Make Me Work (2 page)

Rodney beamed through his dusty wire rims as she entered his booth. If you needed a techie in your life, a man with a nice wad of keys on his belt, you wanted it to be Rodney. He was the original engineer of WWHY and its chief engineer today—the only member of the staff with an actual license from the FCC. He resembled the young Thomas Edison, right down to the shoes, though he wasn't really young anymore. Nobody was, except Milo.

“How about these great sounds, Rod?” Lisa said, plopping into a chair.

“Milo's music upsets me,” Rodney replied.

“Really? Some mindless dolts using a million bucks of studio time to make stupid, pointless ugliness? What's upsetting about that?”

He looked up from the clump of audio cables he was untangling. It seemed as if he'd been untangling them for a while now. “I guess it's just me,” he said.

There was a sad story you always heard about Rodney, and if you hadn't heard it he would tell you himself, with the most heartbreaking earnestness. Owing to some boyhood mishap, he had a metal plate in his head. That wasn't the story. The story was that one night in the early seventies, some d.j.s at the station talked Rodney into smoking marijuana with them, something he'd never done before. The pot interacted with his plate in some unprecedented neurometallurgical way, shifting valences or unleashing ion fields in his brain, with the result that he never came back down. The fun-loving d.j.s laughed when he told them the next night. They assured him that he was imagining it. But he wasn't. He waited a few more days, then a week, and nothing changed. He never touched a reefer after that night, and he'd been stoned for two decades now.

“What are you doing here?” Lisa asked. Rodney rarely officiated over particular radio shows—twiddling the knobs and watching the meters. The transmitter itself was his sphere of operations now, out in the hills. Lisa thought of it as a furnace that Rodney stoked, heroically, all by himself.

“We got a bone in our throat around 4 a.m.”

“No kidding. Did we die?”

“Briefly.”

“Got any bigger bones?”

They laughed. On the other side of the glass, Milo was wearing a pink T-shirt that said “Elvis Came From Mars” below a picture of the young Mr. Presley singing from the side of his horsy, carnal mouth. The T-shirt troubled Lisa out of all proportion to what it said. Quite possibly Elvis
had
come from Mars—she'd had the thought more than once herself, in connection with the King's possession of her estranged husband's soul. But this apprehension went beyond Mitchell and her marriage; she felt it coming from further down. For weeks she'd been this way, plunging into deep anxiety over the slightest things. It was partly the relentless rain. She wheeled her chair over and put her cheek on Rodney's shoulder. He smelled musty—mildewed, in fact—but so did everything these days.

Behind the glass, Milo was scowling at her while some head-banging travesty whacked away on the monitors. “Hello, Lisa,” he said, his voice floating over the music like the Wizard of Oz's. “Thank you for coming to do your radio show this morning.”

Lisa and Milo agreed on only one thing in life, but it was something so fundamental that it made them friends—the vileness of “mellow.” She leaned into Rodney's mike. “Milo, give me a break, will you? My car wouldn't start in the rain, and then it kept conking out all the way over here. I got about two hours' sleep, because my bedroom smells like a landfill and a monster raccoon runs through my floor all night. My dog wakes up and howls at 3 a.m., my cat starts yowling, and my shrink is now pushing survivors' groups and light meds.”

“What kind of light meds?” asked Milo.

“Survivors of what?” Rodney asked.

“Marriage and downers,” Lisa replied.

Milo stared at her, gnomelike beneath the big phones, while his ravagers of beauty finished their song. Then he opened his mike to the world. “All right, everybody,” he announced, “our very own flower child, Miss Lisa, is finally here to do her show. Please be nice to her today. Her car won't run in the rain, so she parked it at the dump and lives in it now with her dog and her cat and her raccoon. They take bad medicine and never go to sleep. If her husband is listening, she's not coming back. It's a sad story. But the old girl can still rock ‘n' roll, so let's segue into those classic moldies with the new one from Lizard Euphoria, a little thing they call ‘Want Slash Need.'” Then Milo spun the tune, if tune it could be called, and pried the headphones off his head.

