The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 by Steve Kistulentz
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Cover photographs: window © Dennis Lane / Getty Images; clouds © Michelle Dormer / Getty Images
Author photograph by Kira Derryberry
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First ebook edition: March 2018
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Portions of this book appeared, in different form, as stories in Crab Orchard Review and Quarter After Eight. The author thanks those editors.
ISBN 978-0-316-55177-9
E3-20180124-NF-DA
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Part II 25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
For Tracy, first reader, favorite reader
The trouble with us Americans is we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.
—Hal Hartley, Surviving Desire
Part I
1
THIS HAPPENED on the last day of the last year when we still felt safe, with the American skyline brilliantine, the entire panorama still rendered in its familiar postcard wholeness.
The two years bisected by this particular New Year’s Eve would come and go without fanfare, no shock in the timeline, no Dealey Plaza or Ambassador Hotel, no Miracle Mets or miracles on ice, no archdukes or mad monks, no anarchists or secessionists, no Treaty of Versailles, no surrender, no peace, no Sputnik or man on the moon, no heiresses turned into gun-toting molls, no Giants Win the Pennant! or Nixon Resigns!
The names of the infamous airports of the past became, at a distance, a roll call of crises: Tel Aviv, Kennedy, Sioux City, Hanoi, Tripoli, Athens, Entebbe, all those historical locales that conjured up grainy, United Press International photos of smuggled handguns, heroic pilots negotiating out the cockpit window while hijackers demanded unencumbered passage to Beirut, Havana. In San Juan, the narco dogs barked at every piece of luggage; in Geneva, armored personnel carriers stood sentry between the runways, a response to the vaguely threatening nature of our time.
We could have been anywhere. But for the purposes of this particular holiday and its hurried arrangements and contingencies, we need to choose a benign location. Salt Lake City, the middle of the Great Basin, in the valley sandwiched between the natural fortress of the Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains. A sprawling city on the bottom of what was once a tremendous prehistoric lake.
Even on a holiday, the town rolled up its sidewalks just after dark. Whatever celebrating was to be done was likely a solitary pursuit. Disgruntled airport workers smoked their last cigarettes of the year alarmingly close to thirty-thousand-gallon tanks of jet-A fuel. The terminal was empty except for employees so close to the margins that these few hours of overtime meant the difference for the next month.
And what are New Year’s resolutions but our simplest prayers? Help me give this shit up, uttered by forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic Arnold Bright as he wandered the tarmac of the Salt Lake City International Airport these silent hours of late evening. A pledge to quit made for the fourth year in a row while digging behind his lip to remove an hour-stale pack of chewing tobacco, just a pinch between his cheek and gum. His wife would refuse to kiss him when he got home, and it was, after all, New Year’s Eve. He swirled tepid coffee in his mouth, trying to extract the grit of tobacco and coarse coffee grounds from his teeth, then spattered the mess onto the concrete.
This burden he carried: at home, everything he did or said was a disappointment. He was worn out, too, from family squabbles, a wife he could not seem to please either emotionally or sexually, a teenaged daughter who now refused to go to church, whose newest set of complaints included not getting a car for Christmas, not having her own cell phone. New Year’s Eve meant another night as last man on the tarmac, a duty his wife would see not as a practical effort to pay the bills but as just another way he had conspired to stay out of the house.
He hoped she could be assuaged with a nine-dollar bottle of champagne, a neck rub, and a pre-midnight arrival home. He was just four hours from union-mandated double time, and besides, every conversation at home reminded him how much they needed the money. But his week already included sixteen hours of overtime, so his decision to cut corners seemed without consequence. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten to do something; instead, he’d actively decided not to roll out the ladder, not to take a closer look at the entire tail rudder assembly. This human gesture—Arnold Bright’s inclination toward home and family on the last night of the year—set in motion a series of events with their own unstoppable momentums.
Arnold busied himself initialing the ground crew’s preflight checklist, making cursory marks with a twenty-nine-cent BIC pen. One of tomorrow afternoon’s early departures, one of the airline’s decades-old workhorses, a 727, was already attached to the Jetway at gate B14. He picked up the basic tool of his job: a clipboard, its metal jaw straining to hold the nearly inch-thick pile of recent airworthiness directives and safety bulletins. There was newfound concern about the older 727s, the potential malfunction of a servo control valve that might cause the sudden deflection of the rudder. A known defect that could result in uncontrolled flight into terrain. The airline took these government-issued documents and
translated them into new preflight inspection procedures. But today’s memos, written in the Esperanto of bureaucracy, appeared in commonplace batches of ten or twelve, which made Arnold Bright think none of them was cause for alarm.
