Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“I’m very pleased you think so, sir.”

“Oh, I think you do a terrific job. If I have any objection at all I guess it’s that you don’t play enough golden oldies.”

“Golden oldies,” Dick said.

“Well, those were some pretty good songs they had back there in the first war,” the general said. “Not to take anything away from the stuff they’re doing now, of course,” he added quickly.

“He doesn’t play any cavalry tunes,” a colonel in the tank corps objected glumly.

“Do any of you fellows know ‘She’s the Mistress of the Quartermaster’?” another asked.

“How’s that one go, Bob?” a two-star general asked.

“You’re a lucky kiddy, son,” the famous general said, breaking in.

“I am, sir?”

“You’re mighty well told you are. Why, it’s only because I like your program so much that your case came to my attention at all. You know, it’s funny; I don’t really care all that much for music. My lady can never get me to go to a concert with her. I’m not even all that fond of a military band. I guess that as much as anything else it was you I was listening to. There was something about your voice. It reminded me of an experience I had, oh, back a few years now. Anyway, when there was a substitution for you on Patriot’s Songbook last Sunday I had to find out why. That’s how I heard about what you’d done. Well, naturally once I found out I just had to hear that record Lieutenant Collins had made. I can tell you one thing — you made me mad as hell. Why, I was all for hauling your ass up before a firing squad or something. Then, when you signed off saying you were Dick Gibson, why it suddenly came to me why I’d always been so fascinated by you.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” Dick Gibson said.

“Why, I guess you don’t. Well, of course you don’t. But I’ll get to it, son, I’ll get to it.” The general put his arm about Dick’s shoulder and led him toward a chair. “Do you recall a few years back working for a station in Nebraska?”

“KROP,” Dick Gibson said, “the Voice of Wheat.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s the one. Well, sir, my first wife’s people live out in Atkinson, Nebraska, and when I was running the Fifth Army headquarters in Chicago, I sometimes had occasion to take old Route 33 to go see them. Well, I use the radio a lot when I drive. I kind of depend upon it; it helps me to stay awake. You see, I don’t like to stay in motor lodges or hotels — most of them aren’t very clean, you know; ’s ’matter of fact, the only place I like to stop is some army camp where they train inductees; I know that sort of place will be clean enough for any traveler to lay down his head — so usually I drive through. That’s where you come in. I was near the Iowa — Nebraska border, I remember, and suddenly I picked up this program, with this fella talking. Well, sir, as I already told these gentlemen, there was ice on that highway, and it was getting dark and I was tired — but I mean tired — and I’d already dozed off for a fraction of a second and only the sudden swerve of the car jolted me awake again. That’s when I picked up this program. Well, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. Something about the voice … but not just the voice, what the voice was saying … I was fascinated. It woke me up. I didn’t want to miss a word. That was you speaking, lad. I remembered the name soon as I heard it again on Lieutenant Collins’s record— Dick Gibson. I don’t even recall now what you said back then. All I know is that whatever it was, it helped. I followed your voice all the way to Atkinson.”

“There was something wrong with the equipment,” Dick Gibson said.

“No sir. It came in perfect. Perfect. Best reception I ever had. Funny thing about that too, because I’d borrowed the car, and up to the time I picked you up the radio had been giving me trouble. But you came in perfect, no static or anything. It was as if you were right there in that car with me.”

Dick remembered how good he’d been, how he had thought even at the time that he was in a state of grace. His chest heaved, and he felt tears coming. Whatever the general might tell him now, he knew that it was over; his apprenticeship was truly finished, the last of all bases in the myth had been rounded, his was a special life, even a great life — a life, that is, touched and changed by cliché, by corn and archetype and the oldest principles of drama. In ignorance and absent- minded goodness of heart he had taken a burr from the general’s paw. And the general had turned out to be the general and would now repay him. This was no place for it, but he began openly to cry, simultaneously congratulating and commiserating with himself. Good work, Dick Gibson, he thought. Poor Dick Gibson, he thought. You paid your dues and put in your time and did what you had to. You struggled and fought and contended and strove, and many’s the time your back was against the wall, but you never let up, you never said die, even when the night was darkest and it seemed the dawn would hold back forever. You showed them. You, Dick Gibson, you showed the dirty motherfucking fartshits and prickasses. You showed them good. Poor Dick Gibson.

The officers, embarrassed by his weeping, looked away. Only the famous general watched him. He’s letting me cry, Dick Gibson thought. He’s letting me get it all out. Poor Dick Gibson, he blubbered silently.

The general waited a few moments, then stepped forward. There was a war on. “Feeling better?” he asked gently.

“Yes sir,” Dick said, his nose filling.

“Calmed down?”

“Sir, I am,” he managed forcefully.

“Talk business?”

“Business as usual,” Dick said, and took out a handkerchief and emptied his sinuses.

“That’s the spirit,” the general said when Dick, his nose clear once more and his eyes dry again, looked at him brightly.

“What’s up, sir?” Dick asked.

“We’ve been playing the transcription,” the general said. “Remarkable. You were hysterical. Fear brings things out in you.” Dick blushed. “No, you don’t understand. We want you to do the same for us.”

“We want to hear the war,” one of the other officers said.

“Yes,” the general said, “this place—” He indicated their surroundings with his arm. For all the fullness of his emotion, Dick understood exactly what the general’s gesture meant. It took in the false floors and new walls, the elevator and desks and typewriters and secret pockets of the secret service. But more than anything else Dick understood his gesture as an indictment of the chairs.

For all the precision of his understanding of the moods in the room, it was a long time before he could concentrate on what they were actually trying to tell him, however. Only a certain sharpness and impatience in the general’s tone impelled him to put it all together.

He was to be sent to the most terrible war zones of all, and from these incendiary landscapes he was to send back reports, transmitting them the thousands of miles to headquarters over special equipment. They were interested not in military information as such, but in the feel of the campaigns. He was, in short, to do the color on World War II. Lieutenant Collins was to be sent along with him as his engineer. Except for the incident during the air raid, they worked well together.

Dick asked if the enemy wouldn’t be able to pick up his broadcasts.

“Negative,” a naval commander from research and development said. “We’ve perfected this transmitter and receiver that work on a band below three kilocycles. Your standard broadcast band begins at 550.”

He was given to understand that the assignment would be dangerous. He expected to be told this. They would understand if he turned it down and chose instead to be court-martialed. He expected to be told this. His infraction wasn’t actually treasonous. The Judge Advocate representative told him that his punishment wouldn’t amount to more than an eleven-year sentence and a reduction in rank. He expected this. They wouldn’t force him. This wasn’t unexpected. No man would look askance if he didn’t “volunteer,” and of course there was some good-natured laughter at the use of the word “volunteer.” Did he understand, then, what was required and that they weren’t trying to push him into a corner? He expected to be asked.