Watch Out for Vizzas

A guy at work wanted me to take him flying. He is the janitor, although you never see him actually cleaning or anything. I told him I would if he would share expenses and he agreed to that, but that made me worry. You see, I’ve heard him talking to his trapping and hunting cohorts at different times, and I’m just not sure if he lives in the same reality as the rest of us.

Just the other day somebody asked him how much they owed for something and my janitor friend replied, “two coons and a possum!” The scary part was that they seemed to really know what they were talking about.Anyway, the appointed day arrived and we got the keys to the airplane I ususally rent, along with an extra set of headphones. My friend kept asking, “When we talk in these will anybody hear us?” I kept telling him they only would if we were holding down the transmit button.We were all strapped in and starting to taxi with our headphones on and he asked again, “Now, can anybody hear us talking?” He made me a little nervous, but I decided a chance to fly and not pay the whole rental fee was worth it.Every so often I would make a little, tiny, insignificant error of some kind and mutter “Oops,” into my microphone. This seemed to make my passenger nervous, so I tried not to say it too often. Otherwise he would ask with a high pitched tone, “What did you do? Can anybody hear us talking?”We managed to get up in the air and fly over his house and places where he hunted at night with his coon dogs. He started to relax a bit and seemed to be enjoying the flight. I asked him if he wanted to fly the plane a little and showed him what to do. He tried for awhile but then said, “You better take it.” I leveled off, straightened the wings and headed back to the airport.Once back, we went inside to settle up. He asked me how I was going to pay. I said, “they take Visas.” He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face. “I’ll pay and then you can settle up with me later,” I told him. He said, he’d wait outside.When I came out he was smoking a hand rolled cigarrette. “Well, what do I owe you?” he asked. I told him he could pay for half the total if he wanted. He agreed to that and then asked, “Just what kind of varmint is them vizza’s?”I couldn’t resist. “Well,” I drawled, “them vizza’s are small little critters. They’d fit right in your pocket. They have a shiny coat and come in all different colors. Gold ones and platinum ones are real dandies but only if you know what pen number they come from.”He looked confused so I kept on. “You just better watch ’em though. If you use them for trading too much, I hear tell they can start smokin’ and later on they’ll bite you where you keep your wallet. And never, ever go over your limit, cuz the Feds don’t like that at all.””Just one question,” my janitor friend asked as he handed me some greasy currency, “When we were talking on them headphones. Could anybody hear us?”I looked him in the eye for a bit and then finally said, “Yeah. They could.”