The accountant on duty would cut the kid a check in the low five figures. All the kid wanted was his name on the screen, Footage courtesy of Jeris McDougal, and the bureau chief had to sign off on that.
The production assistant dumped the tape into a deck, and the monitors in the control room split into two distinct categories: those showing the live network feed and those showing the plane in its final moments. The bureau chief was on the phone to New York control, saying, I know you think I must be some kind of fucking Huckleberry, but the kid has the shit, and, He’s got it on tape, and, We’ve got it cold, and, No, no one else has it, and finally exasperation took hold and he shouted into the handset, “He has the crash on tape. The plane. Right into the fucking ground!”
The kid kept trying to say My name is Jeris as he stood in the control room of the Dallas bureau, watching the tape with a paternal pride, expecting a high five, because to him the tape was the first verifiable evidence of his powers of persuasion, documented and incontrovertible, and he knew the technicians were alternating between watching the monitor and watching him.
At time code 0:00:12, the abrupt presence of horizontal lines fluttered across the tape, as if the control room had tuned in on a vintage, tube-powered television. The interference was caused by a camera powering up at random, and the tape had a bit of vertical roll to it, which made the producer in the room think of his childhood, the old nineteen-inch Philco black-and-white, the first television he had ever known, and his afternoon struggles with a rabbit-ear antenna, all for the pleasure of watching the local UHF channel, its grained and snowy broadcasts of Japanese kids’ shows, Marine Boy and Ultraman.
In the foreground, a girl—freckled and prematurely endowed with the prominent curves and sun-damaged décolletage of a much older woman—sat on the edge of a motel-room bed. The voice of some young man, presumably the same one who was now standing in the reception area, started cajoling her to remove her top. The girl who’d arrived with Jeris couldn’t make eye contact with anyone in the room; she could tell by the way they were looking at her that they only wanted to know just how far the girl on the tape was willing to go.
The image of the girl working at the buttons on her blouse, a midriff-baring silver number stretched across her ample chest, and a voice asking, What you gonna do, are you going to suck my cock? You know how I like to watch you do that—and Christ, the editor thought, she has to be the same age as my little sister. The voice told her, Undo another button; stand up and show me what you got on under that skirt.
Then the kid went running out the motel-room door and into the parking lot, and the sudden flush of daylight saturated everything into such bright hues that on the control-room monitors, the light of the sky and the color of the cars and the glint of this girl’s silver shirt as she appeared in the corner of the frame—standing in front of the cameraman by about a foot, she asked the question everyone asks of a man holding a camera at a moment of crisis, Are you getting this?—it all appeared with the shining brilliance of an old Kodachrome snapshot. The camera began to move, and the editor thought, Yes, yes, kid, follow the action. The guys who worked in television—the VTR and chyron operators, the video editor—they too felt a certain vicarious pride that the kid had been smart enough to know he had something, a passenger jet and its continual spiral of right-hand turns, the inevitability of its uncontrolled descent.
To the film editor, a man in his early sixties, the images looked like the handheld battle footage he’d shot himself in Vietnam, the camera with its distinctly first-person point of view, These are the men of the air cav, First Division, First Squadron, Ninth Cavalry; this morning they dropped in An Loc, fanning north toward the Cambodian border, and you are there. (In the sixties, he’d shot tape in Danang, shot the aftermath of Tet, and the proudest moment of his career was when his 16-millimeter Bolex got loaned out to one of Cronkite’s guys, who toted it between hot zones.) He marked out the first twenty-five seconds with a digital tag, the part with the girl in the top and the aborted motel-room fucking of two kids. The bureau chief told him to cut in the fluttering of those vertical lines, the camera powering up, so that the tape opened with the plane, visible, already in its final spirals. The time code on the digital display said that the relevant segment—the plane as unidentifiable streak in the sky, gleaming and silver, to the moment that implied impact, the plane disappearing at the bottom of the horizon and the view obstructed by the corrugated-steel warehouses and sprawling three-story office buildings that surrounded DFW Airport—ran thirty-two seconds.
