Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Special report. The first time Richard remembered hearing those words, they’d been about his father.

  It was the disillusioned autumn of 1978, the president begging us to drive fifty-five and turn the heat down to sixty-eight, the shah of Iran about to wander the globe in search of the Western miracle of chemotherapy. Ron Guidry of the Yankees had just picked up the Cy Young Award for his one miraculous season.

  Lew MacMurray was the chief of staff to a member of Congress, and one morning he walked into a Rayburn Building anteroom to find a group of parents from San Mateo waiting patiently, hoping they might convince their congressman to investigate just what had happened to their daughters. Two families telling the same story: she’d once been the shining light of their family, they said, and now was off in the Guyanan jungle in the grip of some Svengali.

  They’d seen news footage of the Reverend Jim Jones peering over the dark lenses of his Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, the kind favored by state troopers. He kept telling the children how the time would soon come for the dispensation of judgment. These parents had written letters, epistles of heartbreak, but the congressman could not understand how this was a governmental matter and shuffled the letters off to Lew, told him to make it go away. And Lew picked up the case. The parents told him there had been reports: the minister was having sex with the children; it was more like a commune; they were growing weed; they were trying to create a master race; they were holding people against their will. The Reverend claimed they were building a utopia in the jungles of South America, and he’d begun to say some strange things; he was too fond of quoting Revelation, stories of horses carrying plagues, stories about the end of times. But in his correspondence with congressional investigators, the Reverend was surprisingly lucid, inviting them to come on a fact-finding visit to the plantation—a thousand Californians living a simple agrarian life in the Guyanan jungle, raising their own livestock and growing their own vegetables, weaving rope and fabric out of the hemp they grew. They hadn’t given up the comforts of home entirely, the Reverend said; a plane came in from the States once a week with mail, toilet paper, magazines, and Hershey bars.

  And so Lew advised the congressman to visit.

  After a miserable fourteen-hour flight, they landed on an old airstrip built by the British twenty years before. They made a cursory tour of the farm, expecting no problems, expecting to be poolside in Caracas by dinnertime. Then the people, in their twenties and thirties, dislocated from the cocaine-and-gold-chain California of the seventies, started talking. They’d come to Guyana because they’d seen the future visions of the corporate wars, and they were tired of all that, oil prices and odd-even gas rationing and stagflation and land wars in Asia. Tired too of the pressure to discover what was next, so they’d fled to the jungle, and their problems had followed them there. Out of earshot of the leaders of the church, they asked the congressman, Take us home. Begged him, really. There had to be seats, certainly, on such a big plane. And then on the tarmac, as the congressman and Lew MacMurray and thirteen members of the cult were preparing to leave, men who worked for Jones, men who feared everything was about to be taken away, rounded into view on a jeep with a .50-caliber machine gun bolted in the back.

  When the special report aired, a reporter in his 1970s-issue safari jacket narrated the disaster. Twenty-year-old Richard saw his father’s recognizably rumpled khaki suit, the repp-striped tie (Brooks Brothers number one red). His father’s hair was mussed, tangled, his body facedown on the tarmac that had been carved out of the Guyanan jungle. The congressman almost made it to the trees.

  His father’s body, via satellite, the first in a chain of death that would be known by one name, Jonestown. He’d never see his father’s dead body except on television; the casket came back from Dover already sealed, draped in the American flag.

  Lew MacMurray’s death became a recorded case, something indelibly American, the mere presence of a large gun making everyone feel safe for a time. That scene, replayed over and over, slowed down and sped up, diagrammed and telestrated the way Vince Lombardi used to draw up the power sweep on the chalkboard—how the cult members emerged from the jungle at the far end of the longest runway, waving arms, white flags. Flags of surrender. The bait for murder. A few hours later, film of those displaced Californians, those dreamers of a tarnished dream, facedown in the lush subtropical grasses of Guyana, delivered to the Almighty by a glass of a poisoned kiddie drink.

