Signals: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Tim Gautreaux is the author of three novels and the collections Same Place, Same Thing and Welding with Children, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ, as well as multiple times in The Best America Short Stories and New Stories from the South. His many honors include the National Magazine Award, the Southeastern Booksellers Award, the Heasley Prize, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the Louisiana Writer Award. After teaching for thirty years at Southeastern Louisiana University, he now lives, with his wife, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Gautreaux / SIGNALS

Radio Magic

Cliff had a great desire to be famous, if only in a small way. Coming from a long line of people whose only legacy was a grave marker, he figured he could do better. The older he got, the more intense his yen for fame, until at age fifty-two, after his last child left to join the navy, he started taking piano lessons. His teacher, a Miss Deutch, told him he was hopeless and had the worst sense of rhythm in the state of Ohio. He asked if he might be suitable for another instrument and she suggested the ocarina.

Cliff tried art lessons, but his misshapen nudes looked like white cattle that had grazed too long on a nuclear test site. Next he took a creative writing class and tried for two years to get something published, but even a limerick he’d embedded in a letter to the local paper about trash pickup had been cut by the editor. His quest went on throughseveral other episodes before he realized he might have to settle for turning his twins’ large bedroom into a man cave, the most famous man cave in the county, a room full of startling objects that his friends down at the waterworks would wonder at and maybe bring to the attentionof the regional news media.

The first treasure he installed was a crumbling moose head half the size of a Volkswagen. He purchased it through an ad he heard on the local radio station’s Swap Shop program, the cheapest way to buy anything manly and grotesque. Every morning he listened at seven while he was eating breakfast with his wife, Tammy, a good woman who tolerated his purchases in silence, suspecting that her sweet-natured and naïve husband could have worse habits. After the moose head, he purchased an electric slot machine with semi-nudeAsian cowgirls paintedon the glass, and next the trunk section of a 1947 Plymouth that hadbeen made into a neon-greensofa, then a pool table covered with hot-pinkfelt, followed by two red-glazedcow patty ashtrays, though no onehe knew smoked. The collection grew, and his friends came over to playcards on a giant wooden cable spool that had a Lithuanian flag paintedin its center. No one said much about all these items, though two fromthe chemical department cast suspicious glances at the twin dress dummiesshaped like overweight women. Cliff liked his collection thoughhe sensed that most of the members of his poker group seemed mildlydisturbed by it, especially by the skeleton of a goat hanging over thecard table, two blinding bulbs descending from its crotch.

One morning on Swap Shop, a man with slurred speech called in tooffer five chickens that had been dyed green. The station was in BlueShaft, West Virginia, a ruined coal-miningtown, and the locals wouldcall up and try to sell anything they had just to keep the lights on. Thenext seller was a woman who was trying to offload a whorehouse pianothat had been struck by lightning. Cliff thought the offerings were agood omen, that something special might be coming up. When a youngboy came on the air attempting to sell his only pair of pants becausehe’d outgrown them, Cliff reached to turn up the volume. As the childdescribed his jeans, Cliff took a trip into his young life, about the onlykind of travel he could afford, since his wife was an assistant publiclibrarian for the hamlet of Lincoln Foot, Ohio, and he was only the guyat the waterworks who gauged how much came in and went out.

In the middle of the program Tammy got up from the table. “Bye,sweetie,” she said as she brushed past. “Don’t buy another hornet’snest.”

Cliff closed his eyes. “You don’t have to keep bringing that up.” Oneof his early purchases from Swap Shop was a large nest for $10 from aman down the road. It was an early fall day and the farmer thought thehornets were long dead, and they were. Cliff hung the big nest in hisman cave and proceeded to write reports for the water company, notknowing that a few dozen live eggs had been left behind. They hatchedmore or less all at once when the central heat came on, and the youngstingers descended on Cliff’s head like tiny syringes of poison. After his eyes swelled shut he figured he’d better go to a doc-in-a-box,but he felldown the side steps, ruining a new sport coat, and when he got into thecar, he couldn’t see to drive, so he called an ambulance, guessing at thebuttons on his phone and calling the Sears washing machine repairmanby mistake. By the time he was brought to the hospital, his nose wasthe size of an adolescent squash. The charge for the ambulance service,emergency room treatment, and injections was monstrous, but whatkept him angry for a week was the $109 service bill from Sears.

