On the Air

Cliff had the basement to himself when the first returns came over the telephone, and for a moment he forgot to write them down.

He was twenty-four and he had wanted this since he was a boy taking crystal sets apart on the kitchen table, and now here he was in the cellar of the Elks building on North Sierra Street, on the river side of town, in a room the station had draped floor to ceiling in gray felt to kill the echo, with a carbon microphone in front of him on a stand and a telephone at his elbow and a lamp with a green shade throwing the only good light in the place. The station had been on the air only a few weeks. It was the first real one in the state, a hundred watts going out on a frequency Cliff could recite in his sleep, and the transmitter itself sat miles away southwest of town in a field with the antenna guyed up over the sagebrush, and every night Cliff still could not entirely believe that his own voice went out from this felt room and reached it and jumped off it into the dark over the whole basin.

Tonight was the election. The station had made an arrangement with the evening paper, whose men had a wire to the outside world and a telephone line run down into the basement, and Cliff’s job was to take the numbers as they came and read them out as fast as he could make sense of them, county by county, state by state, for as long as they kept coming. Mr. Peters had set it up. Peters owned the place, had run a portable rig around the country before the government made him plant it somewhere, and he had a way of appearing at your shoulder without a sound and disappearing the same way, and he had put his hand flat on the table an hour ago and left a slip of paper under it with three words on it in pencil, plain and slow, and gone back up the stairs.

The telephone buzzed. Cliff caught it against his shoulder and wrote as the paperman read, his pencil skidding, and then he squared the copy on the table, and he leaned in to the microphone the careful few inches he had taught himself, not too close, and he pressed the key.

“This is your election desk,” he said. “We have new figures.”

He read them. Washoe County, the early boxes. Then a run of numbers off the national wire, the two men at the top of the ticket, the New York governor and the engineer from out West who everybody already seemed to know was going to win it, and Cliff read the margins in the flat even voice he had practiced and did not let himself say what he thought, because a man reading returns had no business having a thought. He read them plain and he read them slow.

Between the calls there was nothing to do but wait for the telephone, and in the waiting the strangeness of it came over him the way it did every night, but bigger tonight. Somewhere out past the felt and the cellar wall and the river there were people leaning at their sets. He could not see one of them and he knew they were there. A rancher in the Smoke Creek country with a set run off a bank of glass batteries because no wire would ever reach him, his family pulled up in a half circle around the speaker the way another family might pull up to a stove. The night man at a filling station on the Lincoln Highway. A kitchen in Sparks, a back room over a store, a sickbed. All of them out there in the dark of a country that was mostly dark, and the only thing crossing all that distance to sit down in the room with them was Cliff’s voice saying the numbers.

He thought about that too much and it made his mouth dry, so mostly he tried not to. But tonight, with the returns coming and the nation deciding itself box by box and every box passing through this cellar on its way to those rooms, he could not entirely keep from it. He was the tower they came through. Him and the machine humming out in the sage.

The telephone buzzed again. More national figures, the margin wider now, and a first return out of the eastern counties of the state that would take three more days to finish counting for real. He read them. He gave the time, because the station gave the time on the hour and people set their clocks by it, and he read a line the paper had sent down about crowds gathered on Virginia Street under the arch to watch a board where the numbers were being chalked as they came, the arch that had gone up two years back and spelled the town’s name in bulbs, though there was no slogan on it yet, just the four bright letters over the street. He read that people down there were cheering. He could very nearly hear them through the sidewalk grate, four floors of building and a street away, a town finding out something together in real time, which was itself a brand-new thing, this finding out together, and half of them finding it out from him.

Toward midnight the calls came slower. The paperman on the other end sounded tired and started giving him the numbers with editorial sighs attached, and Cliff kept his own voice level and stripped the sighs back out before they went into the microphone. The engineer from the West had it, plainly, everywhere; it was only a question now of by how much and of which far counties had not finished. Cliff read a last set of figures a little after twelve, and then the telephone went quiet for a long stretch, and he sat in the green lamplight with the felt eating every sound but his own breathing.

He should sign off. Peters wanted a clean sign-off, the call letters and the frequency and good night, and then a man threw the switch out at the field and the hundred watts stopped and the basin went back to whatever it had been before. But the telephone might buzz again. There might be one more box, one more county, and out there the rancher and the night man and the kitchen might still be leaning in, waiting, unwilling to go to bed until somebody told them it was finished.

Cliff pressed the key and leaned the careful few inches in toward the microphone, toward all of them he could not see.

“If you’re still with us out there,” he said, to the dark, and stopped, and listened for the phone, and went on.

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