A Voice In The Night

by Brian Matthews

  West of Harrisburg, they wheeled into a single-tabled picnic stop along a quiet stretch of Route 22. “We’re that TV show, ya know. Route 66.” She hummed the program’s sweeping theme, rocking from side to side on the bench to animate it, her arms conducting an imagined string section. “Soda. I need sooodaaa,” Luke mugged. She pulled two Coke’s out of the grocery bag and the church key, passed them over for him to drain in a single swallow each. She continued the theme as she pulled lunch out like magicians’ rabbits. Through their lives, she would whisper the music to him when she wanted to bring back the shear freedom of the journey west. Through nights of sick children, the storm of public criticism he would be forced to endure, she could summon back those two weeks on the road with a few bars of it, their shorthand for shared happiness. He would nod. Yes. He remembered.

  At Pittsburgh, they stopped by KDKA, America’s first real radio station, disappointed in the grimy studios of the broadcasting landmark. Pittsburgh itself at first seemed even more sinister than Luke had envisioned, listening to the station late at night in his boy-room. The night sky was on fire as they hit the eastern outskirts, the Bessemer furnaces of the steel mills belching columns of it skyward like searchlights. At one point she almost reached for his hand, seeking reassurance that they weren’t driving into the very gates of Hell.

  But The Golden Triangle downtown was all new and revitalized. On Seventh Avenue, they passed KQV’s glass-fronted studios and slammed on the brakes, reversed back up the street and looked into the glitter, chrome and flashing lights that surrounded Chuck Brinkman the deejay that was on the air at the moment. They tuned to 1410 and listened for a few minutes. “That’s what it’s supposed to be like,” Luke said. They eventually pulled away from the curb, edging west in the night, scanning for a motel and sleep.

  Chapter 4

  He started out low and intimate, and stayed that way, almost whispering. “This is Luke Trimble, with Voices in The Night – KOGO, San Diego. Our lines are open. Give us a call.” His being here was pure luck. Three of the station’s air staff had mutinied over format changes and the manager had canned them on the spot. Luke’s audition tape was on his desk. He got the job because he was available right away, and because he dared to be different in a medium that was now based on strict control of everything that went over the airwaves. They called it “format discipline.”

  But Luke had become irreverent over the last year in Connecticut, treating sponsors’ commercials and things in general with just a hint of sarcasm. It had begun out of boredom one night. By week’s end, the sponsors were calling in, not to cancel their advertising, but to buy more. Customers were talking about the quirky ads, and merchandise was moving off the shelves. The first night on the San Diego air he’d hit on something else. Because he wasn’t up on local issues, he decided to make the first show about that. “I’m the new boy and I can’t-believe-I’m-in-California.” Turns out everyone else was from another place and the lines lit up. People wanted to tell him their stories. He asked. They answered. It was novel. It was a hit.

  From then on the callers were the show and Luke, not the authority, but the catalyst, asking, probing, prodding.

  The other piece of luck was Jake. His producer and engineer was an unmade bed in the same clothes every day. At first, Luke would squint through the glass, wondering if the guy had nodded off. In fact, Jake was often mistaken as a cripple by studio guests owing to his lurched-over posture and spastic moves. A phone was embedded between his right shoulder and ear and he mumbled to callers, screening out the nut jobs by punching their lines into endless hold.

  “After this call, a three-spot seque and news,” Jake murmured into Luke’s headset.

  “Thanks for the call. Voices in The Night-KOGO-San Diego. News next, but first there’s this.” Luke barely nodded a cue and Jake punched the number one Spotmatic deck for the first of three ads.

  Later, they huddled over breakfast in the 24-hour diner, Jake hunched over his plate, Eileen in her starched white uniform, Luke leaning back, listening. “We’ve got a good thing here but it can be better,” Jake said to the scrambled eggs. Luke squinted. “How?”

  “Even less of you,” Jake smirked, looking up devilishly from his dish.

  “Oh. Fine. I was starting to like it here too.”