Swap Shop ran a little longer than usual, and the last item of the daywas an antique wooden radio. He remembered his grandfather’s Crosley669, which he was allowed to play when he was a child. Back then,the broadcasts sounded antique, the music muzzled and full of soft popsand windy static, as if there were a fire inside the cabinet, the announcersounding faintly like Edward R. Murrow even when advertising colorTVs. Gramps let him stay up late, and after eleven o’clock Cliff wouldswitch on the police band, which hadn’t broadcast police radio sincethe 1940s, but way down on the left side of the dial, he could tease ina ham-radiooperator in Australia who always talked about fishing. Hewould click a different knob and the set would land on the abandonedshortwave band, but sometimes he could hear what sounded like Chinese,the radio chanting in a far-offand mystical faintness, coming andgoing like consciousness during a fragmented dream.

He jotted down the seller’s number and after many rings he spokewith a creaky-voicedwoman named Selma McKeithen, who lived downin nearby Blue Shaft. She wasn’t sure about the radio’s current condition,only that her deceased son, who had owned an electronics repairshop, had restored it years before, and she wanted fifty dollars for it.

Cliff called in to the waterworks and took the day off.

Blue Shaft, West Virginia, was just twenty miles from Cliff’s house.It had been slowly dying over the past six decades, one business closingup per year, ten newly boarded-uphouses per annum, fifty youngworkers moving out in the same time period, until the town felt like abig country house abandoned by its many grown children. The growlyold announcer on the radio read his announcements for yard sales andused car lots as if he could barely see the printed text.

Cliff drove past many dusty, empty storefronts. Behind them in the distance hovered mud-coloredmountains ribboned with seams oflow-gradecoal. Mrs. McKeithen lived in a large two-storyframe housesurrounded by broad, peeling galleries. He knocked and waited a longtime, thinking he’d been forgotten or was being ignored because theradio had already been sold. But after six or seven minutes of knockingand waiting, he heard slow, puffy footsteps and saw the white ceramicdoorknob turn as slowly as the second hand on a clock.

Mrs. McKeithen was straight in the back and had eyes the color ofblue willow china, but she was very old. She apologized for being soslow, explaining, as she motioned him in, that she’d just turned ninety-eight.After she closed the door, she evaluated him up and down.“You’re a little thick through the middle, aren’t you?”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

Putting up a hand, Mrs. McKeithen said, “My father used to say thata fat, happy dog wasn’t happy long.” Leading him to a back bedroomover her creaking floors, she pointed to the radio. “It belonged to myoldest son, Vernon.” A large mahogany floor model stood next to a tallwindow. A copper antenna wire snaked through the bottom of the sashand ran, he was told, up to the roof where it was strung between twosticks, one at the front of the house, one at the rear.

“It’s bigger than I thought.” He turned it from the wall and saw itwas a Philco 41-290 that brought in AM, shortwave, and police band.

“Does it work?”

She snapped a hand toward the wall. “Plug it in, my boy. It runs onelectricity, you know.”

“I don’t think so. It could go up in smoke.”

“Oh, nonsense. Don’t you have any courage? It should play justfine.”

Cliff gave her a doubtful look. “Can’t be too careful.”

“Oh, for goodness sake.” Mrs. McKeithen slowly bent over to pickup the plug.

“Please don’t. Let’s just make a deal. Will you take forty for it?”

She straightened up and said, “And what will you do with that extraten dollars in your pocket? Buy a yacht, perhaps?”

He looked down at the dusty cabinet. With some furniture wax heshould be able to see his reflection. “Yeah, okay. Fifty it is.”

She held out her hand, wide palmed, not shaking. “My husband says,or said, that Vernon put many new components inside that old dustything. He used to make a really good living before his heart went bad.”

Cliff pulled out his wallet and frowned into it. “Oh, has your husbandpassed away?”

She shook her frosty head. “No, we just got divorced last year.”

“Really? How long were you married?

”She touched her chin and closed one eye. “Seventy-threeyears.”

Cliff’s mouth fell open. “Why’d you get a divorce after seventy-threeyears?”

She shrugged. “Oh, we wanted to wait until the children were dead.”

Later that night, Cliff used a dolly to roll the big Philco into his mancave at the rear of the house, where it joined a mouse-nibbledanteater,part of a broken B-24propeller, a giant locomotive piston, a jukeboxwith two bullet holes through the glass, a straitjacket covered withbloodstains, a collage made with twenty red hot-waterbottles, andmany other oddities, all bought on Swap Shop or given to him by friendswho were fine judges of bad taste. An acquaintance from work had oncegiven him a plastic donkey whose backpack was filled with cigarettes.When Cliff lifted the donkey’s tail the first time, a stale Lucky Strikeextruded from the animal’s rear end.

