WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  With the train steaming slowly through the pine woods, the snow swirling up from the wheels, Frank curled up on the caneback seat and pulled his jacket around his ears. He fell asleep and then awoke with a jolt and felt for the billfold. Still there. He slipped it into the front of his pants. He thought, “I could go to Minneapolis, back to the radio mill, return the money, work my way up the ladder, and ask Maria to stick it out, or I go to Chicago and send for her and then something else could happen.” He fell asleep again.

  He awoke as the train pulled into Duluth, under the long shed and up to the stone palace, alongside a parade of wagons of mailsacks and baggage. “All out!” yelled the conductor.

  Frank crossed the platform to where freight men were loading the baggage onto another train across the platform. He tapped a man on the shoulder: “Is this to Minneapolis?” he asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “You sure?”

  The man shrugged. “I’ve never missed one yet.”

  It was only a thought, but he could go to Chicago, get an apartment, let her know where he was, find a job, and by the time his Maria rolled in, he’d be sitting pretty. You’ve got to jump out front and surprise a woman before she’ll pay you proper attention, maybe, he thought. But there wasn’t time to think.

  The train to Chicago whistled, and rather than miss it, he got on. Three old red passenger cars and a baggage car and Railway Mail Service and a coal tender and the locomotive. “Now boarding on track four. . . . The Superior ... with intermediate stops ... to Chicago,” said the train announcer, but Frank was already on board, in a double-facing seat, his feet up, looking forward. The whistle blew twice more, and he thought, Daddy, be careful, but of course it was him who was in danger now.

  Ray lay pale, damp, unshaven, shivering under the heavy quilt and a wool blanket, and rolled over on his other side and faced the table. The lamp had a towel over it, and there was a glass of water and eight bottles of pills, and his old Crosley bedside radio, the Aztec model, a golden temple with triangular tuning knobs.

  “I knew what would happen if I lived long enough,” he told Patsy, “but frankly, I would give anything to have one more year.”

  She had come to visit him on Tuesday and now it was Friday and she was still there, nursing him. Vesta was still in London, where she had discovered tape recorders. She was so happy on the telephone, Ray didn’t have the heart to tell her how sick he was. “The tape recorder is going to change everything,” she said. “We can harvest lectures and speeches from anywhere, use them anytime. I can travel the world with a tape recorder—it only weighs forty pounds—I can gather the wisdom of the nations and bring it back to the Midwest. Ray, this is going to finally make radio what it ought to be.” She laughed at the joy of it. She was heading for Stockholm, she said, to interview Nobel Prize winners.

  He hadn’t listened to the radio for three weeks. He was dying, for pete’s sake—should a man be ushered into Eternity directly from listening to a Lakers game or a North West Orient Airlines commercial? His chest felt caved-in, it was hard to breathe. His heart hurt—and the iodine on his forehead from when he had fallen, which he didn’t recall, though he remembered getting up in the middle of the night and trying to use the bathroom.

  One morning he woke up and felt better and went through his desk and threw out everything. All the letters, all the check stubs, all the pictures. Put your house in order: clear the decks and make room for the young, that was his philosophy. The old men die and the children forget. When your time comes to go, get out. Not like that fool Dad Benson. Seventy years old and still hanging on. Poor sister Lottie, coming in to screech a few more songs every morning, young people smirking behind her back. Why couldn’t these people see the handwriting on the wall?

  “Man is conceived in ignorance and born in doubt and his life goes downhill from there,” he wrote to Dad. “He makes his way from pure foolishness to outright stupidity, stopping now and then to do something mean and ugly, and yet, to some lucky persons, the Lord has doled out a modicum of common sense, enough to enable us to know our butt from a hot rock, to not spend all our money or insult our friends, and to sit down and shut up when it’s time to. Now is the time to sit down and shut up, Walter. The urge to perform is not a sign of talent. Greed is not an indication of business acumen. Keep this in mind; it may be helpful in the future. The beauty of retirement is the way it raises your reputation. Keep plugging ahead and you will soon become a ridiculous old relic and a back number, but quit soon enough and live long enough and you will come to be regarded as a genius and a pioneer. This is the truth, otherwise I wouldn’t tell you. The key to a person’s reputation is He knew when to quit. A word to the wise should be sufficient. Good luck, your friend, Ray.”

