Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

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.

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 man 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.

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.”