Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Her preshift duties included cutting four dozen limes and four dozen lemons, refilling the maraschino cherries in the service trays, and pestering a busboy to deliver ten five-gallon buckets of ice for the drop-in coolers of bottled beer. Never once had the ice been in the cooler when she punched in, and never once had someone fetched it without complaint. The bar manager stayed focused on the larger things, like the bottom line. He’d bought these syrupy premade mixes for the fancier cocktails and had the soda gun switched from name-brand sodas to generics. The tonic water tasted more like rust than quinine, and that meant Sherri constantly had to buy back drinks, and buying back drinks meant she got the same three-dollar tip for pouring the same drink twice, no matter how weak or strong she poured or how many buttons of her Stay-Prest uniform blouse she left “accidentally” undone.

  On this New Year’s Day, only a handful of skiers wandered the hotel, these impossibly hardy families who’d braved I-80 or I-15 in their minivans, hoping for a few days of fresh powder and reasonable winds. The sun today turned the busiest runs to gunk, and the arriving winds and falling temperatures tonight would turn them into skating rinks and make even the bunny slopes fast and slick; all that meant people would stay tethered to the hotel, order their food at the bar. Since it was a holiday and her husband was on a plane, she’d picked up an extra shift, and there was no one to help her and the cooler still needed ice and the register drawer needed to be counted, eighty dollars in change to get the night going, though she could count on one hand the number of checks that got settled in cash; everything got charged to the rooms or to a credit card. She wished Ash wasn’t on his way to see his mother, that he’d show up at eleven p.m., the hour that passed for last call in these parts, and produce a key to a room that he’d connived from the night manager. He’d be back in a couple of days, she thought, and she counted a roll of quarters, two rolls each of dimes, nickels, and pennies, seventeen dollars in ones. Making note of the shortage in her audit journal, she flipped through the pages and found a business card, the insurance man who’d been working them even on New Year’s Eve. She slipped it into her apron pocket and spotted the remote for the overhead television behind the first row of call liquors. Why couldn’t people put things away at the end of the shift? Almost as strange as the fact that she could flip channels from 2 through 200 and back again and couldn’t find any of the football games.

  She knew the late bowl game was on FBN; the omnipresent promos with incongruous animated robots and cartoon fruit had aired all morning. The network came back from commercial, and Sherri saw the reporter saying, “You are looking live as firefighters tend to the final resting place of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which crashed just short of runway 13L here at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport about two and a half hours ago.”

  Sherri would not remember this, the remote trembling along with her hand, her finger remaining on the volume key, the voice growing louder and louder, distorted. Then the ridiculous notion that it was all a joke, a misunderstanding. Any moment now, Ash would walk into the bar with a room key, flashing that smile that told Sherri he’d saved up forty-five dollars, enough for a couple of drinks and an order of those Tex-Mex spring rolls he liked so much, and a carefree night in the hotel with the password for the in-room movies and a couple of extra pouches of self-serve coffee for the following sluggish morning.

  She dropped the remote, flung it away, really; the cover opened, and the AA batteries rolled across the floor. As she scurried, crablike, across the green carpet, gathering up parts, she became aware of how loud the television was as the screen showed the reporter telling the world, “Initial reports, now confirmed, say all seventy-seven passengers and six crew members aboard were killed.” Sherri fumbled with the remote, its reassembly. The reporter’s face disappeared, but her voice reset the entire story, and the network went to commercial with the correspondent saying, “You are watching continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503 on FBN.”

  But Sherri could not find the battery cover, and the bar manager heard the television, wandered in to find his bar empty, the bartender crying on the floor, the cash-register drawer open, the television blaring a commercial for an over-the-counter remedy for upset stomach and diarrhea.

