WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  Darlin’, I can’t live without you.

  I wouldn’t know how to start.

  I can’t help that my love is so strong

  For you have taken my heart.

  The friends and neighbors looked up, spellbound, and swooned at this garbage, meanwhile you sat on stage exhausted, wrinkled, stiff, crusted, dirty, a little drunk, pissed-off at the drummer, and though you felt awful you had to play music, a wounded bird made to dance, and you had to endure the humiliation of grinning and playing in front of an audience. If one could use such a fancy word to describe this gang of lost souls who filled the seats (and some more than filled them). The poor emcee stood up front in his cheap suit and cried out, “Oh it’s good to see you wonderful people,” but from the stage, they looked like deceased walleyes, mouths agape, eyes glazed, gasping. And those were the better audiences—even worse was the 8 a.m. junior high crowd where hideous gap-toothed children wriggled and jeered at the feeble jokes of the poor dying artists on stage, or the old-folks home where rows of the senile and deranged sat rocking back and forth, chins on their chests, licking their lips, pools of urine at their feet, or the Kiwanis and Jaycee luncheons with the tables of big boomers and boosters hunkering over the hot beef sandwiches, or the ladies’ luncheons, or the church socials, or the county fairs—they all melted into one massive wall of flesh, dreadful, immovable. After months of grace and ease playing in a quiet room at the radio station, it was hideous to think of facing The Folks of Radioland—pale, damp, rancid, quivering. Dead fish.

  “Oh God, save me from this;” Wingo cried, but he went out with The Shoe Shine Boys and soldiered on and almost made it through four weeks of pianos to the end. He came darn close. He did the next-to-last show, in Paynesville, and only a breakfast show in nearby Willmar remained, a cinch, but then Wingo made his fatal mistake and called the Bureau. “We’re coming home,” he whispered, his big hand shaking like a leaf, and the girl said, “We’ve added two shows. Osseo and Braham. Both on your way home.” Wingo wept. “It’ll only take a few hours,” she said. He asked to speak to Roy Jr. or Ray. They weren’t in. So Wingo tried to go to Osseo. He got as far as the bed, and lay in it, and lost track of time. The Boys pounded on his door to rouse him but it was the wrong door. Wingo lay in bed for a day, hallucinating that he was riding in the box of a coal truck. Meanwhile The Shoe Shine Boys sped south to Osseo to the gig and the bus missed a curve on the West River Road and overturned in a shallow ravine and the Boys were killed, their necks broken by fifty-seven cartons of unsold record albums, and Wingo went to work at the post office, in parcel post. When he heard music on the radio, it made him flinch. Wingo preferred absolute silence.

  Slim Graves and The Blue Movers dedicated their first show to Wingo. Like Wingo’s shows, theirs consisted of the weather and livestock reports, fan mail and requests and dedications, and about four songs, of which one should be a hymn. The Movers had plenty of songs about losing women, drinking, losing their jobs, shooting people, riding freight trains, finding other kinds of women .and then losing them too, but not many songs about Jesus, so Slim brought in a singer named Billie Ann Herschel, who had performed with the Shepherd Boys, to do the hymn segment. She was twenty-four. She stood at the microphone while Slim stood behind her, playing guitar and looking at her slim hips under the cotton dress. While singing hymns, she liked to shift her weight from side to side, and he found it hard to keep his mind off her, not that he tried to—her rear end was prettier than most people’s faces.

  Slim opened the show, whistling a few bars of “Only a Pal,” then Swanny the announcer said, “Morning, friends and neighbors, it’s time for Slim Graves and The Blue Movers for Sunrise Wafnes—gosh! they’re good—with more of that good old lonesome blues music, so pour yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy the show, there’s DAYLIGHT IN THE SWAMPS!” and the band swung into “Locomotive Daddy.” The next tune was a vocal, and then Slim said, “Well, what say we take a look in the ole mailbag here.” The letters from listeners were written by Slim himself. (“Loved the way Ernie picked apart that Dill Pickle Rag. Man, it’s hard to believe that’s one person. ”Sure enjoy all those two-steps, stomps, and shuffles. You boys are the best and I sincerely mean it. Please play Under the Double Eagle.” “You are my favorite band and I look forward to hearing your show every morning. Keep up the good work. Especially love Billie Ann and her duets with Slim. P.S. This is the first fan letter I ever wrote.”)

