Hunger of the Wolf (10 page)

Dale hiccupped and sighed at once. “All right, Ronnie, I won't bring you down but how about you don't bring me down either? How about we fight against all this destruction, all this collapse, and learn to be human beings to each other.”

“That sounds good,” Ritchie said warily.

“Now, don't get nervous. I'm not asking you for what you owe me.”

“No?”

“I wouldn't expect that of you now, at this moment.”

“That's good. Fine. Swell. What do you want then, Dale?”

“What I want is a debt guarantee, just a sheet of paper saying that you owe me, that you know you owe me, that I know that you know that you owe me, and that you plan to pay me.” That would be something he could show to MacCormack when the heavenly books swung open.

Ritchie frowned solemnly as he took his first sip of beer. “Not really going to be able to do that.”

“What part of what I said is untrue?”

Ritchie licked the luxurious foam from his primitive lips. “You want to be human beings about this?” he asked.

“That's what I said.”

Ritchie's eyes glassed over, the sign of a man recusing his meaning from whatever he was about to say. “I can smell the death on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll be back, don't misunderstand. But even if I paid you all that debt, it would keep you alive for, what, six months? Another season in hell.”

“So you're not going to pay what you're telling me you owe.”

“What I'm saying to you is that I'm a businessman, and I know that if you go bankrupt, I'll only have to pay a fraction of the debt.” Ritchie paused for a slug of beer. “That's what I meant when I said I can smell the death on you.”

“So you're going to kill me,” Dale said. A bored telegram boy was standing by Dale's side.

“No, nothing so grand. I'm telling you that you're already dead.”

Dale fingered open the message from the telegram boy. Ritchie reached over the green-gray tub to finger-filch a five-cent egg from the reeky waters. The telegram read:
SON BORN STOP
.

*  *  *

Dale left Ritchie to pay for the drinks and walked to Atkinson Station, considering the fate of men. He was near middle age, had worked hard and smart for twenty years without pause, and now owed far more than he possessed. His child was born to an absent beggar, a drifter. He had nothing to show but two hundred Interceptor radios in a sufferance storage center on the outskirts of a two-bit gold-mining town. If he could sell the radios, he might be able to blanch over the auto parts losses to MacCormack. He might be able to keep his job. He couldn't go back to Champlain without a job.

He had to sell those radios. He had to. Dale Wylie started to make his fortune for the simplest reason there is: He had to.

*  *  *

The patter for radios in 1930 was elaborate, a full-fledged opera of a sale with enforced intermezzi between multiple acts. Approach was key. The houses of potential buyers had to be solid. Never bother walking up to a door if the lawn's not trimmed, if the steps aren't swept. Never bother with bachelors or the poor. Never bother with a busted roof. Dale mostly tried farms on the edge of town, which could at least sustain themselves, despite depressed food prices, with their own produce. Their remoteness, too, was an advantage. The radio was the latest cure for loneliness.

Never admit you're a salesman. To arrive at a farm in 1931 and to admit salesman status meant guaranteed rejection. Dale informed whoever answered, suspicious housewife or shirtsleeved proprietor rustled from his newspaper or dreamily uninterested teenager, that he was from a government office performing transmission tests in the area. Dale would then set up a radio transmitter in their parlor, or their dining room if they didn't have a parlor, completely free of charge, and return in a week to find out if they had received any signal.

In the salesman's fantasy, what played out a week later was a short scene. “So did you snag a signal?” The man of the house, bragging a bit, replied that he even managed some stations in Washington State, and then the salesman proposed, “Well, if you want to keep it, I can do a deal for you,” and the man of the house replied, “Now, what would that cost?” and the salesman mused, “Well, seeing as you've done us such a big favor by allowing it to be installed for the test . . .”

The scenes we write for ourselves are the dramas that never get produced. The sparse territories around Atkinson huddled in a subcutaneous
bowl of nickel, which screened out radio signals, so the installed receivers generated mostly a howling ruff of static. Even when Dale managed to slip through the suspicious door, set up the transmitter, pry his way out of pointed questions, and bait the sale, he received a curt “Get that bloody machine the hell out of my house” rather than “Where can I buy one?” when he returned.

