Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

Daley “Howdy” Ard Jr. got his nickname as a child, following an afternoon trip with his mother to the airport. Daley Sr. got off the plane, and in the sparse Love Field crowd, Daley Jr. picked him out easily; he wore a bolo tie and a Resistol hat, and everyone in the airport, the gate attendant and the shoeshine man and the redcap at the baggage claim and the valet who brought around his mother’s Plymouth, all greeted Daley Sr. with a cheerful “Howdy.” In the logic that only six-year-old boys can have, Junior decided that his father’s first name must really be Howdy. Which meant it was his name too.

  Now, after twenty-seven years on the job with the Fort Worth Police Department, and two here at the airport, the only things in the world that identified him as Daley Ard were his laminated airport ID and his Social Security card; even his Texas driver’s license referred to him as Howdy Ard Jr.

  At work, Chief Howdy Ard was the only cop who wore a white shirt, a thick elasticized double-knit polyester. Badge of office. Running the airport police was a cushy job, the easiest way to double-dip on his pension. Twenty-five years’ experience had earned him the right not to spend his retirement sitting at the front desk of an office building asking people to sign their names in a three-ring binder. Because his wife was out of town, Howdy had volunteered to work the holiday, double-shifting on New Year’s Day, covering for the family guys. It was easy duty, average passenger traffic and parking enforcement and swinging through the terminal every hour, his walk punctuated by the soundtrack of people calling out to him, Hey, Howdy, patrolmen tipping their hats to the boss.

  When the plane hit, Howdy was at the food court in terminal C, which meant that he felt the impact before he heard it, a seismic event. His instinctive, spasmodic turn toward the sound knocked over his extra-large cup of coffee, light, with two sugars, sent it pouring across his white shirtsleeve. With the rush of adrenaline, he never felt its heat. Reflexively, he looked at his watch.

  Seven minutes then at a near sprint from terminal C to the police garage on the air side, seven more by the time he’d hopped into his cruiser and driven the length of the two-lane limited-access road inside the fence that delineated the edge of FAA-protected property.

  Of course, the aircraft rescue and firefighting personnel had already arrived; that was the whole point of being a first responder. Fire trucks sat motionless, emergency lights still blinking, sirens silenced. Howdy sped across the open tarmac, hoping to get as close as he could to the crash site. A firefighter held up two hands, and the chief parked his car, stepped out. The field had a slight crown to it, and the ruined tail section, Panorama Airlines’ red-and-white logo still visible, loomed above him at the horizon.

  Howdy did not have to see the rest of the airframe to know how bad things were—the fire chief’s helmet was tilted back on the crown of his head; its protective visor hadn’t even been clipped on, and the chief was the kind of guy who liked to get his hands dirty. Howdy watched as more trucks arrived, moving with the urgency he expected. A half mile out in the flatlands, men from the pumper trucks sprayed the burning wreckage, then turned their attention to where the crash had ignited the field’s dry grasses. In the minute or so it took Howdy to walk over to the fire chief, Tommie Perl, Howdy realized the men were simply looking for something to keep themselves occupied. There was nothing to be rescued, just a fire to be contained and an investigation to begin. The coroner had already sent out the vans.

  Tommie gave him a nod, and Howdy said, “Bad?”

  Tommie offered Howdy a bottle of water from the seat of his truck. “Yep,” he said. They were natives, laconic in that Texas way, and Tommie motioned with his head in a manner that said to Howdy, Hey, look around.

  It dawned on Howdy that he was looking for an airplane that wasn’t there. There was evidence of a plane, melted pieces that suggested one. Not much else. He didn’t have to be an engineer to know they’d hit hard and fast. “Shit,” Howdy said.

  “That’s the word for it, all right,” Tommie Perl said. He turned to his lieutenant, giving orders; the lieutenant repeated them into a walkie-talkie; the echo Howdy heard was the squawk of his own radio, slightly delayed voices coming back at him through the tinny speaker.

  He reached to his belt clip and turned the squelch knob and said “Shit” again.

