Shuttered Sky

“This can all be over now!” The black teen told the man with the bag, but the man was surprisingly strong, hurling the kid away hard enough to deliver him across the galley, knocking loose the secured cart which flew out of its niche, and tumbled on the boy.

“I need help back here!” she shouted. By now other attendants were already running to join the melee.

The man held his pack high out of reach of the second teen—high enough for the other passengers to get a good look at the bulging, rigid shape inside.

“He’s got a bomb!” someone yelled. The cabin erupted in panic, to the point that the flight attendant wondered if it were true. She hesitated, and rather than deal with the man, decided to fend off his antagonists, because whatever the situation was, they were making it worse. She turned to the black kid, who had just freed himself from beneath the cart.

As Winston rose to his feet, he saw Briscoe swing his bag at Drew’s arm, the urn inside connecting with his injury. Drew wailed in pain. Winston tried to get back into the fight, but the stewardess inserted herself as an obstacle in the narrow galley. She shouted something ridiculous about placing him under FAA arrest, while behind her, Bris­coe was tugging mightily on the hatch’s release lever.

“Drew! Stop him!” But Drew was already being hauled up the aisle by a steward, and two other passengers who had had enough.

Winston saw the hatch lever engage, and self-preservation suddenly supplanted all else. He reached up, grabbed a hand rail, and clenched his fist around it as a blast of sudden wind exploded in his painfully popping ears.

It was Drew who had the clearest view.

Eyes still locked on Briscoe even as he was pulled away, Drew saw the handle go down, and the instant the lock disengaged, the door crashed open, and Briscoe was gone, sack and all. At only a mile high, decompression wasn’t explosive, but it was close enough. A wind sucked violently through the cabin, air masks dropped. Drew’s feet flew out from under him and he hooked an arm rest with his good arm. The flight attendant who had first tried to stop them grabbed futilely for purchase, then was ejected into the void. Pressure equalized, but the roar of wind and engines remained.

“Winston!”

But Drew couldn’t even hear his own voice. The jet vibrated as if it would rattle itself apart, and the screams around the cabin began to fade as passengers realized they were not going to die. The sound of the engines changed as the pilot took a new flight plan, slowing air­speed, angling them for descent and a quick airport return.

Winston, just aft of the open door, let go of the handrail, the chilling wind pummeling him, thundering in his ears. He slid to the ground, and put his head in his hands, already feeling the depth of what had been lost.

* * *

Tumbling in a cold freefall, Martin Briscoe fought to get control of his plunge. The brilliant blue sky had become a white fog as he hit the clouds, and he could no longer tell up from down. He had looped the strap of his bag twice around his arm before the door opened. But the force of being sucked into the thin atmosphere had torn the strap free from one side of his bag. Now it twisted on a tether. He fought to pull it to his chest, then gripped it tightly.

There was a sound now, even more furious, more demanding than the wind. It was the angels. “There is one deed left to do,” they told him, “the one act that will avenge your family’s death, and will make your life count for something.” He could hear them now so much closer than they had been before, no longer behind a window, but pressing urgently upon his mind. No faces, only voices, light, and shadow. “Do this one last thing, and we can enter this world unchallenged. Dillon will be damned,” they assured him, “and you will be elevated.”

The clouds gave way to clear air, and a flat brown landscape filled the view half a mile below. Still clutching the bag under his arm, he undid the clasp and reached in. Then he grabbed the lid of the urn, and tore it off.

Tory Smythe’s ashes became a funnel plume escaping the urn, like an unfurling parachute. Her dust billowed into the shredding currents of the wind, and when the urn was empty he released the pack, letting the wind take it as well.

The deed was done and he could sense the angels’ satisfaction as they prepared for a grand entrance into the world. With the ground less than a thousand feet away now, he gloated, and laughed, for the Shards were defeated, and the heavens appeased. Then he stretched his arms out wide to receive the earth, and his reward.

18. An Abundance Of Flesh

A thousand miles south of Dallas, a steel gate seven feet thick and weighing seven hundred tons slowly swung open, then slowly swung shut. Once sealed, the chamber was flooded. This water-step lifted even the greatest of ships more than thirty feet before the Pedromiguel Lock released them on their way toward the treacherous Gaillard Cut, Gatun Lake, and the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal.

At midday, ships bottlenecked in Lake Miraflores. Eight of them today—from the sleekest of cruise ships to the rankest rust-bucket freighters. All became equal as they waited for the locks to admit them, one by one.

The gate labored open. A freighter passed into the lock. The gate labored shut. The waters within the lock silently rose.

A small switchback path on the eastern bank of Lake Miraflores zig-zagged its way up the hill, lined with colorful flowers. Thousands of cruise passengers would see it as they passed, comment on how it resembled a great Zorro “Z” on the hillside, and then think themselves clever that they had thought of that.

The garden path, which connected a tiny weather-worn dock to a house further up the hill, was planted by Gabriela Ceballos, who died before she could enjoy it, and was now maintained religiously by her daughter.

Unobserved on that east side of the lake were three Canal Zone residents. The boy at the foot of the path, kicking his feet back and forth at the end of the small dock, the mother, who labored on the garden path, and the grandfather, who sat on the veranda at the head of the path, watching the snare of ships in the lake.

Carlos Ceballos was the patriarch of a family much smaller than it should have been. His fault, really, and his wife’s, for educating their children so well, that three out of four broke out of their familial orbit, leaving Panama completely. But Carlos could never leave home. Even his job as a canal pilot never took him far from home—just from one end of the canal to the other. Still, the glimpses of the world he saw aboard the ships he piloted made him feel like a world traveler. At fifty-five he was one of the most respected canal pilots, and boasted more than twenty thousand trips through the canal. Each time a virgin ship arrived for its first transcanal voyage, Carlos was given the honor of piloting her.

But today was Sunday, his day off, and so Carlos thankfully found himself peering out across the lake from his little verandah at the mouth of the garden path, eating salted jicama as he watched other pilots maneuver the familiar contingent of ships up and down the Pedromiguel Lock—but not fast enough, for seven ships clogged the waters of Miraflores now. Four cargo, three cruise ships. Music blasted from the cruise ship decks, resounding from the hills and blending into an arrhythmic cacophony that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Such had be­come the soundtrack of Carlos Ceballos’s life. His life was filled by the sounds from the ships, the taste of salted jicama, and the smell, that luxurious smell of plumeria blooms that swept up from the garden path, reminding him so much of his late wife. There was something missing, however. A feeling that nagged at him even in his quietest of moments. Unfinished business. It would wake him at night, and when his mind was idle, it would pull him to the front door, as if he were heading out for an errand, only to find that there were no errands to be run. Each Sunday he would sit on the verandah, wondering what this unfinished business might be.

The gate swung open. The gate swung closed. Another ship was already approaching from the Miraflores locks to take the place of the one that had been dispatched.

Cerilla Ceballos tended flowers just past the second turn of the switchback path. Cerilla had never married. A badly cleft lip had warded off most suitors. She was twenty-five now, resigned to her lot—which included an eight- year-old son. She had him at sixteen, by a schoolmate who apparently didn’t care about her face, as long as he got what came with it. But he had quickly found someone else, then disappeared into the crowded workforce of Panama