Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  Dale paid one dollar for the radio license, with the understanding that if Atkinson Lumber requested the property back within one calendar year, Julian could pay back the dollar and have his license back. Rich Julian was in the lumber business. Not the radio business. Take the tax fix. For free? And get the little fellow in glasses out the door? Sure thing. He wrote off the loss and forgot that he had ever met Dale Wylie.

  That single dollar was the outlay for the entire Wylie family fortune, the seed of billions.

  *

  Dale had a license. He needed a machine. He needed means of broadcasting. Over at the Atkinson High School, it so happened, he knew that a bright lad named Sidney Colman was halfway to being a solid radio mechanic. His family had bought one of the sixteen Interceptors he’d managed to fob off, and the boy had founded a radio club. Over a milk shake and a cheeseburger, Dale proposed a special project. He would pay for the parts if Sidney set up the transmitter. The fantasy of Sidney Colman’s teenage years was to construct a functioning radio transmitter; here was a man willing to let him buy whatever parts he might need from the distributor in Minneapolis, on as much credit as was required. (And only Dale needed to know that the distributor was going bankrupt so he wouldn’t have to pay. He could smell the death on them.) Sidney built his transmitter, and Dale wrote a letter to the principal of Atkinson High commending the boy, and a year later Sidney Colman was off to Oxford, the first Rhodes Scholar Atkinson ever produced, and Dale had a radio transmitter for the price of a cheeseburger and a milk shake.

  Last and most definitely least, Dale needed something to put on. What do people listen to? Every media owner thinks of content as little as possible but Dale barely had to think. Preachers stopped him on the street. High school kids handed him well-formatted typewritten notes imploring him to let them volunteer as DJ. Any old man in town would have agreed to announce the high school hockey games for a mickey of rye. What did it matter? The Atkinsonians had nothing else to listen to. The bowl of nickel in which the town squatted had made selling radio sets halfway impossible. Owning a radio station was all gravy. He was literally the only show in town, and in a town with two of everything. Two gas stations. Two Chinese restaurants. Two grocery stores. They had to advertise or die, advertise or cede to their worst enemy in life, the owner of the other place.

  A week after KCUV launched, he sold all the Interceptors, and then brought a thousand Victor sets and sold them to all the families that had just bought Interceptors. That’s what you call progress.

  *

  Then, in the hallucinatory summer of 1932, the badlands encircling Atkinson hallelujahed with fresh gold seams. Dale needed more to get more, so he returned to Pittsburgh, to the Liberty Bell Bank, to ask for a loan. The jowly manager stared at Dale’s single page of prospectus like a joke, his awe tinged with disbelief. The cost of Dale’s business had been two dollars. That week, the profits had been four thousand dollars. How? Well, Dale explained cheerfully, one dollar on the license, and the transmission room was a building the owner couldn’t rent out, so just to maintain the space in good condition, he rented it out for a dollar. And everything else had been free. Everything? He called it Community Radio.

  The Liberty Bell Bank loaned him twenty thousand dollars with the transmitter and license as collateral. For the first time, he amounted to something. He amounted to twenty thousand dollars. The certified check burned his inside pocket, blazing with the promise of indisputable value, tugging him up to the heavens of respectability. With the power of that number, he could roll with the train into Champlain Station, stride down the streets he remembered, turn suavely onto Flora Avenue and up to the old door.

  The boy who answered his knock gazed up at him with his own eyes. He was wearing navy blue cotton shorts and a coarse shirt of faded white linen. He had Max’s shoulders, Max’s streaked blond hair, Max’s compactness, but Dale’s own eyes. A deeper howl than the wolf, the recognition of his own, Dale smothered by lifting the frightened, resisting boy into his arm. A letter from Marie had told him the boy’s name was George.

  *

  George Wylie’s first memory was his father’s rough hands, unfamiliar, leading him by his fingertips away from dark succulent 17 Flora Avenue through the crisp, burnt-pumpkin, scarlet-leaved air. They walked away from the bustle of the east-side streets, across the Monongahela River, to the curvy big houses that danced around one another as dauntingly as grand ladies. They were so rich, so gingerbread, so haunted.