  37

  DON KEENE loved hotel bars. They reminded him of the era of oak telephone booths in the lobby and gimlets and Rob Roys at lunch. The Pilgrim Hotel reminded him of the very first time he’d been to Washington, as a wire service reporter just out of college in 1968. He’d gone “Clean for Gene” McCarthy, and the combination of an old-school haircut and a degree from Columbia meant he’d never looked the part of a revolutionary. Universities up and down the eastern seaboard manufactured boys like Don by the thousands. He just walked into one of those young establishment jobs, already equipped as he was with the narrow ties and lapels.

  He hoped MacMurray wouldn’t ask him for advice, because when people asked him for advice, Don Keene had a strong but only year-old tendency to tell the truth. In television, this was a considerable handicap. Not telling the truth was incompatible with his newfound sobriety, and if that wasn’t the way that Don was interpreting the twelve steps that week, it was almost certainly the way that his sponsor would. His sponsor was the kind of hard-ass who made him pick up the phone and apologize, the kind of guy for whom making amends meant making immediate amends, none of this taking inventory and ritualistic letter writing. His sponsor was a man of action, and after a few months of working the program this way, Don had decided that, for him, the easiest and softest way to live his life was to just tell the truth, all the time, and damn the consequences. He’d suffered through meetings in which people asked him, “Don, are you bored?” and he’d said yes. After a few sorrowful dates, one woman had looked at him askance and remarked, “It’s almost like you aren’t attracted to me in the slightest,” an accusation that Don answered with body language that said, Yes, but what’s your point?

  So when Richard dared to ask, Why do you want me? he’d wavered on telling him. Hiring a rank amateur to anchor northeastern Pennsylvania’s lowest-rated evening newscast represented acceptable risk; he could get Richard at a discount price and save the $20,000 it would cost his station to use a headhunter. He’d save the station another $30,000 on what he was going to underpay the new guy, and if it worked, Richard would be a perpetual bargain.

  If Richard didn’t ask, he’d keep his mouth shut and let the guy figure it out for himself. Don didn’t have the stomach for focus groups and test reels and tryout weekends when some stranger flew into town and did the Saturday six p.m. news. And Don didn’t feel like taking the three harrowing connecting flights on the kind of turboprop planes better suited to running guns to Salvadoran rebels, flights that would deposit him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Battle Creek, Michigan, where he’d see some consultant who would tell him things that were best described as common sense: anchormen shouldn’t wear flashy suits, and anchorwomen should be slightly deferential, wear earrings no larger than a nickel, and be about as sexy as June Cleaver. Don couldn’t help but think of those small planes as the ones that featured drunk pilots, failing equipment, ownership that cut corners on keeping the aircraft clean and well maintained. More often, those were the planes, Don thought, that fell burning out of the sky.

  Richard could be an experiment. Don saw him as the kind of guy that people wanted to invite home and tell about the kids, and that was the gift that Jack Shea had too. But first Richard had to display an awareness of his limitations, an understanding that he was being set up to fail. At the very least, Don wanted someone reckless enough to say yes without really thinking about it, and smart enough to ask for a little more money. After Don had pissed and washed his hands and left a message for his boss, he walked back to the bar.

  “Where were we, exactly?” he asked.

  Richard tapped the folder and sipped off the vodka the bartender had floated on top of his Bloody Mary. Don could smell it, medicinal, the
hints of pepper and horseradish that bit at the back of his nose. Ever since he’d gone clean, his nose could always be counted on to find these sensory reminders of his past. The vodka. The female bartender who wore the same slight perfume as one of the women at the station. When he’d gotten out of his four weeks of residential treatment, Don had walked barefoot along the facility’s cut grass, and the smell had made him feel eight years old. His father had made a ritual out of cutting the lawn: mow and trim, rake up the clippings, wash down the sidewalk, a victory cigar and a beer. And Don’s mind felt so sharp, so associative, that he imagined the smell of the gasoline and the oxidized rust burning off the mower’s muffler and the hints of wild onion and berry that grew in his parents’ lawn and the vodka and horseradish of Sunday dinner.