After the tenth rejection, in the futility of February, Dale sat nursing a sudsy beer, tracing figure eights in the sawdust floor of the Late Spring Inn, ruminating on the day's nastiest sales calls, the dooming screech of the hectically oblivious static. How can you sell radio sets when there's no radio to pick up? He wondered: Why didn't Atkinson have its own station? It would give a radio salesman a chance. Then he wondered: Well? Why didn't Atkinson have a radio station?

Dale helped himself to the bar's phone and connected to a clerk at the Radio Commission in Minneapolis. The license for the town belonged to Atkinson Lumber, he was informed. They communicated with crews who were working outside the town line by radio. Or rather they used to, the clerk said. Why weren't they using them anymore? Dale enquired. Oh, new regulations. The camps had to be connected by telephone if they employed more than two hundred men.

The next morning, Dale admitted himself to the frantic offices of Rich Julian, owner of Atkinson Lumber. Drunk, lecherous, always in the middle of labor conflicts, mostly because he hated to pay men who did nothing more than work for a living, Rich Julian was permanently screaming into a phone or thinking about screaming into a phone. In the pause to light a cigarette, Dale piped up: Did Mr. Julian know that he was still paying property tax on the value of the radio license? Did Mr. Julian know that he could write off the sale as a depreciated asset
with a simple transfer of ownership? Fine. Other fish to fry. What was the deal?

Dale paid one dollar for the radio license, with the understanding that if Atkinson Lumber requested the property back within one calendar year, Julian could pay back the dollar and have his license back. Rich Julian was in the lumber business. Not the radio business. Take the tax fix. For free? And get the little fellow in glasses out the door? Sure thing. He wrote off the loss and forgot that he had ever met Dale Wylie.

That single dollar was the outlay for the entire Wylie family fortune, the seed of billions.

*  *  *

Dale had a license. He needed a machine. He needed means of broadcasting. Over at the Atkinson High School, it so happened, he knew that a bright lad named Sidney Colman was halfway to being a solid radio mechanic. His family had bought one of the sixteen Interceptors he'd managed to fob off, and the boy had founded a radio club. Over a milk shake and a cheeseburger, Dale proposed a special project. He would pay for the parts if Sidney set up the transmitter. The fantasy of Sidney Colman's teenage years was to construct a functioning radio transmitter; here was a man willing to let him buy whatever parts he might need from the distributor in Minneapolis, on as much credit as was required. (And only Dale needed to know that the distributor was going bankrupt so he wouldn't have to pay. He could smell the death on them.) Sidney built his transmitter, and Dale wrote a letter to the principal of Atkinson High commending the boy, and a year later Sidney Colman was off to Oxford, the first Rhodes Scholar Atkinson ever produced, and Dale had a radio transmitter for the price of a cheeseburger and a milk shake.

Last and most definitely least, Dale needed something to put on. What do people listen to? Every media owner thinks of content as little as possible but Dale barely had to think. Preachers stopped him on the street. High school kids handed him well-formatted typewritten notes imploring him to let them volunteer as DJ. Any old man in town would have agreed to announce the high school hockey games for a mickey of rye. What did it matter? The Atkinsonians had nothing else to listen to. The bowl of nickel in which the town squatted had made selling radio sets halfway impossible. Owning a radio station was all gravy. He was literally the only show in town, and in a town with two of everything. Two gas stations. Two Chinese restaurants. Two grocery stores. They had to advertise or die, advertise or cede to their worst enemy in life, the owner of the other place.

A week after KCUV launched, he sold all the Interceptors, and then brought a thousand Victor sets and sold them to all the families that had just bought Interceptors. That's what you call progress.

