WLT (47 page)

Al found a shelf of Harold Hand, Christian Detective novels under a window. He had enjoyed them as a boy and had not seen a copy in twenty years. Slim found a crack in his fiddle. “I wonder if there's any epoxy in Fred's shop?” The old man found a book of sermon outlines, including the themes of Christ the Refuge in time of trouble, the tribulations of the Tribes of Israel, and the perfection of love through testing and trial. And then all of them undressed and climbed into bed and drifted off to sleep, except Frank. He lay on his back so he wouldn't fall asleep and when he felt drowsy, he thought of Maria and he woke right up. He imagined her climbing the stairs with him and him unlocking a door, but it wasn't the door at the Antwerp. It was a nicer room than his, with windows that looked out on a park. It was dark. They didn't turn the lights on. She took him by the hand and led him to the bed and he sat down and she took his shoes off. He unbuttoned her shirt and it came off in his hands. All her clothing melted away and his too and they plunged into the bed together and dove below the surface, hand in hand, bubbles streaming from their mouths as they laughed and floated and dove and turned—beyond that, his imagination did not go.

He lay in his bunk and it seemed to be several hours later. There was general snoring. He eased his feet onto the floor and sat up. The springs creaked, loud. The snoring stopped—there were snorts, groans, a sigh or two—then the snoring started in again, scattered at first, then steady and orchestral. Frank stood up and tiptoed over to Wendell's bed, where Wendell's green pants hung on the post, and slowly he slid Wendell's wallet out and felt his pockets. One down, six to go.

His next guess was Rudy, and that was no luck either. He even rummaged in Rudy's grip and checked his coat.

Frank felt that he was being watched but he didn't see who, nobody's eyes were showing. He slipped over to Red's bed, but Red had his pants on. So did Al. He looked in their suitcases. He checked Slim's mandolin case. He even tried to pry Slim's shoes apart, in case he had a false sole. Time was running out. If one of them had swiped the money from him, he didn't care to stick around. He'd have stuck by the Shepherds if they had played fair with him, but a thief in the crowd—and then he found the money. It was where he had hoped not to find it, smoothed out, almost flat, tucked into the minister's Bible, between Revelation and the concordance, leaving a slight gap in the gold edge, a gap that caught his eye, and Frank was ashamed of what came to his mind, the suspicion, the minister was a friend, and he opened the Bible to clear Reverend Odom's name and there was the cash.

Not a bill was missing. Hundreds. Eight crisp ones.

F
rank slipped the bankroll into his pocket, took his coat off the hook, picked up his valise, and left. As he opened the door and as he tromped down the steps and as he headed down the snowy path, he expected the Shepherds to come hurtling after him with sticks of kindling in their fists, but he got all the way to the lodge and found Fred and Alma in the kitchen, washing dishes, and he asked for directions to Eveleth.

“You're not staying? But there's a blizzard coming.” Fred bent down and looked out the window up at the sky. It looked leaden all right. “Where you going to?”

“Minneapolis,” said Frank. “I need to get to Minneapolis.”

“You're not going to the Cities tonight,” said Alma. “I don't think there's even any trains running. Oh, I do wish you'd stay.” She gave him a pleading look. “I know your mother wouldn't want you to go out on a night like tonight. ”

But he knew that blizzards didn't stop the train, of course. Fred gave him a lift into town and the southbound train to Duluth had just arrived from Ely and was sitting in the station, steaming, and Fred drove up to the platform and Frank had barely time to run and jump aboard before the conductor waved and there was a
whoosh
of steam and the train pulled away. “What are you in such a big rush for to get to Minneapolis anyway?” asked Fred, an instant before they spotted the train, and Frank had been going to say, “Got to get my job back,” but he wasn't sure about that as he rode down to Duluth. Time to ponder, while the train swayed and bucked through the snowy night.

He could get on a train to Minneapolis and be at work in the morning and see Maria at noon, but it seemed like the short road to nowhere. He had lost all the Soderbjergs' trust the moment he ran away from the show. It would take too long to win it back again. Besides, radio was dead. How do you know?
You know
, that's how. The ones who were trying to keep it alive were dying themselves —Dad Benson, Slim Graves, Elmer, Ray, Patsy, Reed Seymour—all fading away, not much spunk or drive left there. The audience was leaving in droves.

Ten years before, they would have been a big hit in these little towns, big crowds, lots of noise, reporters from the paper nosing around, pretty girls standing out on the periphery blushing and trying to catch your eye. But here it was 1950 and every tavern had a television set and every tavern was packed with people. All of the
Rise and Shine
audience was staying up late at night with their eyes glued to Milton Berle as they sat guzzling beer at Bud's Dew Drop Inn. And old Bud was bitching that business was dropping off every week, as more and more people bought their own televisions.

The tavern guys wanted television to belong to them, and Frank wanted radio to go on and on, but like Dad said, yesterday's river doesn't turn the mill.

You've got to be smart,
he thought. You don't want to get yourself into a line of work where two years from now, four years from now, six—you'll be sitting high and dry, the tide gone out, and you feeling like you are somebody else's mirage.