  It was all too tempting. He had to get out of the bar. He never noticed how much business was conducted in bars until he had a reason to avoid them entirely. Don tapped his pencil, then pulled a couple of cocktail napkins from the holder and started doing some figuring on them. Richard watched as he added a trio of six-figure numbers.

  “You’ve got that look,” Don said, “the one that says you want to call time-out.”

  “That’s not it,” Richard said.

  “Well, then I’d say that you aren’t as smart as Toni said you were. You should call time-out and take a step back and figure out your next move. Heed the advice of learned counsel. Isn’t there someone you’d like to talk with before you sign on the dotted line?”

  “There is. Was. I’m not sure,” Richard said. He looked pained by the admission. “Tell me why this has to happen today.”

  Don knew he meant a woman. He debated whether or not he should put the cap on his pen, slide the sheaf of papers back into his file folder, start the pantomime of packing up. “The whole point of this is that we want to put you in the chair next to the guy you are replacing. Make you look like the anointed one. Jack Shea is going to do everything short of kissing you on the cheek and telling Luzerne County that you are the goddamn heir apparent. His tumors are so advanced that the doctors can’t believe he can read the news, much less walk. You’re going to come in there, and Jack’s going to tell everyone that you’re the next man up. So no, technically, it doesn’t have to happen today. But if it doesn’t, and he dies, then it might not happen at all.”

  Richard said, “I thought this wasn’t a high-pressure sell.”

  Don gathered up his overcoat and briefcase. He put his case on the bar and extracted a pair of discs and handed them to Richard. “This is your predecessor. The living legend. Eight hours of his greatest hits over thirty-two years on the air. The last eighteen as the anchor of Eyewitness News at Six and Eleven.” And Don wouldn’t realize until a week later that he’d made a mistake in asking Richard, and that he secretly wished Richard would be consumed with a sudden awareness of his limitations and say no. He could just hand the discs back to Don and shake his head and say, You have the wrong man.

  “Eight hours?” Richard said, putting the discs into his own briefcase.

  “Think about that. Ninety minutes of broadcast, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year. And then, because you’re dying, an intern boils it down to eight hours of highlights, and the last two duties we’re going to ask you to perform are this: we’d like you to train your replacement, and we’d like you to document your own illness. From the moment the doctor comes in and worries about that spot on the X-ray until the day it takes us thirty-seven takes for him to utter, Tonight is my final broadcast.” Don took out forty dollars and half-threw it to the bartender.

  Richard said, “What do I do with those discs?”

  Don finished his club soda and used the cocktail napkin to wipe his mouth, then left it in a ball on the bar top. “We’d like you to edit those eight hours of tape into a two-minute-and-twenty-second highlight package that you’ll write and narrate, and we’ll broadcast it the day he dies.”

  There wasn’t much more to explain that wasn’t in the folder. The salary was guaranteed and even for this small market bordered on astronomical, and Richard would be just as much of a fool to say yes as he would be to say no. As Don stepped behind him to make his exit, Richard picked up the folder and swiveled around on his bar stool.

  “Well, what do you say?” Don asked. Richard opened the folder and shook his head. The salary was there on the first page. He added $25,000 to it, mumbling something about moving expenses.

  Don took the pen, initialed the change, and said, “I take it that’s a yes?”

  Don, or more likely someone who worked for him, had thoughtfully affixed little yellow stickers that said SIGN HERE in each of the places where Richard’s signature was legally required. The last time he’d seen little reminders like that, he was signing the sheaf of documents that dissolved his law partnership, transferred the deed to his house, enforced a qualified domestic-relations order dividing his meager retirement savings in half, paying his wife back for suits and ties and prescription medications and every damn thing she could think of, and he’d never had the pleasure of telling her that it was worth every penny to get the fuck out. He smiled and signed. As he was about to hand the folder over, he turned it around so Don could watch him scribble a quick note on its cover, tiny block printing that said WHAT THE FUCK.

