by Don Keith
But half-way there, something funny happened. The strange buzzing and humming at the bottom of the tower stopped for a second, like a hiccup, then was replaced by something that seemed strangely familiar to Jimmy. The rhythmic throbbing sounded just like the drumbeats that always marked time when WROG played "Dixie" on the big Zenith radio in the middle of his bedroom. When the station ended its “broadcast day” every evening just before the sun went down.
He stopped dead still and grabbed Detroit by the shoulder so his shuffling steps through the dry brush would not wipe out the sound. He could almost make out something in the buzzes that sounded like the voice of Rockin' Randy Mathews, reciting his now-familiar litany about the American flag and the five-thousand watts of power and the authority of the Federal Communications Commission. Then, the arcing scratches stopped, and the only sound was the hot summer breeze humming eerily through the tower's cross-members and support wires.
Detroit and Jimmy walked closer, until they stood next to the little concrete block outbuilding, directly under the upward stretch of the tower. They both almost fell over backward as they craned their heads back to look straight up the tower's length toward the orange sky, then looked at each other wide-eyed.
“This thing is a mile high!” Detroit guessed. “No, two miles!”
Jimmy did not speculate. A wooden ladder was propped against the hog wire fence, almost hidden by weeds and tangled coils of copper-colored wire. Jimmy did not know what crazy impulse seized him, what wild urge suddenly possessed him, but he bravely, purposely waded through the weeds, grabbed one end of the ladder, and began to try to drag it over to the tower’s base.
"Jimmy Gill?" Detroit, usually the more impulsive of the two, could not figure out what his friend was up to, but his expression showed he was worried. “What in the world are you...?”
"Help me prop this ladder against that tall thing," Jimmy ordered, driven by some strange inner force.
Two kids their size should not have been able to lift the heavy ladder, but they grunted and strained and sweated and finally managed to lay it against the tower, about ten feet from the ground, forming a bridge over the hog-wire fence. They ignored the signs wired to the enclosure: “High Voltage”. “No Trespassing”. “Danger!”
Detroit looked sideways at Jimmy again, as if he could not imagine what crazy thing he was going to do next. Or maybe he knew exactly what his blood brother had in mind. Detroit gripped the ladder from underneath to help steady it, to keep it from kicking out at the bottom, and Jimmy, without any hesitation at all, began crab-walking upward, one rung at a time, climbing toward his goal.
“Where the Sam Hill you goin’, Jimmy Gill? You’re gonna fall inside that fence and you won’t be able to get out.”
“You’ll see. You’ll see in a minute.”
Detroit sensed that there had been a change in roles. He usually led the way blindly when they ventured into danger. For the first time, it was Jimmy Gill who dived headlong into the dangerous darkness.
Jimmy intended to climb up the ladder until he could reach out and touch the tower. See how cool and solid the cross-members might be when his fingertips brushed them. See if he could feel the vibrations, connecting somehow with whatever caused the ghostly buzzing they heard.
But when his hand first touched the cold steel, he could not help himself. Something besides good sense or fear was suddenly in charge of his will. He had to reach out with the other hand, then stretch upward for the next higher grip. Then his feet found an anchor on the tower, much more solid than on the shaky wooden ladder. Without ever consciously intending to do it, he was climbing. Just a foot or two at a time, but he was climbing steadily upward into the warm dusk.
Thirty feet or more of space stretched out under him before he dared a look back down. Involuntarily, he felt his whole body draw tight, his stomach turn over, his breath leave his lungs. Detroit looked tiny and insignificant down below, gazing upward, his mouth open in horrified disbelief.
“Jimmy Gill, you can come on back down now. We need to be getting on to supper. It’s getting late. You hear me, Jimmy Gill?” His voice was small, far away.
Jimmy ignored him, turned his face back toward the sky, and resumed climbing. By now, up looked friendlier than down. Finally, his arms growing tired, trembling from the strain of the climb, he found a grip on a cross-member with each bend of his elbows, locked his calves around a leg of the tower, and stopped there to rest.
Then, he found enough nerve to look around himself. What he saw stunned him. He had to fight to catch what was left of his breath.
Jimmy could see the ribbon of the town’s main road, the Superhighway, as it wound in from the north and disappeared off to the south. Cars already had their headlights turned on as the last of the sun's brightness gave way to night. There was a blanket of lights spread out away from where he rested, stretching in all directions, as far as he could see. Porch lights, kitchen lights, street lights, stoplights. Millions of fireflies, burning embers, winking colored light bulbs, all sprinkled among trees, along streets, up the side of Red Mountain, peppered into the sides of buildings downtown, strung along the streets like jeweled necklaces. All those lights dusted onto the landscape as if they had been tossed out there at random by some great hand.
“Jimmy! Come on now! Hear me? Come on!” His voice was so far away. Jimmy could hardly hear him.
Over a hill to the northwest was the steel mill, now clearly seen below the orange cloud. Its blast furnace made an angry red-hot wound in the middle of the dusk while several tall needles belched fire amid the smoke and steam that ultimately spread out to hug the valley floor like cotton fog.
“Jimmy Gill! Can you hear me? You all right up there?”