  31

  PEOPLE COME to Utah, as they always have, to escape. That’s the history of the place, God’s chosen people chased out of the breadbasket of Missouri and Illinois. They took to the western trails in search of deliverance from the enemies of the Lord. Mike had seen the land with his own eyes, such magnificent desolation that first time; he felt like an astronaut soaring high enough to see the curvature of the earth. Just a few days before, as he had arrived by passenger jet, on the long and slow descent into the airport, the landscape below became obvious in its beauty: if Brigham Young could have taken the same circuitous flight path, a seamless descent over the valley and its perimeter of copper hills and peaks, among the expanse of the immense lake and its surrounding flatlands, with the clearing jolt of the zephyrs filling his lungs, the land teasing him with the promise of shelter on three sides from all enemies foreign and domestic, it would have been even more apparent than it already was to this leader—tired of the backstabbing and the internecine politics and the blood atonement that came with being a visionary—that this great basin, this Kingdom of God on earth, was the place.

  What it might take to convince Mary Beth to feel that way, Mike Renfro had no earthly idea. He hoped she’d be drawn to the landscape the way he was, a feeling of homeplace, that whatever was planted here would grow solid and tall. Instead she’d answered his enthusiasms with more questions, rhetorical ones, repeating one word over and over again with a shake of her head and an upward lilt in her voice that made even the simplest declaration sound like a question. Utah?

  Time would render Mike Renfro’s recollection of the afternoon a muddle, clear only in snapshot. His most persistent memory would be standing next to a rented Jeep along the frontage road that dropped gradually into the bathtub-like expanse of Montezuma Canyon. The house he intended to look at that afternoon stood on eighty-two contiguous acres of land dotted with sandstone and red rock, and the agent who was supposed to meet him at the property was late. Mike entertained himself with daydreams of being a gentleman rancher, raising organic chickens, buying himself a thirty-year-old red truck to drive to and from the mailbox in the late afternoon, a large and overly friendly mutt riding shotgun, lolling his head out the passenger window.

  Only as Mike saw the approaching truck, with its feathering trail of red-brown dust, did he step back into his own car, intending to turn off the radio. But he heard the familiar four-note overture of the FBN network, heavy on tympani and synthetic brass, and then this: From FBN Radio News in New York, our top story this hour is the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. The flight, which originated in Salt Lake City, carried seventy-seven passengers and six crew. Early indications are no survivors.

  The real-estate agent arrived in an extended-cab pickup truck covered with dust and road salt, and Mike watched him approach, his slow gait meaning he likely hurried for no one. Mike felt this insistent pressure on his ribs, realized he’d collapsed against the top frame of his car door, hung his arms limply over it. Tears fell to the ground, to the tops of his shoes. There was no heightened awareness, none of the clarity that adrenaline provides. His recollections would be unreliable, factually incorrect; he was after all a man of action and had spent his career helping others plan for just such developments in their own lives, and what good was a man if he wasn’t good in a crisis?

  This crisis demanded action, and as Mike sobbed over the door, he tried to imagine what he could do, what action he might take. Excuses could come later. The real-estate m
an would be the type to return to his truck to give Mike a chance to gather himself. That would take some time. Instead Mike slid into the driver’s seat and wiped his nose, childlike, on his jacket sleeve. His rented Jeep kicked back an impressive spray of gravel and chalky mud as he spun away. Mike turned the radio off, wanting to be submerged in the quiet hum of tires over the highway, but there was the sound of his wailing, and he could not be consoled.

  32

  IN THE bathroom of Mike Renfro’s palatial house, Sarah Hensley and this guy Carter came together naturally, the kind of temporary alliance that happened between single people in their twenties. Sarah untied her bikini top at the neck and it hung down her torso. She eased herself down, working at Carter’s button-fly jeans and worrying about the toll of the tile floor on her kneecaps. Carter offered reassurances as to the rightness of this particular sexual transaction, telling her, “You’re gorgeous,” and tracing her jaw with his right hand. Her posture, his mumblings about God, suggested some crypto-religious overtones. She wondered if maybe Carter was married and having second thoughts, or gay, because when she took him in her mouth, he softly said, “Don’t.”