Which somehow caused Lisa to figure it out. It wasn't really about Elvis at all. The picture of the King on Milo's shirt was taken in 1957—the year her father threw her bottle in the sea. She'd been thinking about it in the shower this very morning. It happened on a Jersey-shore vacation with her folks when she was three years old. She was playing beside her parents' beach blanket, dropping her bottle in the sand and then crying because it had sand on it. Her mother cleaned it off for her four or five times, and then the next time she dropped it the old man leaped up and flung it into the waves. That was how Lisa was weaned. Thirty-five years later, a T-shirt was making her feel bad about this. So it was true: she was hysterical. All the stray garbage-signals of the world had found their satellite dish, and its name was Lisa. Her father was dead now, meaning he was truly alive. Alive forever. Leaving her husband had brought him back; she thought about him every day.

Milo poked his head into engineering. “I'm playing the long mix of this,” he said. “Seven minutes.”

“Milo,” said Lisa, “promise me something or I'm gonna worry. Don't go in Mitchell's store wearing that shirt, O.K.? He's weird about Elvis.”

“Mitchell weird?” Milo said. He looked down to see what shirt he was wearing. “Lisa, I drive all the way to Brattleboro to buy music, just so I won't have to set foot in Mitchell's store, ever, for any reason. No matter what I'm wearing.”

Lisa shot him with a gun-shaped hand that meant “Good thinking.”

“I don't shop at Mitchell's store, either,” said Rodney. “He yelled at me once, and all I was doing was looking through the bins.”

“Yeah, but how many hours had you been looking?” Milo asked.

“I don't keep track of things like that, Milo.”

Lisa wheeled her chair back to look at Rodney. He was really a very sweet man, she thought, far sweeter than most. But he'd shaved himself badly the day before, leaving a patch of brown-gray stubble under one nostril, and several more on his neck. No, Rodney was not the answer. She stood and kissed his cheek. “You're not the answer, either,” she told Milo.

“What's the question?”

“What is Lisa doing for the rest of her life?” she said, and gave herself to the fluorescent hallway, the shining linoleum path to the coffee machine.

“She's doing the classic-rock show on WWHY!”

“Oh, no,” she said, not looking back. “No, no, no.” Though it was perverse and destructive, she allowed herself the thought that she was old enough to be Milo's mother, simply to enjoy the consolation of the subsequent thought: But I would have had to get started awfully early. And then she recalled that she
had
gotten started awfully early.

She yelped once in the coffee room and poured herself a mug of the black acid bath from the Mr. Coffee carafe. One of Milo's pre-dawn survival tricks was to put three foil bags of ground coffee in the filter instead of one, and then coax the results past his tongue with heavy measures of non-dairy creamer. He had left the morning arrivals to figure this out for themselves.

She had a sip of sludge. She hadn't been on a date since leaving her husband, and now it was the weekend again and she just wanted to go out with somebody, and not somebody she already knew, either, which ruled out everyone. There was a very nice gay man, HIV negative, who donated sperm to lesbian couples in the area. She never thought she'd join the ranks of the turkey-baster moms, but it was starting to look like either that or become Lisa Harrington, Raccoon Lady of Hollyfield, Vermont.

It had been a dumb move to feed the raccoon in the first place, she'd be the first to admit it. But he was cute and she was lonely. Recipe for trouble.

Her rented house had a pantry window facing the redwood deck in back. Since the end of the bitter-cold weather, she'd been leaving it open so Sergeant Pepper, her cat, could come and go at will. One evening after dinner, cleaning up at the sink, she sensed Sarge in the corner of her eye. When she turned to look, it wasn't him. It was a mammoth raccoon on the windowsill, looking at her with his broad masked face. He was moving his pointy nose all around, smelling the pantry smells. His long, black claws hung over the edge of the sill.

You couldn't live in Vermont without seeing lots of raccoons, but she'd never seen one this close up, or this big. She'd certainly never seen one sitting in a pantry window, so trusting and calm. She felt, after all these unsatisfactory years of adulthood, that she might finally be in a fairy tale. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “Do you talk?” To her great disappointment, he did not.