The rewound tape went straight into the broadcast feed. Everyone at the network listening on a headset or an earpiece heard the director saying, “Cue chyron,” and “Thirty-two seconds of tape,” then the director’s quieter, “Roll VTR in three, two, one.” Anchorman Max Peterson watched his own image depart from the monitor, and the fly-in of chyron that gave the event FBN’s official title: DISASTER: THE CRASH OF PANORAMA 503. He’d covered the elections of three popes and five presidents, and whenever he had to fly by the seat of his pants, he eased forward in his chair, and his voice, always mellifluous, slowed down, and he could hear the sentences forming in his mind before he spoke them, an unattributed gift springing from a source he never understood. “You are watching an FBN exclusive, amateur footage being fed to us now, live and unedited, from our Dallas bureau. The last moments of Panorama Airlines Flight 503 captured on tape, as it struggled in an apparently futile attempt to make an emergency landing earlier this afternoon at Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport.”
Concurrently, a voice on the tape said, Oh, Jesus, look at that. The camera moved past the obstruction of an office building covered in mirrored glass panels and reacquired the target, a plane moving through the air; careening was a better word. The left wing turned skyward, a movement the engineers would study and alternately decide meant some system had either failed or just started to work again.
The plane continued its trajectory, its route expanding into circles that drew closer and closer to the ground; the sound from the tape became a litany of gasps and exhalations of disbelief from seventeen-year-old Jeris McDougal and his girlfriend, a soundtrack that contained numerous utterances of nearly all the FCC’s prohibited words, audible even over the anchorman’s narration.
At the Pilgrim Hotel, half a country away, Richard MacMurray watched the coverage on the bar television. The anchorman’s words, This isn’t happening—Richard had said the same thing at seeing his father’s body on the tarmac. But at the remove of two decades, he couldn’t remember if he’d said it while watching the special report, or if it was the phrase with which he’d begun to narrate the whole week’s worth of events: the air force officer who explained about the repatriation of his father’s body, the soldiers at attention as the aluminum casket was offloaded at Dover, the stricken look on his mother’s face in the American sunlight the afternoon of the funeral, the way he’d had to remind her to extend her hands to accept the offered flag, that symbol of thanks from a grateful nation.
The nation watched.
This isn’t happening, repeated by Max Peterson in the most studied and solemn version of his voice, and the thirty-two-second tape—the plane spiraling from the upper right-hand corner of the frame and disappearing behind a landscape of warehouses and two-story office parks and freeway overpasses, the moment of the crash obscured at the horizon, the video offering only the concussive shake of the impact, followed by the thick column of rising black smoke—was over.
The director went back to a one-shot, tight on the anchor, who had nothing to say. In his ear, the producer was telling him, “Twelve seconds to cutaway; we’ll take a break and then reset at the top of the next segment,” and she was counting, “Nine seconds, eight...” He vamped for time, shuffled the stack of papers in front of him; he was the only one who knew that they were a prop, the script to a newscast that was some twenty-one hours old, a useless artifact. The television critics who saw this continuous coverage
would look at the anchor, his pausing and obvious effort to collect himself, and to a person they would comment on how refreshing it was to see this small demonstration of humanity, proof that at FBN, real people still populated the news division.
In the collective memory of everyone who watched this broadcast, the anchor had teared up. Whether it was emotion or the very real consequence of being on the air for thirty-nine consecutive minutes and the rush that came with an unscripted live broadcast, or the fact that there was no water under the desk, when the voice in his IFB told him, “Five seconds and we’re out,” he put the papers down, then said only, “This is not happening.” His voice broke, a slight adolescent waver. The anchor hadn’t even noticed the playback monitor showing the tape again: the fuselage beginning to separate, what the engineers writing in the incident report labeled Catastrophic failure of the airframe; the tongues of fire; the noise of the impact; and the smoke rising in three distinct columns of dark-blue haze, with the camera zoomed in to its mechanical limits. And then the tape, and the utterances of the two teenagers, went silent.
