After a week in Dallas, he did, however, return to Utah to view a few possible homesteads. He checked back into the same hotel in Salt Lake and took his dinners at the Canyon Room Tavern and Grill, where he kept looking for Ash the bartender and Sherri the waitress, his well-qualified leads. The new girl behind the bar did not know either of them by name. But on the third night, as Mike tried to muster some newfound enthusiasm for his overdressed salad, he asked a manager what happened to Ash the bartender, and the manager simply said, “503,” the state-sponsored shorthand for the crash.
Each evening, he would check in with the office via telephone, and each evening, Sarah Hensley would ask him when he was coming back; signatures were requested and required. But Mary Beth had years ago thought to have a stamp made with a facsimile of Michael David Renfro’s signature, and as long as there were Speedy Ink rollers and pads, his signature could pay the bills and endorse checks and write payroll. Once he’d heard of Ash’s death, Mike avoided the grill and took to his bed, ordering three or even four meals a day from room service, watching reruns of television series that were two decades old.
In one serial drama about a law firm, the name partner had died, and the junior partners staked their claim to the corner office even before passing the hat for a nice display of carnations whose ribbon spelled out Beloved leader, mentor, and friend. He realized there would be no wreath for Mary Beth, no ribbon; Mike would ask one of the girls to clean out the personal items from Mary Beth’s desk, and the girl (it would be Sarah Hensley) would find in the rear corner of the top drawer two pieces of saltwater taffy, desiccated and fossilized, their wax wrapping paper knotted together at the ends. Sarah was enough of a romantic to recognize a souvenir when she saw one; she slipped the taffy into her pocket, and later, it took up residence in her desk. In a little more than five months, after a discreet period of mourning, Sarah Hensley was promoted to office manager of the Renfro Agency and moved into Mary Beth’s old office.
Howdy Ard got a literary agent and with her help wrote a book proposal, which turned into a book called The Chief: Leadership for Tomorrow’s Crisis. It saw mediocre sales and spawned another book with even fewer readers.
After a brief hearing that occurred in her absence, Sherri Ashburton was named the sole beneficiary of her mother-in-law Geneva’s estate. Geneva died of complications from the pneumonia that set in just a week after her hip surgery. She was buried next to her husband in the family plot, and a headstone was added to represent the body of her deceased son Warren. His seat had been in the part of the plane that had been engulfed in the fireball, and Sherri chose not to go through the charade or the expense of burying an empty casket some fourteen hundred miles from where she lived. One afternoon she took a pair of her husband’s jeans and doused them in lighter fluid and burned them in the chamber of an old Weber grill that Ash had purchased at a yard sale the summer before; she scraped the ashes into a small metal can that had once held some English toffee and kept the can in her closet.
Eighteen months after the crash of Panorama 503, the National Transportation Safety Board’s forensic reconstruction of the incident would appear in executive summary, omitting the unnecessary statistics such as airspeed and pitch angle, and providing the story of the death of seventy-seven passengers and six crew, as follows:
The aircraft leveled off at 11,000 feet and rolled out of a fifteen-degree left turn, gear still retracted, autopilot and auto-throttle systems engaged. The aircraft entered the wake vortex of a Delta Airlines MD-80 that preceded it by approximately forty seconds. Over the next three seconds, the aircraft rolled left to approximately eighteen degrees of bank. The autopilot attempted to initiate a roll back to the right as the aircraft entered a wake vortex core, resulting in two loud “thumps.” The first officer then manually overrode the autopilot by putting in a large right-wheel command, yet the airplane never reached a wings-level altitude. At 14:03:01, the aircraft’s heading slewed suddenly and dramatically to the left (full left-rudder deflection). The aircraft began to oscillate in pitch. The aircraft pitched down, continuing to roll. Gaps in instrument data were inconsequential, likely caused by onboard power fluctuations. Performance of the craft during the incident was verified by amateur videotape of the crash. At 14:03:07, the descent rate reached 3,600 feet per minute. At this point, the aircraft stalled. Left roll and yaw continued, and the aircraft rolled through inverted flight. A compressor disk likely disintegrated, rupturing fuel, oil, and hydraulic lines. The nose reached ninety degrees down, less than a half mile above the ground. The plane descended fast and impacted the ground nose first.
Likely cause: A manufacturing defect, complicated by failure to perform both routine and emergency maintenance.
57
FOR YEARS, the boy will dream of his mother.
In those dreams, she is young, filled with an illusory beauty. She is part of landscapes that Gabriel Blumenthal finds no way to describe in his waking life. He has few true memories of her. Instead he has the tangential planes where memory intersects with subconscious hope; his own desire for a well-ordered ending suggests that being orphaned is a burden, which of course it is, but the largest part of Gabriel’s burden will be these dreams.
In each, his mother is vibrant and very much alive. He has grafted images of her from photographs into surrealist tableaus. On the few occasions when he encounters adults who knew his mother, he will ask them to share their memories of her, a ritual that he eventually stops in his teens, saddened by the inconsequential nature of what these strangers recall: She was nice, She had very straight teeth, She didn’t like white bread, She hated the Doobie Brothers, She kept the office humming right along.
