Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  He looked at Jimmy across the desk, checking for signs of offense, but Jimmy had sunk deeper down into his own office chair, tired from all the revelations he had just shared, his feet propped amid all the crucial papers and screaming figures now laying ignored on the desk. He, too, watched the ceiling and listened for once to what someone else had to say.

  "But look what you built, Jimmy! Damn! Just look what you have done! Sure, you had to take some short cuts. There was no way you could have pulled it off without the George's money. I know I screamed like an old woman when you first proposed it. But just look. You did it. Oh, and I'd like to think I helped just a little bit."

  Jimmy looked down at him quickly.

  "Damn, Dee! There's no way I could have done anything without you. Right now, you and Cleo are the only people in this world that I love, and I've shut you completely out and she's two thousand miles away singing to a bunch of drunks in some honkytonk while I'm here getting neck deep in a mess that just might get her killed and cost you everything you’ve built!"

  Jimmy did not know where the tears came from. So suddenly. So uninvited. So unexpected. He had never dreamed that he had so many. They burst out of him like a downpour. For the second time in a year—and the second time since he was a kid—he was squalling like a baby. Only this time, there was somebody else there to see him crying. Not just a flock of crows and couple of ghosts in a cemetery by the river.

  Detroit was up immediately, arm around his shoulder, quiet, but comforting in his silence. Finally, Jimmy stood, wiped the remaining tears with the initialed cuff of his custom-tailored dress shirt and, embarrassed by his sudden letting go, returned to his favorite place for contemplation, staring out the office window.

  Below, on the Cumberland River, a tug boat shoved a barge loaded with coal upriver at a brisk pace, angry white water churning at its stern. The long, thick shadow of the building in which Jimmy stood fell directly across the muddy stream, cast there by the late afternoon sun. It seemed to put up a dark, impenetrable barrier to the boat's progress, but the boat simply plowed right through the shade, shoving the barge even faster, and left the black shadow of the solid building diffused and shimmering in its frothy wake. Gill hardly noticed that Detroit now stood beside him at the window, watching the tug.

  "You know what, Jimmy Gill? Sometimes things we see as impossible obstacles to overcome aren’t really so tough after all. We only have to try to push on and think our way through them. Maybe what we need to do now is to sit down and get busy rigging up something that will get the job done."

  Even over his own sniffling, above the renewed buzzing of the intercom on the desk behind them, the screaming of the telephone, more of Sammie’s impatient pounding on his door, Jimmy Gill was certain that he could hear the wheels beginning to spin inside Detroit Simmons’ head.

  Thirty-five

  "You know what, Jimmy? I hate to sound melodramatic, but I don't think you love me anymore."

  The cold matter-of-factness of Cleo's long-distance voice left him stunned. A harsh, metallic echo on the telephone line surrounded her words and made them rattle and snap like brittle ice.

  "But Cleo, I..."

  "You ought to listen to yourself sometime, Jimmy. Look at how you are. Look at how you allow me to get just so close to you. Then you seem to suddenly wake up or something and shove me away like I'm trespassing on posted territory. Look at how you wrap yourself in a cocoon with your work so nobody can get near enough to you to reach you. Not even me. Why won't you let me love you, Jimmy? What in hell are you so damned afraid of?"

  Jimmy Gill was silent then, with only the hum of the phone in his ear. For once the patter did not come. He did not know what to say.

  "Good answer, Jimmy. Damn good answer. I’ve got a few days off. Some promoter went bust and cancelled out on us. I'm going to hole up somewhere and think awhile. Probably cry my eyes out and eat way too many chocolate-covered cherries or something, too. I do that when my heart is breaking, you know. No, on second thought, you wouldn’t know, Jimmy. You wouldn’t know. Maybe I can write some and that'll help me work it out. Figure out some way to touch you. Hopefully, I can decide if I really want to try any more. You know what? Sometimes talking to you is exactly like trying to talk back to the radio!"

  Still, he was silent, not sure what words to say to convince her how much he loved her. Needed her. "I love you and I need you," somehow never occurred to him. Fine damn communicator he was!

  "Jimmy? Are you listening to me? Maybe right now would be a good time for you to do some serious thinking about us, too. That is, if you care."

  With a loud, terminal click, she was gone.

  The call came out of the blue, a shock in the middle of one of the most fantastic days Jimmy had enjoyed in months. Of course, they had hardly spoken to each other in over a week. When they did, her voice was hoarse and tired from the grueling final leg of the tour. He usually was distracted, his mind more on stock offerings and profit-and-loss statements. It seemed like years since they had held each other. He could hardly remember what she felt like lying close to him. What her voice sounded like when she was there in the same room.

  The distant iciness of the telephone left him silent, not sure what to say to let her know how much he missed her. To fill the dreaded silence, he ranted on and on about stupid business drivel that he should have known she did not care to hear. He let her tell him what was happening on the road, in the shows, at the radio stations she visited for interviews. But he knew that she could tell, even over the thousands of miles of wires and microwave links and telephone relay stations that were stacked up between them. His mind was blitzing back and forth from her to company business. That kept her from getting to what was really bothering her. At least until this call.

