Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  The crowd on both sides of the track quickly melted away as the fire burned out. When Jimmy got home and told Grandmama about what he had seen, she said it had been on the news all evening. That the Ku Klux Klan had burned over fifty crosses all around Birmingham that night.

  "The niggers have all been harping on integrating the schools," she said. "Even the old Supreme Court says they got to go ahead and let them mix. So the Klan wanted to show them not to get too uppity just yet. They’re going to make sure them niggers stay in their place! Reach over there and turn that to channel thirteen, Jimmy. It's nearly time for Dinah Shore."

  For some reason, Jimmy Gill did not feel like listening to the radio that night. The air was still warm outside, so he sat on the front porch, on the high top step, nibbling on some hot dogs he had boiled up. He watched the occasional car ease along the street as a few men arrived home from overtime at the mill.

  He had a feeling in his stomach he had never felt before. He was only eleven years old, but he was worried. Concerned about Detroit. About their friendship. About what might happen if the troubles between the races got any worse, as they were threatening to do.

  There was no doubt in his mind. He loved Detroit Simmons as deeply as he might have a brother if he had had one. He did not care about his race. Not a bit. Why should anybody else? He would love to have Detroit going to the same school as he did. Why would anybody be against that?

  A soft breeze played with the turning leaves on the water oaks near the Polanski house. Noisily, it scattered the first ones that had already turned to gold, giving up their grip on the highest branches. The breeze also brought the aroma of something delicious cooking somewhere along the block, the perfume of honeysuckle, and of Mrs. Polanski’s rosebushes on the corner.

  But then, that same wind brought the stench of kerosene, of singed rags, of black smoke, of fear and hate.

  Ten

  The leaves had turned to glorious oranges and yellows and scarlets, painting the distant hills the same colors Jimmy figured the NBC peacock might show if Grandmama’s television set had not been a dim black-and-white picture tube. But most of the leaves on the trees along Wisteria Street simply went from dull green to gone. They were washed into soggy mounds by the rain, clogging gutters and building dams, creating muddy, stagnant lakes that had to be skirted and hopped.

  The trail through the woods to the radio station had grown mossy, slick and treacherous. More than once Jimmy had come home with mud caked on his overall knees or with the seat of his britches sodden from a sudden slip or slide.

  Grandmama gave him what-for and a whack on the butt, but he simply rinsed the clothes out in the bathtub and hung them up to dry for the next day’s school. She did not have time for such. She spent her afternoons with cartoons and western serials, laughing out loud at the simple jokes the kids in the local studio audience would tell the clown-host.

  “You ought to be watchin’ this show, Jimmy. Spin and Marty are going to be on the Mickey Mouse Club today. They get into the funniest messes on that old dude ranch. They may have Zorro, too.”

  “I need to do some homework, Grandmama.”

  “And then we can switch it over in a minute and see Roy Rogers and that feller with the jeep on Channel 6 Rodeo.”

  “If I can finish this arithmetic, I’ll come look at it.”

  But he rarely did. The big Zenith radio was his primary release.

  October looked like January already, but on a rare, warm, sunny day he escaped out the front door of the school building, breathed the clean, fresh air as if he had been holding his breath all day, and ran the entire way home. He had stayed up late the night before, twisting the Zenith’s knobs, and then he slept too late to have time to fix his lunch that morning. That helped, in a roundabout sort of way, to make him an even bigger hit in class that day.

  Loud stomach growls started about two that afternoon. Growls so boisterous that they provided welcome entertainment for the kids sitting near him. All their merriment and giggles inevitably got them into trouble with Miss Cleveland, and Jimmy and several buddies were sentenced to stand the rest of the day on their tip-toes, their noses in chalk-circles drawn on the blackboard. But even that was better than the mind-numbing boredom of sitting in the schoolroom all afternoon.

  Jimmy had been accepted by his new classmates. Anybody with a gut that loud, and who worked at a real, live radio station, was all right with them!