  “No. Really. You hang back nice and push the callers up front. But it’s still one-on-one. What if the callers could talk to each other? Eileen’s eyes swung between them like a tennis spectator. Luke looked over for a sign, a signal. She smiled, eyebrows arched, and barely nodded.

  “Alright, but how?” Luke squinted the challenge at Jake.

  “Gimme a pen. A pencil. Something.” A passing waitress dropped a Ticondaroga in front of Jake without changing her gait. He dove for the napkin holder, swiping his sleeve through two breakfasts. He already had it worked out in the engineer’s side of his brain. He carved a couple of circuit diagrams into the napkin, and folded it into his shirt pocket. “Not a problem. I’ll have it ready tonight.” He held up the pencil, and the waitress grabbed it on the return trip, like a ring from a merry-go- round.

  It looked simple and it was. A box with four knobs. A couple of wires hung down, ending in alligator clips. About $25 in parts from Radio Shack. Jake hooked it to the phone lines and they were ready to conference up to four on-the-air callers at once. “We’re violating about a million Bell System patents here, no big thing,” said Jake as he hooked it up somewhere under the control panel. I’ll hide it in my locker when we’re not using it.”

  That night, it started out a little ragged. Luke didn’t sort out what to do at first, and the callers weren’t too sure either. But after a couple of hours, it smoothed out.

  When they were in a break, the private studio line lit up. Only Eileen and the station manager knew this number. She got through first. “I’ve been listening. It’s good. Really good.” His wife never exaggerated. This he could take to the bank. “Yeah? Ya think?”

  “Yeah. I think. Gotta go. Got sick people here.”

  Zack Osfelder was right behind her. The station manager was a legend in the business for the brutal control that he exercised on the rest of the on-the-air staff. But the ratings proved him right. He had no patience for anything on the air that was extraneous. Night or day he would call the studio to point out unnecessary, empty chatter. “Who goddam cares?” was all he would say, sometimes often enough to drive the guy on the air out forever. One drivetime deejay had to be taken away in restraints after Zack’s repeated needling drove him to tear the music library apart in a fury. He never returned.

  “I don’t know how the hell you’re doing that bit with the callers, but keep it up. This shit is outstanding.” Zack hung up, replaced by a dial tone. Two weeks later, billboards were going up all over town. Voices In The Night.7p.m - 12. Luke Trimble. KOGO 600. Luke and Eileen drove past one with its hand-painted likeness of him. “Geez. That’s close,” she said. “It doesn’t look anything like you.”

  “I’ve got a face for radio, baby.”

  Chapter 5

  California was a dream. Nearly perfect weather every day, save for the dense morning fog along the shoreline that burned off by 9 a.m. They snatched up a converted carriage house in La Mesa, on a side street where they could walk to a dozen restaurants and shops. The rent seemed too low to be in, what seemed to them, a resort. Every day was vacation. Regularly there’d be a realization of where they were and how much their lives had been transformed.

  “This is all because of you, ya know. We’d still be back in Connecticut, getting ready to freeze our asses off if you hadn’t started this.” Luke knew what he said was true. He had a big inertia problem. “Thank God one of us has some balls,” he shrugged.

  “Most guys would just say ‘I love you,’ but that’s OK,” she mocked, warmed more deeply by his acknowledgement. “That too.”

  He rose from the table of the outdoor café, moving to her side. He guided her out of her chair and kissed her ligh
tly. A middle-aged couple watched from their quiche Lorraine, longing for their youth and certainty again.“You kinda like me, huh,” she beamed up to him from their embrace, her chin pressed into his chest.

  “Let’s go home and I’ll show ya.”

  They walked the three blocks faster and faster until it became a full-bore, laughing foot-race to bed.

  At the hospital, patients eyed her name tag and asked if she was related to “that one on the radio.” ”Married to him,” was her reply, pleased with the celebrity status it conferred. But she had a status of her own. To her surprise she was a natural at nursing, especially the patients whose barely concealed terror she could calm with a few words of reassurance, or just by listening, stroking their hands while they talked. She wondered where this facility had come from, and came to see that her own happiness had created more emotional space inside her.