  Just that quickly, with the breaking of the long-distance telephone connection, Jimmy Gill faced the inevitable. He had known all along Cleo Michaels was too good for someone like him. One day she would wake up to realize who and what kind of man he really was. Then she would run away from him as fast and as far as she could.

  People leave the ones they love. For whatever reasons.

  Jimmy had always harbored the thought that he should drive her away from him first, spare her before she was hurt even more. Make the unavoidable easier for her. Maybe that was why he had stayed so quiet on the telephone while she pelted him with her raw words. Even when his throat ached to speak and his heart burst from loving her so much.

  Soon. Soon he could have her back, in person, and most of the blackness that had been occupying his mind would be past. Then he could tell her how he felt. Or maybe not. Maybe she was gone for good. Maybe he would never say what he needed to say to get her back. Before it ate him whole, he tried to shake the call from his mind, to turn back to work.

  Richard and the team that had headed up the stock offering for Wizard Broadcasting were ecstatic. The shares had been gobbled up and the price was already up several points.

  "Three or four holding companies I've never heard of bought most of the shares in a hurry,” Graffeo reported. “The underwriters couldn't believe what you've built down here without borrowing money through conventional channels. But you've got control of the whole shebang now, Brother James. And lots of cash to throw at some more properties anytime you are ready. Just keep those stockholders happy 'cause if they ever get their noses out of joint, they can get together and fire you and me both!"

  Now that the radio stations and satellite programming networks were publically traded, Jimmy somehow felt a huge pressure lifted off his shoulders. With a management team in place, maybe he could once again spend time thinking of creative programming and music. Make magic out of nothing but thin air and sound. Maybe even stop by a studio sometime late at night and take a turn on the microphone. Talking with Detroit about his technical ideas had fired Jimmy up for more innovation and less financial manipulation.

  But for the first time, he was having some doubts about his ambitious growth p
lans. He was not so sure they should spend all that available cash on new properties. Maybe they should take what they had accumulated already and concentrate on making them the best they could be. That had been Detroit’s suggestion and Jimmy had to admit that it was sound.

  When Cleo called, Jimmy was immersed in a project that had him tingling all over. But there had been no way he could have told her what it was. He had long ago decided to shield her from all that was happening with the Georges.

  That morning, with Dee looking on, he had personally placed the licenses for the puny AM station in Homestead, Florida, and for the one in New Orleans, into a brown manila envelope along with a handwritten note. Then he prepared to overnight the package to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. It was the first step in his and Detroit’s plan. He was simply going to turn the licenses back in to the Commission and wash his hands of them.

  He would tell the board of directors and the stockholders eventually in some dull prospectus that he was simply cutting loose a couple of unprofitable facilities in depressed markets. The others who would have to know about what he had done would find out soon enough on their own.

  The power companies in each city had already been notified to pull the electric meters outside each transmitter as soon as possible. A couple of college broadcasting departments would soon receive a windfall donation of old AM transmitting and studio equipment. “For sale" signs would go up in front of the grimy little block buildings in both cities as soon as contracts could be signed with real estate companies there.

  The Wizard Rock Network was about to lose two of its marginal affiliates. Jimmy Gill, and the man who started the whole thing, was quite happy about those developments.

  Putting back together the rest of his crumbling life would have to wait a few more days.

  Thirty-six

  Jimmy Gill could not shroud his feelings behind the veil of work any longer. He kept hearing the sound of Cleo’s voice beneath everyone else’s on the telephone calls he took. It was her words that kept washing out the printed ones on the reports that he tried to study.

  Finally, frustrated, he left the office early, out before eight o’clock for the first time in as long as he could remember. He steered the car toward Cleo's place that night instead of his own lonely house, partly out of habit, but mostly out of a need to be somewhere that he could feel closer to her for a while. In a place that bore her touch, her feel, her scent.

  He tried to call her a couple of times, but there was no answer on the portable phone she kept in the Silver Eagle bus. He tried his own answering service several times but there was no message from her there.

  Her agent had no idea where she had run off to after the show dates were unexpectedly cancelled. He said that she sounded tired when he last spoke with her, though. She told him that she intended to find some place quiet and dull to rest up for a week. The band and crew went on to Phoenix without her to wait for the next show.

  “Is everything okay?” the booking agent asked him.

  “Sure, as far as I know. She said the tour has been going gang-busters.”

  “I mean between you two. I’ve been booking Cleo for ten years and I’ve never heard her sound like she did last time I talked to her.”

  There was suspicion, blame in the agent’s voice.

  “Aw, I think everything is okay. It's just the big change coming up. Pulling back, coming off the road, it isn't easy for her, you know. Everything will be fine.”

  Wishful thinking, Jimmy thought. Wishful thinking.