  The boy lived in a house of women, much the way his father had. The whirl of household machinery ignored him, the steamy yard of laundry, the gagging slops hauled out to the gravelly alley, the beef of requirement chewed at the dinner table, the treasury of the berry jam in the risky larder. Passing between the laughing skirts of the boarder women, avoiding the somnolent, shadowy propriety of parlors, George ran toward sweet and away from slap, praying to the expected god in the quiet before bed. His mother loved him with her tender gazes. His grandmother loved him with her guiding hands. Despite all the busyness, despite the full dinner tables and the crammed halls, he was alone in a house of women. His father was a whispering among the boarders. George Wylie, though he didn’t know it, was born lonely.

  As they crossed the river, mother sulked with grandmother behind them. Father stopped the family outside the biggest and curviest of all the houses, a mansion on Larchmount Crescent, the fanciest street in town. “Well, boy, what do you think?”

  “Fine,” little George croaked.

  “Which room do you think you’ll want for your bedroom?”

  “Dale Wylie,” interrupted grandmother. “Don’t give that boy ideas of what he can and can’t have. You’ll fill up his heart with envy.”

  “All right, what do you think, Mother?” The adults seemed to be talking about things they weren’t talking about.

  “None of my business.”

  “Tell me, though, what do you think, Kitty?”

  Mother said nothing. The Larchmount Crescent house was three or four times the size of the house on Flora with lawns on either side and tall hedges screening the view in a ring. “A good, solid house,” grandmother said.

  “It’s ours. I bought it yesterday.”

  George could hear the women saying nothing behind him. Father drank in their shock like Ovaltine steam. George had only one question for his dad: “Will the boarders like it?” But there would be no more boarders. They didn’t need the boarders’ money anymore. George just wanted his father to stay. But he curled his hand into the roughness of his father’s because he knew that he would go. The house at least was grand. Here was an early lesson for George Wylie: The grander the house, the lonelier it is.

  *

  The house on Larchmount Crescent was collateral for seven separate mortgages, which Dale used to raise capital for a binge of spending.

  He bought Atkinson’s town paper, The Atkinson Register, for ten thousand cash, with an agreement in monthly promissory notes for fifteen thousand over the course of ten years. That price included the oldest building in town, on the highest hill—he moved the radio station in and forced the six reporters that came with the building to move their desks into the hall. The employees already worked for minuscule salaries and he slashed them further. In the early thirties the possession of a job rated about the same as possession of a soul. At the same time, he raised his rates. With the newspaper and the radio station, he held a town monopoly on advertising.

  As the profit margins crept up, he could leverage higher sums against the properties, with which he could buy more papers, more radio stations. In 1935, he took over The Rainsview Sentinel and KMPS in Bracebridge. In 1936, The Fargo Herald and The Callister Standard. At that time, the purchase value of a newspaper was calculated by taking the annual profit and multiplying it by ten. Working out the annual profits, especially during the years of turbulence, was a problem. The owner always wanted to pick 1927 as the year to establish the business’s profitability because that yea
r combined high commodity prices with a fast-growing global economy. Dale accepted that assumption, which made his opponents believe they’d pulled one over on him, then he would apply the incurred debt obligations of that year over ten years, too. The sellers always believed they were realizing a huge bargain—the 1927 price for a paper in the middle of the thirties—but Dale knew that the optimism of 1927 had incurred its own costs.

  Once he owned a newspaper, Dale cut costs in half. Cut everything. In half. Since the purchase price had been based on ten times the profit margin of a single year, the key was to double that profit margin immediately. “A penny saved is a penny earned” is a mistaken aphorism. A penny saved exponentially improves the ratio of profit to investment. Among his junior executives, Carnegie was famous for never asking the profit, only the cost of things. The work of the owner is not to create or to add value but to make desirable things cheaper. That’s it. That’s the entire trick. Everything else is an accident or a by-product. Dale understood.