  Billie Ann, though she was brought in for hymns, stayed around and sang more and more with Slim. Their voices were a natural blend. At first, they did songs like “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “Froggy Went A-Courtin’,” but then they did a couple cheating songs and hit a groove and settled in. Cheating seemed to bring out their best vocal qualities.

  Nobody had ever done cheating songs that early in the morning before, but for The Blue Movers, seven-thirty was a continuation of midnight: they were night owls, the show was their last stop before they hit the sack. Slim and Billie did famous old cheating songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Foggy Foggy Dew” and “Black Jack Davy” and then they wrote their own. They wrote “A-D-U-L-T-E-R-Y (That’s a Word That Makes Me Cry)” with Billie as the young wife with two little children (the truth) who is attracted toward the old cowboy who comes to town with his band—“What is that word that begins with A that Daddy said to you?” “It’s a word, LaVerne, that big folks say, that means I’ve been untrue”—and “She Gets Pleasure from Seeing Me Cry” with Slim as the husband with three children (the truth) whose wife is cold and enjoys seeing him miserable—and “Why Must the Show Go On?” in which Slim and Billie are singers in the same band and fall in love—We’re just a couple of people

  In the show business,

  Doing a radio show,

  But deep in our hearts

  As we stand here singing,

  There’s something that you folks don’t know.

  We fell in love—there,

  I’m glad that I said it—

  And my love for another is gone.

  Why can’t I break up this act I’ve been living?

  Why must the show go on?

  You couldn’t make it much clearer than that.

  Billie Ann’s husband, Tom Herschel, was a WLT engineer and worked the afternoon shift, but he certainly knew what was up between his wife and Slim, and so did the early-morning engineer, Harlan. Engineers were a tight brotherhood, united by a shining contempt for performers, and Harlan made trouble for Slim every way he could. When Slim needed to clear his throat and gave Harlan the “Cut” sign, Harlan left the microphone wide open, and Slim, after a long night of it, had a lot of phlegm to account for and had to honk and hawk pretty hard to bring it up, none of which endeared him to the listener at home who maybe had a headful himself and didn’t care to hear Slim’s sinuses so close up. Harlan also figured out ways to make Slim’s voice sound thin and warbly and to give it a sibilant nelly-like texture. He could even bend the pitch, and on Slim’s high note, his money note, the big note at the climax of the song, Harlan could bring Slim in a quarter-step high, with a flutter, a tone that made your front teeth hurt. Slim did “Down the Chisholm Trail” and on the long yodelling part, Harlan played with him like a puppet on a string, it sounded like the cowboy’s horse was running away with him and he was bouncing on the high pommel.

  This did not discourage the two lovebirds, however, and they carried on without an ounce of shame, grabbing each other, smooching during the waffle commercials, kissing during songs, and Slim sometimes liked, during Billie Ann’s hymn, to run his hand inside the back of her dress and twitch her underwear. “I love her,” he told The Blue Movers, “she’s the most excitement I’ve had in twenty years, and boys, there is no substitute for excitement. No sir.” The Movers, rascals though they were and quick to snatch up any cupcake loose on the great table of life, nevertheless were concerned about Slim’s doing it on the job, in full view, with the husband nearby. “Don’t jim the gig for us, boss,�
�� said Smiley the steel-guitarist. “Do your two-timin’ in the tall grass like everybody else. Keep it under a bushel. Don’t go wavin’ it around like this.”

  But Slim didn’t care. The Little Buddy years had taken a toll on him, all those mawkish ballads about children. “You boys have forgot how important love is,” he said.

