WLT (46 page)

“So what happened to Hoyt Buford?”

Reverend Odom shrugged. “What happens to
anybody
when twenty pounds of cow manure falls on them from a height? It knocked the man down. He fell in a heap, covered with dung, and in blind rage and frustration he screamed, ‘I hope you bastards die in hell,' and those were the last words he ever spoke on the radio. That was his swansong. The capstone of his broadcasting career. Crushed by the mob. He lost the suit, the Buick, the woman who loved him, everything.

“Of course it isn't true, what he said. Nobody dies in hell, they just wish they would. And though he lost what he had, he got some of it back later. Went to Pierre and became a late-night DJ. Played jazz and talked in a low voice and everything. What passes for a farm boy in Minneapolis is a real bohemian in Pierre. He got another car and another girlfriend. But the rule is true: stick close to your audience. Otherwise you are going to have to bang them over the head with skillets and you saw how well that worked.”

Al put a pot of water on the stove to boil. “At least, our clothes are reasonably clean,” he said. “Except for this egg on my shirt.”

“I almost got 'er,” said Rudy, and Elmer shuddered, and the bloody sliver came out.

Elmer sat with a hanky over his weeping eye. He had a cup of coffee. He let Rudy put a snowball on his eye. “You want some breakfast?” asked Wendell. Red turned in the driver's seat and asked if Elmer felt up to him driving. They had a show in Bemidji in three hours. Elmer shook his head.

“I think this is the Lord's way of telling us to move on,” said Elmer. “I never ran out on a show before and I hate to start now but maybe there's a reason. We have done all we could do in radio. The Lord has used radio to teach us, but now school is out. We have to move on.” He said, “We are done with WLT as of six o'clock this morning.” They all cheered and clapped. He had an old buddy from Fargo who ran a Bible camp in Eveleth and they could get there by lunchtime and stay for a couple days and rest up and decide what they were going to do.
Real beds
. The Rise and Shiners fell all over themselves with gratitude—Wendell wept and Rudy hugged him and Al cried, “Thank you, Jesus!” Even Slim was moved. They were getting out of hell and into a warm shower, and then they'd eat lunch, talk, take a nap, sit around, like human beings—Red put the bus in gear and they bumped along out of the backyard and pulled onto the highway and Red yelled, “Eveleth!” and they all cheered, except Frank.

My job
, he thought.
I can't throw away my job. I lose this job and I have to go back to Mindren
. On the other hand, it was an impossible job. Roy Jr. had told him his job was to get the Rise and Shiners through the tour, but the purpose of the tour was to punish them and get rid of them, drive them from the radio—so Roy Jr. had accomplished what he wanted: the Tour of Hell had worked and the Shepherd Boys were leaving radio. But they were leaving too soon, before their suffering was complete. Frank's instructions were to make sure they did all the shows.

You gotta get off this bus
, he thought.
Or else you've got to head them toward Bemidji
. But how? Slim had unpacked his mandolin and Al was playing the guitar and they were singing,

The Shepherds were laughing and singing and had their arms draped over each other and they weren't even drunk. This troupe would no more go to Bemidji than they'd take work in a lacquer factory. Red was happy, driving with one hand, beating time with the other. Reverend Odom sat next to Frank, and Wendell behind them was talking a blue streak about how this was the beginning of the good times. Television. A big touring bus, bigger than The Rankins'. A bigger TV show than theirs. Records. Maybe movies. “There never was a good movie with our kind of music in it,” said Wendell. “But more people like our music than that Broadway crap and all that tinsel and showgirls—that's rich people's music. We could get rich playing poor people's music.” He laughed at that.

“Gospel music?” asked the old minister, cranking his neck around.

“Naw. Cheatin' songs. That's real poor-man music. Rich guys don't even understand somebody like Hank Williams. A rich man hardly needs a woman at all. If she runs away, who cares? he'll go get another one. But when you've got
nothing
and not much to look forward to, then if your woman runs off and you lose the one good thing in your life, man, that just about kills you. Rich sonsabitches can't understand none of that shit. It's like they say, a song only gives you a taste of what you already know. We oughta get out of gospel and into cheatin' songs, cause that's what
we
know, right?” He clapped the Reverend on the back.

Maria is waiting for me, I can't let her down
, Frank thought. He slouched down in the seat, his knees pressed up against the seat in front, and imagined her next to him, her hair, his hand in her lap, his other hand easing into her shirt the way she let him do and easing along her soft belly, touching her tiny crevasse of bellybutton, reaching, slowly reaching. Everything that made a difference in this world lay inside that shirt and down below—everything else was so weary and stale, men, dreary men, angry men, the bragging and strutting and the loud words like a whipsaw and the sharp blow, but she was so sweet and peaceful. His hand against her breast, resting. He cupped her in his hand and she seemed to swell with pleasure, he slipped his hand into the cup and curled around her skin and her delicate sharp nipple and she sighed and turned toward him, almost snapping off his wrist—he withdrew—his hand slipped around to her back and unclasped her bra, his hand slipped down into her pants and along her sweet butt, left and right—his hand slid up over her hipbone and up the delicious ribs and up and freed the breasts from their hammocks, slipped them loose, like opening an ear of sweet corn—he weighed them in his hand—he slipped down front over her soft belly and felt the slope—his hand tiptoed down the beautiful hill and into her soft darkness, and up the sides of her thighs—

It was all so perfect, what else was there in the world but her? The rest was all paper and long dry afternoons of typewriters ticking far away and the clock stopped and men's voices yammering over the office transom—he would gladly stay in the hallway and never go inside that room! The vanity of men in suits is hard to bear. Ray was right. One could hardly regret being alone with a beautiful woman and, compared to the men in the room, what woman is not beautiful?

