WLT (44 page)

As the young man waited for the anesthetic to take hold, he read a book that appeared to Ray to be a textbook with diagrams of teeth. He jotted down a few notes. Then he glanced at the X-ray again, and let out a low gasp. “Oh no,” he said. “I never noticed this. Oh my God. Oh, this is terrible.”

“What is it?” asked Ray.

“I think you have cancer.”

“In my tooth?”

“No. In your jaw. It looks like a terrible tumor or something up in the roof of your mouth and it's in the bone and it's—oh, this is an awful thing to have to tell somebody. I'm sorry! This is just terrible!” The young man's eyes were full of tears. “You woke up this morning and you thought it was just a tooth and you come down here and now I have to tell you that you have cancer. I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have told you!”

He changed into a fresh white smock and he put Ray, who was now stunned and glassy-eyed as well as numb from the neck up, into his car and drove him to Abbott Hospital and delivered him to a doctor named Forbes who sat him down in a row of miserable people sitting in the hall. The young man squeezed Ray's hand and burst into tears and fled around the corner. Forbes disappeared into an inner office. The man next to Ray was slumped down as if shot and he stank of whiskey. Ray looked straight ahead at a water stain on the opposite wall, which somewhat resembled the state of Texas. A state he had never seen nor felt any desire to see. Texas nor most of the rest of the South, except maybe Nashville. He had known a Nashville girl once named Judy Jo who taught him a bedroom technique called The One-Man Band; Or, The Ballplayer's Friend. Now he was sick, maybe near the end, and he'd never see her again. How gladly would he trade this whole week for one minute alone with her!

The man next to him said, “The last days are here, the last days of the end of time, and when I was young I scorned the thought and now I see they are here. And God will come upon us with fire and a sword. And God will open the book. And our torment will be great.”

“Shut up, ya old rum-dum,” said a man down the line, and there were murmurs of agreement.

The man looked at the wall. “And there will be no escape from it. And they will cry out for comfort and there will be none. And they will cry out for the end to come, and the end will not come, only grief and pain. And their weeping and gnashing will rise up to the heavens, and there will be no answer, only fire and the sword.”

Ray blinked. He was not sure if he wanted to go quick or go slow. Quick, he thought, but how could a person want to cease to exist when the world was full of so many delights, such as the nurse who now came and helped him up. “Mr. Soderbjerg, we're ready for you now,” she said. Such a sweet girl! She took his old hand in hers and he heaved himself up on his feet. “That's the way!” she exclaimed, as if he had leaped over a fence for her. She led him around the corner to the room where Forbes would see him. Ray took her arm and his hand brushed against her breast and he felt a quickening of the loins.
O love
,
dear love
. Even at the end of the last days, a strong persistent urge. Maybe he wasn't sick after all. Maybe a few days' rest and some little green pills and it'd all clear up. Maybe she'd like to go to New York in the spring.

Roy Jr. had no idea where Ray was until around five o'clock, and meanwhile Ethel had been dispatched to Ray's house to search for him and Laurel was sent to the police. The switchboard ladies had given up answering calls and gone home after lunch. Between Mr. Pokey's party songs and Lily Dale's tearful appeal for public support, WLT had managed to touch the folks in radioland all too deeply, and then, on
Friendly Neighbor
, Dad Benson, weak from his intestinal troubles, misread a line and instead of saying to Dale Snelling, “Well, Frank, did you send the seed all right?” (referring to a complicated order at Benson Feed & Seed that had to go out by parcel post), said, “Where did you spend your seed last night?”

Dale and Faith Snelling stalked out of the studio at the end of the show, tight-lipped and green in the gills, and a few hours later she phoned Roy Jr. to say that neither of them would be returning to
Friendly Neighbor
again. They planned to return to Bird Island and resume their careers in secondary education. Dad, she said, had told her he wouldn't continue the show without them, but she couldn't think about that now, her marriage had to come first.

“Are you sure about this?” A silence. “Faith?” And then a click in her throat, and out came a river of remorse.

“How could I have done it! I feel so—stupid. I feel like dirt. Why did I do it? I was
happy
. I didn't need this—this
intrigue
. But I did it. And I'll have to live with it for the rest of my life. And you know what? I won't even have nice memories of it—because it
wasn't that much fun
.” And at that thought, she was racked with sobs. To have launched upon something so shameful and then have nothing to show for it—to be no good at virtue and then prove to be an artless sinner on top of it and
to have no fun.

“Well, I'm sure you're not the first or the last,” said Roy Jr.

He buzzed for Ethel. “Find Frank and tell him to come back, all is forgiven,” he said. “I need him here. We're falling apart.” Ethel thought the
Rise and Shine Show
was probably in St. Cloud at the moment, en route to Moorhead.

