WLT (49 page)

Ray tried to think about his own mother and about the Resurrection, but his mind drifted toward the problem of storm windows and the furnace, which gasped and wheezed and needed replacing. There was no sense patching it up again and running the risk of a breakdown and frozen waterpipes bursting and all the aggravation—no, a person shouldn't take half-measures, and he knew that now, having wasted so much of his life hemming and hawing, hedging his bets on the furnace, modifying it from coal to gas-burning: no, it had to be ripped out and a new electric one put in. But a new furnace would survive him. He would be cold and in the ground and turning to mold before the new furnace had come to the end of its warranty.

He thought of the radio he didn't listen to and had no idea what they might be doing, but who cared now, they could whoop and curse and screech filth on the air, it was no reflection on him, he was out of it now—the good part about dying:
I am not responsible anymore. Death pays all debts. Fix the damn furnace yourself.

Time flew backwards. Pictures of Moorhead and Lottie on the farm, gathering eggs in her apron before she got crippled, and Vesta when she was young and full of ginger. Going to work for his father, working an ice route in northeast Minneapolis. Boy, there was a way to build muscles! Those hundred-pound blocks in the wagon, under the gunnysacks. You'd chip them with a pick and split them in two and haul them with ice tongs up to the customer's back door while the horse plodded ahead, old Prince, who knew the route better than anybody. A gang of kids following along, grabbing chips off the wagon. One house after another, up Buchanan Street and down Lincoln and up Johnson and down Grant. There was a job that made a young man look forward to Friday night! Take off your ice apron and it was holy shit, get out of the way, Jim, time to go to the moon. Go to Marklund's Moonlite Ballroom and throw yourself at the young women in the lemonade section and see who picks you up. Drink gin from a jellyglass and drive fast at night with your headlights out. Once his pal Duke told him it took two days to drive to Chicago and Ray drove there in ten hours, careening through Wisconsin. He sideswiped a coal truck and skidded three hundred feet and into a ditch and bounced out and fifty miles later fell asleep and almost collided with the North Coast Limited. And all to make a point. Twice he saw Eternity beckon, but he was young and got away, and now the Time had come, and there were all those Other Women to think about, some of them deceased by now, others long in the tooth, all of them disappointed, and WLT lay on his conscience like a brick.

Women and Radio. His life in a nutshell.

An earnest young Methodist minister named Joe Simpson, the son of a former WLT program director, came around to sit and read from First Corinthians. As he saw it, spiritually speaking, it was the bottom of the ninth with Ray sitting on a five-run lead, and the Lord waiting for him in the dugout, hands outstretched,
well done, thou good and faithful pitcher
. The old man closed his eyes. “I don't think God is going to be that glad to see me,” Ray whispered.

“But God's promise of eternal happiness to those who love Him—”

“I didn't love Him that much, if the truth be told.”

“You don't mean that. You're not feeling so good, that's all.”

“Damn right I'm not. I'm dying.”

“Is there anything you want to get off your conscience?”

“Yes. Women and radio. My big sins.”

“I'm praying for you, Mr. Soderbjerg. The Lord's will be done.”

“I just wish he'd do it and get it over with.”

Roy visited him, though Ray had sent him a note saying not to come.

I am over here dying, and before I am done I want to say goodbye to you.

Goodbye.

Also I want to forgive you for anything you did, whatsoever, no matter what. All of it. It doesn't matter anymore.

Roy read this and went straight over to Ray's house, and Ray was feeling good enough to get dressed and sit in the solarium. A big white wicker chair was pulled up next to the windows, between the potted hydrangeas. The waterfall was turned off. Ray sat in the chair, in a black sweater and slacks, under a blue comforter, smoking a cigar, looking out across the snowy lawn, toward the garage. “I oughta get out the Buick and drive her, she's been sitting there for two months,” he said. “Good car. You want it?”

“You said not to come, but I came anyway, because I have to tell you something. You don't want to hear it, but I have to say it, otherwise I wouldn't be your brother, I'd just be a false friend.”

“I don't want to see you,” said Ray.

“That's okay. It'll only take a minute.”

“I don't feel good.”

“You shouldn't. You're a cheater and a jerk. You ought to stop and consider that.”

“That's what you had to tell me—?”