  The fuselage had come to rest in three large parts; the wings had yet to be found; the nacelle of the tail engine looked as if it had been shot through by artillery fire, and because the event was going to go out on live television, a cameraman was wandering too close to the smoldering site for the chief’s comfort. Howdy went to retrieve him. He put his hand on the cameraman’s shoulder and steered him back a respectful distance. The cameraman had something in his left hand, a stuffed animal, and he handed it over. Howdy examined it for a minute, then tossed it aside. The bear left a residue on his hand, something jelly-like, and the horror of it struck Howdy. Blood, or worse, but the mess was a strawberry color, maybe a child’s melted Fruit Roll-Up; it certainly smelled like fruit, and Howdy wiped his hand across his white shirt without thinking, leaving streaks of artificial color and soot.

  Hours later, when the cameraman would return and ask for comment, when the pool reporters were assembled in a terminal 2 conference room, they would show a cover shot, Howdy Ard standing in the burned field, that same shirt stained with whatever had been smeared all over his hands and the rush of the coffee he’d spilled at the moment of the crash. As chief, he’d be the first to take questions, and the image was this: Howdy Ard backlit by temporary stage lights and in his stained shirt, tired from the events of the afternoon and unable to process the enormity of loss, and those millions watching continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503 would remember this as the moment that the grizzled police chief began to cry. He looked tough, too tough to cry like that, like some old Texas Ranger with that bushy mustache he’d cultivated in retirement, the sun-lightened hair and the reddened face and a distinctly nonregulation Resistol hat in the same style and color that his father had once worn. And because Howdy did not answer any questions, he never disabused the viewers of their erroneous presumptions. He’d already begun to walk away when he paused and, looking into the camera, said “What else is there to say?”

  27

  ON THE short riser that was the newsroom set, Richard sat in a director’s chair and strained to see the last few minutes of the football game on the live-feed monitor at the foot of camera one. He could hear the game audio, along with an occasional comment from Toni in his earpiece; he liked the way her voice insinuated itself in his ear, its quiet assertions of her authority. She’d remind him to sit on the edge of his suit jacket and lean forward slightly, to show 10 percent more of his left-side profile, to look not at the camera but the camera operator, which kept viewers from regarding him like a portrait that hung over the fireplace in an old Vincent Price movie. He imagined her saying these things to all her guests, the occasional ex-president, celebrities major and minor, the neighbors with human-interest stories to tell, the owners of the dog who traveled two hundred miles to return home, the teachers of the year, lottery winners, hero cops, hangers-on with memoirs to sell.

  He looked up after an incomplete pass, and Richard could see Toni, behind the soundproof glass of the control booth, talking into a telephone, her hands darting to extract her cell phone from the pocket of her slacks and then typing into the keyboard on the broadcast command console. Around him, people began with the electronic setups for the upcoming news broadcast.

  Another voice, from network control, in his ear, saying, “We’ll be live after the next break,” followed by the return of the audio feed of the football game, the familiar baritone of the sportscaster announcing the game’s final time-out and promising a doozy of a finish right after these commercial messages.

  Richard’s opponent for the day, a backbench Republican congressman from Orange County, strode in and greeted him. “I can’t believe you take this shit so seriously.” The fact that the guy wasn
’t home in California over the holidays meant he’d decided against running again, was busy lining up clients for his turn through Washington’s revolving door as a highly paid adviser to Fortune 500 companies.

  Richard knew little about the congressman other than that he was a John Bircher. The shake was perfunctory, Richard worrying about whether his palm felt clammy; in the closeness of the greeting he thought he could smell booze on the congressman’s breath, the aftermath of New Year’s Eve. He hadn’t known the congressman as a drinker, but then again, the guy was a bachelor and rarely traveled, so it would’ve been unlikely for Richard to run into him in steakhouses or on congressional fact-finding trips to tropical locations or other places he might drink. Rumor had it that he slept on a foldout sofa in his office in the Rayburn Building. Other rumors said that the congressman, when he was a member of the California state assembly, had been known by the nickname Steam Room Sammy. The most noteworthy accomplishment of his four undistinguished terms in the House was that he had never missed a vote, a fact the congressman would inevitably work into the argument.