  She had become a whole person.

  Her mother noticed too. During one of their weekly telephone visits, she blurted, ”You’re different now.”

  “How?”

  “Just different. You’re grown up. You never seemed that happy when you were a kid. Now you’re – I don’t know. You’re not mad at me anymore.”

  “I wasn’t mad at you. Just scared. Of everything.”

  Zack had summoned Luke to the station late in the afternoon, to his tiny office with the obsolete title, sales manager, on the door. There was room for his small grey metal desk and two chairs, nothing more. While Zack was clearly in charge, the station owner’s office across the hall was ludicrously large and vacant. On the rare occasions of his visits it was startling to see someone at the highly polished, kidney-shaped desk that was buffed to a high luster. Not a scrape of paper occupied the richly glowing space. The owner intended, apparently, to keep it that way. On his rare visits a strange nervous tick took over. He would repeatedly sweep the desk clear with his hand as though sweeping crumbs or remnants of a meal to the floor. He was thoroughly unconscious of it.

  Zack’s modest cubby and outdated title was part of his legend, and Luke wondered if it was a deliberate prop. Or perhaps it was to amplify his tiny stature. He stood 5’4”, including a piled-up pompadour of gray hair that added an inch to his scant size. Luke settled his gaunt frame into the guest chair, his knees pressed painfully against the front of Zack’s desk. Was this a ploy to make Zack’s victims uncomfortable?

  Zack liked this kid. Luke wasn’t the least intimidated by his usual tactics. And he was a true talent, an original idea in an industry of sound-alikes. Zack had been nurturing the notion that was spreading around broadcasting circles that he had developed another programming breakthrough. It wasn’t true. Luke had invented himself, and would become a prototype in later years. But for now he was Zack’s and he wanted to lock him in.

  He pushed the stapled papers across his desk to Luke without a warm-up. “I’m not gonna bullshit you, Luke. I like what you’re doin’ for us and I don’t want somebody else to steal you away for a few more bucks.” Luke squinted through the pages, his eyes landing on the salary line of the contract. It was three times what he was making now. He felt dizzy. The room looked suddenly like a movie he was watching from inside himself, detached.

  “And if you sign it, this is yours too.” It was a check for $5,000.

  “Ya don’t need a lawyer or agent. Just sign it. It’s for two years, then you’re on your own. But it gives us first rights on you for a network deal. And there’s the same contract for Jake, too.”

  Luke’s first stop was to deposit the check. The second was the car dealer where the yellow MGB still occupied center stage in the showroom. He drove it home to her an hour later, the salesman following behind in the Healey. In their driveway Luke leaned on the horn hard. She came out to the front porch with a paintbrush in her hand. When she saw him grinning from the driver’s seat, it dropped from her hand, painting her jeans and sneakers on the way down.

  She skipped down the steps and vaulted into the two-seater.

  “My car. You bought me my car! She ran her tiny tan hands over the dash, the Walnut, the leather seats. “Switch. Let me sit there.” Luke watched her glowing behind the wheel, and knew then that making her happy was the only thing he really cared about. Not radio. Not money or celebrity. She was so good, so real. The fleeting idea of life had he not met her descended on him for an instant then and he felt a dread so deep he pulled her to him and held her as hard as he could.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” He couldn’t talk about it, even to her. In the months ahead, the dread would come sometimes as he felt the potential of loss as a real thing, a possibility. By then he’d learn to dismiss it and return to the present. “Luke, how can we afford this?”

  “Well, as of today we’re a little rich.” He showed her the contract and the bank deposit slip. “I paid cash for the car and we have enough for a down payment on the house if she’ll sell it to us.”

  Chapter 6

  Margaret Mann owned the carriage house and the restored Victorian out front that went with it.

  She’d rented the smaller place to them after turning down several applicants. In an hour over tea with Eileen, she knew she’d found her tenant and a friend, someone to love the jewel box she’d been restoring for years, a curator for her masterpiece.

  “She’s hinted at it a couple of times. You know, in passing. Nothing really overt.”