He ought to have been more attentive. An understandable oversight, one that would no doubt have been corrected if he could only have seen the next afternoon’s breaking news.
A plane down on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth.
What Arnold Bright would see on television: ranchland scattered with the detritus of wreckage, briefcases, a lone running shoe, the live network feed from a camera stationed at a discreet-enough distance to insinuate a burning fuselage, its cyclone of smoke visible over the reporter’s right shoulder. In that field, the camera would find its narrative in garbage, air sickness bags and in-flight magazines, luggage thrown clear of the debris field, a teddy bear and some sort of melted personal electronic device, a leather portfolio stamped with the name of a property and casualty insurance company, its corporate logotype intact despite the presence of soot and ash and oozing plastic and blood spatter, the implied presence of human remains.
Those broadcast images would never leave him; the insurance logo would always evoke for him not the image of a blanket or a fireman’s hat or a piece of the rock, but an airplane short of the runway, the end of his career as a burning field.
Months after the accident, once reports had been written about the failure to notice the stain of bright-purple hydraulic fluid visible against the predominantly white and orange paint of the Panorama Airlines’ color scheme, and blame officially assigned, the livelihood of a forty-eight-year-old airline mechanic, a union and family man, would become the final casualty of Flight 503.
2
RICHARD MACMURRAY—moderately well-known television pundit, part-time gadfly, prized Washington cocktail-party guest, owner of more than a hundred neckties in a palette of screaming oranges and purples, forty-two years old and once divorced, a Capricorn, former criminal defense attorney turned professional advocate—sat in a director’s chair trying to regulate his breathing, hoping his forehead sweat wouldn’t pop through his makeup.
He was a guest, live and in studio, on a cable news show debating the issue of mandatory sentencing. Eight weeks ago, at the beginning of the November sweeps, he’d appeared on the same program supporting the inalienable right of a bakery owner in Madison, Wisconsin, to sell pastries shaped like human genitalia. A cupcake frosted to look like a breast was guaranteed airtime, guaranteed ratings, maybe a two-point spike in the overnight share. Tonight’s topic, legal and esoteric, meant that no one would watch. During the commercial break between segments, he found himself wondering what the lowest possible rating on the Nielsen scale could be. He wasn’t breaking news or making memorable television here, just cashing a check. He hadn’t even told his sister about it, and she recorded nearly all of his appearances.
A foundation for criminal justice reform had hired Richard as their television mouthpiece, given him contractually defined talking points simple enough to memorize: mandatory sentences handcuffed the judiciary, put a disproportionate burden on youth and minority offenders, gave too much discretionary power to the police, to prosecutors. But he’d hit all the high notes in the first segment, closing with, “If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then absolute discretion divvied up between police and prosecutors is a power that will be absolutely abused. We all want safer schools, safer streets. But those good intentions haven’t led, in this case, to good public policy.”
On the adjacent set, Max Peterson, tonight’s anchorman, fiddled with papers; Richard knew from experience the papers were blank, a prop. A former Marine and a Rhodes scholar, Peterson could be counted on to digress eloquently on anything from the Stanley Cup finals to the risks inherent in American naval presence in the Persian Gulf. His appearance as a substitute anchor tended to evoke a similar reaction in most viewers: I thought he’d retired. Among the inside-the-Beltway talent, Peterson was famous for trying to get his guests to crack, interrupting arguments about the serious issues of the day with a discrete flash of a hand-drawn pornographic cartoon, something like Uncle Sam sporting a monstrous erection. No shenanigans tonight, however, which made the attorney in Richard suspect that maybe Peterson had been spoken to by human resources.
Richard stood and smoothed his suit, eavesdropping as the anchor mumbled monosyllabic responses to his in-ear instructions. Forty-five seconds back. The director would probably offer him some comments as well; the previous segment featured Richard talking over the flustered objections of the other guest, Vance Hiddell, a United States attorney from Alabama.
“One last segment, boys,” the director said. Richard realized he didn’t know a face to put with the voice in his ear. “Let’s try to share our little sandbox. We’ll treat it like congressional debate, two minutes and forty-five seconds, divided equally. Then we’ll go back to Max for wrap-up and his final thought.”
