It didn’t come.
Nor did it come the next day or even the next time he lost control of himself and, too keen, keened the ferocious grief of his mistakes. He knew, of course, that he was vulnerable now, that this time he would surely hear from the Credenzas. When he didn’t he realized that they were giving him not leeway but rope. He took their unspoken hint and went the other way entirely. To save himself he went the way they had told him not to go. Now when he came to those bulletins he laughed openly: “Early this morning—along the Lake Baxter rim road—a car with two pa-ha ha-hass-engers went out of contro-ho ho—l, and h-hit a t—a tee—a tee hee—tree. The passengers, Ha-ha-ha-rrr— ho ho—ld, Ha-ha rold and Haw-haw Hortense Sn-sn-snick, were be- ha ha-headed.” The engineer stared at him. “It’s seven minutes after four,” he ad-libbed. “It’s seven minutes after four.”
Still the call did not come. It was clear; they meant him harm. He returned to the shack as soon as he was finished with his shift and asked if there had been any calls for him. The transmitter man did not even look up.
“Have there?”
“The injuns want you to their picnic,” the man said.
Still frightened, but made willful by his fear, he determined to force a confrontation, convinced that only through a showdown could he ever hope to negotiate his brotherhood with the Credenzas. He eliminated from his repertoire all those human interest stories they loved, and selected only bad news to read. He gave it euphorically, blithe as Nero. Some Credenza cattle had come down with disease. A few had already died. He gave the news of these fatalities with a chipperness nothing less than ecstatic. He’d heard from one of the hands that when disease had broken out on a ranch he had once worked in Texas, the herd had to be shot. He took this gossip and repeated it over the air. “An undisclosed but reliable source high up in Credenza management,” he said, “is already speculating that the entire herd may have to be slaughtered.” He added that it was better economics to cut one’s losses at once than to drag out hope, meanwhile spending more on feed each day for the sick beasts.
He seized on every rumor available to him—desultory talk among the farmers about the expectation of a severe winter, random chatter of a decline in the price of dairy or a dip in grains—and presented it as the hard inside information of experts. If rye prices were expected to be disappointing, he carefully pointed out that the Credenza interests were heavily overextended in rye. His weather reports were jeremiads. If the sun was shining in northeast Nebraska he found a storm gathering in western Canada and spoke darkly of the prevailing gravity of weatherflow, its southern and easterly shift from its fierce source in the Bering Strait.
The engineers and transmitter men and the other announcer, silent as the Credenzas, pretended to ignore his new antics. He supposed that they were under instruction, that the Credenzas, fearful of tipping their hand, wanted him to continue for a while in his fool’s paradise.
“At the time of the tone,” he announced on his record show, “it will be three-thirty.” Then he coughed brutally into the open mike, dredged up phlegm from deep in his chest, and made the lubricious rattle preparatory to spitting. “It’s three-thirty. It’s three-thirty.”
And often when he played his records now he deliberately kept the key open on his table microphone, thus adding even more hollowness to the already bloated convention-hall vagueness of the music.
Then, almost two weeks to the day since he first began his campaign to get a rise out of the Credenzas—the record on the turntable was “Asleep in the Deep,” sung by the South Philadelphia A.C. Girls’ Aquacade Chorus and recorded at poolside—he purposely brushed his elbow against the switch on his table mike, and beginning not only in mid-sentence but in mid-syllable so that it seemed accidental, he said in perfectly controlled, conversational speech, as if to a guest with him in the studio, “ … rstand that Charley’s wife, Grace, and Poke Credenza have been seeing a lot of each other lately. More than it’s usual for a brother- and sister-in-law to see each other. More than it’s even legal, if you know what I mean. Well, what the hell, Charley Credenza’s been down at Lincoln with the legislature two months now. Grace told him she couldn’t be away from the house that long. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyway, she’s an attractive, healthy woman, even if she is too heavy. Poke likes them big, I guess, though why he didn’t marry a large woman in the first place instead of that furled umbrella of a Lucy, I can’t say—unless of course the talk is true that he had to. Come to think of it, it might be true at that. That woman has hot pants. Did you see the way she was riding Louis III’s right leg at the Fourth of July dance, and how she put her hand on his ass? I thought there’d be trouble, but old Poke was making out too good with Grace even to notice. Wait a minute, I’ve got to take this record off … ” Then, as if he hadn’t noticed that the switch was already on, he turned it off and, extending the myth of the accident, spoke into the dead microphone: “That was ‘Asleep in the Deep.’ We hear now ‘Come Josephine in My Flying Machine’ in the new instrumental version recorded by the Association of Missouri Underwriters.”
