Angels in Heaven

of John
R. Wood (no thanks to Benny the Boy for once). Doris, amazingly, had a
passport, as she had proudly informed me when I broached the subject of ID a
couple of days earlier. God only knows why she went to the trouble of getting
one because she’d never used it, and it must have been trouble; as a foundling,
she didn’t even have a father, let alone any proof of birth. Maybe the idea of
merely having a passport excited her in some obscure teenage way; maybe she lay
in bed at nights listening to Johnny Rotten on her Walkman and popping uppers
and scanning her pristine passport, imagining herself in exotic, faraway punk
heavens like Liverpool. Who knows about kids?
    Anyway, we nipped through both
Immigration and Customs speedily and without problems, waited ten minutes
slouched in Naugahyde and chrome chairs in the modern-looking terminal, and
then one of the stewards in his pretty blue uniform herded all of us who were
continuing on to Mérida back on board.
    As soon as we were airborne again, we
were treated to a tasty snack of chicken and mushroom soup on rice, beside
which lay several large chunks of that mother-in-law of vegetables, squash.
    “Remind me to ask the chef for the
recipe,” I remarked in an aside to Doris.
    “Remind me to tell you to stop
complaining about everything,” said she, who had devoured every morsel on her
tray including the green marzipan cake-thing with the desiccated coconut on it,
as she brushed a few errant crumbs off the skirt of her incredibly expensive
innocent-office-girl-on-vacation outfit Evonne had helped her shop for.
    “Well, excuse me,” I said. Hell, if
you can’t complain about airline food, what can you complain about? Houston, I thought to myself. In some bland metropolis like Houston, I bet there’s a
cooking school that all airline catering personnel have to attend where they
teach you how to make fresh rolls go stale in seconds and how to glue down the
little end bit on those packets of nondairy creamers and salad dressings so I
passengers have to use their knives to open them and how to I pack crackers in
cellophane so tightly that you can’t open them without crumbling the crackers
into microscopic bits. I could go on about those antediluvian, cast-iron wagons
the poor stewies have to haul up and down the aisles and which have been
brilliantly designed so as to fill up the whole aisle so you can’t get by to go
to the bathroom until your whole section has been served, but why bother? Who
would listen I to one plaintive voice emerging from just another face in the
milling throng? Above the milling throng, actually, and while I’m at it, how
about a section for tall people that you only get to sit in if you’re six foot
two or over (which happens to be the same height requirement as the Sacramento
Tall Club, which I might modestly mention here I was once invited to join)?
    About then the captain was kind
enough to let us know I how many feet in thousands it was straight down to
earth. I once flew with Evonne on an airline that actually had a sense of
humor, albeit slightly black. The chief steward or whoever I it was would say
things like, “It looks like Magellan managed I to find the airport for once, so
welcome to Portland,” when I we were landing in Las Vegas. Or he’d say, “In
case of emergencies, parents of small children should put their own oxygen
masks on first and then assist the child with his, but I only if he’s been
good.”
    Well, time passed, as it loves to do,
even at thirty-two thousand feet, and eventually we managed to somehow land I
safely at Mérida, where long ago the Indian village of Tho once lay, you may be
interested in learning. I don’t really care one way or the other—Tho what? it
is tempting to say—-but it seems the least I can do is to insert from time to
time a spot of local color and history, gleaned from various tourist I
brochures and the like. For example, amongst other things, I Mérida is famous
for Panama hats, which are woven in dark caves where the damp coolness gives
the fiber a supple lexture. What precisely the darkness and the damp coolness
do I to the hat makers aside from turning them into blind albinos I my brochure
did not say.
    And
speaking of Panama hats, guess who was wearing one, waiting for me and Doris
when we finally struggled out of the baggage retrieval section loaded down like
Tibetan porters on their way to establish a base camp at the foot of Everest—
Señor Benny the Boy