Fireball

by Robert Matzen

  They say that at the moment of death, the experiences of a person’s life flash through the mind. This wasn’t Gable’s point of death, or was it? The torture of the plane ride aged him. Did he see their life, their entire life together, flashing before his eyes? That sculpted Lombard face, that voice, that goofy grin with her tongue between her teeth and her eyebrows raised when she had gotten him good with one of her gags. The early days at her place in Bel Air, the hunting trips to Canada and Mexico, her coaching of his dance moves for Idiot’s Delight, buying the ranch and riding the horses and tinkering with the tractor, running lines for each other after dinner, the endless Selznick shoot—oh, how she had stuck by him through that year of hell on Gone With the Wind. Did he relive the elopement and the hours in that damn rumble seat with Otto driving? Otto. Christ, Otto too. He had never had a better friend, really he hadn’t. Never a more loyal lieutenant. Wink was a guy who would take a bullet for you.

  Or die doing his best to protect and serve your wife. Oh God.

  Nobody knew if there were survivors on the mountain, or maybe they did know and they weren’t telling Gable. He looked at the faces of Mannix and Wheelright for clues. Did they know for sure? No. If something had happened, if there was news, about… her, the plane would be radioed, right? But nobody made eye contact with him, and that was a bad sign.

  Ma was the toughest broad he had ever known, tougher than he was certainly, and if anyone could survive a crash landing it was her, and she’d be bossing around the ones that could walk and tending the ones that couldn’t. She was a hard one, all right, and nothing could stop her. And yet here he sat on an airplane when he hadn’t expected to be flying, listening to the drone of engines, the ominous silence in the cabin, feeling temperatures getting chillier every minute. And the faces of the men he knew so well. Grim, on edge, silent.

  “He was so tense,” Strickling said of Gable on that flight. “You knew you shouldn’t talk to him. You knew not to say ‘It’s going to be all right’ or ‘I’m sorry.’”

  The hostess brought around blankets. Gable put his arm around Jill to warm her; he didn’t say anything; neither of them did as the Western DC-3 charter flew on.

  At this moment Clark Gable revealed nothing to the others in the plane, but then he had always been a closed book and always would be, an immaculately dressed, obsessively clean person who expended his energy living the image of what Clark Gable was expected to be, which meant that now he must be what the others needed to see. It wasn’t something he thought about or affected. He was just…himself.

  Ma was the first woman who ever knew and accepted the wounded narcissist and helped him to become some semblance of a human of genuine warmth. But then Ma was a rescuer, and her incredible energy had maintained the task of spoiling Gable for six years now. How many times had she flown off the handle at his lack of communication and screamed at him and slammed doors and cussed his ears into bleeding just trying to get him to open up, which was something he just couldn’t manage for her. He just couldn’t. He knew he was a handful, but he had long ago accepted the reality of life as the king of Hollywood and all that meant for himself, for the women he had to satisfy, and, of course, for Ma. He had just accepted that he was living the life he was meant to live. He was Narcissus, with Ma cast in the role of her life as Echo.

  And now what was he to do, with her plane down somewhere between Las Vegas and Burbank?

  Finally, the passengers felt the DC-3 begin to descend, and the engines quieted a little. Gable could see lights on the ground. Dread must have filled him; he would step off that plane and not know what to do, and he hated that feeling, the helplessness and incompetence of just not knowing what was the right thing to do at an important moment. He had always been that way, as if at some level he realized he was made of spun glass, and it was his big secret and nobody else knew it but him. But Ma knew. Oh, sure she did, and somehow she loved him all the more because the glass could chip or crack or shatter into a million pieces if mishandled. But the biggest secret of all was that when that happened, she would get down on hands and knees and with utter patience pick up every shard, large and small, and put him back together again. The gal who couldn’t sit still, who paced every floor, who exploded in tirades of profanity and had the patience of a cobra would become serene for him, as if somebody had thrown a switch and she was a different person, if it meant helping Pa get through some little thing that troubled him.

