Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

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.

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 picking. 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.