Black Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  “I know. You told me. But, a name is a name. a rose is a rose.”

  “A baby is a baby.”

  “You will have two. What’s her name…”

  “Cookie. Aja. Yes. I know. Honestly, I felt bad about all that. I have no idea if she had my baby, or if it was Juan’s, or somebody… Who cares? Yes, Barbara, I will marry you. In the morning. I promise.”

  “In the afternoon. We have the closing ceremony in the morning. At ten.”

  “What time is it now?”

  She looked at her watch. “Well after four. Let’s go to bed. You big lug.”

  “I love you.”

  “What?”

  “I fucking said, I fucking love you. Want me to say it again?”

  “Yes. I do. Often. I love you too. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Shower first?”

  “Bed.” She took my hand. “We can change the sheets in the morning. We have to dress up for the ceremony, anyway.”

  “My aching head.”

  “You ought to find out what causes that, and stop doing it.” She smirked.

  “Said the pregnant lady.” That’s when she hit me.

  >>>>>>

  It was all cut and dried, the brass bands hurt my hungover head, but I smiled nobly, nobody noticed. I just had to stand there and look important. Or at least conscious. After all the papers were signed, and all the hands shaken, I slipped the word to Hodges in an aside that progress had been made on the radio, and he whispered back; “Good work. Things are moving fast; we need to set the stage for our next move.”

  “You tell me what to say, and I’ll get it on the air, sir.”

  He pulled me aside so we could talk. Nobody noticed. They were all looking at the Soong sisters. “You just establish a presence on the air, is that the right way to put it? I have no idea. Play music, tell jokes, just be there. Don’t say where you are, who you are, don’t be political, don’t sound like that damn Freedom Radio, whatever that is. You understand? Be everybody’s chatty next door neighbor. Establish trust. Have the news, but don’t slant it. Be honest with people. If I have to boil it down, I want you to be what you want to hear, late at night, you know, when you might be lonely… scared… alone. You know how people are. How they get at three o’clock in the morning. Do you understand?”

  “I do. Folksy. Reassuring. A voice in the dark. Somebody to cling to. And I have just the boy to do it. This Woody kid. He is like a young Will Rogers. From Oklahoma, too. He is perfect for the job. He is a bit of a commie, we might have to sit on him a little, but he will do fine.”

  “Woody, hey? What’s his last name?”

  “I honestly don’t know. They just call him Woody. The kid. I’ll find out and send you a memo.”

  “Do that. I’ll have Ray keep looking for transmitters. We will need a lot of power for what I have in mind, and we will need more than one set-up. It might get bombed. A word to the wise.” He winked.

  “I understand. A lot of people are going to not like this. Not one bit. We will need more gold. And I need to talk to Epi. It just dawned on me, that battleships have radios too. Powerful ones. I should have seen that before.”

  “You can’t think of everything, no matter how hard you try. But you have to keep trying. Get good people, and give them their head. Remember what Ben Franklin said, “A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit.”

  “That’s an odd thought. I’ll have to think about that.”

  “Perhaps I didn’t quote it just right, but that’s the gist of it. It has served me well over the years. People will fight you to the death, ignore your best ideas, if you insist on getting the credit. You let somebody else think something is their own idea, they will fight tooth and claw to do what you wanted them to do in the first place. And on the other hand, if you don’t take the credit, you don’t have to take the blame, if it all goes bad.”

  “General, I stand in awe.” I was not kidding. What kind of a man, a general, thinks like that? One in a million? Generals were egotistical monsters for the most part. Were there a million generals on earth today? Dubious. And holy shit. Could anybody on this beat-up planet be less like fucking asshole Patton? I felt a little glow down in my deepest gut that told me he was right, damn right, and better than right. Now, all I had to do was to stop being an asshole long enough to get this done. Living through this shit was secondary.

  He twinkled an eye at me. “Don’t stand. Move.”

  “Yes, sir. On it.”