He faced the engineer and winked, but couldn’t get the man’s attention.
He went back to the transmitter shack convinced that at last he’d torn it, and when he got there things did seem different.
For one thing the beds were empty. Carpenter, the off-duty engineer, in whose car they had returned to the shack without speaking, hung around only long enough to pick up Mullins, the off-duty transmitter man; then they had gone off to town together. Murtaugh, the other transmitter man, was not by his equipment but had gone out behind the shack to check a guy wire on the tall main transmitter. Alone, the cramped, submariney quarters seemed almost spacious to him. He lay down on his bunk and it occurred to him that except for those few minutes in the outhouse when spurning the new flush toilet he had vainly sought Credenza brotherhood by emerging himself in what he took to be the Credenza smell, despite his knowledge to the contrary—he knew they were only the anonymous and corrupt smells of former staff, an indiscriminate odor that was no longer shit but shit’s shit, chemically changed, fermented to something beyond the strongest wine in the world but vineyardy still, acrid and eye-searing, smelling not of the cozy, snuggish intestines at all but of fire, or of sun gas perhaps, if you could get close enough—this was the first time in the months since he had come to work for them that he was by himself, without an engineer, without a bunkmate, without anyone.
Then he heard the radio.
“I knew it was no accident I was alone, that the Credenzas had anticipated me, that plans had been laid in advance, that Carpenter and Mullins now worked as a team, that the Credenzas picked up their check and they rode to town on Credenza gasoline to toast my disaster in Credenza beers. Still in my bunk I looked out the single window at Murtaugh, the transmitter man, squatting on his heels by the base of the antenna fooling with a wire and I thought: you lazy bastard, is that what Credenza (they had become one enormous undifferentiated persona for me now) pays you for? Climb, bastard, decoy me at something better than ground level. Ah, old sealegs, a little at least sweat, please! Make those picturesque adjustments up in the mizzen of that thing. Lazybones, landlubber, less decorousness in your game, if you don’t mind. Murtaugh must have been left by him (I meant the Credenza brothers, and the wives and sisters too now) as a sort of staff sentinel and shill, a nice philosophic touch. Can a man fall in the forest if there’s no one by to hear him scream?
“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It
gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act—whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.
“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”
Music was coming over the radio. It was The Children’s Hour. The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought now, but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought now, but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases—the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for—he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.
The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.
“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”
He stood there all through The Children’s Hour and through The Six O’Clock Round-Up (thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest story), and through Dinnertime Melodies till Seven, and was still standing there during the electrically transcribed Mormon Tabernacle Hour—Now, he thought, now he’ll break in, his plans for me a goddamn sacrilege—and on into the sixth inning of the remote pickup of the charity ballgame between the migrant workers and graduating seniors at the consolidated high school, when something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed.
The migrants were ahead 1–0. The seniors were up with the bases loaded. There was one out. Shippleton, the relief announcer, a man who had been with Credenza for years, was doing the play-by-play. “The tension here,” Shippleton was saying, “is terrific. Consolidated High has a good chance to tie it and even to go ahead, and this crowd knows it. Their hopes are on Scholar Joe Niebecker to hit one out of here. (Scholar Joe’s the valedictorian and could really make himself a hero if he connects.) Just listen to this crowd. I want you to hear this—” Then came the sound that Shippleton was talking about. Only it wasn’t the expected roar at all, just something very faint, something softly liquid, not a roar or a rush but more like a trickle of water in a pipe in a distant corner of the house at night.
Shippleton’s gone crazy, Marshall Maine thought. He knew that Credenza, like the parents of the boys themselves, was a strong supporter of the high schoolers, and resented something in the mute underprivilege of the migrant workers as the townies resented their strange rough ways. Did Shippleton mean to be ironic, Maine wondered. What was the point? Appalled, he thought, have I inspired him? It was insane. Shippleton was a hack, a safe man. Yet when Niebecker hit into a double play and ended the graduating class’s chances in that inning, Shippleton’s voice came booming over the speaker in top-heavy decibels. “IT’S A DOUBLE PLAY! THIS INNING IS OVER!” It was exactly like the wrong weight he had given Jack’s slow progress past the sleeping giant.
In the last inning, when the kids went ahead and won the game, Shippleton sounded quiet, defeated.