There were people out there. People all over the place. Folks behind the wheels of all those cars, sitting on their front porches, looking out the windows of the kitchens and from the downtown buildings. Maybe there were people glancing up from their labor over at the mill or from where they worked in the filling stations and foundries or the buildings downtown.
A powerful thought hit Jimmy Gill like a slap in the face. If all those people down there would only look this way, they would see him, James Earl Gill, clinging to the side of this tower, still lit by the glow of the sun that had already deserted the earthbound. Left them in the darkness way down there where they were forced to run about in their maze of lights and concrete. Ground-locked, shackled by gravity, not hanging freely in the breeze as he was.
From his high perch he was visible to hundreds...no, thousands…of people! Maybe even hundreds of thousands! The strange feeling was indescribable. He wanted to shout at all of them down there, wave his arms wildly, scream for them to look up at him as he dangled there, make them see him, listen to him as he laughed and sang. Make them listen to anything he might feel the need to say.
But he could not do that, or course. He dared not release his grip on the cool steel. And he knew, no matter how high he might climb, even if he got all the way to the clouds, to the stars even, the people down below would never hear him.
But somehow, it did not matter. It was still such a rush! Jimmy had no idea where the euphoria came from, what craziness had laid claim to his senses, but it seized him with a grip so fast, so binding, that he would never lose the wonderful thrill of it for the rest of his life.
"You damned brat! Get your damn ass down from there!"
Jimmy looked downward so quickly that he felt dizzy. He almost spun loose from the tower and had to redouble his grip on the steel to keep from plummeting. In the pinkish glow of the last sunlight of the day, he could just make out a tiny black dot, Detroit's head, parting the brown grass as he wildly fled toward the ditch and into the cover of the honeysuckle.
In the deepening shadows directly below him, at the base of the tower, he could just make out the upturned face of a scrawny little man, the source of all the screaming down there. The man’s anger easily reached up the tower to Jimmy.
"Get your nigger ass down from there before I get my shotgun and shoot you down off there like a damn squirrel!"
There was no way to escape horizontally. Climbing upward would only prolong the inevitable. And who knows? Mad as the little man seemed to be, he might actually start taking shots at him for real.
Jimmy slowly, cautiously started to climb back down. But he could not help pausing for a moment to drink in the vista from the side of the tower one more time. And to again be stunned by all he could see. Maybe one or two people had looked his way after all and had noticed the little lump that was Jimmy Gill dangling up there. Maybe so.
“I said get your ass down! Now!”
There was no other way but back across the ladder that spanned the hog wire fence and that path led right into the clutches of the glowering little man waiting for him there.
"You lame-brained little idiot! You stupid little bastard!" He was no longer hollering just to be heard but out of seething, exasperated fury. "If that goddam transmitter had still been turned on you would have been cooked blacker than that other little nigger that got away from me! Burned to a damned crisp!"
The man was no more than five feet tall, wore horn-rimmed glasses taped together over his nose with black tape, had several days' growth of beard and thinning gray-brown hair that was greasy and slicked down with smelly oil. A nest of screwdrivers sprouted from a plastic pouch in his shirt pocket. Odd tools stuck their heads out from his baggy, dirty trousers. It was hard to be afraid of such an odd-looking little man, even as he grabbed Jimmy by the collar and jerked him down roughly off the last rung of the ladder, whipping him around rudely to face him.
"Hell, you ain't even a nigger after all!" He seemed genuinely surprised by Jimmy’s whiteness, but he was still fuming, spewing as if he was about to blow a gasket. "What the hell was you doing climbing my tower, you piece of damn white trash?"
"I just wanted to see what I could see from up there. That’s all." Jimmy’s voice sounded weak and trembling. He had just wet his pants, too.
"I ought to call the cops on your ass and have 'em put you under the jail right now. Throw you in there with all them rapists and murderers until you rot," he threatened. The man continued to shake the boy, to curse and rant until he ran out of steam, his white hot anger finally cooling down. "Look, kid, make for sure that you don't come messing around my radio station again or I will fix you but good."
Jimmy had long since stopped trying to tear loose from the grip the man had on the collar of his shirt. He seemed to be more bluster than danger anyway. And besides, he had just then said the magic words.
"Radio station? This is a radio station here?"
"What'd you think it was, a damned playground, with monkey bars for goddam little monkeys like...?"
"Are you the one that plays all the songs and talks on the air? Are you Rockin' Randy?"
Jimmy doubted that this ugly little man could actually be the golden-voiced spirit who had cast such a spell on him from behind the Zenith's speaker grill, but that was the only radio name he knew for sure. The wiry old man stared at him as if this kid was even crazier than he had at first thought. Then he burst into laughter and lost his grip on the boy’s neck as he slapped his thighs and hooted.
Even loose, Jimmy was going nowhere now. He had questions for this little man.
"Hell, no, I ain't no damned Rockin' Randy," he said, cutting off his laughter like a light switch. Suddenly serious, he pulled up his puny chest. That sent the screwdrivers in his pocket pointing in different directions. He squinted behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. "I'm Charlie McGee, the chief engineer for radio station WROG, duly licensed by the F.C.C., and I can put you in the penitentiary right now for messing with this here tower like you did. It's a federal crime to trespass inside that fence!"