  He couldn’t find fault with Ma except she gabbed too much, so why did he feel compelled to step out on her? Why had he stepped out on every woman going back to Franz Doerfler—women with genuine qualities, good qualities? As much as he was capable of loving, he loved Mrs. G, but he needed the others for reasons even he would never understand. To him it was like breathing, walking, eating breakfast. It was something he had to do, and somehow she seemed to know that, and perhaps even understood. Well, most of the time, anyway. Not quite about Virginia Grey, though, and not at all about Lana.

  Even Pa had to understand what the experience of Lana meant to him. The Lana thing meant what Crawford had meant, but more, because at the time of Crawford he had been 30 and now he was 40 and what they called “middle-aged.” And a hot little number of 21, the biggest sensation in the pictures, still found him to be the cat’s pajamas. Well then, he had to do his best not to disappoint. He owed it to the kid, and to himself, because who knew about age 42 or 45 and God forbid 50. Would he even be able to get it up at age 50? Then Ma could be content because the king had been put out to pasture, not to stud but just to graze.

  Outside the window the forward landing lights snapped on, and Hackett eased the plane down, down. Wheels touched with a bang, and they were on the ground in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  The Western Air Express ship taxied up near a hangar where police cars awaited. He followed the MGM executives off the plane and shivered in the bitter-cold air. Ma had just been here, just a little while ago, and now she was out there someplace, in the cold and in the dark. It was after one in the morning, and voices were hollow and dry. The police officers introduced themselves, shook hands with the entourage, and offered seats in their warmed cars for the drive to police headquarters.

  He looked at their faces for clues, all these cops and politicians, but they were so many masks, faces behind masks, avoiding eye contact as much as possible, not saying anything important about where Ma was. He heard something about a command post, something about rounding up search parties to put into the mountains, something about the location of the plane being pinpointed. But nobody would say anything about Ma and how she was. It was enough to scare any man like he’d never been scared before.

  29. There's No Rush

  Lyle Van Gordon kept climbing through the snow and the cold. He had to keep swiping at the tears clouding his eyes, tears produced by the winds and the snow blowing into them. His nose was clogged and it was hard to breathe, and deep within him was a general weariness, his bones aching from every bump and bruise from the rocks of 2,000 feet already climbed. But something deep inside kept him climbing up, up, over places he wondered if any human had ever trodden, through deep snow and over fallen timber.

  There was that smell again: burning wood as if in a campfire, and he wiped his nose, paused, and breathed, and watched clouds of his own breath on the mountain air and sensed—nothing. But in another few steps there was that aroma, burning wood, evoking images of survivors of the crash huddled around a fire for warmth. Exhausted as he was, he forced himself to wade on through the white, up a deep dry wash in the mountainside. He was tired and hungry, and he needed to urinate but hadn’t allowed himself for hours because Lyle Van Gordon needed to be up the mountain so he could save people.

  He sensed that he must be nearing the peaks. He didn’t know this for any sensible reason, but something about the terrain and his own mind led him to believe that he was near the end of his search. The smell of the burning wood lured him, and he imagined warmth ahead, a fire to ease what he tho
ught must be frostbite after hours in the snow. Then came another pungent odor. He didn’t know it then, but Lyle would soon be shedding some innocence. Life was hard for Nevadans, but nothing could prepare him for what lay just ahead.

  It was exhausting, plowing two feet of snow aside with every step. So terribly exhausting. He pushed on and waded his way past rotting tree trunks and boulders, until finally, up the ravine, he could see what he imagined was a metal structure. He rubbed his face through frozen gloved hands and scooped mouthfuls of snow for the water it held and sat there enjoying his long lead over the others. His stomach was empty after expending everything to climb the mountain, and he hadn’t prepared for two feet of snow. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had eaten a full meal, so long it had been that he anticipated the climb and then embarked on it. He struggled for breath in the thin air of Potosi Mountain, so thin, so cold, all alone where no men had been, not since the snow anyway. A part of him deep inside didn’t want to stand or go any further because a part of him knew. Just stay here and rest a while. There’s no rush. But really, there was a rush and there were lives at stake, and he strained to raise himself to a standing position. Ahead through clouded eyes he saw something blue. He could make no sense of it because this was January in the desert, but he saw blue amidst the white of the snow and the brown of the timber. He set one foot in front of the other and climbed toward the blue.

  There was an explosion, and he ducked. It was—what—birds?