The functional details of his life: As an older preteen, he will play a competent small forward in rec-league basketball. He will hit the floor with abandon in pursuit of loose balls, work tirelessly on the off-hand dribble and on maintaining good defensive position, spend hours shooting the same shot over and over, in the quest to develop a decent touch on his jumper from the left-hand corner. He’ll box out for rebounds and deftly follow his shot to the offensive glass. He’ll shoot free throws at a near 90 percent clip. He’ll play a steady if unspectacular second base from T-ball through Little League and on to Babe Ruth; he’ll learn the art of the drag bunt and hit for high average, but in high school, he’ll ride the bench for only a year. He will begin to seek his escape in comics and graphic novels in which the world of morality, though still murky and situational, is far more clearly defined than the confusing world in which he lives.
Gabriel suffers the serial angst of adolescence and the embarrassments of eighth-grade gym; the pleasures of furtive kissing in a basement closet will elude him, but instead he will find happiness in the discovery of music, namely the recordings of bands that speak to his sense of alienation and displacement. Secure in his place, the older Gabriel will favor solitary pursuits.
His uncle will teach him the strategies and offenses of competitive chess and the joy found in a library of hundreds of books. Richard will convert the basement of his home into a makeshift gymnasium with free weights and exercise mats and a stationary bicycle as part of his own last-ditch effort at self-improvement, but it will become more Gabriel’s equipment than anyone else’s. Gabriel will get the rest of his exercise as a long-distance runner. By seventeen, he will be a letterman on his high school track team, a threat at the five-thousand- and ten-thousand-meter distances. Running will be the only place where he finds comfort in his surroundings, the place where his breathing, his own rhythm and function, become part of the natural order of things. The teenaged Gabriel will spend his quiet hours alternately doing his road work or hiding behind the closed doors of his bedroom, practicing diligently on the electric bass guitar, becoming competent enough to mimic the wandering bass lines of Jack Bruce, the pentatonic rumblings of Paul McCartney. He’ll take hours to do this, playing the complications of “Crossroads” until his fingers can keep up with the Clapton-is-God-era pic
king. Gabriel will not join in bands or casual basement jam sessions; he will not ever perform in public. In other words, if you need a clinical assessment: he is going to grow up; he’ll become a teenager; he is going to be fine.
58
THE WINTER prayers of schoolchildren are limited in their ambitions, invested only in the idea of school closings, unconcerned with the consequences of squalls that lock in traffic for days, the historic conflation of a pair of Atlantic low-pressure systems stalling over the eastern seaboard, the kind that bring blizzard conditions and a record three inches of snow per hour. The local eleven o’clock news reported tomorrow’s cancellations—banks, libraries, recreation centers, shopping malls, all closed—as the lead stories. The city obligingly ground to a halt.
The solitary light from a news camera illuminated the intersection where Richard and Cadence walked. The cameraman was a freelancer who sometimes worked for FBN, and he knew Richard by sight, waved and shouted his last name. He turned the attached external light on Richard and shot a few seconds of footage, Richard taking a quartet of short and choppy steps before sliding across the packed snow in the middle of the street. He kept the camera on as Richard and Cadence tossed small, puffy snowballs at each other, Cadence’s first throw striking Richard in the upper chest, the cameraman catching the powdery explosion on tape, lit by the battery-fueled spotlight and by the yellowish sulfur of a decades-old streetlamp, the two competing lights giving the evening an almost buttery glow—followed by Richard’s sudden lurch sideways to avoid Cadence’s second missile, then his laugh, the openmouthed and uninhibited roar of it.
Nearly midnight now, a Metrobus eased down the hill, riding its brakes and knifing gently sideways, barely in control. At the bottom of the hill, it slid in front of Richard, blocking the cameraman’s view. The bus was trailed south by a cabal of young Salvadoran kids on foot, some of whom were seeing snow for the first time. A handful of unsupervised rogues strolled up and down the nightclub-and-restaurant district of Eighteenth Street, testing the packing abilities of the newfound blanket of snow, compressing projectiles from the moister slush at curbside, scraping grapefruit-size balls off the trunk lids of parked cars, test-firing them against No Parking signs. The kids took the opportunity to belt the bus with a fusillade of iceball artillery, the impacts sounding out like snare drums across the quiet nightscape. The bus, displaying its Out of Service sign, slowed to a halt, and its driver stepped out to gather up snowballs for a retaliatory strike. He was outnumbered six to one, and Cadence and Richard quickly came to his aid, Richard fanning out to the left and lobbing snowballs up in the air as far as he could, baiting the kids to watch, and, each time they looked up, firing a fastball on a straight line right at the ringleader, who retreated after being struck twice in the chest, once in the leg (the driver). As the kid withdrew, he got truly smoked by a snowball thrown on a perfect straight line by Cadence, a hollow-sounding thump hitting against his wool hat. The teenagers threw back a few more half-hearted volleys and began a full-fledged retreat.
