The Dick Gibson Show (7 page)

“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”

Music was coming over the radio. It was
The Children’s Hour.
The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought
now,
but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought
now,
but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases—the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for—he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.

The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.

“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”

He stood there all through
The Children’s Hour
and through
The Six O’Clock Round-Up
(thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest story), and through
Dinnertime Melodies till Seven,
and was still standing there during the electrically transcribed
Mormon Tabernacle Hour
—
Now,
he thought,
now he’ll break in, his plans for me a goddamn sacrilege
—and on into the sixth inning of the remote pickup of the charity ballgame between the migrant workers and graduating seniors at the consolidated high school, when something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed.

The migrants were ahead 1–0. The seniors were up with the bases loaded. There was one out. Shippleton, the relief announcer, a man who had been with Credenza for years, was doing the play-by-play. “The tension here,” Shippleton was saying, “is terrific. Consolidated High has a good chance to tie it and even to go ahead, and this crowd knows it. Their hopes are on Scholar Joe Niebecker to hit one out of here. (Scholar Joe’s the valedictorian and could really make himself a hero if he connects.) Just listen to this crowd. I want you to hear this—” Then came the sound that Shippleton was talking about. Only it wasn’t the expected roar at all, just something very faint, something softly liquid, not a roar or a rush but more like a trickle of water in a pipe in a distant corner of the house at night.

Shippleton’s gone crazy, Marshall Maine thought. He knew that Credenza, like the parents of the boys themselves, was a strong supporter of the high schoolers, and resented something in the mute underprivilege of the migrant workers as the townies resented their strange rough ways. Did Shippleton mean to be ironic, Maine wondered. What was the point? Appalled, he thought, have
I
inspired him? It was insane. Shippleton was a hack, a safe man. Yet when Niebecker hit into a double play and ended the graduating class’s chances in that inning, Shippleton’s voice came booming over the speaker in top-heavy decibels. “IT’S A DOUBLE PLAY! THIS INNING IS OVER!” It was exactly like the wrong weight he had given Jack’s slow progress past the sleeping giant.

In the last inning, when the kids went ahead and won the game, Shippleton sounded quiet, defeated.

He left the shack to call Murtaugh. The man lay on his back inside the steel ribbing at the base of the antenna, poking a flashlight up at the various angles of the tower and pulling on cables to test their tension.

“Heh, Murtaugh,” he shouted, “you can knock that off now. Come here a minute.”

The man directed his beam into Marshall’s eyes. “What? What is it?”

He thinks it’s happened, Marshall Maine thought. Whatever it is, he thinks it’s already happened.

“Maybe an emergency,” Maine said. “Come inside.”

Moving from beneath the steel tent, Murtaugh swore softly.

Marshall Maine stood at the speaker and waited for him. They had switched back to the studio where the engineer had put on some marches while waiting for Shippleton to return. Maine pointed at the speaker. “Listen,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, buddy—”

“Shh,” Maine said, “
listen.”

There was no mistaking it. The values of the music were totally confused. The volume bore no relation to what the band was playing. The sound was completely erratic—now loud and booming where it should have been soft, or so thunderous and distorted where it should merely have swelled that Maine thought the cone of the speaker had ripped. At other times the music was incredibly tinny, as if someone was moving the needle around the record at exactly the right speed but with the power off. Then the sound would settle normally, only to erupt or fade again seconds later. The effect was incoherence, a sort of musical gibberish.

“Hey, that ain’t right,” the transmitter man said. He went to the control board and examined some dials. He turned a knob experimentally, Maine watching his hand carefully as it reached out for the knob. It
ain’t
right, he thought warily. Something’s fishy, Murtaugh. You were supposed to be pulling cables, weeding the hardware, planting the tower deep in the garden.

“Something’s wrong,” the transmitter man said.

“It is,” Maine said, and wondered what Credenza was up to, how his ends were served by throwing the transmission out of whack. What did he mean to do, give him the headache?

“Here,” Murtaugh said, “when I give the signal, push the amperage on that dial up to eighty. I want to try something.”

So, thought Maine. So. Electrocution. It’s to be electrocution. Then he understood why Credenza troubled with vagrants, why he kept them around—so they could electrocute the announcers when they got out of line. Maine shook his head and, walking calmly toward the doorway, planted his feet firmly on the rubber welcome mat, grounding himself.

“Come on,” the transmitter man said. “Quit fucking off. I’m testing for a short circuit.”

“I’m a staff announcer,” Maine said simply. “I have nothing to do with the equipment.”

“Shit,” Murtaugh said. Then, to Maine’s surprise, he went through the motions without him, fiddling with knobs and dials, throwing switches and, at one point, actually taking apart a rather complicated piece of machinery with a screwdriver, the best acting Maine had seen him do that evening. When Murtaugh finished he looked up at Maine. “It’s at the studio,” he said.

“Is it?”

“I’ve checked everything out. It’s at the studio. The only thing it can be is the coil.”

Marshall Maine planted himself even more firmly, making himself a dead weight on the doormat. “The coil, is it?” he said.