  Sometime since Cleo’s dramatic call and now Jimmy Gill had come to a momentous decision. Maybe it had been the finality of her words. Maybe finally forcing the issue with the Georges had made him want to set things right with her, too. Whatever it had been, he decided to finally let go, to commit to her, to let her know how much he loved her, to open up to her as he had never done with anyone else except Detroit Simmons, and, like the words to that old Charlie Pride song, let the chips fall. Let her fulfill his expectations and drop him once and for all, or accept him with all his flaws.

  That was what he would tell her, point blank. That is, if he did not change his mind by the time they spoke and once again shove her away for her own good.

  Jimmy had some plans of his own to tell her about. Plans that had been bubbling close to the surface of his psyche for a while and now came so easily to the top after his heart-to-heart with Detroit. He had decided to pull back a bit himself, to actually get back to those things that had kidnapped him into the broadcasting business in the first place. He had not enjoyed what he had been doing for a long time now. He was finally ready to admit it to Cleo, to Dee, and amazingly, to himself.

  He wanted to take pleasure in some of what he had worked so hard to achieve. To be able to do a show on the air again. To have time to actually listen to the stations for which he was responsible.

  Most importantly, though, he needed to warn Cleo, tell her to watch out for DeWayne George. Especially after what he and Dee had done that afternoon and what they would do the next day.

  But he could not find her to tell her that either. Lord, where was she? Why didn't she call?

  That night at Cleo's house his missing her became something close to an obsession. He rehearsed all he would say to her in a rambling monologue to the walls of the mansion. He sincerely told the furniture how he felt about her. How much he needed her. How hard he would try to be the kind of man she deserved. But the walls and furniture could not answer him.

  Without his really intending it to, his nervous pacing took him over to the old upright Zenith radio. It stood there in the corner all alone, watching him striding back and forth like a caged cat, ranting like a loon. He reached out and gently touched the cool mahogany of its cabinet, felt the smoothness where Cleo had shined the wood to a glow with furniture polish and love. The speaker cloth was soft when he stroked it. He could smell the electric aroma of the radio's internal parts.

  The "ON" switch clicked loudly when he twisted it, snapping at him in the silent, empty living room. He could hear the growling hum as the transformer sent electricity to the filaments of the radio’s tubes, just as he had as he sat on the floor of his bedroom back in the duplex the night he first turned the box on. It sounded as if the radio was grumbling at him, chiding him for being gone so long, for ignoring it.

  The tubes warmed and did their job of amplifying through the speaker the sound that had begun to fade in. There was something so comforting and familiar about it all—the sounds, the smell, the warmth—that Jimmy at once began to feel better.

  Then something strange happened. As if right on cue, as if the station the radio was tuned to was playing it just for him and him alone, the first song he heard from the Zenith’s speaker was one of Cleo's. The new single from her latest album. He had heard it only once before, and then only quickly, half-listening to a tape she shoved into a cassette deck one day, making him stop and hear. It certainly had not affected him then as it did now.

  He trembled as the vibrations from the speaker softly tickled him where he leaned against the cabinet. Instinctively, he hugged the box tighter, as if it was a living thing, as if it was actually Cleo here with him now, singing to him. He pulled closer to the radio’s warmth, placed his cheek against its top, and felt the power of her wonderful voice run through him, the gentle pulsing of her fingers on the guitar strings as she stroked them, as she pulled the tear-shaped notes from the instrument.

  Then, there were the words of the song she was singing in a voice full of sadness. Jimmy had never listened to song lyrics. When he was a jock, he spent the time the song was playing getting the next one ready and cued to spin, preparing whatever wit or wisdom he was going to share with his audience when the record ended. He could still recite the length of time from beginning note ‘til the first vocal of hundreds of records, their exact running time, even the color of the record label, but he hardly knew any of the words of the songs he played over the air all
those years.

  But this time, the words to Cleo’s song grabbed his heart and squeezed.

  Loving without touching, listening without hearing,

  Saying those same words you didn't mean before.

  How can I reach you, become a part of you,

  When you won't let me love you anymore?

  Cleo tried to sing it to Jimmy on the phone several times while she was writing it but it had been an especially busy time. He had only given her some kind of quick half-hearted approval and rudely steered the conversation some other way without even thinking of how important it might have been to her for him to listen to the words of a song. To this song in particular. Words that were more important to her than usual.

  It was only another country song, after all. Maybe a hit. Maybe only filler on the back side of an album. But now, as he heard it pour from the Zenith’s big speakers, Jimmy realized it was much more. It was a song she had written for him. For both of them.

  The guitars and voices swelled to a finish and Jimmy was left weak and wounded. The disk jockey on the radio kicked off some wild and wooly Texas two-step song and Jimmy viciously twisted the volume control back to "OFF" before the mood was ruined.

  Then he ran to the shelves along the back wall of her living room and found a copy of the new album, still clothed in its protective shrink wrapping. He almost ripped the cardboard apart as he tore the disc from its cover and slung it quickly down on the turntable. He listened as the song filled the room again, this time in stereo, sounding all the more as if she was there with him. He kept a hand on the nearest speaker, again to feel her voice as much as to hear it as she sang.

  He listened to it again and again, letting the words beat him, punish him with their power and hurt.