  As he ran past the Polanski house on his way home, he spotted Mrs. Polanski and Clarice George sitting on the sunny end of the porch, enjoying the rare remaining remnants of warmth before damp winter swept in for good. They excitedly waved him over for a glass of iced tea and a talk. Jimmy only hoped there would be tea cakes, too. He could put up with the old-woman talk if there were only some of the wonderful cookies.

  The cold tea was sweetly wonderful, especially as thirsty as he was from the arid dryness of Miss Cleveland’s class. And there were some frosted tea cakes and a generous slice of pecan pie. He tried not to make a pig of himself.

  The two women had become inseparable since the day their husbands died. Clarice George had, for all practical purposes, moved in with Greta Polanski, taking care of the older woman. Both of them kept each other company. Jimmy often saw them sitting on the porch, coming and going in Mrs. Polanski’s car or working in the front yard or the rose garden in back. The duplex next door to Jimmy and Grandmama had been surrendered to Greta’s twin boys.

  The only time Jimmy even knew they were there was when they staggered home, loud-drunk, in the wee hours of the morning, back from some adventure he could only imagine. They slept away their days away. There was no indication that they worked. The only other time he saw the twins was when they tinkered on one of the old cars they kept parked helter-skelter in front of the house.

  Clarice and Great asked about his grandmother, and then, politely inquired about school. Then they listened with nodding attention as Jimmy hemmed and hawed and tried to avoid the truth about the hell it had become for him.

  “Yes ma’am, I spent a good part of this afternoon at the blackboard, working out a problem for the class.”

  “Why that’s so wonderful, Jimmy,” Mrs. George said. “My own boys never cared much for school and Hector didn’t help me encourage them at all. I’m so glad you are paying attention to your studies.”

  “Young ones so need their education to be successful in life,” Mrs. Polanski added. “Education...so taken for granted in this country...”

  “And I’ve been working some at the radio station over yonder,” he added quickly, trying to change the subject. He waved a cookie in the general direction of WROG’s tower.

  “Oh, Jimmy, at the radio station? How wonderful! What do you do there? Sing?” Mrs. George gushed.

  She seemed excited to be talking to someone from the media. Mrs. Polanski did, too. She leaned forward in her rocker, listening for his answer as she again shoved the glass plate of tea cakes toward him. Jimmy took two more, a chocolate one for now, a lemon one to slide into his overall bib pocket for supper.

  “No’m. I just help take out the trash and do odd jobs and stuff.”

  But the truth about his thrilling job in show business did not seem to diminish their interest. They pushed for more information about the radio station, insisting on knowing what famous people he had met so far. If he personally knew any of the people who “talked on the wind,” as Mrs. George put it. If he had seen any of the singing stars in the flesh? They named several people he had never heard of...Mitch Miller, Kay Starr, and the McGuire Sisters. And a man he had seen on television named Tennessee Ernie Ford.

  The two women assumed all the people who performed on the radio were alive, in person, waiting right there inside the station, crammed into a studio of some kind until it was their turn. That Perez Prado dragged his orchestra into the little concrete block building on the Superhighway each time the station wanted to play “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” then hustled
them all out quickly so Roger Williams could wheel in his piano for another rendition of “Autumn Leaves.”

  They pumped him, asking excited questions, most of which he could not come close to answering. Then, when Jimmy rose from his seat on the chaise lounge to start for home, the ladies begged him to get the autographs of all the stars he undoubtedly met every day. Urged him to tell Jerry Diamond, their favorite announcer, hello for them. They both loved him, they said. The smooth way he talked, his beautiful, deep voice. But Jimmy dodged their questions about what he looked like, what sort of person he really was.

  “And be careful you don’t get electrocuted working around all that juice, Jimmy,” Mrs. Polanski called out to him as he cut through the gap in the row of azaleas in her front yard.

  He merely waved back. Everyone who found out that he had started the job at WROG was instantly fascinated by the personalities who “talked on the wind” and usually was not shy about asking for favors. Even the kids at school wanted him to get autographs from Elvis and Tab Hunter and Pat Boone. Or to see if he could steal some records for them. He acted smug about it, but he secretly loved it when they wanted to know about the station. And they actually listened to him when he answered their questions.