  No response from Dad. No response from so many. He couldn’t blame them. Dying people aren’t much fun to be around. Dying was so tedious and such a miserable business, it made a man not want to live. Dying was so discouraging. Here you are, spending your last days on this green earth and they should be beautiful days, and instead you drag around with your willie in the dirt.

  Ray’s letter didn’t reach Dad for a week because Frank wasn’t there to see to it. When Dad got it, it rode around in his jacket pocket for a few days and then, finishing up his toast and chipped beef at the Pot Pie, Dad reached for his wallet and found the envelope, read the letter, looked up and said, “We’re going back to the barn, Wilmer. We came into radio with Ray and we’re getting out with him. Tomorrow’s the last show.”

  “What’s the big rush?”

  “No point in postponing our obligations, Wilmer. It takes us long enough to wake up to them.”

  Wilmer went home and cried. Tiny was all he was good at. People had told him for years that Amos and Andy were nowhere near as well done as Tiny, including a great many fine colored folks on the North Side had come up and told him that. “What do I do now?” he wondered. If his main talent in life was to be a colored man, there wasn’t going to be much call for him outside of radio probably. Maybe Patsy Konopka could make him his own show. Tiny and His Buddies. And now, Powers Dry Goods Company—when it comes to fashion, come to Powers—is proud to present ... Wilmer Benson as—Tiny! “Yassuh, yassuh, yassuh, and how do, ladies and gentlemens, it sho is real to be heah!” And on this sweet dream, he fell asleep.

  Little Becky went back to her dad in Manhattan. He wrote her a nice letter saying that he woke up one morning and decided “I want my little girl.” He had reformed. No more long trips to Rome and Morocco with strange women. It was going to be strictly home and hearth from now on. Jo and Frank weren’t home—they were off to Michigan to see their aunt, whose house burned down when the hoboes got mad at her because she stopped making johnnycake. There was only Dad and Delores and Tiny. “Mornin’, li’l miss. Ah ’spected yo’ might be fixin’ to de-part so I come round with Ole Henry to give yo’ a lift to the de-po. Wheah is yo’ valise?” asked the old colored man. Delores the exotic dancer was leaving Elmville and going to Chicago to work with polio victims; life with Dad had lifted her aim in life, and now she hoped to trade her G-string for a nurse’s cap. She thanked Dad for his goodness, and then Becky said her goodbyes and “Oh how can I ever thank you?” and Dad made his “We show our gratitude by doing good for others” speech and Little Becky cried, “Goodbye, Elmville! Goodbye, trees and houses and yards! Goodbye, church and school! Goodbye, seeds and dirt! Goodbye, snowstorms and thunderstorms and hot July days and Christmases and birthdays! Goodbye, everybody! Goodbye, Uncle Dad!” and a transcribed bus carried the child away. Dad said, “All good things must come to an end but God never closes one door but what He opens another. It is never a bad day that has a good evening.” And that was the end of Friendly Neighbor, except for when Dad knocked over the stand, which hit the microphone, making a bwaannngggg, and Tiny laughed a loud white-man laugh.

  That was all there was time for. “Whispering Hope” came in and Reed Seymour said Friendly Neighbor was brought to you
by the friendly folks at Milton, King Seeds, and Dad said goodbye to Marjery, who was all torn up by the suddenness of the end.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” she cried. “You bring me in here to play a child and I spend half my life on it and now you throw me over the cliff like I was a piece of garbage.”

  Dad said that all good things must come to an end.

  “But what am I supposed to do?” she cried.

  Dad smiled. “Each man to his work. Find a job. There’s work for all hands in life, Becky. Or go back to school. Learning, you know, is what makes a man fit company for himself.” He patted her shoulder and turned away and a second later let out a shriek and hopped twice, sideways, trying to escape from her hand in the seat of his pants. Her sharp fingers dug into his wounded rear end, like someone sticking a hot poker in him, a hot green wave of pain, and he had to twirl around twice to get her out. “It hurts!” he said. She bared her teeth: hee hee hee hee hee.

  “How evil you are,” he said.

  “Yes!” she cried. “Yes! I am evil. And I hate your ass!”

  Dad lay on the Green Room sofa, recuperating. “Twenty-three years,” said Wilmer. Dad corrected him: twenty-four . Or was it twenty-two? Anyway, nobody had been waiting in the Green Room to congratulate them. No cake or cookies. Roy Jr. was gone to see Ray, and Roy was on the farm. Leo was on the air. Everybody was somewhere else. “We should’ve remembered to have a party, but maybe nobody would’ve come,” said Dad. “Like they say: In time of prosperity, friends there are plenty; in time of adversity, not one in twenty.”