  >>>>>>>

  So, move. I got on the horn, called Epi, or one of his lackeys, told him what we needed, and while he was at it, we needed some Signalmen, or whatever they called them in the Navy. I got back an “Acknowledged” instantly, and a few minutes later a “Will Do. On the way. E.” Which was better than money in the bank for me. While that was on the way, I figured I needed to find some more on-air people to fill out the time. Woody could not fill twenty-four hours a day, now, could he? So? So, ask people. It’s all about knowing who to ask. That’s how you do the newspaper business. Everybody knows something, you just have to find out who knows what you need to know, and ask them. You might have to kiss their ass a little to get them to tell you what you want to know, but that’s how the game gets played. Somebody must have gotten the word from Hodges, it was only two days later than not one, but three Trimotors full of radio gear landed at the airfield, with three radiomen in each. Some serious head-scratching occurred, it developed that the Russian and the Japanese navies both used different voltages or whatever they were in their radio sets. Sometimes I treasure my ignorance. But another couple of those boxcars with living quarters showed up, and lights burned all night long, as Will, Bob, and their new boys hashed all of that out. Not my job.

  It was not my job to supervise railroad construction either, but it was noticeable that the Southwest Line to Persia was getting the lion’s share of men and material, I supposed that was another side effect of the blocking of the Suez Canal.

  What was my business was finding more people to yak on the radio. We had a low power station up and running, Woody and Alde were taking four hour shifts, they had a couple of bands playing music, they calling themselves Radio Home. Receiver sets were few and far between, but were all but concealed by people clustered around, night and day. There was a lot of improvisation of those old-fashioned crystal sets too, a lot of telephones and gramophones vanished to be reborn as earphones. Somehow they could turn a razor blade and a pencil into something that could pick up radio waves, and there was some kind of deal with different mineral specimens that would work too. Quartz? All I really understood was that the desert was full of rocks, and some of them could be made into radios, if you could hornswoggle an earphone. Who knows?

  Woody had a fund of corny jokes of the Arkansas Traveler, Farmer and the City Slicker variety, and could spiel off one after another for hours, it seemed.

  If all else failed, he would play his damn harmonica and sing endless hillbilly songs. Either somebody got done wrong, or somebody got killed, or both, but people seemed to like them well enough.

  Alde could cram five or six musicians into that boxcar studio, the piano took up most of the room, and they stole carpets and blankets to hang on the walls to muffle the sounds of the passing trains. She sang, a steady stream of piano players kept the music tinkling out of that old upright, and airtime was filled. I provided five minutes of headlines every hour, I kept it nonpartisan, non-committal, and low key, like the BBC used to be, before the Anglo-German Alliance. The Portuguese stations were still our best sources, but the South Africans, the Aussies, and the Persians were helpful too. The Spanish stations were voluble enough, but too excitable to be trusted. No matter, all grist for my mill. Nobody was shooting at us, the Germans and the Japanese were seriously negotiating someplace, and we were waiting for railroads to be built to Persia, and from Urum-chi up to the Trans-Siberian. Let’s call it a honeymoon.

  >>>>>>>>

  I did ask Alde
to advertise on the radio for more personalities, and posted a few notices on bulletin boards around town. Response was immediate, if not instant. I even knew of one of them, Henry Mencken, a journalist from Baltimore, a learned guy and a royal pain in the ass. He had a real bitter outlook, but a deft touch with words. We had met, here and there, over the years, and I didn’t even have to ask what sent him here. He was a right-wing gadfly, thought highly of war as good for the species, meaning white people. But he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools gladly or otherwise.

  I remembered he was a detractor of religion, populism and representative democracy, calling it a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. He being one of the superiors, of course. He was a supporter of scientific progress, skeptical of economic theories and critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine. I knew there was something about him I liked.

  He said that he had opposed American entry into World War I, he was twenty years or more older than me. I remembered him writing, "War is a good thing, because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature… A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid." And he was here, in exile. If he wanted war, we had plenty. He had been working as a clerk for the railroad, was bored silly. I kissed his cheeks and sent him to Alde with a clear conscience.

