Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act — whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.

“‘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.”