“This is not happening.” The voice recovered its usual stentorian tone and pace. “We’ll return after a break.”
39
THE EARLY afternoon at Salt Lake City International Airport should have been filled with just a handful of solemn (read: hungover) travelers and the occasional harried businessman. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, the relatives of the dead began to congregate, wandering near the ticket counters, increasing in numbers, all coming to the only place where they could imagine finding an answer, standing together in the stunned silence of their grief.
The survivors moved in the disoriented and staggering steps of the near-dead. They wanted to huddle together for comfort. They’d driven a loved one to the airport, and the last thing they saw, the last image, was a tepid wave or the obligatory blowing of a kiss from the other side of the security checkpoint. They scanned the terminal in search of a sign that what they had been told was a mistake. The hope was that their loved one, just this once, had missed the plane. It must have been a different airline, a different flight, they told themselves. But their hearts were already becoming accustomed to the truth. They practiced the ways and means of saying it aloud. They made phone calls. They shared pictures from their wallets and purses. They wandered the corridors in the hope of random comfort. Their anxiety was a tangible thing that they carried and passed among themselves.
In the antiseptic hallway of terminal 2, around the displays that showed the arrival and departure times of every flight, a group began to gather, their murmuring conversations attracting the attention of Bob Denovo as he mopped the linoleum floor. Bob, like the rest of us, was a voyeur, inclined to eavesdrop. He often used an old push broom to cursorily sweep under the chairs of the waiting area just to hear one side of a telephone call. He looked around the gate and began making up stories for each distressed face that he saw. Bob craved to be connected, to be returned to the bosom of friendship; he wanted to be a confidant, an ambassador of consolation.
A large man in a navy blazer stared at the monitor, moved close enough to take his finger and run it along the screen at eye level. Bob couldn’t say why he felt drawn to this man, but he pushed his custodian’s cart toward the screens and began mopping in his general vicinity. Bob wrung out the mop in its metal press and placed down a bilingual caution sign, WET FLOOR/PISO MOJADO, even though most of the people who spoke Spanish at Salt Lake City International Airport were the Salvadorans who arrived each night to buff the floors.
As a few more people arrived, Bob gave up the charade of his headphones and simply joined the crowd, listening to the chatter as it became discernible: Panorama Airlines Flight 503 was no longer listed on the departure board. Not canceled or delayed. Just gone.
Bob thought about returning to his mop, but for some reason the image of his father passed into his head. Saturday afternoons of Bob’s childhood, watching NBC’s Game of the Week with Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek. His father had been a catcher, and among the few things he’d taught Bob was the nickname for all his gear, the mask, the chest and shin guards, the protective cup; he called them “the tools of ignorance.” “The tools of ignorance”—Bob said it out loud as he looked at his mop and bucket; pushing a mop was what he would be doing for the rest of his shift. Twelve hours on and twelve hours off, he thought, the workaday rhythm of a loser. He was a grunt, unskilled labor, an afterthought. He tried to be a good worker, to distinguish himself by volunteering to work holidays in place of the guys who were married and had families, and absolutely no one had noticed. He could put his mop and bucket back in the custodial closet and drive out into the high desert, and someone else would take his place by the next day, as if the airport spontaneously regrew the people it needed to serve it.
His thinking was interrupted by the quiet arrival of two men and two women in matching poly-blend blazers, the ubiquitous uniform of the airline customer-service rep. The particular shade of blue identified them as employees of Panorama Airlines—Bob could not see the blazers without thinking of the airline’s commercials, the flight attendant who stopped to pick up a dropped teddy bear for a five-year-old, the slogan We Fly the World intoned by one of those film noir actors. Bob wandered over to the newsstand in the main concourse, where a second small crowd had formed beneath a television monitor. Bob heard the narration before he saw the screen: “You are watching continuous live coverage of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which crashed on approach to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport just over one hour ago. Initial reports say everyone on board the flight, which originated in Salt Lake City—that’s seventy-seven passengers and six crew—has perished.”