Hiddell stood close by, tapped on the wooden armrest of Richard’s chair. He smelled like a barbershop. “Congratulations. We’re the featured guests on the lowest-rated network-television program of the year.”
“At least we’ll be done in time to join in the festivities. Any plans?”
“Reservations at the Old Ebbitt. My wife insisted. Even though the crab cake that’s twenty dollars every other day of the year is now part of a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fixed-price romantic adventure,” Hiddell said.
Richard nodded in a way that he hoped suggested agreement. New Year’s was always difficult, had been for years. The imaginary pressure to invent happy occasions with his now ex-wife had given way to an equally imagined fear that people would judge him if he admitted to his usual habit of spending the holidays alone.
Alone. He repeated the word to himself as he reached for his bottled water.
He heard the shuffle on the studio floor that meant they were going live, the count in his ear, five, four, three. The red light on the anchor’s camera went hot, and Max Peterson set up the final segment. On the reference monitor, the split screen suggested that Richard and his opponent had been brought together by the miracle of satellite, when in fact they sat on the same riser, in identical chairs five feet apart.
“Welcome back. We’re talking about possible revisions to federal sentencing guidelines, what the lawyers might call mandatory minimums. Our guests are Washington-based defense attorney Richard MacMurray and longtime federal prosecutor Vance Hiddell, Alabama Republican and candidate for the United States Senate. Mr. Hiddell, how do you respond to the charge some legal scholars have leveled that mandatory minimums undermine the very premise of equal justice for all?”
“Mandatory minimums are the absolute guarantee of equal justice. They serve as a deterrent to crime and add a system of checks and balances against activist federal judges, one that keeps them from handing out unduly lenient sentences.”
“Or,” Richard interrupted, “mandatory sentencing laws undermine the very purpose of the judiciary, which is to allow our learned men and women the chance to display wisdom, compassion, and judgment. We’re building prisons faster than Stalin, and filling them with college kids who made the fatal error of smoking a joint, or housewives who stole a seven-dollar lipstick.”
Hiddell took an unsubtle detour into his stump speech. “It’s almost as if my friend has forgotten where these laws came from. They keep violent offenders off the streets. They keep our wives and mothers safe from recidivists. And the prisons we send career criminals to are nicer than the hotel I stayed in last night. It costs taxpayers nearly twenty-five thousand dollars a year per prisoner in the federal system, and those felons get three square meals and cable TV. What we need to bring back is discipline. The sense that prison is not a vacation but a punishment. Because right now, we’re not reforming or rehabilitating, we’re simply coddling these people. Sending a three-time loser to a work farm for ten years is nothing more than justice.”
Richard took the r
eference to these people as a typical us-versus-them gambit, designed to rile up the pickup-truck-and-shotgun crowd. Hiddell probably had polling data in his briefcase that showed how those voters were exactly the kind of people who might put him over the top on election day.
Richard did not know he would pull the stunt until he was out of his chair and crossing the stage. The director shouted through his earpiece, an airburst of profanity followed by the begging of all three cameras to stay with the shot. Richard walked the two steps across the riser, stopped next to the candidate. “Thirty-eight years ago, a teenager pled guilty to a pair of nonviolent felonies for some youthful mischief involving fireworks and bad decisions. Since then, he’s graduated from high school and college, earned a master’s degree, and become a licensed pharmacist. And this week,” Richard said, “a district court in California sentenced this fifty-seven-year-old pharmacist to life in prison. His crime? Stealing a Snickers bar.”
Hiddell prattled on, “We don’t need to send career criminals off to camp. We need them to pay their debt to society.”
Richard dug into the pocket of his suit pants and extracted some change. When he extended his hand, Hiddell reflexively stuck out his own. Richard dropped the coins in, one by one. “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven, and seventy-eight.”
“What’s this shit?” the candidate demanded. The anchor blanched, but all three heard the director answer, “Easy,” into their earpiece.
“One criminal’s debt to society, paid in full.”
They’d end the segment, Richard knew, no matter how much time was left. A slogan popped into his head: More Americans get their news from our network than any other news organization. He knew too that the clip would be picked up on free media and repeated in a seemingly perpetual loop, the candidate sitting there in his chair, dumbfounded and visibly furious, trying to decide whether or not to stand, still holding on to the spare change.
Panorama Page 1