"Is that where they talk and play the records and all?" Jimmy asked, stretching to see past this McGee man to the cinderblock building.
But Charlie McGee was not answering any more questions for this juvenile delinquent.
"Tell me your name and address, brat, so I can have the law come and get you if you ever set foot on my tower again. That is, if you don’t get your ass fried by all the radio-frequency current first."
Jimmy really was not sure of the address of the duplex so he stammered something and told him his name. McGee wrote it all down with a stubby, well-chewed pencil on a small notebook he had fished from a back pocket.
"Now then. Let’s see here. What's going to be your punishment for climbing up my radio tower? Risking shorting the whole radio station directly to ground and kicking me off the air? Leaving your carcass just a greasy place out here for the crows to pick at? Another sorry mess for Charlie McGee to have to clean up like he always does? Opening the door for your momma and daddy to sue me and WROG and who knows who all for some shit or other?"
He rubbed his bristly chin as he continued to mutter to himself, and then rolled his eyes upward. Blinking red lights had just burst forth along the length of the steeple above them. McGee suddenly snapped his boney, nicotine-stained fingers. He pointed one of them directly at Jimmy’s nose.
"You get your little monkey-climbing butt over here at nine o'clock in the morning and I've got a good day's worth of work for you to do. Trash for you to haul out here to burn and whatever else other chores I can dream up between now and then."
The little man spun quickly on his heels and double-timed almost out of sight into the weeds and darkness, then stopped suddenly, twirled and screeched again.
"And if you ain't here, I'll get the sheriff and the police and the F.B.I. on your ass so quick it'll make your head swim," he called back, then walked on, soon invisible in the murky twilight, still muttering about “federal offense” and being “burned to a crisp.”
Carefully, Jimmy made his way back across the field. Only a bit of a rising moon and some distant street lights showed him the way to the tree bridge. It was hard to be frightened by the comical little man, no matter how much he cursed and raged. Besides, Jimmy was too excited about finally being at the place where the magic was made, confirming that it really was sorcery after all that went on in the low block building with the flashing blue lights.
Stopping at the edge of the ditch, he was a little leery of feeling his way across the bridge in the dark and then having to make his way alone through the jungle of vines. But he was still so flushed by the rush of emotion he had found hanging there on the side of the tower that he was sure he could have levitated across the stream!
Once across, Jimmy looked back before plunging into the undergrowth. The red lights on the obelisk in the field blinked like a healthy pulse. The North Star had moved to a point behind the tower and it seemed to mark the spot where he had clung to it a few minutes before.
A sudden shiver of excitement snuck up on him. He had to tear himself away to head for home.
But never mind. Tomorrow at nine he would be back. Then he would actually visit the place where the wizard cast his spells.
Seven
There was a promise of autumn in the breeze the next morning. It must have rained briefly overnight. The air seemed cooler and cleaner, the humidity lower, the view out Jimmy’s dingy bedroom window for once not dimmed by mist or haze. The floor was cool to his bare feet so he got a pair of well-worn socks that were twisted together in the chiffarobe drawer and then fetched a half-empty bag of stale cookies and a glass of Kool-Aid from the kitchen. He brought his breakfast back to the bedroom to kneel and worship before the radio.
The volume stayed low, his ear close to the grill cloth so as not to awaken Grandmama. She was still noisily sawing away in the bed across the room, sometimes fussing at game show hosts and soap opera stars in her sleep.
The night before had brought another batch of miraculous revelations from behind the Zenith’s dial. Jimmy had stayed up later than usual, but he had spent only a few minutes in front of the television set with Grandmama. She never noticed when he slipped out of the r
oom to pass several hours twisting the "TUN" knob on the big radio until distant voices grew clear, until the music that was being sent out to ride along the wind became distinct and melodic.
And he had listened in awe that often approached disbelief as he heard the rumble-throated announcers rattle off strings of call letters. Some he had heard the night before. Others were new, from even more distant locations. WLW in Cincinnati, WHO in Iowa, WBAP in Ft. Worth, Texas, WWL in New Orleans, WGN and WLS in Chicago, WCKY, WHAS, WNOX, KDKA. There were commercials for stores and restaurants and businesses hundreds of miles away from where he shivered in the darkness, sitting cross-legged on the chilly linoleum in the duplex. News reports about real people in real cities and towns he had never even heard of.
Then there would be a strange noise that crept in like some audio tide. Something that sounded like he imagined an ocean wave might sound, though he had never actually heard one. It would rise up out of the sea of static to overtake the signals and eventually wash them away. Even the ones that had been the strongest, the most solid, would fall victim to the surge. He then would have to turn the tuning knob again to search out another clear voice in the night.
Sometimes the voices he discovered spoke a language he could not understand, and the music was tinkly, the songs sung in words he did not know. And then that, too, would fade into the twisting current of static crashes and whines that seemed to rise up and claim what floated to the top of the din for a few precious minutes of lucidity. Jimmy could only imagine the exotic, foreign locations of those stations, what the view might be from a perch high up on the sides of their red-blinking, candy-striped towers.