NaNoWriMo 2022
First Principals
American Kingdom: Day 11
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Instead of the regular airport, we headed west and then south. Way out in the swamp, would you believe it, there’s a whole ‘nother airport.
The usual immense acreage of flat grass, concrete runways, incomprehensible signs, and random aircraft but instead of passenger terminals and car parks, it was really just a bunch of big tin sheds.
We pulled up to one of them, masquerading as a terminal, and the driver led me inside, hauling a cooler and the one cabin bag I’d been allowed to keep.
After a while a little jet, one of those Learjet things that the big knobs fly around in, landed and taxied over. A door opened, stairs unfolded, and a lady in khaki pants and a pink top emerged. Aviator sunnies, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.
“Here she is,” the driver said, grabbed the bags and led me onto the ramp.
“Your Highness,” he said, bowing to her and doffing his chauffeur cap.
“Jim, how are you?” she said, giving his hand a hearty shake.
“Prime, Ma’am,” he replied. “May I present Molly Freytag, Sergeant-recruit?”
Looking at me, he said, “Princess Dee of Kansas and Nebraska.”
Goodness, what did I do? Bow, curtsey, tug at my forelock? I went bright red and stammered.
She smiled, “Welcome aboard, Molly.”
She reached for my case but Jim shook his head. “I’ll carry these up and stow them for you.”
“You’re not coming with us?”
“Love to, Ma’am,” he said, pausing before he disappeared inside. “But not today. Got to get the Duke’s car back, nice and shiny and gassed up.”
“Huh. You ever want to leave this fetid swamp and come work in the heart of America, you know who to call.” To me, “let’s take a look at this beast, kick the tyres and see if anything has worked loose.”
We walked around the plane. It looked fine to me but the Princess gave a few bits a hard joggle and peered intently at the pieces out of reach.
“Always have a walk around, Molly. When you’re at thirty thousand feet and something starts to rattle there’s no climbing outside with a roll of duct tape. Ever fly one of these things?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you will today. You’re my copilot. Just we two girls. Your job is to feed me coffee and whatever else His Grace has packed for us, and tell me entertaining stories to keep me awake.”
And, I swear, she kicked one of the thick fat tyres.
She indicated the right seat in the cockpit, and busied herself with knobs and levers and radios while I worked out how to fasten the seatbelt.
“Ears on, Molly!” She indicated a set of headphones and showed me how they worked if I wanted to talk to the control tower — did they even have one here? — or just to the person two feet away.
“Cuts out all the bad frequencies, otherwise you end up deaf like me.”
Well, my own hearing had suffered from various explosions at close range in my younger days, so that could be handy.
As soon as I had them on, she hit the go button, two distant fans murmured slightly somewhere behind, she chattered into the headset, saluted Jim the driver standing in the shade, and we were off.
Now, this was flying. Not like sitting in the back of a Boeing. We seemed to have our bottoms barely above the tarmac as we turned onto the runway, the noise behind grew slightly louder, and off we went with a big push in the back.
“Whee!” she yelled as we lifted off and she hauled the stick back. The earth rotated out of our way and we were headed up into the late-morning clouds.
We straightened out after a bit and I watched Charleston disappear behind my right shoulder. Two days ago, a pothole had jolted my life around. Now, here I was being whipped through the air by an honest-to-God princess.
“Ah, Princess…” I began, wondering if I had to push a button to talk or something.
“Dee,” she said. “We use the titles as a greeting when there’s just we hammies around, just to acknowledge His Absent Majesty, and after that, don’t bother until it’s time to say goodbye.”
“Hammies?”
“You’ll get used to it. It’s a way of reminding ourselves what we are really doing. You had a question?”
“Um, yes. where are we going?”
“They didn’t tell you? Camp Whiffie.”
Yeah. Right.
She laughed, seeing my expression.
“It’s our holiday camp in the middle of Missouri. We use it for conferences, celebrations, training, anything we want to keep private. And recruit courses.”
Recruit course. That had been a month of Hell I didn’t want to go through again.
“Not what you’re probably thinking. We keep a couple of old gunnies there to yell at people, assess them on military skills, get them lost in the boondocks, teach them the right fork to eat hog jowl and beans with, and blow stuff up. You’re starting as a sergeant; they’ll be nice to you.”
She pointed to a few displays. “Now. Autopilot set, we’re pointed in the right direction, we’ll climb a bit more and level out. I'm going to go back and see what Francis gave us for lunch. I’ll run you through all the controls later, but basically if we’re about to run into American Airlines or something, you push this button to take off the autopilot, and move the steering wheel in the direction you want to go. Back to go up, forward to go down, and so on.”
She clambered out of her seat and disappeared, leaving me staring in horror at a dashboard that pretty much covered everything I could see, covered with buttons and displays. I jammed my hands in my pockets and tried not to breathe on anything.
Next scene:
Daily notes
I enjoyed writing this chapter. For one thing, it gave me a chance to put forward more about this religious organisation using the old writer’s trick of having a veteran instruct a recruit on how things are done.
The second part of this chapter (published separately as High Flight, link above) contains some scenes echoing the words of the achingly beautiful poem written by aviator John Gillespie Magee Jr. a few months before his death.
These people do indeed see themselves as “touching the face of God”, as (I trust) do we all, no matter how we might see the divine in the beauty and majesty of the Creation.
We also get another glimpse of the wealth and privilege of these “hammies”, funded through the Christian Nationalists of America.