  He lifted her by placing two fingers under the curve of her jaw and gently suggesting that she stand up. “I ought to buy you a proper dinner first,” he said, a thought she could almost accept as sincere before he added, “Besides, there are a lot of people around who could talk, and you never know what one of them might say.”

  Sarah slipped out of the bathroom first and headed instinctively for the kitchen, away from this Carter guy and away from the hum of the party. She’d never known a man who had refused a blow job. She made herself a stiff margarita, doubling up on the Herradura Silver. She gathered her drink, wrapping the stem of her glass in a paper napkin, and when she returned to the great room, the spectators, her party guests, were all standing around the television. We’re getting reports of the disappearance of a passenger jet, a Boeing 727 bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas, vanishing from the screens of air traffic controllers just moments before its scheduled landing at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, apparently crashing into the Texas countryside at approximately 2:05 Central Standard Time.

  She felt the tension in the muscles of her jaw, her teeth tight, one deck against the other; she used two fingers to inspect the racing of her drug-afflicted heart as it announced itself in her carotid pulse.

  Sarah managed to think about the child. Who can say what he saw?

  She did not think of herself as maternal, but surely Mary Beth would have wanted to shelter the kid from news of the disaster du jour that he couldn’t possibly understand. He was a curious one, that Gabriel. Just a few minutes before, passing idly through the den, he looked up at the football game long enough to ask the room the difference between field turf and regular old grass, and no one knew to answer him. That was his M.O. He’d been watching those end-of-year wrap-up shows and pestering her with questions: What is the Palestine Liberation Organization? Who is Al Gore? Where’s Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Vanuatu, Kashmir? What’s the euro? He’d watched the weather and explained the polar vortex and the jet stream to Sarah, and seemed to have at his disposal a tremendous amount of useless information for a first-grader, the kind of things that couldn’t help you at all in the real world but made you a hit at parties and a wizard at Trivial Pursuit.

  Gabriel stopped playing with the Lincoln Logs and the Legos and the pack of cards and the Matchbox cars and the blanket, ignored the small plate of nacho-cheese tortilla chips and the plastic cup filled with America’s number-four-bestselling soft drink. Instead he stared at the television as the anchor repeated the lede.

  A Boeing 727 bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas has crashed on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, some thirty-eight minutes ago. You are watching continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, lost on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. We have crews on the way, and we’ll continue to bring you the most news and information on this developing story after a short break.

  The news seemed to stop the party. A handful of people moved closer to the television, and a voice, indistinct, demanded that they turn the volume up. The silence stunned the child.

  Minutes before, he had himself prescribed the deaths of the entire civilian population of one of Asia’s largest cities, but now he stood in front of the screen as it showed an aerial shot, the news helicopter hovering at a discreet distance from the crash site, the only sign of tragedy the presence of fire and rescue vehicles, the men in their turnouts loitering truckside in the midday sun. Gabriel stood there, in front of the television, mouth open with the intent of making noise. The helicopter shot moved higher to show a scar, a burning field. Who can say what the child saw?

  33

  RICHARD WATCHED.

  He hadn’t removed his IFB device, so he could hear the New York producer narrating the story into the anchorman’s ear. “What we know,” the voice said, “Panorama 503. A Boeing 727 en route to DFW from Salt Lake. The rest is going to come at you hot.” Richard knew enough to deduce: crash.

  His interview canceled, he unplugged himself and made his way into the tight quarters of the control room. He mouthed, We’re done? and Toni nodded, paused her shuffle of phones to point up at the large monitors and turn on their audio feed. A fly-in graphic, then introductory music, ten seconds of backing track, long enough for a voice-over to say, “From FBN World News Headquarters in New York, this is a special report. Reporting from our Washington bureau, here is FBN News Now anchor Max Peterson,” and on the camera monitor, Richard saw the anchorman fiddling with his lapel microphone. A third hand, some technician, reached in from stage left to make one final adjustment of the mic before a voice in the background, bleeding through on the control room audio, said, “You’re in the goddamn frame!”