“The meter’s disabled,” Murtaugh said. “I’ll call the station.” He picked up the direct-line telephone and said something to someone at the other end. He waited for a few moments, appearing to listen as the engineer got back to the phone and made his report. The transmitter man nodded. “I didn’t either,” he said. “No, what’s-his-name, the staff announcer told me about it.” He put back the phone. “It’s the meter, all right,” he told Maine. “The needle must have jammed and shorted the coil.”

Marshall Maine looked at him.

“That’s why it sounds like that,” Murtaugh said. He pointed to the loudspeaker. “He’s been riding a false gain. There’s no equilibrium in the output. He couldn’t tell. The needle was just floating free.”

“ONE MOMENT PLEASE!” they heard the engineer shout. Then the loudspeaker went dead.

“And he hadn’t noticed,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that?”

“He hadn’t noticed. That’s what he told you before you said, ‘I
didn’t either.’ That he hadn’t noticed. You hadn’t either.”

“That’s right. Hey, how’d you know that?”

“He hadn’t been listening. Only watching the needle.”

“That’s right. Say, mate, could you hear all that?”

“When I shrieked,” Marshall Maine said.

“What’s that, fella?”

“Nothing,” Marshall Maine said. He stepped off the mat and came back into the shack. He leaned against the equipment. He played his fingers over the dials and stroked the switches. He thrust his hand into the space from which the transmitter man had removed the electric panel which he had taken apart. He picked up one of the loose wires.

“Hey, watch it!” the transmitter man yelled. “You want to get burned?” Murtaugh knocked the wire out of his hand.

“Right,” Maine said calmly, grabbing the wire again and picking his teeth with it.

Murtaugh shook his head and started outside with his flashlight. “Call me when it comes back on,” he said.

The first time I laughed, Maine thought. When I shrieked that time. That’s what jammed it. That’s when I tore it. And they hadn’t noticed. Not the engineer or the relief engineer, not the transmitter man or the relief transmitter man, not Shippleton, not the Indians—not even Credenza himself. Hell, not even me.

“Because we had all stopped listening.

“And that’s why I never heard. Because one by one we had all stopped listening weeks before when I came back from Lincoln with the new records. Because they never heard those other programs. Because without consulting anyone each of them had become bored, without even recognizing the moment when they no longer cared to listen to their own radio station, and without even
deciding
not to, without—my
God,
they must have been bored—its even being a conscious act on their part, and so there was just this piecemeal tuning me out, just this gradual lapse as one loses by degrees his interest in a particular magazine he subscribes to, just this sluggish wane, just this disaffection, not from my programs alone but from Shippleton’s too. They were all
so
bored that it was simply something personal, taking boredom for granted, almost as if it were something in the eye of the beholder with no outside cause at all, just a shift in taste, as one day one discovers that he can no longer eat scrambled eggs. So bored that it was just too trivial to mention to one’s brothers, because each made the unconscious assumption that the others still had their appetites intact.”

Well, thought Marshall Maine, I’ll be. I ran KROP right into the ground. All by myself.
I
did it. Not even my engineer listened to me. Not even my transmitter man with nothing to distract him except the sound of the relief man’s snoring. I’ll be. It doesn’t have a single listener. Not one.

“This is Marshall Maine,” he said aloud in the empty shack, “KROP’s Voice of the Voice of Wheat. Be still. We interrupt this radio station for a special announcement. Be still.”

2

It is not enough to say that he lost his job. Rather, it disappeared—his as well as the jobs of the transmitter men and engineers and the other announcer. Even the radio station disappeared—KROP plowed back under.

As it happened, Dick Gibson was able to take advantage of the Credenza boredom for a few more days. Though now that some of his colleagues had realized what had happened—or soon would—he knew he did not have much time. Once the requisitions were put in to replace the equipment he had damaged, the Credenzas would easily be able to fill in the rest of the story. Meanwhile he worked.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that no one heard him, or perhaps it was to make a sort of amends for his former fear, or simply the hope that if they should tune him in now, at the top of his form, they would forget who it was that had driven them away from their sets in the first place and would place a new and stronger confidence in him. At any rate, using the name Dick Gibson, he spoke during this respite with a silver tongue, lips that were sweeter than wine, a golden throat. He was in a state of grace, of classic second chances. The more it galled him that no one heard him, the better he was. The weather had turned bad and there was a thin film of unseasonable ice along Route 33; yet he hoped that someone passing through might be listening. It could make the difference between one concept of the place and another. Such a stranger might think, for as long as the signal lasted, that he had entered a Shangri-la, crossed a border more telling than the Iowa-Nebraska one, and come into—despite the flatness stretching behind and before him—a sort of valley, still unspoiled, unmarked perhaps on maps. To stay within range of the signal—never strong and now damaged further by the involuntary surges and slackenings of an inconstant electricity—the stranger might slow down (it would have nothing to do with the ice) and Dick would guide him, preserving him on the treacherous road as art preserves, as God does working in mysterious ways. The stranger might even pull over to the side. Dick pictured the fellow, his salesman’s wares piled high in the space from which he had removed the back seat, sitting there, his appointments forgotten, time itself forgotten, preoccupied, listening with a recovered wonder unfamiliar since childhood, in a state of grace himself.