And then the video began.
The crowd watched the monitor as it replayed amateur footage, an FBN News exclusive, you are getting our first look at the final moments of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, followed by the appearance of the gleaming jet lurching through the sky as it moved right to left across the screen.
The image they all would remember: contrails of black smoke, the fuselage moving at its catastrophic speed. They remembered the image because television took the intangible and gave it authority, eliminated any doubt; the network brought in an aerospace engineer to telestrate the destruction of the airframe, his drawings explaining the pieces missing from the aircraft as it loomed into view. The engineer talked about stresses and shearing forces of the compound elements of the airliner, and already they were trying to answer the peculiarly human question: Why? The thirty-two-second clip became the Zapruder film of personal loss. Everyone had seen it. Everyone knew how it ended.
To the question of why? there was no answer. It did not depend on an overlooked checklist or a faulty indicator light or a pilot distracted by the holiday or any singular factor. It was a confluence of events, a series of contingencies for which there was no preparation.
The television went to commercial, broadcasting an appeal for one of those emergency-alert services for the elderly, and a voice behind Bob’s shoulder said, “I have no snapshots.” Bob thought the voice was talking back to the television. Most of the assembled dozen kept watching the monitor, but Bob turned as he heard, “I don’t think I have a single picture of her,” and whether it was the tenor of the voice or how each word came between the heaving breath of his sobs, Bob made eye contact with this great, bearlike man, saw in the light of the televised glow a highway of tears marking his face. The man rifled through his wallet as if he’d misplaced a driver’s license or a credit card. Bob stepped close and took the man into his arms, the benevolent touch of consolation.
Before Bob could respond, a man in a suit stepped in front of the assembled crowd, reached up to turn down the television, and said, “You’re about to hear a series of announcements. But if you believe that you knew someone on Flight 503, I’d like you to follow me. We’re going to escort you to conference room C upstairs, where you’ll be briefed by representatives from the airline
and from the National Transportation Safety Board.”
Bob expected a barrage of questions to follow, but the group stepped in one direction and began to toddle slowly down the hallway. Only then did the large man step out of Bob’s embrace, the entirety of his story on his face, the look that betrayed all the persistent tortures of hindsight, its sadness and regret, a look that Bob knew well. He knew it from his own mirror, a look halfway to the madness of shame and grief.
40
THE AIREDALE’S name was Maestro. When the time came for his afternoon feeding, the kennel handlers found him running up and down the fence at the far end of the property, a few hundred yards to the left, a few hundred to the right, chasing imaginary rodents and romping through the grass in a path that his paws had trampled over the past four days. A guy from the local organic-foods market had delivered some marrow bones, as he did each Monday. Maestro took his out to the far end of the property and alternately chewed on it and used a whip of his neck to toss it as far as he could, another toss to throw it back toward where he started.
When the handler on duty, Tommy Campbell, called his name, Maestro ran back toward the pen and took a seat at his feet. Tommy hand-fed him pieces of lamb kibble and corners of cheddar cheese and tried to explain what he’d heard on the news. Maestro’s master had been working that doomed flight. Tommy just said it to the dog, already suspecting that Maestro, and maybe all dogs, knew far more than we give them credit for. Who knows what it was that Maestro responded to, the tenor of Tommy Campbell’s voice or even the disappearance of what had moments before promised to be a never-ending supply of cheese. This was a story Tommy would tell his wife; he’d read that wolves use different vocalizations to announce their location to other members of the pack when they are separated, and that must have been what Maestro was doing, sending up an effervescent wail, a howl, rising in timber and volume until most of the dogs at the kennel joined in and filled the yard with their mournful tune.
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