Jimmy grabbed Jake’s collar and pulled him into the airplane. “Common you stubborn fuck. I don’t have time for this.”
Jake hated flying, and had ever since he was a pup. The first time Jimmy took him up in a plane, he yowled and whimpered for the duration of the flight. The first two Jakes had loved flying, and Jimmy was dumfounded when Jake III turned out to be such a pussy. But he was determined to make Jake a flying dog, so he took him up every chance he got. At first, Jimmy kept things simple: gentle banks, smooth descents, greased landings. When Jake continued to cry through the easy flights, he decided to crank it up a notch. He strapped Jake into a makeshift doggie harness and went through a sequence of hammerhead stalls, barrel rolls, spins, and inverted flight. He put the pup through every maneuver the airframe could take. He hoped to scare Jake’s fears out of him. Of course it didn’t work. So in one last desperate attempt to make Jake a flyer, they took off on a moonless night during the heart of the arctic winter. Jimmy surmised that Jake wouldn’t be afraid of what he couldn’t see. But Jake didn’t need to see to be scared. The second the plane left the ground, he crammed his head under the co-pilot's seat and began to cry. Twenty minutes later, Jimmy began to cry himself when both engines of his Cessna Skymaster came to a sudden halt. Here they were, 10,000 feet above the black void of the Alaskan wilderenss; Jimmy couldn’t make out the horizon, let alone a suitable landing field. As they drifted silently down toward what he accepted as their inevitable doom, Jimmy replayed every sexual conquest in his head.
It was only through blind luck that they survived. Instead of descending into the side of a mountain, or a thick forest, the plane came down in the middle of a frozen arctic lake. Jimmy yanked back on the yolk the second his landing lights illuminated the wind-swept ice. Apart from some minor damage to the landing gear, the plane didn’t suffer a scratch.
Now Jimmy saw Jake as a good luck charm. Anytime he took off on what he thought of as a dangerous mission, Jake had to come with him. And this—to put it mildly—was a dangerous mission. In one smooth motion, Jimmy pushed the throttle to the firewall and accelerated down the runway. With a small growl and a resigned whimper, Jake stuffed his head firmly under the co-pilot's seat.
Charlotte didn’t think she could take much more of this. If the porn director wasn’t yammering innuendoes and entertaining himself by fucking with the preacher’s wife (“I’d like to see your daughter gush. Do you think she would gush over me?”), Leroy was shouting out dialogue from a slaughterhouse’s instructional video. (“Place gun hammer at back of skull. Pop, bam! Cut jugular so blood doesn’t pool in lower extremities.”) Charlotte was about five minutes from killing the lot of them, but she knew she had to stick to the plan. Thank God she brought some homegrown with her. She lit up another joint and leaned back into the deep grass.
“You shouldn’t smoke dear. It’s not healthy.” God she hated Mrs. Causewell.
“Smoking can actually inhibit gushing. I never let my girls smoke anything on the set.” She hated the porn director more.
Charlotte knew she could deal with these small annoyances. She had to keep the big picture in mind, and up to this point, everything had gone according to plan. She heard the drone of the Skymaster’s engines before anyone else. She released another deep drag and watched the smoke spiral up into a brilliant arctic sky.