*  *  *

Then, in the hallucinatory summer of 1932, the badlands encircling Atkinson hallelujahed with fresh gold seams. Dale needed more to get more, so he returned to Pittsburgh, to the Liberty Bell Bank, to ask for a loan. The jowly manager stared at Dale's single page of prospectus like a joke, his awe tinged with disbelief. The cost of Dale's business had been two dollars. That week, the profits had been four thousand dollars. How? Well, Dale explained cheerfully, one dollar on the license, and the transmission room was a building the owner couldn't rent out, so just to maintain the space in good condition, he rented it out for a dollar. And everything else had been free. Everything? He called it Community Radio.

The Liberty Bell Bank loaned him twenty thousand dollars with the transmitter and license as collateral. For the first time, he amounted to something. He amounted to twenty thousand dollars. The certified check burned his inside pocket, blazing with the promise of indisputable value, tugging him up to the heavens of respectability. With the power of that number, he could roll with the train into Champlain Station, stride down the streets he remembered, turn suavely onto Flora Avenue and up to the old door.

The boy who answered his knock gazed up at him with his own eyes. He was wearing navy blue cotton shorts and a coarse shirt of faded white linen. He had Max's shoulders, Max's streaked blond hair, Max's compactness, but Dale's own eyes. A deeper howl than the wolf, the recognition of his own, Dale smothered by lifting the frightened, resisting boy into his arm. A letter from Marie had told him the boy's name was George.

*  *  *

George Wylie's first memory was his father's rough hands, unfamiliar, leading him by his fingertips away from dark succulent 17 Flora Avenue through the crisp, burnt-pumpkin, scarlet-leaved air. They walked away from the bustle of the east-side streets, across the Monongahela River, to the curvy big houses that danced around one another as dauntingly as grand ladies. They were so rich, so gingerbread, so haunted.

The boy lived in a house of women, much the way his father had. The whirl of household machinery ignored him, the steamy yard of laundry, the gagging slops hauled out to the gravelly alley, the beef of requirement chewed at the dinner table, the treasury of the berry jam in the risky larder. Passing between the laughing skirts of the boarder
women, avoiding the somnolent, shadowy propriety of parlors, George ran toward sweet and away from slap, praying to the expected god in the quiet before bed. His mother loved him with her tender gazes. His grandmother loved him with her guiding hands. Despite all the busyness, despite the full dinner tables and the crammed halls, he was alone in a house of women. His father was a whispering among the boarders. George Wylie, though he didn't know it, was born lonely.

As they crossed the river, mother sulked with grandmother behind them. Father stopped the family outside the biggest and curviest of all the houses, a mansion on Larchmount Crescent, the fanciest street in town. “Well, boy, what do you think?”

“Fine,” little George croaked.

“Which room do you think you'll want for your bedroom?”

“Dale Wylie,” interrupted grandmother. “Don't give that boy ideas of what he can and can't have. You'll fill up his heart with envy.”

“All right, what do you think, Mother?” The adults seemed to be talking about things they weren't talking about.

“None of my business.”

“Tell me, though, what do you think, Kitty?”

Mother said nothing. The Larchmount Crescent house was three or four times the size of the house on Flora with lawns on either side and tall hedges screening the view in a ring. “A good, solid house,” grandmother said.

“It's ours. I bought it yesterday.”

George could hear the women saying nothing behind him. Father drank in their shock like Ovaltine steam. George had only one question for his dad: “Will the boarders like it?” But there would be no more boarders. They didn't need the boarders' money anymore. George just wanted his father to stay. But he curled his hand into the roughness of his father's
because he knew that he would go. The house at least was grand. Here was an early lesson for George Wylie: The grander the house, the lonelier it is.

*  *  *

The house on Larchmount Crescent was collateral for seven separate mortgages, which Dale used to raise capital for a binge of spending.

He bought Atkinson's town paper,
The Atkinson Register
, for ten thousand cash, with an agreement in monthly promissory notes for fifteen thousand over the course of ten years. That price included the oldest building in town, on the highest hill—he moved the radio station in and forced the six reporters that came with the building to move their desks into the hall. The employees already worked for minuscule salaries and he slashed them further. In the early thirties the possession of a job rated about the same as possession of a soul. At the same time, he raised his rates. With the newspaper and the radio station, he held a town monopoly on advertising.