  A production assistant got the congressman settled into his chair, wired a lavaliere microphone to its battery pack. The monitor showing the live network feed broadcast a commercial for light beer, then went to black. Next came the preview of Richard’s appearance that he’d taped just a few minutes before, and Richard had the disconcerting experience of watching his own face appear onscreen. He heard the network announcer begin the pre-recorded setup: After the game, what happens when an underground newspaper hits too close to home? Taking sides, with Richard MacMurray from the left, and from the right, Congressman Sammy Bickley.

  “That’s a total Star Trek moment there,” the congressman offered, and when Richard raised an eyebrow at him, the congressman scooted forward and pointed back at the monitor. “Sorry. It’s the kind of thing you see in the movies, the Sammy Bickley of the past meets the Sammy Bickley of the future.”

  This concept was an idea that would return to Richard again and again whenever he thought about the events of this New Year’s Day. Perhaps he’d always been inclined to think this way. Richard had always wanted to be able to change his bad decisions into more benign events, to force things into a shapely resolution of his own making. That would be a worthy superpower. He could talk his father out of going on the trip that killed him. He could convince Cadence to stay. He’d always believed in his abilities as a persuader. That’s why he’d chosen litigation over corporate law, then television over litigation. As a child, Richard sat in the cramped stall of his elementary school bathroom and believed that with concentration, he could transport himself across the space-time continuum away from the place where six-year-old boys learned how to be sadistic and back home to the talismanic comfort of a teddy bear. He’d always been uncomfortably aware that the Richard MacMurray of his childhood might look upon his career as something inexplicable—You get paid to what?—something with no allure in the outsized dreams of a fairly average boy. He’d wanted, even then, to be part of a team, to contribute, to belong. When he got recognized on the street, he knew his feelings to be exactly what they were, discomfort, unease, an awareness that he’d become an accidental pundit and inconsequential celebrity. He never dreamed of being the Hall of Fame outfielder, turning his back to home plate and making a running grab that made Vic Wertz into the answer to a trivia question; he wanted to be a slick-fielding utility infielder, a master of the dying art of the pinch hit; he wanted to be known for his drive, his enthusiasm, his hustle to leg out the extra base, the ability to move from first to third on the meekest of base hits. He wanted to be known for playing the game the right way.

  He wanted to be a man people relied on.

  He’d once (actually, more than once) asked Cadence to enumerate his appealing qualities, and she’d offered his earnestness, his sincerity, his competence. He didn’t have her perspective. The discussion reminded him of a tepid letter of recommendation he’d found in his father’s papers, wherein Lew MacMurray—veteran of Korea, paratrooper, holder of the Combat Infantry Badge and winner of the Bronze Star—had been described by his commanding officer as trustworthy and loyal, appellations, Richard thought, better reserved for the family dog.

  You did something a hundred or a thousand times, and it became almost automatic, and you never observed any of the artificiality of the moment. And there it was, Richard watching his own image appear and disappear before the screen dissolved into a commercial for fabric softener. He saw himself for what he was, a commercial. What did it say about him that often he could think only in terms of the image of his irretrievable past and its impossibilities? Surely there was some magic that could return him to the most crucial moments of his past, the ghost of bad decisions that could steer the university man in his second year to continue in literature, take up French, instead of following the indeterminate course of study that had herded him directly into law school, a voice that could stifle the urge to propose to the former Ellen Pritchard (his now ex-wife) after a fling with one of Ellen’s friends? He couldn’t remember her last name, Lisa something-or-other, this woman he had taken to bed six days before his first marriage, who in the false comfort of afterglow belittled his nervousness, telling him not to worry about his impending vows, since getting divorced was easier than buying a house, and he, Richard MacMurray, had already bought a house.