  The next guy to show up was a kid from the Carolinas, just out of college. He had a soft approach, no experience, but a deep resonant voice, one that sounded reassuring from the first syllable. I asked him his name, and he said it was Egbert Roscoe Murrow, from Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, and that he was interested in international education. He had been assistant director someplace, and the director had been exiled for being too liberal, dragged the kid with him. I suspected somebody up the chain of command had been playing cover your ass, but who cares. “Can we call you Ed?”

  “Most folks do.”

  “Hired.”

  While I was showing him the door, a cute Irish lassie caught my eye. She moved closer, but waited until I gave Ed directions down the platform to the Radio Car. “Excuse me, mister, are you this Colonel Kapusta that is hiring for the radio?”

  “That’s me. What can I do for you, young lady?”

  She had no brogue, American born then. “I’m a vaudeville performer, I have been on the boards since 09, sing, dance, tell jokes, anything you need. I don’t want to brag, but I don’t want to hide my light under any bushels, either. I was in line to audition as a singer, saw your flyer, and here I am. My name is Grace Burns.” Her gaze was clear, and strikingly, she had one blue and one green eye. Not that that helped on the radio, but I liked her directness.

  “Burns. Is that Irish?”

  “Jewish. It was my husband’s name, he was Jewish. I’m a mick. From San Francisco. I’m older than I look. Thirty-five.”

  “You have been in show business since you were fourteen?”

  “Talking. Before that I was a dancer with my three sisters. "The Four Colleens"? My husband was George Burns; we were becoming fairly well-known. Then they banned Jews from the theater, George spoke up, and I never saw him again. Then, a few months later, they rounded a bunch of us San Fran theater people up. And here we are. I was doing for another colonel, but…”

  I didn’t ask what she was doing for her colonel. Some things you don’t have to ask. “You know Bob Weeks?”

  “The backstage guy? Everybody knows Bob. Why?”

  “He is in charge of the Radio Project. If he says you are in, you’re in. Let’s go.”

  I led her to Bob’s car, he saw here, gave her a big hug, said, “We all were so sorry about George. You two were wonderful for each other.”

  “You know he’s dead?”

  “No.” Flatly. “But I do know nobody has seen him since they took him away. Special Handling is the best bet.”

  I had to ask; “Special handling?”

  “Nobody knows, but people marked Special Handling were never seen again, alive or dead. It’s just a rumor, but…” Grace took the news dry-eyed. She knew. They must have been close.

  “Those fuckers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you recommend Grace, here?”

  “She can do anything. Good attitude, hard worker, more talent than any three people.”

  “Hired. Grace, let’s go talk to Alde.”

  >>>>>>>

  So, that gave us the foundation to build on. Grace, Gracie, was the spark plug, she did have more talent than any three other people on the air, and she could get along with and inspire all the others. She could even tease a chuckle out of Henry Mencken, no easy task. Woody and especially young Ed were smitten, Ed almost ridiculously so, but she took it all in step, like a great dancer, and kidded him out of his infatuation, playing Granny Gracie every time he tried to get serious. And he was a very serious young man. Great voice though, we needed him on board. He added gravity to our broadcasts.

  It was only a few days, less than a week before Epi’s sailor boys had us a real transmitter, and cobbled up a tower that ran on a couple of flatcars, could be erected in less than an hour, braced with guy wires. We were worldwide.

  I was on the air occasionally, reading the news I wrote, it was odd, in a way, knowing that there was a possibility that you were being heard by people all over the world, all over China and Siberia at least, and having no way of knowing what they were thinking about what you were saying. We sure were not giving out our address for postcards. Even if they had mail, and if we had any address. As soon as the tower was operational, we took off up the Urum-chi-Omsk Railroad, which was going to be better than a thousand miles long. We had to keep moving out of simple caution, bombers can easily home in on radio signals, so we moved every day, forward and back up and down the track, from one barren place in the desert to another. We had to be on sidings of course, the construction trains rolled day and night, running the line up to Omsk, which was still in German hands. There was supposed to be a truce, but you can get hurt trusting those bastards.

