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.
CHAPTER 38
Touching Bottom
On 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.
“Wish we could sleep in a motel tonight,” Elmer told Frank, “but once they lie down, I don’t think we’d ever roust them up.” The gate was poor, a measly $31 total for Friday, and Wendell was sick from eating a bad hamburger. “Otherwise,” said Elmer, “we’re holding our own.” He tried to keep up their spirits by sheer flattery —“You’re the best announcer I ever heard,” he told Frank—and by giving them the spotlight (“We’re going to let the boys move out on a fast one now—stand back, children, here comes the Orange Blossom Special!”), but flattery wears off fast, and when you are worn-out and hungover, the spotlight is not what you want. What you want is the day off in bed, a warm quilt, heavy curtains.
It was snowing hard when Slim fell asleep at 2 a.m. Saturday morning, stretched out on the table, and when he woke up, it was four. The bus was parked in a snowdrift in front of the Baptist church in Baudette, and somebody was knocking on the window, shouting muffled words he couldn’t make out. He waited but they wouldn’t go away. Slim couldn’t sit up. He rolled off the table and landed on Pastor Odom, who was sleeping on the floor, who rolled over and tried to kick him and connected with the table leg instead. Slim opened the door. A man in a parka, ice frozen to his face, said he was from the telephone company. The church breakfast for The Rise and Shine Show had been cancelled so he had installed the broadcast lines at a restaurant a few blocks away called Guy’s Breakfast Shack, the only place open in town at that hour and he hoped it would be okay.
“Okay by me,” said Slim. He scrawled “Show Not Here, Go to Guy’s’” on a lunch bag and stuck it under the sleeping Elmer’s hand, then dropped off to sleep himself, only to be awakened by a frantic Barney, who had broken into the church and found no lines there and was now, with fifteen minutes to broadcast, on the verge of tears. The Shepherds were dressing swiftly in the back and Red was at the wheel. Frank had run off to the telephone office. “We’re supposed to go to Guy’s Breakfast Shack,” said Slim. He had slept in his clothes. He was all ready to go.
Guy’s was a small stucco cafe tucked in between a garage and a warehouse, two brightly-lit windows pale with frozen grease. Frank dashed up a moment after the bus pulled up and Barney flew out, the microphones in hand. The cafe was packed with hefty men in flannel shirts glumly chewing big forkloads of eggs and sausage, cooked up by the fattest man Frank had ever seen. Even for Minnesota, he was a fatty. His belly hung down over his pants, he walked side to side. “Where’s Guy?” asked Frank. “That’s me,” wheezed the cook, “who in hell are you?”
“We’re here to do the radio show.”
“Don’t know about any radio show.”
“Well, it’s on in ten minutes.”
The cook snorted. “We’ll see about that,” he said. Elmer peeled off a twenty and laid it on the counter. The man’s eyes softened. “Two more of those and I’ll listen to any radio show you want,” he said. Elmer laid down two more.
There was no piano and no room for drums, even when Frank persuaded two tables to slide over a few feet, which they took their time doing. No sooner did Barney get two microphones hooked up and all the plugs in than Wendell and Al and Rudy sailed in the door, and Frank said, “Good morning, neighbors, from the makers of delicious Home Salad and our good friends at Prestige Tire & Muffler, as they bring you the Shepherd Boys with another program of good old gospel music—yes, it’s time to Rise and Shine!” and Slim kicked in with the guitar and Al blew the harmonica and Wendell sang the first verse of the theme song—On that resurrection morning when the saved of earth shall rise
From the beds of earth and gather at that breakfast in the skies,
O how pleasant and delightful when He puts His hand in mine,
Then I will Rise and Shine!
Just when he came to the second stanza, about the morning glories in the arbors of heaven, a deep growly voice from the end of the counter said, “Shut your yap, ya stupid hayshaker.” A thick bearlike man with a red beard and red hunting cap got up from his stool. “When I want you to sing, I’ll stick a nickel in yer ass,” he said. His voice was hard to miss, like a trombone. Wendell stopped singing and the man said, “And if I want you to fart, I’ll take it out.” He took a fried egg on his fork and flung it their way. It caught Al on the throat and stuck to his collar, where the bow tie would be, and the yolk ran down his shirt. “Get your fat farmer butts out of here, we’re eating our breakfast,” said the man.
Frank took a step toward him, to explain that they were in the middle of a live broadcast, but the man did not appear to be at all curious about them. “It’s a radio show,” Frank said, and he put his finger to his lips, shhhhh. An old geezer said over his shoulder, “That’s Hard-Boiled Hansen down there, sonny, and he don’t shhhh for anybody.”
