just follow the cat

Chapter 11: the shipment

10:10AM PST, January 28th

above the Los Baños Springs, near Los Baños, California

("This – if it definitely proves to have been one of our shipments – marks the first mishap.") 

– The Fresno Bee

Splash. (Splash. Splash.)

Three large clumps of oil broke through the failing oil seal and plunged toward the springs at Los Baños. When they hit the water, they made three splashes that were noticed only by a small group of blackbirds. The whole flock flew toward the sounds to see if something edible had mysteriously fallen from the sky.

Three thousand feet above them, Sam Wilson asked his wife about the shipment. "Everything okay back there?"

"As good as can be expected," she answered. "The usual jitters but nothing special."

Since finding space to sit in the cockpit, Charon had gone back to the main cabin several times. Unlike most flights, she kept her visits brief and never wandered as far back as the last row where Jésus and Maria were sitting. The baby clothes that she had intended to give Maria were still stuffed into the waistband of her skirt. When she was sure that her husband wasn't looking in her direction, Charon pulled out the small blue outfit and laid it flat across her knees. Then she straightened the terrycloth arms and legs to make it look like a flat blue boy was sleeping on her lap. She thought, "You're such a good child. You never cry at all."

In the last row of the plane, Maria held Francisco up to the window so the infant boy could see the patchwork ground below. Francisco's head wobbled with the vibrations of the plane and Jésus peeked over his son's shoulder, trying to catch glimpses of a view that was also new to him. Below them, the springs at Los Baños glowed in the sunlight as if God had spilled an enormous can of silver paint across His Earth.

Maria pushed back against her seat and felt her body relax. She was happy. Very happy. The drama of the last 24 hours was almost over, so she smiled like she had just finished all her work for the day and then realized that the sun was still shining. Moments like this may be small but they are truly amazing. In one instant, you worry that you're floating thousands of feet in the air and in the next your body relaxes. It is remarkable how quickly we all adapt – how soon a feeling of calmness washes over people when the impossible ceases to amaze and suddenly becomes ordinary.

Maria looked out her window and examined all the geometric shapes from the world below. The farms with outlines of rectangles, triangles, squares, and other crazy shapes. Each farm was a tiny world of its own with antlike people pulling up beets in one world, cutting broccoli and cauliflower in others, and sifting through leaves to find ripened strawberries in others. Though the people were too far away to really see, Maria imagined them stooping, picking, hauling, and dumping from sunrise to sunset. Then she wondered if anyone had looked down on her one week before – when she was just another antlike shape working until the sun was down. Finally, she thought of God's angels and how they must be the happiest creatures in heaven because they're always looking down upon the Earth and the people who toil from dawn to dusk. Working so smoothly and efficiently.

But all along, the DC3's portside engine wasn't running smoothly. It was spitting out more clots of oil. They slid off the underside of the wing and then floated on thermal air pockets bobbing up and down and up and down. Like the three blobs of oil that had just escaped, these latest blobs hoped (and even prayed) that they would land in the center of the springs at Los Baños. To them, it looked like a beautiful place to end their journeys.

Below the plane, a large black bird floated above Los Baños on the same air pockets as the tarlike droplets of dirty oil. Together, they flew in narrowing spirals above the springs. When the bird slowed almost to a stop, the oil clots drifted downward along the same circular path until they hit the water.

Splash. (Splash. Splash.)

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