  Jimmy was almost to the open front door of the duplex, still munching his cookie, when he heard an unusual sound from inside. Grandmama squealed loudly. That was a sound usually reserved only for the biggest winner on The $64,000 Question or Twenty-One. Or the sudden, unexpected death of one of her soap opera favorites. He rushed inside to find her sitting on the edge of the sunken couch, hand to mouth, eyes wide and disbelieving, an ash about to drop from the end of a neglected cigarette that trembled between her yellowed fingers.

  “Oh, God. Oh, dear Lord.”

  “Grandmama, what is it?”

  The look on her face was awful. They must have finished off Townsend Faulkner on The Secret Storm. No other character’s demise would cause such abject panic.

  “It’s the Russians, honey. They just broke in on one of my stories with a news bulletin, Jimmy. The Russians have put up some kind of a space satellite.”

  Jimmy was perplexed. He was not certain what a space satellite was, but it sounded like something from Captain Midnight, “presented by Ovaltine.”

  But whatever the Russians did meant worry and fear. His class at school actually enjoyed the monthly atomic bomb drills because it meant a few minutes of giggling under their desks instead of fighting sleep while sitting in them. A quarter hour without having to listen to Miss Cleveland’s drone while they filed outside to check the damage caused by the nuclear blast.

  But there was always something else lurking there on their A-bomb larks. The underlying fear that one day the wailing sirens would weep for real. Their simple wooden desks with their murals of carved initials, curse words and phallic art would offer little protection from the hellish hot wind and flesh-melting radiation.

  They had seen the films of tests in the desert somewhere out west. Heard the breathless descriptions on television by those who would ban the bomb for everyone. But Grandmama always cussed viciously when the whine of the Conelrad test tone interrupted her shows.

  “That damn whining is hurtin’ my ears,” she complained. “Where’s Truth or Consequences?”

  But there was always the thought that one day the announcer behind the Civil Defense logo on-screen would say the horrible words, “This is not a test”.

  Jimmy Gill sat on the cold linoleum floor, absent-mindedly eating the last of the tea cake. He listened to the sad-eyed newsman on the television, half-afraid of what strange new threat he might be about to report.

  “...and the small capsule has been called ‘Sputnik’ by the Soviets. It will continue to orbit the earth and send back a weak radio signal until its battery runs out. Neither President Eisenhower nor Pentagon spokesmen had any comment about this major space breakthrough by the Russians, but critics of the administration said it is a major blow to...”

  “Lord, Jimmy! What if they can send down a atom bomb from that thing? Or if they can launch rockets at us like they do on them shows you watch on Saturday mornings?”

  She seemed to be on the verge of tears, still shaken, as she slid back into the depths of the couch and took a deep drag on her cigarette. But her panic lasted only until the special bulletin had finished. She immediately locked back into the show that was interrupted by the newsman. The mushroom cloud left her consciousness immediately as she became lost in yet another tale of misery and pain to be rewarded with furniture and appliances on Queen for a Day.

  Jimmy rose from the floor, dusted the cookie crumbs off his lap, and went outside. Out to his favorite high front step. He leaned back on his elbows to get the fullest view possible of the darkening late afternoon sky. He searched as deeply as he could for the tiniest of lights in the blue-going-to-purple overhead. He was looking for a glint, a glimmer of something that might be the Russian Sputnik satellite as it sped overhead directly above Wisteria Street.

  He was not sure what he was looking for up there, or that he would know it if he saw it. But he knew that this thing that had happened that day was somehow momentous. The ability to hurl an object into space was stunning. Then to follow it with tracking equipment as it whisked around the earth almost faster than the eye could see.

  Man! It was nothing short of a miracle. The Buck Rogers movie serials Detroit and he had mimicked in the woods behind the house were suddenly, instantly, not so far-fetched after all.