Jesse was sleeping on the living-room rug. Lisa stepped into the pantry, and, far from running away, Sparky—she'd already named him Sparky in her mind—came a little farther in. Quietly, she took bowls of dry cat kibble and water out the back door to the deck. Sparky waited on the railing, rising up on his hind legs to sniff the air and flex his slender hands. When Lisa went back in, he hopped down and ate the food, while she watched through the door. She had to keep the window closed from then on; otherwise, Jesse would kill Sparky on her kitchen floor, or Sparky would kill Sergeant Pepper on the redwood deck. Somebody would kill somebody. When Sparky came the following night, he scratched adorably on the glass. Lisa bumped him up to Sarge's canned provisions—Elegant Entrée, Liver in Creamed Gravy, Tuna in Sauce.

Beyond the town limits, they didn't send a garbage truck to your house; Lisa had to take her own trash to the dump once a week. Between trips she kept her bags in the basement against the cool stone wall. A week after Sparky arrived, she went to take another load down, and a stench came up the stairs. She crouched on the steps with the flashlight. Every garbage bag was ripped open. She sent Jesse first and then followed him down, tiptoeing in her flat shoes around the scattered trash. The dog wriggled through the basement like a large black muscle, vacuuming the floor with his snout. Periodically, he stopped to scratch himself, and it made Lisa feel itchy, too. Her ankles bristled. Didn't I shave my legs this morning? she thought, glancing down at the stubble there. She could have sworn she had. The light in the basement was bad, but she seemed to have hair on her feet as well. Then she saw the stubble hopping.

She shrieked and ran upstairs, and washed her legs in the tub, spritzed her rubber boots with flea spray and went back downstairs. Jesse was still on a psychedelic nose trip at the far end of the room. In the yellow light of the bare bulb, Lisa saw the black particles of fleas rush away from her boots like iron filings repelled by magnetism. Thousands of them were flicking around the concrete floor amid piles of white dust and plaster scraps she'd never noticed before. She glanced up at the ceiling. It was all busted—holes punched through it in many places, irregular clumps of white solids dangling by threads.

It took her a second to understand what this was. Sparky, the fat hog, had been running in the space between the ceiling and the floor upstairs, breaking through the plaster wherever it wouldn't hold his weight.

Milo's musical parting shot was pure thrashing rudeness, but it gave Lisa four minutes in the record library. She arrived in the booth with a stack of CDs, put on her phones, and cued up a disc. She was supposed to do a station ID followed by spots for a water-bed store and a Chinese takeout place, but they'd wait. She pulled a slider on the console to kill Lizard Euphoria, pushed another slider open, hit the button, and—
wham!
—Jimi Hendrix cracked the gloom with “Still Raining, Still Dreaming,” the only song Lisa could possibly play to start a radio show today, because it
was
still raining and she
was
still dreaming, and because if raccoons did talk they'd sound like the amazing wah-wah guitar Hendrix played on this tune.

Lay back and dream on a rainy day
. Jimi made her feel so much better that she went on to his version of “Red House,” a blues she dedicated to herself because her raccoon- and flea-infested house was red. By the time the great man shook his strings through the first chorus, she had figured out what to do: an all-day blues marathon. Her condition called for the heavy medicine. I'm a one-woman blues revival, she thought, and ran to the record library again.

“How about some B. B. King, everybody?” she said when she was back in her d.j. chair, and the Master riffed on Lucille, his famous guitar. “Now let's hear from the other King,” she told radioland, “and I do mean Albert,” and Mr. Blues Power ripped into one, followed by Buddy and Freddie and Muddy and Memphis. She did a whole half hour of the Wolf, and calls came in on the listener line. They were liking this out there. She'd struck a nerve with these blues. It must have been the weather, not to mention the economy these days. Vermont was more depressed than Lisa was. Last month, the station had run a news piece on the numbers of people eating road kill to get through the winter.

Maybe she could get someone to eat Sparky, she thought, answering the flashing phone. No, she didn't want Sparky on a spit. She just wanted him out of her house.

The man on the phone was all worked up and couldn't speak English very well. “This is best radio I hear since I come to this country!” he exclaimed.

“Glad you like it,” said Lisa.

“I love blues!” he said.

“Great. What's your name?”