“Now, here’s an old favorite of ours,” said Elmer, “a good old gospel song that my mother dearly loved, called ‘The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago.’ And we’d like to send this out to all these friendly folks here in Baudette, at Guy’s Breakfast Shack—oh boy, wish you folks at home could smell the sausage and the coffee—yessir, soon as we’re done with the show, we’re going to set down and have us the world’s greatest breakfast, but first here’s a song about the old account and how Jesus paid it all at Calvary—boys?” Al started playing it softly on the harp and Rudy and Wendell stepped up to sing, but their eyes were on Hard-Boiled Hansen, to see if the mention of Mother and Jesus and a plug for Baudette and Guy’s sausage might have softened his heart. It had not.
He reached down and picked up his plate, which Frank saw was empty now. “I come in here to eat my breakfast and drink my coffee and not to listen to these yoohoos stand around and have prayer meeting,” Hard-Boiled explained to a little man si
tting on his right. And then he threw. The Rise and Shiners ducked and the plate shattered on the wall about a foot above their heads. A splinter caught Elmer in the eyeball, and he dropped to the floor, microphone in hand. Hard-Boiled was reaching for the saucer when Reverend Odom slipped through the back door with a cast-iron skillet in his hand and crowned him a good one, flat and hard on the cowlick. The skillet rang, and Hard-Boiled’s saucer crashed to the floor. Instantly six men got up and paid and left.
A quizzical look came over Hard-Boiled Hansen’s face, as if he had never been hit on the top of the head with a skillet before and was puzzled that someone would make the attempt. He turned toward the old man and smiled. “You hit me,” he said.
“But not hard enough,” said the minister, sadly. Hard-Boiled grasped him by the lapels. “You people come in here aggravatin’ me,” he said. “I’m a peaceful man. I didn’t come lookin’ for you to aggravate you—I don’t give two hoots about you. You come in here to do your singin’ and yammerin’ and aggravatin’—well, what I’m sayin’ is you can aggravate yourselves right outta here. Otherwise I’m going to plant your rear end on the griddle over there. You want that?”
The minister shook his head.
“And then I’ll pitch you through that window. You want that?”
No, he didn’t want that either.
“And then we’ll take you down to the lake and cut a hole in the ice and dip you by your ankles. How does that sound?”
Reverend Odom shook his head and tried to smile.
“So don’t aggravate me another minute. Take your friends and all of you shag your hairy butts outta here.” And Hard-Boiled hoisted him up by the lapels and threw him at the Rise and Shiners. Al and Wendell ducked, and the Reverend landed on Rudy, who was bending over Elmer who had the sliver in his eye, and they both fell on top of him in a heap.
Frank, to his own amazement, suddenly had his hand on the front door—he didn’t know how he had gotten there—and then he was out the door and in the snow, heading toward the bus. Red was asleep in the driver’s seat. The motor was running. Frank turned to go back and Rudy ran into him. Al streaked past, guitar in hand, and Wendell, they had all broken for the door at the same time, and Reverend Odom hobbled out and Elmer, his hand over his eye. “Where’s Barney?” he cried. “Where’s Slim?”
Slim was already on the bus, they found out, but Barney was nowhere. “I think he snuck out the back,” said Rudy.
“Did he think to take us off the air, I hope?” said Elmer.
“Lemme see that eye,” said Rudy. He peered into his brother’s weepy eye and peeled back the lids and spotted the sliver of dish deep down in the lower one. The puddle of tears in the lower lid was red with blood. Rudy dipped a corner of his hanky in, trying to raise up the sliver, a wicked little thing about a quarter-inch long, but it disappeared, and then they heard the radio as Red tuned it to WLT.
A wheezy old voice was saying, “—run so fast in my life, they were scared shitless, they had a look in their eyes like deer lookin’ into a headlight. Heeheeheeheehee.”
A deeper voice: “Look, there’s one layin’ in the back by the woodshed. Want me to chase him outta there, Guy? Heeheeheeheehee.”
The wheezy voice: “I don’t think that old booger could run if there was bears after him, Jimmy, he went pedalling out the back door and he ran smack into the low post. He wasn’t quite high enough, Jimmy. I believe that old booger has made himself a soprano—heeheeheeheehee. I think I see the family jewels layin’ over by the tree. Yessir. I believe the women of Baudette are safe for tonight, my friend.”
CHAPTER 39
Chicago
Red pulled the bus around back of Guy’s Breakfast Shack and sure enough, there was Barney, folded up in the snow, next to a fence post, holding his vitals. Frank and Wendell hopped out and helped him up and carried him on board and still the show was on the air—the guys in the cafe were telling sheep jokes now—and Rudy was still trying to fish out the sliver. “Hold still, willya,” he said, but Elmer was upset about the engineer down in Minneapolis not cutting off the show: “What, is he taking a dump or what?”
Finally, Frank went to retrieve the equipment.
On the bus radio, they heard the back door open and the footsteps across the linoleum floor. Then there was a loud thump when he pulled the plug. Hard-Boiled drank his coffee and watched Frank collect the three microphone stands, the cord, and the mixer, and he watched Frank go out the back door, which whacked shut, like a slap in the chops. There was one full minute of silence on WLT, and then on came the recorded voice of Reed Seymour to say, “We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by. We will return to our scheduled program as soon as possible.”