  Jimmy jumped. Red lights and a loud roar zoomed across the northern sky above him. But he quickly realized that it was only a Southern Airways plane banking for a landing at the airport across town. Then he caught his breath when he noticed a faint, winking gleam in the middle of the airplane’s arc across the sky. But he knew that was only Venus making its regular nightly appearance behind the veil of the orange smoke from the steel mills.

  It was getting chilly and the stars were popping through the fabric of the sky everywhere as he watched. Somewhere a dog was starting to bark loudly as it caught sight of the full moon on the horizon.

  A shiver tickled Jimmy Gill’s spine.

  Up there, so high above his head that he could not even see it, something made by the hands of humans was being whipped across the dusky sky by a combination of man’s thrust and complicated natural physics. Anyone on the globe with a telescope or the right radio receiver and antenna could see it or hear it. Were it just a bit bigger or brighter, anyone on the face of the planet could look up in the night sky and lock their eyes on the ball.

  Just imagine the wonder of it! From the satellite’s view at the edge of the pull of the planet, it could look down on all that walked and worked and slept and moved and fought and loved and lived and died way down there below it.

  The thought almost overwhelmed Jimmy. That little ball of shiny steel had the wonderful ability to reach and touch so many from its perch on the highest rung of God’s tower.

  Eleven

  “So you’re the little skinny rascal that’s tryin’ to steal my job!”

  Her black face in the dark hall outside the control room was stern, angry. Then it cracked in half and she erupted into the same cackling laughter Jimmy Gill had heard that afternoon when he had gone in search of Detroit and Ishkooda. It was the woman who had been weeding her yard that day. The one who had chased him back home. And now here she was, confronting him in the hallway at WROG.

  But she suddenly seemed friendly enough. She offered him her hand and he took it and shook it.

  “I’m Lulu Dooley,” she said. “Did you ever find that scoundrel of a nephew of mine you was lookin’ for?”

  “Nephew?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Detroit Simmons. I’m his Aunt Lulu. Surely he’s been bragging to you about me.”

  Jimmy was struck by what a small world it could sometimes turn out to be. Lulu Dooley, the maid at WROG who was afraid of the deejays and the transmitter, was Detroit Simmons’ aunt.

&
nbsp; “No ma’am, I never did find Ishkooda. But me and Detroit play together all the time. We’re best buddies, I guess.”

  “Well, it may be best that you didn’t try to find Ishkooda anyway, little mister. You’re way too pink and blue-eyed for that neck of the woods!” She cackled again then shut it off with a big hand when the on-air light popped alive just above their heads. She waited for it to die out, then turned her head sideways, exactly the way Detroit would do, and pried a little more. “What they pay you to work here, anyhow?”

  Lulu looked at him defiantly, daring him not to answer her nosey question. He could see even more of Detroit Simmons in her expression.

  “Mostly Charlie just gives me old records they don’t want, or copies of fan magazines. Maybe a dollar every once in a while. But I don’t mind.”

  Jimmy and Detroit had retrieved a couple of discarded record players from the city dump and Detroit had somehow managed to get them both back into working order. When Jimmy was not pulling in stations on the Zenith radio, he would drag the two turntables to the middle of the bedroom floor, sit down between them, and play disk jockey, just like Jerry Diamond and Rockin’ Randy. He wrapped an old sock around a Vienna sausage can and taped it to the end of a broomstick for a microphone. Since Detroit was not able to come into Jimmy’s house, he sat under the bedroom window and listened to the songs and Jimmy’s high-pitched deejay patter. When he got tired, he slipped back home to listen to the old radio he also salvaged from the dump and fixed up for himself.

  Jimmy Gill rarely noticed that his one-kid listening audience had tuned him out. He would just keep on spinning the discarded records and gabbing into the sausage-can mike and pretended to talk with girls on a make-believe telephone.

  “Come on with me,” Lulu told him, “and I’ll find you a thing or two to help me. Then I’ll give you something better than them old nasty rock and roll records.” She twirled in her tracks and dusted both sides of the narrow hallway with her bulky hips as she charged back toward the front lobby of the station building. “Skinny as you are, young Mr. Gill, you look like you could use some cat-head biscuits and fried chicken and apple pie for your trouble.”