“But they were way up in Roseau this morning,” he said. “How can they be down in St. Cloud?” But then he remembered what he told Harry in the Artists Bureau:
lose these guys
. He said, “Can you reach him, Ethel? It's important—”

And a minute later, she reported that she had raised the Shiners. Not Frank, but she had Slim Graves on the line.

“Is he drunk?”

“Worse than that,” she said. “He's remorseful.”

When Slim came on the phone, his sinuses were backing up on him.

He said, “Morning, boss,” and turned away and hawked and cleared his head, and said, “Sorry. Kind of a rocky day today. Believe me, I feel real bad about that Pokey business. I knew I never shoulda left the Movers to do the show,” and he turned and hawked again.

Roy Jr. didn't have the heart to fire him. He had already fired Itch the engineer, and one was enough for one day, and Itch was a better choice. Itch had been sober, mostly, and sat and listened to Mr. Pokey for half an hour without touching the switch.

“I'm an engineer,” he muttered, standing on Roy Jr.'s rug. “I don't listen to all that shit. It isn't my job to decide what goes on the air.”

“A song called, ‘Baby I Got a Wiener for Your Bun'?”

Itch blushed. “Hqw'm I supposed to know what it was about? It coulda been a commercial.”

“You didn't know what ‘Ram Rod Daddy' referred to?”

“It coulda been about a lot of things. I didn't know. Maybe ‘Jimmy Crack Corn' is a dirty song. I don't know. Maybe ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep.' I don't study songs.”

“ ‘You Got Me Dancing in My Pants'?”

“I donno. It isn't my job. You wanna fire me, fire me. But don't try to convince me that it's fair.”

So he fired him. Itch took it well. He looked Roy Jr. in the eye and said, “I saw your wiener once in the men's room and it was the size of a Vienna sausage. Your wiener'd be
lost
in a bun. It wouldn't've filled a bon bon.” And he turned and stalked out.

Still feeling shrivelled in the loins, Roy Jr. rang up the hospital and got hold of Dr. Forbes, who said that Ray was resting up from his tests and would be released in the morning.

“How is he?” asked Roy Jr.

The doctor lowered his voice. “Do you want to know the truth or do you want what I told him?”

Roy Jr. chose the truth. “A few weeks,” said the doctor. “He's full of cancer. I don't know how the old bugger kept going this long. He's like Swiss cheese inside.”

When Ray came on the phone, a minute later, he sounded weak but still game. “They skewered me like a pig,” he said. “Stuck a tube down my throat, and rammed a rod up my ass, had me running around in a little cotton dress with my hinder hanging out, I tell you it's the last time I ever go to that dentist.”

He would rest up at home for a day and be in the office on Wednesday. “Everything shipshape?” he asked. Roy Jr. assured him that WLT was running like a well-oiled machine.

O
n Wednesday, the Rise and Shiners did Cloquet, Staples, Bemidji, and International Falls, playing in church basements and school cafeterias, and then Grand Marais, Aitkin, Willmar, and Granite Falls on Thursday, and over to Pine City for the Friday morning broadcast in a back room of Russ's Short Stop Cafe, a small, squatty, cinderblock edifice next to the locker plant. No posters were in evidence, nobody seemed to expect them. On to Owatonna, Wadena, and Bagley, and by Friday the lack of sleep was making them jumpy. Friday night, they hit the Bagley High School auditorium, where a crowd of sixteen sat, widely scattered in the auditorium.

Reverend Odom suggested that they cancel. He had studied the audience through a hole in the curtain and they looked to him like people who might be just as glad to have their thirty-five cents refunded. He was sure that they were expecting a movie show. But Elmer said that if you start cancelling shows, you might not be able to stop, so out they went.

“Friends,” said Frank, who was not applauded, “tonight is a great night for all of us from the Friendly Neighbor, WLT, to finally get a chance to meet and greet you, and in honor of the occasion, we have a special low price on all Shepherd Boys records, pictures, plaques, and souvenir plates!” But nobody raised their hands to buy a thing. Nobody waved dollar bills. They looked at Frank as if he were a fencepost.

On Friday, Slim had no feeling in his legs or his right arm or between his ears, a gray oily film covered his unshaven face, and his eyes were hot and red; he vibrated continuously, was too weak to walk and too exhausted to sleep. The others felt similarly, except Red who was alert and reasonably happy, thanks to pills, but who saw strange shapes, like bladders or intestines, slithering in the air. The bus rolled along the miles, and they stared out at the bare December fields, the gray treelines, flocks of black crows strolling through the corn stubble like undertakers. The Reverend sat and stared straight ahead. He had dreams in which he walked over the edge of the world and fell into the darkness. His sermonettes had gotten darker and darker, with no hope of redemption in them.