A cold chill on his face: he remembered the money. The $800 for expenses. He touched his wallet. It was thin. He snatched it out. The money was gone.
Stolen
.
He hadn't touched it the whole trip, hadn't seen it, hadn't thought about it. Somebody had filched the whole wad. Stupid, stupid.

“What's wrong?” asked Reverend Odom.

“I think my money is missing.”

“What money?”

“Some money. Seven hundred dollars.”

The mention of $700 rang in the air like trumpets, and Slim and Al stopped singing. “What money is that?” asked Elmer, his right eye red and swollen.

Frank looked straight ahead down the highway. “Expense money from Roy Jr.”

“Why'd he give it to you and not to Elmer?” asked Wendell.

“I donno. Ask him.”

“That was our expense money. You shoulda handed it over.”

Elmer was hurt. “Why didn't you even
tell
me about it? We coulda slept in some motels, we coulda eaten some dinners we didn't eat. That's not right, Frank.”

“All I did was what Roy Jr. told me. It was for an emergency.”

“That don't make it right. This whole
trip
has been an emergency.”

They kept sniping at him all the way to Eveleth, everyone except Reverend Odom. Two minutes before they hadn't been aware of the money and now the loss of it weighed heavy on them. Money they hadn't even seen, but its loss was a grievous blow to them, almost worse than if it had been taken straight out of their pockets. “Seven hundred dollars,” Wendell kept saying. “Seven hundred dollars.” Frank tried to look them in the eye, looking for that flicker that would give the culprit away. The thief knew it was eight hundred not seven, and he must wonder why Frank lied. Frank looked for curious stares, but there were only accusing ones.

It was a tired owly bunch that pulled into The Nazarene Bible Camp around eleven, nobody singing and Wendell was hitting the bourbon and getting argumentative—“Sick of gospel! We come to the end of gospel! If you can't see that, then you're too dumb to deal with!”—and though Elmer's buddy, Fred Porch, and his wife Alma turned out to be wonderful people and anxious for the company and they hustled the Shiners right into the main lodge and sat them down to a ham dinner with fresh biscuits and redeye gravy with peach pie for dessert, everyone was still mourning the $700. “That was our start-up money,” said Elmer. “That's what woulda gotten us to Chicago.” Elmer had friends in Chicago, important friends in broadcasting. Chicago was a day and a half away. In a couple weeks, Elmer could get them a show. In a month or so, the money would start to come in. The $700 would get them over the hump. “I hope you didn't throw away our whole future,” said Elmer gloomily.

It had begun to snow heavier, and Reverend Odom told about winter in North Dakota when he was a boy, sleeping in the attic and waking up to find a snowdrift on your covers in the morning. This story cheered them up somewhat, and then Slim told about a winter in New Guinea during the war when he was in the Navy playing for troop shows with Uncle Soddy Johnson and the Destroyers, playing two and three ships a day, and the men hanging from the davits and yelling and beating on the deck with hammers in time to the music and it was so loud that it killed fish and the Destroyers scooped them out of the water from their launch and ate them for supper. Of course, the Shiners had heard these stories before, but they were good stories, and so was Al's story about seeing Faron Young in a Nashville department store buying a pair of cotton socks, and then Alma left to go take a nap and Wendell told his story about their childhood church's custom of baptizing in the river and how he had been dipped with his head downstream so the current ran up his nose and he floundered in panic and tore himself loose from the preacher and was swept away and carried over a waterfall and almost drowned but grabbed a branch and hauled himself ashore and when he stood up, he had the biggest erection of his life, nine inches, and he had to run from the search party, and as he trotted along, his penis jumping, it got so big it broke out of the front of his pants. Meanwhile, he could hear his ma back at the baptismal site screaming that he was gone, dead, drowned. “I was the farthest thing from dead,” he said. “I had reached the other shore from dead. I had crossed over into the land of love, boys.” It was snowing so hard, they couldn't see from the lodge to the lake. “It looks like we're going to stay here for awhile,” Elmer remarked happily. He said he was almost done writing a new song called “Waiting for Thee” (or “I Know He Is Coming”) and was pretty sure it would be a big hit.

There were warm bunks waiting in a little log cabin under a tall pine, Fred said, and supper would be at six. The Shiners ambled up the path between the snowdrifts and into the cabin, where a fire blazed in a cast-iron stove. “I could stay here forever,” said Rudy.