Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

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.

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.