  Bradley’s men were building another line from some place called Novonikolayevsk, that was only eight hundred miles from Urum-chi, about two hundred miles east of Omsk on the TSRR. That made Novonikolayevsk only nine hundred miles west of Irkutsk. Only. Damn, this was a big country out here.

  Supposedly, the Peace Conference would be in Omsk, and the eventual eastern border of the German Empire would be another damn thousand miles west at Tsaritsyn. The exact status of the thousands of miles between Tsaritsyn and Irkutsk was open to negotiation. As if I could give a runny shit. I knew it was vitally important to thousands of people, but I was not one of them. Shut up, and do your job. Talk shit into a microphone, pretend you were not pissing into the wind, and continue monitoring the rest of the world’s flaming fuckups.

  The war in New England was hanging fire, the Battle of Northfield was about the limit of German penetration, the Revolt in Boston had been put down, Radio Freedom was broadcasting firing squad executions almost hourly, a sure way to boost morale. The Quebec Canadien Libéré stations were still on the air, it was becoming Mud Season up there, not even tanks could cope with that shit. You get ten feet of snow melting down into the soil, and nobody goes no place toot fucking sweet. Detroit was still ours, Toronto was a flaming ruin, as was Hamilton, Ontario, it looked like Patton had enough tanks to keep the Anglo-Germans on the other side of the St. Lawrence for the foreseeable future.

  Still no good word from Mexico on either side, it looked like a couple of stalemates there, one in the northern deserts on the border, and the big one between Vera Cruz and the mountains blocking the way to Mexico City. Patton was not losing, but he couldn’t win, as predicted. And the poor bloody infantry was getting it in the neck.

  The Colombian Canal was open for business, as if anybody was silly enough to try to ship any legitimate cargos through there, and there seemed to be little to no action against the new Republic of Western Canada. There was shit to do anyway, the
mountains set up steeply a few dozen miles from Vancouver, and the rest of the country was grizzly bears and big horn sheep and cattle ranchers as far as I could tell.

  Stasis. Stalemate. Some of the foreign stations were saying the Endless War was over, that it was all consolidation now, between the two major powers on earth, the Nipponese Empire and the Anglo-German one. That’s what we called it, other countries started referring to the Deutsch-englisches Reich, or just “The Reich.” Big things have small names, it’s a rule. And the Reich was the biggest empire the word had ever seen, two whole continents, a chunk of North America, and half of Asia. The good half. The Japanese controlled more latitude, but a lot less land and a hell of a lot fewer people. Poorer people too. No contest. They had China, but that was a liability, and they were trying to unload it to the highest bidder, sacrifice sale. Slightly damaged and shopworn. Make me an offer.

  The Mediterranean Sea was a German lake, as was the Atlantic. The Caribbean was disputed territory, like the pirate days, and the Japanese owned the rest of the oceans, better than half the globe. That would require consolidation, for sure. Africa was a black hole, no pun intended, no word getting out at all. You could bet the krauts were using their well-honed tactics to plunder that whole continent, all except for the very southern English, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies, ex-colonies, whatever they were called. Words. They would eventually be sucked under, unless they kissed Japanese ass, and the Japs wanted to fight for them, which seemed a little dubious. The Nips already had so many plates full it looked like a banquet at Nero’s palace, as is. India and Burma, Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies were quite a big enough bite for anybody to chew. Consolidation.

  Which left us. Consolidate this, motherfucker.

  >>>>>>>>

  We had another two weeks, twenty days of shuttling back and forth from siding to siding, learning the broadcasting business, before the deals were cut, and things started to happen. Once they did, they happened fast. You could get dizzy. We had advance notice, Ray Reynolds and his people were telegraphing us press releases, some official, most unofficial, so we could get them on the air. The first and most important was the release concerning the German Japanese Central Asia Peace Conference. It was to be held in Omsk, and although we were not allowed to say so, it was already in the bag. The Germans waned the dividing line at Omsk, the Japanese wanted Tsaritsyn, they settled on Yekaterinburg. That was farther north, but still on the TSRR. Who cares? Well, the Siberians, maybe, but they were low on the list of people they big kids gave a shit about.