want him to go on about the two men who lived inside his head. But he was funny, shaking his curls and looking all baffled by his buzzed philosophy.
“Lord have mercy, Randy, I never knew you were such a deep thinker,” MissK chuckled. “Listen. When I was growing up in Athens, I never felt connected. Not like you feel connected to this town, Randy. Now, I have three places that are far apart: Los Angeles, Dallas, and Georgia. I get a little something different, different stimulation, different ways to contribute from them. They seem far apart for you, but in my mind, they weave together, and I have a cohesive life.” She was quiet for a minute, then she exhaled and said in an exaggerated Southern accent, “I’m just a small-town girl with a big old plane!” She cackled.
“Acting is a creative process, but if I lived only in that movie world, I think my range of understanding and emotion would be dull,” she explained. “I need to be here, with y’all, for the connection to Georgia, but also to keep me engaged. I love Georgia, but I need other places.”
I said, “Randy, you saw her working with us the other day?” Then, looking at her, “Did that really help?”
“Absolutely,” she beamed. “It reminded me that even on that old estate, there are different worldviews, different priorities, and even different strengths. Different worlds around us every single minute. I live in my world of rare books, decorating, dealing with investment folks, and working out contracts on the phone. Through the woods, you live in your cozy cabin with a dog. Over the ditch, Louis and Kiko live in what’s basically a world of Mexican food, TV, people, and ways of thinking. All three of us have vastly different things to think and worry about, different values, different crises, but there are ways we are all tied together, too.”
She looked out the window to the fields and farms below, then went on, “I’m going to do a movie to tell a story about a rich white woman who moves to Kenya and falls in love with the people and the place. She stays and merges her worlds as she can.”
Randy jumped in. “Even in town there’s that whole Mexican trailer park that I’ve never been in. There’s a Black world, a Baptist world, and a construction guy world. And we could connect them with cars, but mostly, we all live in different little patterns and different worlds.”
But in her life, I thought to myself, different worlds are connected with very easy air travel. I have this fantasy of my world and friends down in Santo Domingo, but realistically, that will never be an affordable merge. At some point, I have to admit that it is all escape and adventure. But my Savannah world and friends and my place on MissK country estate seem to be merging together nicely now.
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