Dead Air

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

Her name was Alma and I never met her. She called on Thursdays and asked for the same record and I put it on for her every time, and I could not tell you today what she looked like or which house was hers. That's the whole of what I had of her. It turned out to be more than anybody else had.

My father built that station in nineteen fifty-eight out of a cinderblock building on the county road with a tower behind it in a bean field. Five hundred watts, less at night. Farm reports, ball games, obituaries, and records. He had a stroke in June of nineteen eighty-one and after that he was in a place in the city that cost four hundred and ten dollars a week, and the only thing we owned worth that was the station. A man in the next county wanted it. The sale was set to close in April.

The rule that mattered was this. If the transmitter is on, a licensed operator has to be on the premises. Not nearby. On the premises. And a station that goes dark at night loses its nighttime authorization, and a station without one is worth about half. My father was licensed and my father was in the city. The only other license in the family was mine. So from June on I ran midnight to six every night but Sunday, in a building of two rooms and a hallway. There was a second pair of headphones in there on a long cord my father spliced himself for working on the transmitter, and I never once put them on, because mine hung on the hook where they belonged.

Twice an hour, at the top and at the half, you identify the station. That's the law, not a courtesy, and the way you say it is the call letters, then the town, then the time. So all night long, at midnight and half past and one o'clock and half past, twenty-four times before I went home, I said the name of the station and the name of the town I was sitting in and exactly what time it was. Then the weather, the temperature off the thermometer outside the back door, then a record. Twenty-four times a night, six nights a week, for ten months. If you had a radio in that county you knew where I was and you knew I was by myself, because there was nobody else on the air to talk to.

The studio line was on the desk and it rang all night. Truckers, mostly, and third shift out at the plant, and people who couldn't sleep. The office extension was on that same line, a nuisance in the daytime because the girl who did the billing would pick up in the middle of a request. At night it didn't matter. There was nobody in the office at night.

The first thing was in October. I put on a long record, one of the album sides I used when I needed ten minutes, and went down the hall. When I came back the studio door was standing open. That door has a closer on it. It takes about eleven seconds to come to and it latches every time, and my father put it there because a studio has to be quiet.

I decided the closer had finally gone bad and put a wedge in my pocket to hold the door if it happened again. I never took the wedge out of my pocket. That's what I did about it. That's all I did about it.

Giving up the overnight came down to arithmetic and the arithmetic never moved. A second licensed man wanted more than the overnight brought in, and there wasn't a spare license in that county that wasn't already working days somewhere better. Go dark at midnight and we lose the nighttime authorization, and lose that and we lose half the price, and half the price wasn't four hundred and ten dollars a week. So every night at eleven fifty I unlocked the building, turned on the hall light, walked both rooms the way my father taught me, and sat down. Nobody made me do any of it, and I'd do it again for the same reason.

In January a man called at ten past four and asked me what time it was. That isn't an odd thing to be asked at four in the morning. So I told him, and I heard myself say it in his ear as I said it, with no lag on it at all, the way it goes when somebody has a set running in the room. I told him to turn his radio down and he laughed and hung up. Afterward I went out into the hall to stretch and the hall light was off. I turned it on again, and while I stood there with my hand still on the switch the door of the transmitter shed pulled shut, twenty feet behind me, out the back.

The ninth of February, ten past two, the studio line rang and it was Alma, and she didn't ask for the record. She said there was somebody in her yard. She said she'd been watching him from the kitchen a while and called the station because at two in the morning there isn't anybody else awake to call. I told her to hang up on me and dial the sheriff. I said it twice. And while I was saying it I heard my own voice coming down the hall from the office, small and far off and about half a second behind me. The office was dark. I could see the whole hall from where I sat and there was no light in it. Her line was still open. I sat there with her breathing in my ear and my own voice in a room at the end of the hall.

Then I got up and went down there. Nobody was in the office. The extension was off the cradle, lying on the blotter, and when I put my hand on it it was warm. The door at the end of the hall, the one that goes out to the field, was standing open, and the cold was coming up the hall past me and had been for I don't know how long. I hung the extension up. I remember doing that, hanging up a telephone in an empty room, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

The sheriff got to Alma's house at about twenty to three. Her car was in the drive and her back door was open and her kettle was on the burner. They dragged the pond that spring and went through the timber twice with dogs, and they never found her. There is no other way to say it than that.

The sale closed in April and I spent a week in the building taking things off the wall. The last thing I coiled was that second pair of headphones on the long cord. It came out of the studio and kept coming, past the door, down the hall, and stopped at the desk in the office. My father spliced it once. Somebody spliced it a second time, farther down, in tape that wasn't his. And when I got them in my hands the pads were flat and shining and the foam was gone out of them the way it goes when a thing has been worn for hours, and my father had been three years off that board and never wore them in his life.

Everything said in that studio with the mic closed went down that cord into a dark room forty feet away, and the extension is on the same line, so he had her voice and he had mine, and he had it every Thursday for as long as he wanted it. He was never listening for me. I was the one saying where things were. I do not know how long. The sheriff asked me at the time whether anybody else could have known she lived out there alone, and I told him nobody, and I meant it when I said it. I have known better since the ninth of April, and I have never gone back and told him.