  Yes, birds. It was blue jays. Flocks of blue jays took to the air, the strangest sight he had ever seen, their wings snapping to motion at once and producing that sharp sound. Blue jays way up here where he had seen no beast, not even a rabbit or a mule-deer.

  Now the birds started shrieking in a wild cacophony, talking to one another, scolding the human for intruding. In another 10, 20 yards he gazed heavenward and above him, ahead not too far off, he saw burning cedars, aflame not at ground level but up a good 50 feet. Smoldering. It was the odor he had caught on the mountain breeze way down below.

  He pressed on. Then, yes! Yes! He could see a metal structure. Climbing, pushing aside deep snow, up he struggled, and he thought to himself that the surface of the snow was perfectly smooth and glistened like diamonds where the sun hit it, meaning that he had gotten here first. He had gotten here to see the tail section of the plane, gleaming silver and beautiful in the morning sun, and the color and the reflection gave hope of rescue and people who were alive and resilient and grateful.

  “Miss Lombard?” he called out, his voice thin and lonely.

  But the higher he climbed, the more his heart fell. The silver tail of the plane sat upside down in the snow, dismembered amidships and burned black in places, ribs showing in others. Van Gordon leaned over to read inverted words on the tail fin. SKY CLUB. Past the tail, up the rise to the right of him, he saw what appeared to be a green rock in the snow. No, not a rock; a man. And then another. Men in military overcoats. Two, no three of them, sprawled about in the snow, face down, face up, odd angles, all of them dead and frozen to the spot.

  After the hours, the effort, and the hoping, Lyle Van Gordon found his limbs unresponsive. He stumbled against rocks that he couldn’t see under the blanket of white. He struggled past the belly-up tail of the plane. Nearby, the trees gave an occasional pop and crackle, and smoke wafted into the morning air. But now he didn’t find the scent of cooking pine to be at all fragrant.

  The Bull thought to look up and his mouth hung open. All those blue jays up there, flapping limb to limb, impatient, annoyed, calling out to the visitor below. And what was that up there with them? Caught on tree limbs all about and moving in the breeze were crazy things. Fragments of aluminum, opened suitcases, pieces of clothing. What was that, swaying there in the breeze, a fur coat? And there above him, a brassiere, and he stared at it until his eyes watered and suddenly he was crying, looking up at a brassiere of all the crazy things and balling his eyes out.

  The quiet of the morning became oppressive. He was all alone and did not want to go a step further. Instead he backed off and waited for the others. If only there was something he could do for anyone, any survivor, but there wasn’t anything for him here but death. By accident he looked into a blackened pile of debris directly ahead below a cliff and there saw blackened bodies that had been cut to pieces. He backed off some more, and waited a long while until Deputy Moore came up, and then the others.

  Jack Moore grew wary when he saw Van Gordon, the man sitting on a rock and slumped, forlorn. Moore took some steps in a forward direction, up the hard terrain of deep snow and steep mountain, past the Bull, and he walked into hell. Ahead he beheld what looked for all the world like the city dump. Luggage everywhere; the twisted fuselage of the plane, a tangled mass of aluminum, wires and cables, seats, shattered glass, random hunks of engine, and melted rubber. Wedged in here and there were passengers, or rather, what was left of passengers; pieces of passengers. Bodies that had so recently been human were now nothing but blackened clumps of bone and tissue. People burned to a crisp. All around in rugged terrain, in the midst of rock and snow and twisted metal, he beheld arms, and legs, and heads. The rescuers had found what granite cliff could do to a plane and its occupants at a couple hundred miles an hour.

  The pungent smell in the air he and the others had encountered now made sense. It was no longer the clean campfire scent of pine and cedar; it was burned flesh smoldering from the knot of fuselage at the base of the cliff, and from lazy traces of steam wafting up from wreckage that lay crumpled ahead, with NC 1946 painted in large black letters on one of the silvery wings now leaning against the cliff wall. Oh, that stench; it must have been the horrid smell that drew the blue jays, now calling from above, insistently, mockingly, hundreds of birds above them looking down on the foolishness of humans and their flawed flying machine.

  All about in the snow, what snow hadn’t been melted away, was oil and blood in beads and splashes and puddles and lakes.

