They move inside and Wayne waves to them from behind his board. Ronnie nods and then leads the way through a side door to a small break room. It’s a little brighter inside. There’s a green vinyl couch, a coffee table covered with trade magazines, a brown mini-refrigerator with a Mr. Coffee on top of it, and a few mismatched folding chairs.
“All the luxuries,” Ronnie says.
The walls and the ceiling are all faded white acoustic squares with hundreds of tiny pinholes. One wall is dominated by a huge cork bulletin board that’s plastered with pushpinned newspaper clippings, more than half of which have yellowed. It’s a depressing sight. Ronnie gestures to the board with her head and says, “It’s Ray’s. News for the brain-dead. I don’t know where he gets them.”
Flynn spots a headline that reads, “Soviets Using Psychic Clone Moles Deep in Pentagon.”
The other walls are filled with a few promotional posters from station advertisers and there’s a large, wood-framed photograph of a red-faced barrel-chested middle-aged man wearing a charcoal suit with shoulders so square they look like they were fitted with two-by-fours. The man has a severe look on his face, like he’s ignoring a migraine long enough to plot military strategy. He’s posed, holding a pair of bifocals out away from his body.
“That’s Federman,” Ronnie says. “The station owner.”
“Looks like a real pit bull.”
Ronnie shrugs. “Never met him in my life.”
She hands him a kelly-green coffee mug with WQSG in white block letters stamped on the side. She fills both their mugs halfway, then digs her mescal flask from her bag and fills the rest with booze.
“That’s the beauty of this stuff,” she says. “You can mix it with everything. It doesn’t corrupt. I’ve tried.”
“You’re on the air in ten,” Flynn says. “Isn’t this illegal?”
She smiles and rolls her eyes. “You want to spend four hours unmedicated, talking to the sexually dysfunctional? Show some mercy.”
Flynn sips at the mescal and Folgers, makes a face, and says, “I’m saving all the mercy for later.”
Ronnie says, “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”
He wants her to smile, but again she doesn’t. She walks over to the mounted wall speaker and turns a knob on the bottom. The room fills with Ray’s voice.
What is it you’re trying to suggest to me, sir? What is it you want me to accept? What I’m asking, very simply, is, what is your agenda?
And if you’ll give me a minute to—
Because perhaps we can save everyone some time and aggravation. Because if what you want to poison us with — no, wait — more to the point, if what you want to poison our children with is more evolutionary clap-trap from the camp of leftist atheistic homosexual heathens, then I’m going to have to pull your plug, my friend—
I’m sorry, but not everyone who sees the scientific inconsistencies in creationism is gay or a socialist or an atheist. You want to paint everyone—
Yes, honey, we know, it’s a tough life. Are we going to have a little tantrum now?
Can we stay on the point? Can we please just stick to the topic—
Listen, darling, you have begun to bore me. Next call, Earl from the north side.
“Creationism,” Flynn says. “We’ve picked a good night.”
“Not bad,” Ronnie says. “Gun control is a good night. Nixon is a good night. The Knights of Malta is a fantastic night. He gets screaming. One time, Wayne and I had a bet about a coronary. I think that was the night he said Klaus Barbie has been misunderstood. Bad press and weak-minded historians. You should’ve read the mail that week.”
Flynn walks over to the bulletin board and starts to read clippings.
“How much of Ray is gimmick and how much is from the heart?”
Ronnie moves up next to him and he thinks he hears her sigh.
“Radio’s a weird business,” she says. “I think Ray’s like a lot of people. It starts out as gimmick. You pick a schtick you’re pretty good at. Something that comes natural. Then a lot of late nights go by and you talk to more loons than most people see in a lifetime and at some point your voice sort of takes over. The words just slide out. You don’t think about it a whole lot.”
Without looking at her, Flynn asks, “What about with you?”
She doesn’t say anything, gives out a quick brush-off laugh.
He pushes it. “I mean, you’re this Zen master of the sensual, right? Authority on things erotic. How’d that end up your schtick?”
The door opens and Wayne sticks his head in.
“You’re on in five,” he says. “Ray is doing windup after the spot.”
Ronnie nods, raises her mug up to him, and he disappears. She takes a long swallow from her mug, refills it, and starts out the door. Flynn follows her to the broadcast booth and they stand in the doorway staring at Ray’s back, watching him sit rigid with one arm parallel next to the mike, a cigarette with a long head of ash jammed between his index and middle fingers. Over the booth speaker comes the close-out music for a mortuary ad. Ray twists his head from side to side as violins fade. Watching him, Flynn almost expects to hear an awful, high- pitched scraping noise escape from the guy’s shirt collar. The sound of a rusted pipe being forced from a welded joint. Instead, there’s a few moments of silence that become dramatic, almost uncomfortable. Flynn can feel anticipation blooming, a readiness or yearning in every set of ears tuned to QSG. Ray knows how to work the invisible audience. There’s no need for eye contact or physical presence. All Ray needs is the sound of his voice, his ability to lower timbre and increase the richness of tone and construct a fullness in the vibrations emitting from his larynx. The man knows how to play the pauses, knows, instinctively, the power of timing.
If it wasn’t for his lack Of control, Flynn thinks, he could be captivating, a real aural commodity.
Ray takes in a last drag from the Camel, blows it out over the mike in a long vapory line, and begins his summation.
My friends, I think you know as well as I do that we barely scratched the surface here tonight. We’ve quoted scripture and shown the folly of man, the weakness of his science and his ego. We’ve let the crackpots have their say, within the limits of decency. Let the liberal-spewing eggheads and lovers of darkness vent their routine spleen. It’s been over a century since Mr. Charles Darwin trotted his little simian sideshow across our path. And in that time his doctrine has infiltrated our schools, assaulted the minds of our children until they turned their backs on truth and righteousness. Perhaps those of us blessed with the knowledge of the divine wisdom haven’t fought hard enough. Perhaps our weakness is the greatest outrage of all. I don’t know.
[Pause. Voice rising]
But I do know that the Millenium is coming. It is racing down upon us like a blazing chariot. We’re already starting to feel its flames on our mortal skin. Those are the flames of eternal damnation, the province of the dark one, the final home of the wicked and the cursed. The place where the seeds we have sown in this life will bear fruit forever after. There are choices to be made in the days ahead. Battles waged. The worst kind of battles. Civil wars. Blood struggles between kin. There are two mighty armies readying to clash. They carry the same blood in their hearts, but they’ve been divided by choices of the soul. There is a family of light.
[Pause. Voice rising]
And make no mistake, there is a family of darkness. We know these two clans by different names from time immemorial. The family of Righteousness and the family of Evil. The family of Truth and the family of Falsehood. The family of Order and the family of Chaos. They’ve clashed since the archangel Michael cast Lucifer downward. There can be no compromise between them. Only one family can prevail.