  Now that house was four years sold, and his ex-wife, Ellen, lived in central Virginia with a gentleman farmer who planted a half acre of herbs every spring. He spent his spare time holed up in his workshop, building ever more elaborate cabinets and dining room tables and refinishing antique furniture while Ellen tended to rosebushes and grew peppers and tomatoes and three kinds of squash, putting them up in mason jars each summer. Once every six months or so, Richard and Ellen spoke, whenever a stray piece of mail floated to the wrong ex-spouse, or on the rare occasion when Richard’s work merited a mention in a wire-service story that had been copied and pasted into the morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch. The truth was, they had hated each other for a while and choked it down, and now they didn’t hate each other anymore, if only because keeping up the hate had proven more tiresome. Still, the taste lingered, and required Richard to literally shake his head to push away the onslaught of memories.

  An unfamiliar voice emerged from Richard’s molded-plastic earpiece, saying, “You’re up. We’re live in twenty seconds,” and in the background, he thought he heard Toni saying, “We’ve got one, and a mobile unit,” and he knew the background chatter was about something else. A different control-room voice said, “Standby camera. Intro package one.” On the monitor at his feet, Richard saw the pretaped image of himself paired in split screen alongside Congressman Bickley. Then the graphics flew in, and the music began.

  28

  JENNY DROVE, and Jeris sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the camera, playing the tape over and over, watching the playback in the two-inch viewfinder. Jenny’s sister Tara leaned into the front seat and tried to see what she could over his shoulder. It did not occur to her that she had left her maid’s cart sitting outside room 118, or that she’d left the rest of the rooms along the west side of the first floor untended. Tara would receive a phone call the next day asking her not to come to work.

  She had no idea where they were going. Movement was simply required. The reflexology of disaster made it impossible to stand still.

  Jeris hugged the camera nearly to his chest, bringing the viewfinder to eye level and then holding it at arm’s length, as if he were a middle-aged man trying to deal with the unexplained disappearance of his reading glasses. To Tara, the scene on the video looked like a model rocket, sputtering in near circles, leaving a trail of black smoke. Then the camera went back close to his face, and the radio, which Tara had not noticed, announced itself with a quick theme, four attention-getting tones and a pre-recorded announcement—From FBN News in New York, this is a special report—and Tara ordered her sister, “Turn th
at up.”

  “Chaos.” That is how the fire chief at the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport describes the scene this hour following the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which fell to the earth some twenty-seven minutes ago. Initial reports say the plane had not signaled an emergency, and that all aboard—that’s some seventy-seven passengers and six crew—are dead.

  And Jeris tapped at the viewfinder and said, “Do you know what I have here? Do you know what this is?”

  Only Tara answered. “Gold.”

  29

  CHADLEY WAS watching a twenty-four-hour news channel, the volume muted but the closed captioning on. “They’re talking about my company,” Chadley said, pointing at a roundtable discussion that the graphics on the screen titled Corporate Fraud: The Worst Offenders.

  It took a moment for the room’s temperature to register on the skin of Cadence’s bare legs, and for the noise of the city, even through the insulated windows, to whisper to her, Chicago. The Magnificent Mile. Her headache announced itself once Chadley turned on the bedside lamp, and her mildly sour stomach turned a bit when he poured a glass of orange juice. “I’d offer you some breakfast, but they brought the food about an hour ago. You slept.”

  On the other side of the bed was a room-service cart holding a carafe of juice, a pot of coffee, and a pair of plates smeary with grease and ketchup. Once she had been able to eat like that, omnivorous. The best cure for her hangover had always been a bagel piled high with an egg, cheddar cheese, four slices of bacon. Now whatever she ate got weighed, portioned, cataloged, written into a food diary. Never more than 30 percent of calories from fat. Nothing after eight o’clock p.m. She avoided processed foods, nitrates, milk with hormones, and yogurts with too much sugar, and all she wanted now was a cup of coffee, a liter of water, to work up enough of a sweat on the treadmill so that the hint of her hangover would break like a fever.