A four-lane midcity street, the bus driver laughing and brushing himself off before tipping his imaginary hat at Cadence, reboarding the bus, the light of the camera going dark. The safety gates of every storefront had been pulled down hours ago, all except a small French bistro where the waiters and kitchen staff appeared to be singing a karaoke version of “La Marseillaise,” the familiar overture audible due to the entirely absent traffic. Enough snow in four hours to close the bars, empty the buses and the parking lots. As Richard and Cadence walked through the intersection, the lights blinked red in all four directions. In the middle of the street, Richard pulled Cadence to him.
What is every kiss but a prelude, an invitation? The composer Schumann, himself no stranger to the disorders of the mind, described Chopin’s preludes as “ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions.” The Chopin analogy here was a direct parallel, the preludes twenty-four individual pieces, intended to be at once separate and unified. What better description for these kisses, those short pressures that added up to a constant state? Richard kissed Cadence, and Cadence returned the kisses, her hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his scarf flying backward over his left shoulder; the cameraman, had he been more of a voyeur, could not have resisted circling the two lovers, but instead he recognized the moment as both beautiful and private, and set about packing up his gear. In the snow-packed middle of a quiet Eighteenth Street, the moon occluded by a low blanket of clouds and the scene scrimmed by a curtain of snow falling to the ground in large, featherweight clumps, Richard and Cadence kissed, and then kissed again.
It was impossible for him to shake his desire to speed up the events of the next few days, to see how everything would turn out. He wanted some confidence that he could take care of the boy. He wanted to know he could do this ridiculous new job he’d accepted on a whim. He wanted to know if the faith and confidence that Cadence claimed to see in him were real qualities, the kind that made him appear a trustworthy presence on the news at 5:00, 6:00, and 11:00. He wanted to know whether the things he viewed as the possibilities of a better life actually were. He wanted to know if he should buy or rent. Could he afford a house with a few dozen acres, the kind of large and inviting kitchen that he could fill with new friends and their children? He wanted to know what Gabriel liked to eat, what color he’d want his new bedroom to be, whether or not he’d ever dreamed of having a dog. But mostly he wanted Cadence; definitions could come later. She always resisted him when he tried to put labels on things, and in between pressing his lips to hers, he told himself he did not need a name for it; he just desired her presence, its calming influence, the possibility that when they did define it, it could be something permanent.
Cadence took a second armload of snow and shoveled it at Richard. He stepped toward her, halving the distance between their bodies, and as the powdery snow fluttered down, it left its momentary traces on his overcoat. He lifted one foot in the air, pointed to his wingtips, standard-issue Washington wear, and said, “I don’t exactly have foul-weather gear on.” The cuffs of his pants were starched with ice. The wet pom-pom on the top of Cadence’s hat fell limply to one side, and Richard stepped in, brushed the snow off her shoulders while she did the same for him, then used her scarf as leverage to pull her in for another kiss before they headed back to her building.
59
INSOMNIA. The middle-of-the-night city noise conspicuously absent. No deliveries, no garbage trucks in the alley, the only sound the mechanical grind of the snowplows as they cleared the streets, burying the cars parked streetside under decaying mountains of gray-brown slush. When Richard looked at the clock again, it was nearly four o’clock, though he did not remember slipping into the maw of sleep. His view out the window was of a city covered in the cold, dull film of rain.
Beside him, Cadence breathed at a steady pace, one Richard assumed to mean she was deeply asleep. That sonorous breathing he associated with the sound of his own childhood, summer nights when his father broke out the transistor radio and together they listened to Chuck Thompson broadcast the Orioles games on WBAL. Richard had grown up in the no-baseball-in-DC era, between the city’s second and third major-league teams, and hadn’t even seen a game in person until he was twenty. He made the drive up to Baltimore on a Sunday afternoon to sit in the upper bowl of the old Memorial Stadium, section 9, eat three hot dogs and drink four National Bohemian beers. A foul ball from light-hitting shortstop Mark Belanger sailed over his head, into the lap of a kid who looked like nothing so much as the five-year-old version of himself. He’d not thought of that afternoon in years, but he knew he was really thinking about Gabriel, how to teach a boy the unspoken things—about baseball, about…He tended to forget how he’d learned these things himself, listening to the Motorola transistor from Lew’s workbench, his father arranging two nylon-webbed folding chairs in the backyard.
On those nights, Lew taught Richard the proper way to light a cigar, how to tamp its f
at end and how much of the tip to cut. In that great haze of smoke, his father promised that next summer they’d make the drive up to Baltimore together and see the O’s and their crazy manager, who was so fond of the three-run home run. The next summer, Richard’s mother sat at the dining room table studying for her real-estate licensure exam, right up until the day that a man from the General Services Administration showed up with a settlement offer from the government, and Lew was dead.
When the alarm sounded, Richard experienced a momentary dislocation, not knowing much of the situation beyond the time, 5:27 a.m., displayed in the bright-green digits of the clock. In the early days of his career, and again in the first furious months after his divorce, there were weeks of eighty-plus hours and bar nights that went on until three in the morning, and going back to work meant a quick shower, a change of underwear, a new shirt and tie. The era of guest beds, foldout couches, strange apartments, temporary women. He knew this clock. Cadence.
Panorama Page 32