“If we had bought that land and built that building like I told you, the family would've earned millions plus the profits from the station. But no, you sign us up with the Ogden instead, and we pay rent through the nose, and you keep paying and paying and paying and paying, more and more and more, so who gets rich off this? Not your family, not the people who are loyal to you and work for you, but your landlord! Pillsbury! The rich guys walked away with the money, Ray. And the rest of us got chickenfeed. You know that's right. You screwed all those women and you screwed us too. We worked our butts off and made the business go, and you hurt us. You did dirt to the people who loved you. That's all I've got to say. I'm sorry you're dying.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. ”

“Then get out of here. And don't show your ugly face at my funeral.”

. “I'll come if I feel like it, and I'll sit in the front row and look at your big nose sticking up out of the coffin. And I'll listen to the minister who never met you in his life tell what a wonderful person you were, and I'll follow your coffin out to Lakewood Cemetery and see you lowered into the ground and I'll toss in a handful of dirt
but it'll have a stone in it
. When you hear a big thunk on the lid, know that that's from
me.
And afterwards I'll go to Charley's Cafe Exceptionale and have oysters and a martini and a prime rib and a bottle of the best red wine and I'll have a beautiful woman sitting across the table from me holding my hand and laughing at my jokes even if I have to pay her to do it.”

Ray laughed. “I hope you do,” he said. “Take Patsy Konopka. She's good to take to restaurants. Has the appetite of a horse and she can talk half the night. Loved every minute I spent with her. I remember we talked for two hours once and ate tiny lamb chops and drank a bottle of wine. We told each other everything. I told her I wanted to sleep with her. She said, ‘I know.' We had coffee and for dessert we had ice cream wrapped in ice cream. I walked her back home. It was one o'clock in the morning. We stood in the doorway of the Antwerp and we kissed for half an hour. What wonderful kisses! I hope you come to my funeral with a woman as beautiful as her and I wish you the best of luck afterward.”

A week before he died, he had climbed out of bed to go downstairs and sit in a chair while twelve big fellows in red plaid shirts from the Order of Woodmen presented him with. a brass plaque that made him an honorary Boomer and gave him six big whoops and a zinc pickaroon. “You Have Enriched the Lives of Countless Thousands Through Your Contributions to Broadcasting,” said the plaque, among other things. Roy Jr., a former Chief Whoopdepoop of the Woodmen, had arranged the ceremony, but the fellows had no idea who the sleepy old man in the blue bathrobe was.

The $800 bought Frank a whole three months. He lived in a dark room above a cigar store, his room smelled of smoke from below, like the essence of Ray ascending. Ten dollars a week for an army cot and a bureau dresser with the mirror gone and no shade on the window and the toilet down the hall filthy, the bathtub unspeakable. He bathed standing up, pouring water on himself with a Mason jar. He walked the streets and haunted the public library and lived on hot dogs. His biggest expense was talking to Maria in Minneapolis. He got a fistful of quarters and called her up almost every night. “Is Merle there?” he asked. She said no. She told him Ray was dying and Dad had retired and Roy Jr. had killed off the old shows. She was working at the perfume counter at Young-Quinlan, a nice job except that her boss kept asking her to the movies. Frank asked her to come and marry him. She said, “Get a job.”

The cigar dealer lent him a typewriter, and Frank sat and typed his job resume, smoking a Cuban panatela, thinking of Ray. Ray would have some good advice for him, but who would want to talk to a thief? The resume was triple-spaced, four sentences, and offered no personal references. He typed fourteen copies and took them around to fourteen radio stations, but radio was firing, not hiring. He considered going to commercial school and training to become an office manager: $90 for a three-month course, and they guaranteed a job afterward. He thought about becoming a streetcar motorman. One night he rode the Western Avenue streetcar out to Riverview Amusement Park, rode the Silver Flash and the Blue Streak, the Boomerang and Aero-Stat and the Fireball and the Pair-0-Chutes, saw the freak show where Popeye popped his eyes and the hootchie-kootchie dancers and the African Dip where men threw baseballs at a target to dump a black man into a tank of water—a gaudy evening under the blazing lights, the girls in summer dresses brushing against his arms, and then a fortune teller on the midway looked at his palm and told him, “You have the soul of a waiter,” and he recognized the truth of it. Why wait and wait for something wonderful to come along? Why not get a job? He walked three miles home to save a dime.