Late that night, Cliff pulled the back panel off the Philco and foundthe insides to be remarkably clean. Nearly every tube, capacitor, andresistor had been replaced, and some modern components seemed tohave been added. The plug wire was restoration-gradeline sheathed inbronze-coloredcloth. Cliff decided to string a temporary antenna wirearound the room and fire the set up.

He began his tour on AM with a click and a hum, then a rising whinelike a musical saw, so he turned the selector knob and brought in thelocal country music station. The sound was like his gramps’ machine,but cleaner—abig, soft sound with no edges to Taylor Swift. He rolledup on an oldies broadcast and listened while working on a lab reportfor the county. Then he tried out the police band, which was empty.Cliff found it hard to believe that anything on earth was empty, much less a radio frequency. He turned the tuning knob at a creeping pace,and finally, down at the left side of the dial, he heard a ship call for abar pilot to come out into the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of theMississippi. The conversation was full of depths, currents, and locationsand lasted two or three minutes before fading as though the pilot wereindeed floating off into the night. Then calypso music drifted in for amoment and left at once, the melody like a supple deer passing throughheadlights.

For a long time there was nothing, then an old man singing “Dosgardenias para ti,” solo in a soft voice, followed by more dead air, interruptedby a tickle of accordion, then more silence. Cliff made himselfa whiskey sour and pulled a chair up next to the radio, turning aknob to the shortwave band. From Del Rio, Texas, an amateur stationannounced its existence and began broadcasting a waterfall of SpadeCooley’s western swing music. Much later, tuning farther up the dial, hepicked up nothing at all until he hit a steady stream of news in Englishfrom the Ivory Coast, and he moved to the sofa. Cliff and his wife hadhardly ever left the state, their vacation time of two weeks a year not givingthem much latitude for it, but this night, for the first time, he beganto understand how vast and varied the world was, and he listened lateuntil he rolled off to sleep in the trunk of the ’47 Plymouth.

Tammy woke him up in time to shower and shave. She mentioned thatthe radio smelled hot, and if he didn’t want to burn the house down hemight take it over to old man Blumenthal’s electronics repair shop toget it checked for safety. He brought the big unit in on the way to workand picked it up when he knocked off, Mr. Blumenthal telling him itwas safe.

As he helped load the heavy cabinet the repairman said, “You know,this old gal has been redesigned. I mean, things have not only beenreplaced, but everything’s modified. It’s like somebody was trying tomake it bring in a specific station more strongly. I’ve never seen suchcircuitry, especially in an antique box like this.”

Cliff closed his hatchback and took a breath. “I just wanted to knowif it’s going to catch fire.”

“No, no,” Blumenthal said. “These things tended to run prettywarm. It’s normal. Hope you tune in something interesting.”

That evening, Cliff and Tammy sat together in the man cave andwatched a football game until the score reached 48–18and his wifestood up. “No sense in burning time on this turkey. How’s your radioworking?”

“Blumenthal said it was okay.” Cliff turned on the shortwave bandand immediately hit a Delta airliner asking for a change in altitude.But that was all, just a shooting star of words and nothing else. Rollingdown the dial he found another ship-to-shorebroadcast, a tugboat pilotasking for a lineup at a lock on the Ohio River. Then nothing. “Late atnight,” he told her, “a few more things come on.”

She crossed her legs and leaned toward the set. “This is kind ofcreepy, like we’re spying or something. I mean, it’s fun.”

After two rounds of drinks they discovered a program of belly-dancemusic from Turkey. Tammy jumped up and swayed her arms andpopped her hips until she fell over onto the Plymouth sofa. Aroundeleven-thirtythey gave up listening as the music faded out.

For the next two months Cliff developed a habit of searching the dialright before bedtime, sometimes as late as one o’clock on weekends.He heard marimba music, Cuban club music, Alaskan diatribe, backwoodspreaching from three continents, Radio Australia broadcasts toNew Guinea in pidgin English, all weak signals except for one brightbroadcasting point in the Solomon Islands, from a town, the announcersaid, near Gizo.

One morning in December, Cliff got a call from his boss, who saidthat a pipe had frozen and burst in the attic of the lab and that he didn’tneed to come in because the place was flooded. He watched the newsin the living room for a while, then went into his cave to see if anythingwas on shortwave. He wasn’t having much luck until he reached thespot on the dial for the station in the Solomons, which came in strong.At nine o’clock someone was broadcasting an old recording of a femalecomedian, originally taped at a nightclub in the Catskills, the announcernoted, in the early forties. Cliff checked his laptop and discovered it was after one a.m. in Gizo. The old Philco had eight preset buttons, and ona hunch he punched each one; fo...