Angels in Heaven

narrowing down the ways of getting Billy from A to B, wherever B
turned out to be.
    Guile. Force. Charm. Bribery.
Mechanical means. Tunnel. The Indian rope trick. Others. Billy would have to be
removed from prison by one of these, which again was hardly narrowing it down.
    The next two days, in between making
such helpful lists as the above two, I did, among other things, the following:
Thought a lot. Placed a hefty order with Mrs. Martel, owner of M. Martel,
Stationer, one street over from my office, for some curiously headed, good bond
stationery. Purchased certain items at a celebrity photo service on Sunset.
Phoned Sacramento. Visited my oculist. Moved Mom downstairs to Feeb’s spare
room. Couldn’t get a word out of the ladies on what their plans were for the
time I was away. Purchased round-trip airline tickets for Doris and
myself—tourist class but still mucho dinero. What ever happened to
steerage? Dropped in on Wade, proud owner of Wade’s Pictorial Service out near Burbank Airport, where he ran his one-man business out of his brother’s garage. Visited a
flag and banner retailer at Beverly and Vine. Visited Mr. Nu. Visited my bank.
Visited Fred’s to put a couple of bets down with Tim. Ate quickly and slept
fitfully. Stayed over Friday night at Evonne’s. Had buttermilk pancakes with
fake maple syrup for breakfast Saturday mom. Downed three (3) Bloody Marys at
the airport bar while Doris, attired in new traveling finery, had two Bloody
Marys without the Bloody, or is it without the Mary. Strapped myself into a
ludicrously tiny seat in a newly painted torture machine. Let Doris hold my
hand as we took off. Hang on, Gray Wolf, Running Deer comes like March chinook.
    Whatever that means.
     
     
     

CHAPTER
EIGHT
     
    I read an interesting article on the
plane in a copy of that Jay’s Herald-Examiner , which I borrowed from the
guy in front of me when he was done with it. It was all about freezing.
    I don’t mean what Eskimos do when
they take their mukluks off outside or what Margaret Dumont used to do with a
haughty look; I mean having yourself well chilled after you’re dead, and then
stuck into a deep freeze for a couple of hundred years in the hope that when
they finally defrost you, the medical profession will be able to cure you of
what you died from in the first place.
    Obviously, if you died by being run
over by a steamroller! or crushed by one of those machines that compresses a
four-door sedan into a shape roughly the size of a Mexican airline overhead
luggage compartment, this scheme holds little promise for you. I had two major
misgivings about the whole idea to start with, one being that doctors’ fees
already being what they were, who could afford them in 200 years? and the
other, what if all they could save after the defrosting was my brain, and they
put it into the body of a five-foot female punk vegetarian?
    Speaking of which—punks, I mean—while
I was perusing said article, Doris kept sneaking glances at her new self in the
mirror of her equally new compact when she thought I wasn’t looking. As if I
cared. Once she said to me. “Do you think I have bedroom eyes?”
    “More like bathroom,” I said.
    As for the flight itself, what can I
tell you? As a veteran, nay, blasé air traveler—five times already, totaling
almost twelve hours up there in the wild blue yonder—I am no longer frightened
witless by such traditional airline scare tactics as planes with wings that
have movable bits that keep flapping up and down (ours) or the old
crosswinds-on-landing routine (at Guadalajara, our first stop). I shrug them
off now because I learned from an even more well-traveled friend of mine a
brilliant technique for dealing with such minor nuisances. For copyright
reasons I am unable to reveal precisely what the technique involves, but did
you know that on the bottom of every bottle of Carta Blanca beer, there is a
sort of serrated hollow section in the middle that one uses to open the next
bottle of Carta Blanca beer?
    When we finally deplaned at
Guadalajara a mere two horas late, I was relieved, although in no way
surprised, to discover that Benny’s information on what official documentation
was required to get into Mexico proved to be correct. The immigration
authorities accepted passports, of course, but also either a voter’s
registration or a birth certificate, neither of which has one’s photo on it,
and the first one of which I had and had had for some time, in the name