  The anchor said quietly, “Steady, people.” The guy was unflappable. Another newsman of the trench-coat-and-safari-jacket era; he’d covered George Romney’s quixotic 1968 run for the White House right up to the moment the governor claimed he’d been brainwashed; he’d found time to smoke hash with the fine gentlemen of Second Battalion, Fifth Marines on a few days of mop-up patrol in one of South Vietnam’s hottest sectors. A plane crash wasn’t going to make him lose his shit.

  On the main monitor, the graphic dissolved, the animation fading as the anchorman lowered his head to begin: “Good afternoon. We’re interrupting to bring breaking news out of our Dallas bureau. This afternoon, Panorama Airlines Flight 503, a Boeing 727 passenger jet bound from Salt Lake City to Dallas, vanished from the screens of air traffic controllers just moments before its scheduled landing at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport. Weather in the area has been reported as clear. And now FBN is confirming”—he pushed his earpiece farther in—“based on police and fire department sources, that Panorama 503 has crashed on approach. A crew is en route to the scene, and we’ll take you there for a live report. But first, a short break. Stay with us, this is FBN.”

  A bumper. If it’s news, FBN is there.

  Television, Richard thought. The perfect messenger of death. Plane crash, but first a word from our sponsors. He’d seen this movie before. His own father, facedown on the tarmac of a military airfield in a third world country he’d never heard of. The tableau he remembered: his father’s body in the foreground, surrounded by plain men in sack suits who had conjured up handguns and automatic weapons. One guy barked orders, a Secret Service earpiece dangling against his collar. This was a special report, rendered in the grainy realism of 16-millimeter film. For emphasis, one of the agents waved around a compact submachine gun—a weapon he was not supposed to have, a gift of fealty from a Mossad colonel—and no one, not even the millions who saw the film (it was still on film) a day later on television, noticed the proscribed weapon. His father’s body, followed by a commercial. How’d you like a nice Hawaiian Punch?

  Richard made his way to what he hoped was an unobt
rusive spot in the rear of the control room and watched the live feed. The room pulsed with the urgency of disaster, people making and receiving phone calls, doing the leg work of solid reporting, figuring the capacity of the aircraft, its flight schedules and maintenance history, obtaining a copy of the passenger manifest. The familiar faces of on-air personalities scurrying back and forth to the desks in the newsroom.

  One of the other monitors showed a young female reporter milling around the crash site, flipping pages in a reporter’s notebook, trying to push flying tendrils of her hair behind her ear. At the edge of the two-lane road that led to the airport fire station, a sterile area had been carved out by lines of yellow caution tape running between a perimeter fence and an idling fire truck. A firefighter in full turnout gear was pushing the reporter gently toward the truck.

  Richard watched the satellite feed, the pretty young reporter stopping to set up her stand-up, then moving her lips in such an exaggerated fashion that Richard recognized it as a warm-up exercise. Behind her, scattered in the grazing field, purses and wallets, soft-sided duffel bags, magazines. The cameraman had already shot footage of severed limbs and viscera that appeared to have been decoupaged and baked onto what remained of the airframe, a priest’s collar and the shoes that dotted the landscape at random intervals and the intact water bottles and the briefcase with its engraved brass nameplate—the initials G. C. W. clearly visible even through a layer of soot. The rear section of the plane shrouded in the foam of white fire suppressant, and a kid, couldn’t have been more than seventeen, who was missing his clothing from the waist down but still had on a T-shirt bearing the words CLASS OF 2001 and a list of names silk-screened across its back, and a hand, a well-manicured hand with painted fingernails and a wedding set on the ring finger in platinum and diamonds in the art-deco style; the hand clutched an open cell phone, but the casing and the screen and the numbers had begun to melt, and the hand rested on the blackened ground in a puddle of what appeared to be motor oil next to a woman’s facedown body covered in what must have been melted plastic. Richard had seen enough; he knew that the raw feed he was watching would never make broadcast. This was that human compulsion, to see what could not be forgotten, but television news focused on telling us what happened, while we pretended not to want to look.