Like Vince Upton and Sheridan Thomas.
Up in a Balloon
was gone, crashed two weeks before—they quit radio and moved to St. Augustine and opened a seashell shop. They made their decision the day the two German cleaning ladies, Charlotte and Mathilda, came marching into Studio B, ignoring the
Quiet Please, on the Air
sign blazing red over the door, and walked smack into the middle of the show as Bud and Bessie were navigating their helium balloon,
The Minnesota Clipper
, at 6,000 feet over the Burma Pass in pursuit of the Pasha of Endur. Charlotte started vacuuming the carpet.

“Looks like a monsoon moving in from the East!” yelled Vince. “Hang onto the guy ropes, darlin'! We'll have to ride it out!”—where the script said:

Sheridan shouted, “Okay! Whatever you think!” Mathilda brushed past her.

As he called out the monsoon warning, Vince edged toward the wall, microphone in hand, and leaned down and yanked out the vacuum cleaner plug, but it wasn't, it was the plug to the turntable and slowly the transcription of stratospheric winds and the
thubthubthub
of the engine ground to a halt.

“I don't like the looks of this! I think we've hit a pocket of dead air!” he yelled. “The equalizer broke! Those mountain peaks are coming closer! We may have to abandon ship!”

Smoke drifted up from the wax that Mathilda spritzed on the hot tubes in the turntable console. She waxed the turntable too and the needle slid off the disc
grrrrrrrr-eee
and she dusted the microphone. It sounded like thunder.

And that same afternoon Vince packed his traps and said goodbye. “When the
hausfraus
walked in, I felt dumb, like my mother had come in the bedroom and caught me loping the mule,” he told Leo. “I'm sixty. It's too old to be standing in a little room and pretending that you're flying a balloon. Sherry and I are going to Florida and get into the seashell business. There's no limit to what you can do with seashells, you know. Ashtrays, wall plaques, you name it.”

With the train steaming slowly through the pine woods, the snow swirling up from the wheels, Frank curled up on the caneback seat and pulled his jacket around his ears. He fell asleep and then awoke with a jolt and felt for the billfold. Still there. He slipped it into the front of his pants. He thought, “I could go to Minneapolis, back to the radio mill, return the money, work my way up the ladder, and ask Maria to stick it out, or I go to Chicago and send for her and then something else could happen.” He fell asleep again.

He awoke as the train pulled into Duluth, under the long shed and up to the stone palace, alongside a parade of wagons of mailsacks and baggage. “All out!” yelled the conductor.

Frank crossed the platform to where freight men were loading the baggage onto another train across the platform. He tapped a man on the shoulder: “Is this to Minneapolis?” he asked.

“Chicago.”

“You sure?”

The man shrugged. “I've never missed one yet.”

It was only a thought, but he could go to Chicago, get an apartment, let her know where he was, find a job, and by the time his Maria rolled in, he'd be sitting pretty. You've got to jump out front and surprise a woman before she'll pay you proper attention, maybe, he thought. But there wasn't time to think.

The train to Chicago whistled, and rather than miss it, he got on. Three old red passenger cars and a baggage car and Railway Mail Service and a coal tender and the locomotive. “Now boarding on track four. . . . The Superior ... with intermediate stops ... to
Chicago
,” said the train announcer, but Frank was already on board, in a double-facing seat, his feet up, looking forward. The whistle blew twice more, and he thought,
Daddy, be careful
, but of course it was him who was in danger now.

Ray lay pale, damp, unshaven, shivering under the heavy quilt and a wool blanket, and rolled over on his other side and faced the table. The lamp had a towel over it, and there was a glass of water and eight bottles of pills, and his old Crosley bedside radio, the Aztec model, a golden temple with triangular tuning knobs.

“I knew what would happen if I lived long enough,” he told Patsy, “but frankly, I would give anything to have one more year.”

She had come to visit him on Tuesday and now it was Friday and she was still there, nursing him. Vesta was still in London, where she had discovered tape recorders. She was so happy on the telephone, Ray didn't have the heart to tell her how sick he was. “The tape recorder is going to change everything,” she said. “We can harvest lectures and speeches from anywhere, use them anytime. I can travel the world with a tape recorder—it only weighs forty pounds—I can gather the wisdom of the nations and bring it back to the Midwest. Ray, this is going to finally make radio what it ought to be.” She laughed at the joy of it. She was heading for Stockholm, she said, to interview Nobel Prize winners.

He hadn't listened to the radio for three weeks. He was dying, for pete's sake—should a man be ushered into Eternity directly from listening to a Lakers game or a North West Orient Airlines commercial? His chest felt caved-in, it was hard to breathe. His heart hurt—and the iodine on his forehead from when he had fallen, which he didn't recall, though he remembered getting up in the middle of the night and trying to use the bathroom.

One morning he woke up and felt better and went through his desk and threw out everything. All the letters, all the check stubs, all the pictures. Put your house in order: clear the decks and make room for the young, that was his philosophy. The old men die and the children forget. When your time comes to go, get out. Not like that fool Dad Benson. Seventy years old and still hanging on. Poor sister Lottie, coming in to screech a few more songs every morning, young people smirking behind her back. Why couldn't these people see the handwriting on the wall?