  The six weary, sickened men climbed to the base of the cliff that rose up before them, blackened for 90 feet straight up. There was no easy place to stand on the steep incline. Deputy Moore rested hands on knees and gasped, struggling for a deep breath, or any breath at all; the baked earth revealed a hodgepodge: crockery, shards of glass, contents of suitcases, bits of flesh, twisted metal.

  Death.

  Lyle Van Gordon turned and faced down the mountain. He could see Las Vegas, glistening in its normalcy and life, far off in the distance. In other circumstances this would have been a spectacular view of a beautiful morning. He put his head in his hands and just sat.

  Deputy Moore asked if anybody could see her, if they could recognize Carole Lombard. It suddenly seemed strange to hear a human voice in this vile place. No one answered. No one but the angry blue jays. The rescuers didn’t want to look anymore and find out what had become of the movie star.

  Moore had to find a way to get word down the mountain that all aboard the ship were lost.

  Robert Griffith of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce knew that the story here was a worldwide FLASH. The death of Carole Lombard and its effect on Hollywood in general, and on her husband, King of the Movies Clark Gable, in particular. But Griffith didn’t care. He was a rescuer and a man, and he hurt for the passengers of this plane, for Lombard and all the others on board, the pilot, the co-pilot, those soldiers lying back there in the snow. All of them. Such a way to die.

  The men shared a thought in the long silence: This wasn’t just about Lombard and her husband. All these people had mothers and fathers. Some had sisters and brothers and wives and children.

  Even the courageous, hardened band of Nevadans who had struggled for hours up the most unforgiving mountain in the west and found the plane a hundred others sought—all six of these men needed a moment. Some broke down. Others knelt in prayer. The birds above settled, and silence deepened and the moments passed until Deputy Sheriff Moore remembered his duty. He asked for two who were wi
lling to stay with the wreckage, but the band was all in and he knew it.

  Finally, Moore said he would stay with the wreck of the plane until other rescuers arrived, and he asked for one other volunteer. He didn’t expect any takers, but Bondley said a simple, harsh, “Yah,” and all six helped to get a fire going. The others gave Moore and Bondley all the food they had left in their pockets. Moore handed over his car keys and said to get word to the sheriff. Then the two deputies watched the crestfallen four others descend from the scene, Van Gordon, Griffith, Otto Schwartz, and Jack Hart. The two who stayed knew the horror the others faced: It had been hell getting up and now it would be hell getting back down, especially as they swallowed the bile they all felt rising from a scene none were prepared to see up close, despite their best intentions.

  Three hours later, after many slips, falls, scrapes, cuts, and smears of blood in the snow, the four descending rescuers finally made contact with level ground once again. Wearily they eased into their vehicles and drove down to Goodsprings. Griffith sent a wire up to the Clark County Courthouse in Las Vegas. At the Pioneer Saloon, a reporter sidled up to the four shell-shocked men and asked what they had discovered. Jack Hart said, “We found it. Sure. It was a tough climb. I guess I don’t care to say any more about it.”

  “It was pretty awful,” Otto Schwartz allowed. “Me, I think I’ll go to bed.”

  30. Caring Enough to Climb a Mountain

  The Gable party of six was driven from the police station in dark of night past the southern edge of town and into desert. There along Highway 91 they found the brightly lit—even at two in the morning—El Rancho Vegas motor hotel. It was in fact the only hotel and casino in the entirety of Las Vegas, the first of its kind and genesis of later empires. A main structure housed the casino, restaurant, and opera house. Behind it in a broad semicircle stood 63 rooms motel style. El Rancho Manager Ernie Hawes met the group upon arrival, no matter that it was the middle of the night, and personally showed Gable into the best room in the place. Hawes put the MGM men on both sides of Gable, Mannix in an adjoining room, and Gable remained as he had been since the ranch: bewildered. It was the middle of the night and nothing made sense and he paced his room, which was done in a cowboy motif, and smoked and paced and smoked and waited—he didn’t even know what he was waiting for. For some stranger to come in and tell him his wife was dead? Time dragged and he was tired and angry and couldn’t see straight, but he went on pacing and smoking. When he ran out of cigarettes, more appeared for him. Who brought them, he didn’t know. He couldn’t think at all. He could only pace the room that was like a cage, back and forth, back and forth.