  He and Billie sang “They’re Only Two Dogs in Our Manger of Love”—“Her and him, they’re only in the past / And what we have is better and will last. / There’s nothing they can do, / They can’t stop me and you. / You’re mine and I am yours / And loyalty don’t open many doors. / Though marriage is made in heaven above, / They’re Only Two Dogs in Our Manger of Love,” and Billie said, in the recitation part, “I didn’t tell him about you because I didn’t need to. He knows. He knows when he touches me that my heart doesn’t jump like it used to. It can’t because my heart is far away, with you,”—and a mile away, on Blaisdell Avenue, Francis heard it, waking up early and getting dressed to do his paper route.

  He sat in the dark kitchen, his feet up on the green linoleum table, drinking coffee, waiting for the big bundle of Tribunes to hit the front porch, the little white radio turned down low so as not to wake Clare. Francis had liked Wingo okay but Slim and Billie Ann were really something. It was thrilling, so early in the morning, instead of farm reports and hymns, to get somebody singing about exactly what was on his mind, sex and misery. He had let Slim down, and a hundred times since, on his paper route, Francis had sung “Red River Valley” and gotten it to sound sweet (he thought), but now that Slim was in decline, drinking hard, stinking up the Green Room with his beer breath while he slept off a hangover, putting the bite on his WLT pals, a moocher and a four-flusher and a louse to his wife and kids, he became a better and better singer, Francis thought: the only really astonishing singer at WLT, the only one who sang so true and naked that you shivered to hear him. Sex and misery.

  The others all warbled about Home, Home and Mother, Mother Waiting at Home, The Wandering Boy Coming Home, I Wandered Away But Now I’m Going Back, There’s No Place Like Home, but Slim sang “Frankie and Johnny” about the lovers who swore to be true to each other and Johnny went out for the evening and Frankie went down to the corner to get her a bucket of beer and the bartender told her about Miss Nellie Bly and she took her big .44 and got in the cab and got off on South Clark Street and rang the big brass bell and went upstairs and looked over the transom and there he was, on the bed making love, and the gun went Rooty-toot-toot, and they rolled him over easy and carried him to the graveyard in a rubber-tired hearse and they threw her in a dungeon cell and threw the key away. He was her man but he done her wrong. It was as simple as that. You love somebody and they break your heart and you break theirs. It was a noble song.

  And then one day Slim said on the radio, “Here’s a new song that my good friend, Harold Odom, wrote, and I want to do it for you now.” There was some commotion in the background. “Well, boys,” he said, “I apologize for that, but I drank a lot of coffee last night. Anyway, here’s the number.”

  ’Twas the ninth day of October,

  The sky it looked like lead,

  And Old Number 9 left Fargo.

  In an hour they’d all be dead.

  Once she had been a fast engine,

  But her day had come and gone,

  And now she was only for short runs

  To Minot and Jamestown.

  Benny With kissed his wife and his babies,

  And they wept as their dad went away,

  And now he cut loose with the whistle

  To sing them to sleep where they lay.

  And they gave him his orders at Fargo,

  Saying, “Benny, we’re way behind time,

  You must get those empties to Minot,

  It’s all up to Old Number 9.”

  And Benny, he was the new man

  And must prove himself to the rest,

  And a good run might get him promoted,

  This evening would be the big test.

  If he came into Minot by morning,

  He’d be put on the mighty Express

  And his babies grow up in a nice house

  And their lives would be crowned with success.

  So he jumped on the green light and fired

  The engine with bales of dry grass,

  And he laid on the coals and in Erie

  They’d ne’er seen a train move so fast.

  Through Luverne and Sutton and Barlow,

  Like a rocket whistled that train,

  And her lights were a blur in the darkness

  As she blazed cross Dakota’s broad plain.

  And he turned and said to his fireman,

  “Jack, we must put on more coal,”

  And the screech of her whistle in Heimdal

  Was the cry of the engineer’s soul.