He left the shack to call Murtaugh. The man lay on his back inside the steel ribbing at the base of the antenna, poking a flashlight up at the various angles of the tower and pulling on cables to test their tension.
“Heh, Murtaugh,” he shouted, “you can knock that off now. Come here a minute.”
The man directed his beam into Marshall’s eyes. “What? What is it?”
He thinks it’s happened, Marshall Maine thought. Whatever it is, he thinks it’s already happened.
“Maybe an emergency,” Maine said. “Come inside.”
Moving from beneath the steel tent, Murtaugh swore softly.
Marshall Maine stood at the speaker and waited for him. They had switched back to the studio where the engineer had put on some marches while waiting for Shippleton to return. Maine pointed at the speaker. “Listen,” he said.
“For Christ’s sake, buddy—”
“Shh,” Maine said, “listen.”
There was no mistaking it. The values of the music were totally confused. The volume bore no relation to what the band was playing. The sound was completely erratic—now loud and booming where it should have been soft, or so thunderous and distorted where it should merely have swelled that Maine thought the cone of the speaker had ripped. At other times the music was incredibly tinny, as if someone was moving the needle around the record at exactly the right speed but with the power off. Then the sound would settle normally, only to erupt or fade again seconds later. The effect was incoherence, a sort of musical gibberish.
“Hey, that ain’t right,” the transmitter man said. He went to the control board and examined some dials. He turned a knob experimentally, Maine watching his hand carefully as it reached out for the knob. It ain’t right, he thought warily. Something’s fishy, Murtaugh. You were supposed to be pulling cables, weeding the hardware, planting the tower deep in the garden.
“Something’s wrong,” the transmitter man said.
“It is,” Maine said, and wondered what Credenza was up to, how his ends were served by throwing the transmission out of whack. What did he mean to do, give him the headache?
“Here,” Murtaugh said, “when I give the signal, push the amperage on that dial up to eighty. I want to try something.”
So, thought Maine. So. Electrocution. It’s to be electrocution. Then he understood why Credenza troubled with vagrants, why he kept them around—so they could electrocute the announcers when they got out of line. Maine shook his head and, walking calmly toward the doorway, planted his feet firmly on the rubber welcome mat, grounding himself.
“Come on,” the transmitter man said. “Quit fucking off. I’m testing for a short circuit.”
“I’m a staff announcer,” Maine said simply. “I have nothing to do with the equipment.”
“Shit,” Murtaugh said. Then, to Maine’s surprise, he went through the motions without him, fiddling with knobs and dials, throwing switches and, at one point, actually taking apart a rather complicated piece of machinery with a screwdriver, the best acting Maine had seen him do that evening. When Murtaugh finished he looked up at Maine. “It’s at the studio,” he said.
“Is it?”
“I’ve checked everything out. It’s at the studio. The only thing it can be is the coil.”
Marshall Maine planted himself even more firmly, making himself a dead weight on the doormat. “The coil, is it?” he said.
“The meter’s disabled,” Mur
taugh said. “I’ll call the station.” He picked up the direct-line telephone and said something to someone at the other end. He waited for a few moments, appearing to listen as the engineer got back to the phone and made his report. The transmitter man nodded. “I didn’t either,” he said. “No, what’s-his-name, the staff announcer told me about it.” He put back the phone. “It’s the meter, all right,” he told Maine. “The needle must have jammed and shorted the coil.”
Marshall Maine looked at him.
“That’s why it sounds like that,” Murtaugh said. He pointed to the loudspeaker. “He’s been riding a false gain. There’s no equilibrium in the output. He couldn’t tell. The needle was just floating free.”
“ONE MOMENT PLEASE!” they heard the engineer shout. Then the loudspeaker went dead.
“And he hadn’t noticed,” Marshall Maine said.
“What’s that?”
“He hadn’t noticed. That’s what he told you before you said, ‘I didn’t either.’ That he hadn’t noticed. You hadn’t either.”
“That’s right. Hey, how’d you know that?”
“He hadn’t been listening. Only watching the needle.”
“That’s right. Say, mate, could you hear all that?”
“When I shrieked,” Marshall Maine said.
“What’s that, fella?”
“Nothing,” Marshall Maine said. He stepped off the mat and came back into the shack. He leaned against the equipment. He played his fingers over the dials and stroked the switches. He thrust his hand into the space from which the transmitter man had removed the electric panel which he had taken apart. He picked up one of the loose wires.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 5