  His ideal newsroom, he claimed in a later interview, consisted of three people: One to write the articles, one to sell the ads, and one to make sure the writer and the salesman were spending the least possible amount of money. Dale Wylie converted his cheapness into a spectacle, an object lesson for the employees. It is true—and not merely legend—that at The Atkinson Register every reporter had to hand in a pencil stub before receiving a new pencil. Dale banned notebooks. Reporters used scrap paper for their interviews. At The Fargo Herald, Dale discovered the model that he would apply later to his newspapers across the world: the 20/2 system. He demanded a twenty-percent profit margin and expenses worked out to both decimal points.

  Even at this early stage, Dale didn’t bother his editors about anything other than money. The political positions of his papers were irrelevant. If he bought a paper with a strong left-wing sensibility, it kept that sensibility. He never bothered his editors with calls to support one or another of his friends in a local political battle; he had no political friends. Even later, when he controlled some of the most influential press outlets in the world, he never imposed his own view. Other proprietors used newspapers as playthings of their opinions. Dale used them to make money.

  Dale’s acquisitiveness quickly transcended the obviousness of cash. Money was just a means to borrow more money. The Liberty Bell Bank lent him so much that they couldn’t stop themselves from lending him more. Each business plan promised to fulfill the debt he already owed them, and so they ran deeper and deeper into funding his business. Those bets, in the end, turned out to be among the most profitable the Liberty Bell Bank ever made.

  Larchmount Crescent was the distant, shadowy home he returned to if he ever needed to reassure himself that there was a purpose to the leap of number into number. The upgazing boy. The unhappy women who had nothing to complain about. The house admired from the street. The car admired on the street. Respectability.

  *

  Wading through the thick grasses of the backyard that ran longer and wilder toward the ravine, George heard his father’s voice calling him. His father was the world. What did the world want with him? At the milkman’s door, a smiling gray-flannel colossus, all glasses, waving a heavy arm.

  “Come inside, Georgie, let’s get you dressed.”

  “I am dressed,” George answered.

  “You are dressed but you’re not properly dressed. Now come on in.” Dad smelled of cigarettes and gasoline and alcohol, talk and money. He brought talk and money into the silent, drab house.

  A whole suit of strange clothes had been arranged on George’s bed, a burgundy blazer, gray flannel trousers, a starched white shirt, a burgundy-and-gray striped tie. They were a strange dress-up. His father helped gently, clumsily, tucking him into the uniform, smoothing the creases with a butcher’s palm, each article of clothing more uncomfortable than the last.

  “Are we going to church?” George asked.

  “Even better. We’re going to Hamilton College,” his father answered.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “Why can’t I go to school at home?”

  His father’s pause, perhaps to concentrate on the ribbon architecture of the tie, perhaps to contemplate thoughts deeper than ties, bloomed into petals of nothing. “Georgie, you are the first in the family to go to Hamilton College. It’s one of the most expensive schools in the country. You should be proud.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “Why do I have to wear these clothes?”

  “Because they’re respectable.”

  George thought while his father lassoed the tie over his neck. “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is respectable the same as uncomfortable?”

  Dale’s laughter, somewhere in between a peal and a cackle, had the caramel warmth of a man who smokes and drinks with all walks and all stations in life, and the creamy ease of the father’s happiness spread deliciously under George’s skin, though he didn’t get the joke.

  They rode the black car to the school. Outside the pressed iron gates of Hamilton College, where the wealthiest coal and steel families from Pittsburgh bought their children’s placement at Harvard and Yale, Dale and George scrutinized the other boys, all in the school burgundy and gray, bright, clean-cropped, shouting and larking as the jaws of the school swallowed them, a portal to a grand digesting future.

  “They seem friendly,” Dale said.

  “They’re friendly with each other because they’re friends,” George said.

  “Go make them your friends.”

  George pecked his father’s sandpapery cheek. The distant and unpredictable gods are the ones we must obey without fail. In the photographs of his childhood, George Wylie always wears the same dumb smile on his half-pleased face. This smile he placed on his face for his father.