  “It is lonely around here,” said Wilmer. “Especially with Faith gone.” He paused a beat. “Too bad about her.” He waited. Dad said nothing. Wilmer said, “You never told me about you and her.”

  “Well, an open door could tempt a saint,” said Dad. “And she was pretty wonderful. She kept me going. There’s that to be said about it. It was wrong, but without her, I would’ve quit ten years ago, so maybe there’s some good there somewhere. Let’s go get a drink next door. No fans down in the lobby, are there? Good. Let’s go.”

  The two old veterans came out the front door of the Ogden and stood on the corner in the bright sunshine. Across the street, at the MacPhail School of Music, a woman struggled to get her cello through the door. A man darted out of a roadster parked at the curb to hold the door open for her. She turned and blushed, and he tipped his hat.

  “Isn’t that Irtie Lybarger?” asked Dad. “The young fellow who used to work in the newsroom? That’s him.”

  “Naw, he’s too old to be Irtie. That guy’s almost as old as us.”

  “Irtie was a long time ago, Wilmer. He worked for Phil Sax, and Saxy went out to San Diego in thirty-nine.”

  Wilmer suggested the Pot Pie, and Dad said, sure, but they stood on the spot, under the WLT sign, reluctant to move.

  “Look,” said Wilmer. “You can’t even buy a radio around here anymore.” It was true. The Bush & Lane Radio Co., a fine outfit, was gone from across the street at 1200 LaSalle—moved or gone out of business, who knew which—and Lew Bonn Radios was gone from 1211, replaced by General Nut Sales Co., and Eckberg Radio was gone, and Mpls. Radio Sales, replaced by the Northwestern Casket Co. showroom. Four great radio shops within a block of WLT, all gone now. Actually, thought Wilmer, the big Zeniths that Lew Bonn used to sell, the big floor consoles, looked somewhat like those oak caskets, same sort of fluted molding, like the proscenium of a theater.

  Once, the WLT signal was received all the way to the Alleghenies and west to the Rockies, but that was when radio amounted to something and radios were built to pull in signals. The Zenith had a tuning knob as big as a grapefruit. You’d spin that and bring in Nashville and Cincinnati and Detroit and Little Rock and Salt Lake City, but the plastic pisspot radios you bought nowadays wouldn’t get a signal from thirty miles away. The industry figured, why build radios that can bring in the world when the listener lives in Minneapolis and we want him to shop in Minneapolis? So you sell dinky radios and fill them up with twenty-four hours of orange peels, cigarette butts, and coffee grounds, and it sells the beer, Jack, but gosh, what a comedown. All the shows are gone that let people sing on the radio who were not famous, thought Wilmer. They were chewed up and digested and shat out by big money, and soon the radio stations will be gone too, only their signals remaining, cranking out nasty songs by savage young capitalists. Radio was a dream and now it’s a jukebox. It’s as if planes stopped flying and sat on the runway showing travelogues. But of course if you climb on your high horse and talk about radio when it amounted to something, people mark you down as an old fart, the sort who grumbles about the decline of railroad travel and circuses and the 4th of July and the death of the six-day bicycle race.

  “Well, I always knew that the end would come someday,” said Dad, “and now here it is.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The End

  Away from the office, sick, out of touch, Ray wondered about Frank, worried that he had been lost in the North Woods, left in a snowbank to die. Ray woke up at 2 a.m. with visions of Frank weeping in a forest, bruised, bleeding from the forehead, and called Roy Jr. at home. “What are we doing about Frank?” he cried.

  “Hoping to catch the bastard,” said Roy Jr. “He stole $800 from me. He abandoned ship in the middle of the hurricane. If he calls you, have him call me. I’d like to strangle him.”

  “But the boy is in trouble.”

  “You’re damn right he is.”