  And in Tyler, the long stretch of railroad

  Suddenly curved by the town,

  And Old Number 9 could not hold the tracks

  And she jumped about half the way round.

  And her whistle cried out in terror,

  And her wheels on the track did scream,

  And the men in the cab they prayed to God

  And were scalded to death in the steam.

  And the rain falls black as cinders

  And the sky is dark as a grave,

  And the children weep in the little white house,

  The home of the engineer brave.

  May God watch over their suffering souls

  And guide them in love and light,

  But never, no never, will they forget

  Their daddy who died that night.

  Francis listened, frozen, his hand on the cupboard door, as if someone had knocked him senseless with a rock, and then he put his head into the crook of his arm and he cried.

  CHAPTER 21

  Frank

  The most memorable part of West High was the worst: the first day, when his name was called on the loudspeaker and a boy said in a shrill, pansy voice, “Oh Franthith With! Mithter Franthith With!” and for a miserable month he wouldn’t let up—“Oh you wicked With, you!” he’d squeal, and other boys laughed, and Francis shrank down inside his jacket.

  In his freshman year, he gave up the Five Words a Day Plan: in the lunchroom, talking to his only good friend, Francis used the word “insidious” and sensed a coolness in the boy’s eyes. He was different enough, he decided, without talking funny. He was small for his age and he had inherited the long Jensen face from Mother’s side, the thin nose and the watery blue eyes, the thin lips, a man’s face on a kid’s body. In sophomore year, he experimented with parting his hair higher and lower and on the right, but it was no use. Though Uncle Art and Aunt Clare dressed him in nice corduroy pants and white shirts and sweaters, he was a queer duck. He avoided sports, lusted after girls, was avoided by girls. Everyone else believed in the war, and Francis secretly did not, a terrible secret. Churchill and his cigar and the V-sign, Roosevelt and his big grin riding in a convertible, Hitler with his little moustache dancing a jig in a French forest, Hirohito on his white horse, the Japs, the Krauts, it was all a story that he tried to have strong, pure feelings about and support the boys by saving scrap metal and buying war bonds and he couldn’t. And then suddenly the war was over. Everyone else at West was jubilant and leaped out of their chairs and tore out of school and stood in the street yelling and honking horns and stopping cars and riding around on their running boards. Except Francis, who went home and wondered what was the matter with him.

  He was voted Most Anonymous Person in the Class of 1947, and graduated on a hot May afternoon and went home and took a bath. Girls had hugged each other and wept at the ceremony. Two girls had even hugged him, but he had no idea why. School seemed predetermined to him, you went where you were told and you waited there for nothing to happen. Teachers told you so much that wasn’t true—e.g. “These are years you will look back on as some of the best of your life”—that yo
u gave up trying to believe them.

  He wrote to Mother and said it would be nice if she came to his graduation, and she wrote back and said she couldn’t, she could hardly leave the house to go to the drugstore, so how could she come to Minneapolis? “You don’t really have a mother. All you have is this funny old lady in her dirty chemise who sits and listens to the radio. How come I don’t hear you? Are you ashamed of me?”

  One night, Uncle Art offered to send him to the University, but he seemed drunk, and Francis said no, so Art gave him a pearl gray ’46 Chevy instead as a graduation present. That was Art’s way. Ignore you and never want to be with you and then dump some huge gift on you and expect you to grin and jump up and down. Francis walked around the car twice. “Nice,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Art crouched down to inspect the grille. “Leo says you’re thinking you want to come to work in radio,” he said.

  “I haven’t decided,” said Francis.

  There was a polio epidemic in Minneapolis. A neighbor boy came down with it. Went swimming at Lake Calhoun and the next day was in the hospital, a cripple. Francis fled north to Mindren, at the wheel of his own car, afraid he might have polio already. North of the city, he saw a Sherwin-Williams billboard, the bucket of paint pouring over the globe, and thought of steering east instead and becoming a gypsy (We Cover the World), but the thought of Mother straightened him out. He drove home.