  “Honey, we’re the kids she never had. I’m sure she’d want us here.” Eileen had never thought of it that way, but now she saw it. Margaret had poured out her life to her over the months. It was a story of almosts. She had been a Pan American stewardess for 25 years, starting on the early Clipper flights from San Francisco to Honolulu. There had been three near marriages, all to the pioneering airline pilots whose dash and daring drew her and cautioned her at the same time. Now in her mid-’50s, she looked back with regret on her retreat into the safety of singlehood. Luke and Eileen were, for Margaret, what might have been. “I know she’d probably sell it to us, but let me talk to her at the right moment. Just put the money in savings for a while.”

  “OK. Now take me for a ride in your new car.”

  The salesman, who had waited patiently by the Healey, scrunched himself into the jumpseat behind them. After dropping him off, they headed out past Torrey Pines, pulling into the narrow parking with a small the beach. The green water thundered onto the sand. She turned toward him as though to deliver a formal address. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time but I never could.” She looked out to sea, as though she could find the courage there. When she returned her gaze to his, the hesitation was gone. “Luke, I just want to thank you. For everything. For loving me. For California. The house. The car.”

  He looked away, overwhelmed by the emotions that her forthrightness caused in him. Then he turned back to her, and she saw her gratitude returned. With his fingertips, he brushed the hair that hung down in front of her eyes. “Let’s never forget to do this, OK? I mean, talk about us – just about us.”

  Two weeks later, she eased into the subject of the carriage house with Margaret. “This is the first real home either of us has ever had. It’s like part of our marriage. I can’t imagine how we would leave it.” The very idea of them gone drained the color from Margaret’s face and Eileen saw her flustered and frightened for the first time. “Well, what do you mean? There’s no possible reason to – leave. Where would you go? Why?

  “No. No. We’re not planning anything. Really. We were just talking about the future and kids and stuff. That kinda thing.”

  “This is your house. You and Luke. Nobody else could live here now. I won’t have it. I couldn’t.” They closed on the sale later that summer. What they didn’t know was that Margaret had also modified her will to provide that the main house would eventually be theirs, too.

  It was that same summer they started going to Mass on Sundays. Eileen couldn’t remember just when it started, but she was uneasy
at first by the way it transformed him for a few seconds every week. At the consecration, as the host was held aloft and the bells softly chimed, he would cease his restlessness and stare toward the altar, his head cocked slightly to the side, completely absorbed, almost enraptured.

  “So, when did you get this religious calling,” she asked on the way home one Sunday.

  “Ah, it’s nothing like that. I guess all those years of parochial school or something. Who knows.”But he wondered too. Something had changed in him that he couldn’t brush off as habit. Maybe it was the idea that they’d have kids sometime soon, and this was building a foundation for them. Or was it that he felt so blessed by all that had happened that this was a thanksgiving, or a prayer to protect it?

  Even as a boy, he had always felt certain that, at the moment when the priest intoned, “This is my body . . . ,” Jesus was actually there, just as if he had appeared in robes and sandals and stood before the congregation. All those years of nuns and priests had made a believer. No. It was more. Finally, he opened up to her. ”I’m not turning into one of the wackos that call the show,” he promised her. “But there’s something going on. Maybe it’s just a lot of things coming together. All those books I’ve been reading, you and me, the idea of a family, having this place. It’s all so much more than I ever expected.”

  “Well, so you’re grateful . . .”

  “But it’s more than that. I get this feeling sometimes that everything’s planned. Not just random. Like, what if I never came up to you that day after class? If we never met?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded.

  “See? Everything would be different. Everything.” But she didn’t want to think about it. The idea troubled her. The next Sunday, she wrapped her arm around his at mass. She needed to believe that they were not a matter of chance. They talked late into that night about all of it. And as they sat there in the glow of his cigarette, she was silently thankful for this man she was just beginning to know. Later she lay next to him and knew they had made new life. “Thank you,” she whispered, just barely aloud, only enough for her to hear. Then she fell into a sleep as safe and certain as a child. Six weeks later, the doctor confirmed what she and Luke already knew.