  The Rise and Shiners had no idea what had happened to him; he had wandered off, that was all, Rudy told Roy Jr. Frank was an oddball and not one of them, they had no idea how his mind worked. Probably he had gone back to Maria. Slim came home, quit music, and became a janitor at a junior high school. The Shepherds returned to WLT, apologized, and Roy Jr. let them have a Sunday morning spot, 8:20—8:35, the former Reflections spot. “Suits us fine,” said Elmer. “I always thought Sunday was the best time for us.” He and Rudy and Al got jobs at the post office, and Wendell went to work laying concrete driveways, but it was only a temporary setback, they were sure. Maria left WLT when Friendly Neighbor ended; somebody said she was selling candy at Woolworth’s. Roy Jr. tried to call her at home, but an old lady answered and said, “I don’t care for your products, and if you don’t stop harassing me, I’ll have you arrested.” Slim thought Frank had gone on to better things. “I don’t know what his talent is,” he told Patsy Konopka, “but he is sure good at it.” She thought Frank’d go to Chicago. “If radio is going to be saved, Chicago is where they’ll save it.” She imagined Frank shooting to the top at a big Chicago station, WLS or WGN, and sending for her to write him a show. He’d have to shoot fast, though—Roy Jr. was killing off Love’s Old Sweet Song and Golden Years and The Hills of Home. Chop, chop, chop, and down they came, the tall trees. She had written them out in style: the Hollisters got an amicable divorce—“We’ll still get together for Christmas!” said Jane—and Elmer and Edna sold the Golden Rule Cafe in Nowthen and returned to the big city to jump back into the giddy social whirl of the smart and privileged, and Babs got on a bus to Los Angeles. “What do I have to lose?” she told Fritz. One, two, three, the stories collapsed, and only a pitiful handful of letters from fans asking where they had gone. Lily Dale was gone, too. Mr. Tippy went in the hospital with leukemia, and Lottie tried out other accompanists and discovered that her voice was wedded to Mr. Tippy, that despicable pansy, and she couldn’t sing without him. She told Ray that Frank hadn’t stolen the money, he had more than earned it. “Three weeks with the Rise and Shiners—I’d say $800 was cheap at the price. What a beautiful boy he was. He was a prince of the airwaves, our Frank. He used to carry me up and down the stairs in his two arms, like I was a little girl. He came to my apartment for dinner on many occasions and told me all about his poor sad mother. What a tender heart he is. I wish him every happiness and grace.”

  Ray tried to think about his own mother and about the Resurrection, but his mind drifte
d toward the problem of storm windows and the furnace, which gasped and wheezed and needed replacing. There was no sense patching it up again and running the risk of a breakdown and frozen waterpipes bursting and all the aggravation—no, a person shouldn’t take half-measures, and he knew that now, having wasted so much of his life hemming and hawing, hedging his bets on the furnace, modifying it from coal to gas-burning: no, it had to be ripped out and a new electric one put in. But a new furnace would survive him. He would be cold and in the ground and turning to mold before the new furnace had come to the end of its warranty.

  He thought of the radio he didn’t listen to and had no idea what they might be doing, but who cared now, they could whoop and curse and screech filth on the air, it was no reflection on him, he was out of it now—the good part about dying: I am not responsible anymore. Death pays all debts. Fix the damn furnace yourself.

  Time flew backwards. Pictures of Moorhead and Lottie on the farm, gathering eggs in her apron before she got crippled, and Vesta when she was young and full of ginger. Going to work for his father, working an ice route in northeast Minneapolis. Boy, there was a way to build muscles! Those hundred-pound blocks in the wagon, under the gunnysacks. You’d chip them with a pick and split them in two and haul them with ice tongs up to the customer’s back door while the horse plodded ahead, old Prince, who knew the route better than anybody. A gang of kids following along, grabbing chips off the wagon. One house after another, up Buchanan Street and down Lincoln and up Johnson and down Grant. There was a job that made a young man look forward to Friday night! Take off your ice apron and it was holy shit, get out of the way, Jim, time to go to the moon. Go to Marklund’s Moonlite Ballroom and throw yourself at the young women in the lemonade section and see who picks you up. Drink gin from a jellyglass and drive fast at night with your headlights out. Once his pal Duke told him it took two days to drive to Chicago and Ray drove there in ten hours, careening through Wisconsin. He sideswiped a coal truck and skidded three hundred feet and into a ditch and bounced out and fifty miles later fell asleep and almost collided with the North Coast Limited. And all to make a point. Twice he saw Eternity beckon, but he was young and got away, and now the Time had come, and there were all those Other Women to think about, some of them deceased by now, others long in the tooth, all of them disappointed, and WLT lay on his conscience like a brick.