  Dale watched his son dissolve into the crowd of the uniformed elite, drifting into the school’s gates before driving away. He had won. He had a son in Hamilton. No one would be able to say he wasn’t respectable again.

  *

  In November 1937 a stranger arrived at the office in the belly of the Atkinson Register building on Mott Street without an appointment.

  The stranger, dapper in double-breasted Harris tweed, assiduously brushing snowflakes from his shoulder and stomping fine brown leather shoes on the mat, entered smiling like a high school football star sharing the credit for a winning touchdown. Ms. Ricci, Dale’s secretary, who was later to marry into the Stanfield family and become, for 1958, the best-dressed woman in Cleveland, Ohio, noticed that he wasn’t wearing boots or a jacket. He wouldn’t give a name either. He wouldn’t listen when she told him that Mr. Wylie was very busy and had no time for peddlers. He said he would stay in the waiting room until Mr. Wylie was ready. They had business to discuss. No, he wouldn’t say what kind of business.

  A few minutes later, Ms. Ricci, hearing the sound of soft scuffling and scraping, peeked into the waiting room where the stranger was hefting the chestnut leather sofa to an angle more available to the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Ms. Ricci asked.

  “See, with the chairs like this, when the occupant of the office comes out, he can see who’s waiting for him right away.”

  “I think Mr. Wylie knows how he likes his chairs.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, Ms. Ricci,” said the stranger, “but, you see, soon his office will be mine and the waiting room can’t look so shabby when people are here to see me.”

  When Dale finally allowed the stranger into his office, the man who stood before him was in many ways his opposite. Having lived on the road, separated from his family, Dale had grown rotund and sloppy, waddling around in his cheap suits. The stranger strode into every room with the glamour of predation. He had his shoes shipped in from New York, his suits from London; he arrived everywhere freshly barbered and manicured with his smooth charm that mimicked a small town’s idea of a movie star.

&
nbsp; “What’s your business?” Dale asked, affectedly uninterested.

  The stranger placed a book of signed contracts on the desk. Straight from the train station, the man had marched down Robinson Street and sold half the stores sectional ads for the newspaper and the other half-minute spots for the radio station. In 1937, to wrest a book of advertising contracts from small-town businesses was as miraculous as slapping down a grasped ray of sunshine, and Dale’s initial disbelief lessened only when he saw the signature of Saul Levman, the owner of the Second Moon, the movie house, on one of the tickets. That could not be a fraud. Saul never screwed up. Dale’s skepticism faded to a dull, inexplicable dread. Who was this guy?

  “That’s an impressive piece of salesmanship,” he said.

  “I’m an impressive guy.”

  “I guess I ought to thank you for the business. Thank you.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t thank me yet. I haven’t given you those contracts. I’m trading them.”

  Dale leaned back, tucking the stage pen into the properties closet of his suit jacket. “What’s your price?”

  “I want the job of head of sales, either for The Atkinson Register or KCUV, I don’t care which.”

  “Take both,” Dale said instantly. “But you’ll have to fire the other guys.”

  Firing people was never a problem for Dale’s new lieutenant, whose handshake was a silken garrote and whose name, Dale learned only after he’d hired the man, was Jack Taggart.

  *

  Dale had little time or inclination to investigate Jack’s abilities or origins. The sales grew. Growth was enough. With Jack managing Atkinson, Dale returned to the trains, sieving the prairie for any glints of despair he could buy up. There were plenty of papers for sale in the Depression, plenty of once-big men willing to cash out for a survivable sum. Dale ran his luck through a surging mass of hopelessness, men who couldn’t find work or who had given up hoping for work, men who absented themselves from the quest for material advantage as surely as any monk out of legend, drifting into steamy camps with nothing but their bellies and a general fear, a fear of themselves and other men, of their memory and of the changing of the seasons. Among all those sunken faces, in all those irrelevant towns, smelling of stale sweat and unswept horse stalls, Dale couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or relieved never to catch Max’s face staring back.