Red switched it off. “Radio as we know it is dead, boys,” he said. “So where do you want to go now?”
Barney said it was his fault for not hitting the switch. “A man who can’t remember to turn off a microphone—I don’t know if I’d trust myself to carry a sharp stick,” he said.
“It was my fault. I should have yelled as soon as I saw him,” Slim said. “I hope that sucker gets his hand cut off in a planing saw.”
“I hit him good and then I forgot to hit him again,” said Reverend Odom.
Frank said, “I should’ve come to help you. I don’t know why I didn’t. What a coward. I turned and ran.” Rudy put his hand on Frank’s shoulder. “We all ran,” he said.
It was a brotherly moment. They sat in the dimness, waiting for their heads to clear, looking at each other, shaking their heads. They had never been attacked during a show before. That was a new one. Sure, there had been audiences who had given them the fish eye, but nobody had ever thrown objects at them before, not hard objects anyway, or if they had, they hadn’t thrown them hard enough to hurt. Rudy recalled a man in Sioux Falls once who threw his shoes at them from the balcony (and missed). But not during a broadcast.
Reverend Odom chuckled. “I do remember whatsis-name who did that Farmyard Merry-Go-Round show on KSTP from the South St. Paul stockyards—didn’t he get pelted with cow chips once?”
“Hoyt Buford.”
“The one with the two-tone shoes and the creamy cowboy suit.”
“Oh, he was riding high,” said the Reverend. “There was a big story on Hoyt in the St. Paul Dispatch about what a phenomenon he was, what a specimen of manhood, a new planet in the cosmos of broadcasting, and how a million people in four states doted on him and talked about him and longed to know his opinions on a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, he had granted the paper an interview, and they did him the terrible disservice of printing many of his remarks, one of which was to the effect of: those folks would believe me if I said it was snowing in July, they’d believe it if I told them it was snowing cow chips.
“Well, he denied he said it, and maybe he hadn’t, but it sounded exactly like something he would’ve said. He dressed like someone who would’ve said exactly that. And the next day, when Hoyt Buford climbed out of his cream-colored Buick to do the show from the rotunda of the auction barn, he saw that he had a bigger audience than usual. Much bigger. He also noticed that men were up on the roof. He was moved by the big turn-out and put on an even better show, though the Merry-Go-Round, of course, was only a half-hour, but he went all out, told a couple stories, mugged and pranced around as he read the livestock prices, got the audience to sing ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’—which he seemed to accept as a personal tribute. He beamed and said that he had, as they could imagine, gotten offers to do other shows, but that he never wanted to be anyplace but where he was right now, among the greatest people in the world, the livestock growers of the Upper Midwest. And right then was when a gentle rain began to fall. Little flecks of manure descended through the barny air, with some larger lumps and an occasional four-pounder, and he danced around, trying to dodge the storm, but the microphone cord was not long enough. That was his downfall, boys. His cord was not long enough. Because, you see, he never did interviews wit
h the audience. There was his problem, because—take my word for it—shit never falls on a farmer. Because a farmer does not allow shit to rise. Right there and then, old Hoyt discovered a basic secret of show business. You stick close to your audience and you’ll be all right. Unfortunately, just as this fact dawned on him, so did a blockbuster cowflop—the sort of pie that cowmen call the Moneymaker—they’ll pour coffee down those cows for days to stop them up and get a twenty-pound bolus sitting there inside her and bang goes the auction gavel and there’s your profit margin. That’s why at auctions they go around and smell the cattle’s breath for coffee. Coffee or cigarettes. Cigarettes will do the same thing.”
“So what happened to Hoyt Buford?”
Reverend Odom shrugged. “What happens to anybody when twenty pounds of cow manure falls on them from a height? It knocked the man down. He fell in a heap, covered with dung, and in blind rage and frustration he screamed, ‘I hope you bastards die in hell,’ and those were the last words he ever spoke on the radio. That was his swansong. The capstone of his broadcasting career. Crushed by the mob. He lost the suit, the Buick, the woman who loved him, everything.
“Of course it isn’t true, what he said. Nobody dies in hell, they just wish they would. And though he lost what he had, he got some of it back later. Went to Pierre and became a late-night DJ. Played jazz and talked in a low voice and everything. What passes for a farm boy in Minneapolis is a real bohemian in Pierre. He got another car and another girlfriend. But the rule is true: stick close to your audience. Otherwise you are going to have to bang them over the head with skillets and you saw how well that worked.”
Al put a pot of water on the stove to boil. “At least, our clothes are reasonably clean,” he said. “Except for this egg on my shirt.”
“I almost got ’er,” said Rudy, and Elmer shuddered, and the bloody sliver came out.
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