  38

  IN HER most recent personnel evaluation, the receptionist working the front desk of the Dallas bureau of FBN had been praised as an efficient gatekeeper and traffic cop. Important skills, because the news brought out weirdness in flocks of threes and fours: whistleblowers and their more generic tattling counterparts, self-styled vigilantes with fourteen hours of camcorder footage they thought might be the key to solving the lasting riddles of the Kennedy assassination. Sitting at that desk thirty-seven and a half hours a week, you learned to recognize all the great and dangerous things a city assembled, even a city with as benign and polished a facade as Dallas, which at times seemed to Sally Doerfler to be made entirely out of mirrored glass.

  Then came the news alert, a red banner across her computer monitor, followed within thirty seconds by a chorus of ringing phones. Sally knew enough to say, “FBN Dallas Operations, please hold,” and never wait for a reply. “You’ve got thirty seconds, go,” she said to each caller that filled the eight blinking lines. She took notes, gathered the relevant intelligence—plane down at DFW; the conspiracy theorist on line two said, “Ground-to-air missile, Panorama Airlines Flight 503”—and, because it was a holiday, didn’t wait for the assignment editor or the bureau chief, just called it out to the correspondent herself.

  Sally didn’t have time to mess with frivolous things. She’d worked here seventeen years and knew how to take initiative, knew what the pressures of the business and the twenty-four-hour news cycle meant. Sally sent the crew to the airport, telling them what the bureau chief would have said, because it was a motto around these parts, and she knew it—they all did—without his having to say it: Get it first and get it right.

  In just ten minutes, the calls accounted for two pages in her handwritten call log, a total of seventy-four tips, neatly categorized into convenient categories: false starts, pranksters, conspiracy theorists, and, on maybe one call, valid information. She had passed along to the reporter two separate reports of a man with a bazooka at the airport (later this man would be identified as a sound technician for a competing network carrying a boom microphone and a tripod) and was now on the phone with someone from one of the hospitals who said they’d activated their trauma response teams at Baylor and Methodist and Texas Children’s and Parkland, but someone from the airline or the NTSB (the nurse wasn’t sure) had already told them to stand down. That was as good as confirmation: no survivors.

  She was still on the phone, taking tips and callback numbers, when the monitor cut to the reporter doing a stand-up from the airfield, the stopped airport traffic visible over her shoulder, the screen filling with a column of noirish smoke and the now-useless emergency personnel.

 
Then this teenager emerged through the front door and walked up to her desk. He looked like a good kid, like he was waiting for permission to speak. He had the long, hungry look Sally had been taught to recognize as ambition. He was followed by a girl, and to Sally, they registered immediately as a couple. He opened up the playback window on his video camera, turned it to face her, and hit Play.

  Sally watched a plane spiral clockwise into the ground.

  She couldn’t remember who she’d been talking to, just hung up. She raised the volume on the monitor to hear the network feed, then flipped to the other news networks. They were all on-set shots of the anchor desks in New York or Atlanta. FBN would be first with actual video of the crash, just as they’d been the first to have someone in the field.

  Sally called the bureau chief and said, “Someone needs to come down and take a look at this,” and when the chief wanted to know what exactly she was referring to with that indefinite pronoun, she told him, “The gold standard. Flight 503.”

  The bureau chief sent a production assistant, who didn’t bother with introductions, just took the camera from this teenager and asked if it was cued up, hit the Play button and watched the video, grainy, shot handheld and underlit. Holy shit.

  At that point, the PA hit Stop and just said to the room, “Come with me,” and Sally and the kid and the PA went together into the control room. In the crush of the busy afternoon, no one noticed the chime of unanswered calls while Sally narrated for the kid what was going to happen next. “We’ll get someone from Legal on the phone, and you’ll have to sign a release.” Somehow they’d agreed on a price without anyone thinking how strange it was for these de facto negotiations to have been conducted by the receptionist; Sally had shuffled enough paper in the past to anticipate every argument, and she spelled it out for the bureau chief: they could label the kid as an independent contractor to satisfy the standards-and-practices people and the attorneys who kept insisting that this network wasn’t in the business of paying for the news.