Then, almost two weeks to the day since he first began his campaign to get a rise out of the Credenzas — the record on the turntable was “Asleep in the Deep,” sung by the South Philadelphia A.C. Girls’ Aquacade Chorus and recorded at poolside — he purposely brushed his elbow against the switch on his table mike, and beginning not only in mid-sentence but in mid-syllable so that it seemed accidental, he said in perfectly controlled, conversational speech, as if to a guest with him in the studio, “ … rstand that Charley’s wife, Grace, and Poke Credenza have been seeing a lot of each other lately. More than it’s usual for a brother- and sister-in-law to see each other. More than it’s even legal, if you know what I mean. Well, what the hell, Charley Credenza’s been down at Lincoln with the legislature two months now. Grace told him she couldn’t be away from the house that long. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyway, she’s an attractive, healthy woman, even if she is too heavy. Poke likes them big, I guess, though why he didn’t marry a large woman in the first place instead of that furled umbrella of a Lucy, I can’t say — unless of course the talk is true that he had to. Come to think of it, it might be true at that. That woman has hot pants. Did you see the way she was riding Louis III’s right leg at the Fourth of July dance, and how she put her hand on his ass? I thought there’d be trouble, but old Poke was making out too good with Grace even to notice. Wait a minute, I’ve got to take this record off … ” Then, as if he hadn’t noticed that the switch was already on, he turned it off and, extending the myth of the accident, spoke into the dead microphone: “That was ‘Asleep in the Deep.’ We hear now ‘Come Josephine in My Flying Machine’ in the new instrumental version recorded by the Association of Missouri Underwriters.”
He faced the engineer and winked, but couldn’t get the man’s attention.
He went back to the transmitter shack convinced that at last he’d torn it, and when he got there things did seem different.
For one thing the beds were empty. Carpenter, the off-duty engineer, in whose car they had returned to the shack without speaking, hung around only long enough to pick up Mullins, the off-duty transmitter man; then they had gone off to town together. Murtaugh, the other transmitter man, was not by his equipment but had gone out behind the shack to check a guy wire on the tall main transmitter. Alone, the cramped, submariney quarters seemed almost spacious to him. He lay down on his bunk and it occurred to him that except for those few minutes in the outhouse when spurning the new flush toilet he had vainly sought Credenza brotherhood by emerging himself in what he took to be the Credenza smell, despite his knowledge to the contrary — he knew they were only the anonymous and corrupt smells of former staff, an indiscriminate odor that was no longer shit but shit’s shit, chemically changed, fermented to something beyond the strongest wine in the world but vineyardy still, acrid and eye-searing, smelling not of the cozy, snuggish intestines at all but of fire, or of sun gas perhaps, if you could get close enough — this was the first time in the months since he had come to work for them that he was by himself, without an engineer, without a bunkmate, without anyone.
Then he heard the radio.
“I knew it was no accident I was alone, that the Credenzas had anticipated me, that plans had been laid in advance, that Carpenter and Mullins now worked as a team, that the Credenzas picked up their check and they rode to town on Credenza gasoline to toast my disaster in Credenza beers. Still in my bunk I looked out the single window at Murtaugh, the transmitter man, squatting on his heels by the base of the antenna fooling with a wire and I thought: you lazy bastard, is that what Credenza (they had become one enormous undifferentiated persona for me now) pays you for? Climb, bastard, decoy me at something better than ground level. Ah, old sealegs, a little at least sweat, please! Make those picturesque adjustments up in the mizzen of that thing. Lazybones, landlubber, less decorousness in your game, if you don’t mind. Murtaugh must have been left by him (I meant the Credenza brothers, and the wives and sisters too now) as a sort of staff sentinel and shill, a nice philosophic touch. Can a man fall in the forest if there’s no one by to hear him scream?
“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act — whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.
“‘At the beginning, then, the man that calls himself Marshall Maine… ’”
Music was coming over the radio. It was The Children’s Hour. The man who called himself Marshall Maine could not make up his mind whether it was more likely that Credenza would allow the nursery rhyme to finish, or interrupt it, hoping to take him by surprise. The song concluded and Maine thought now, but it was only the relief man speaking patronizingly in the voice of Uncle Arnold. He played another nursery rhyme. Then it was time for the relief man to read the bedtime story, and Maine again thought now, but except for what Marshall felt to be some strange emphases — the story was “Jack and the Beanstalk” and the relief man’s voice was loud when it should have been soft and meek when force was called for — he was permitted to get all the way through it without interruption.
The suspense was terrific. He knew it would come, but he could no longer even hope to anticipate when. It would be random; he could not second-guess it. It was as if they were playing some mortal version of musical chairs with him. As if this were exactly the case he turned away from watching the transmitter man and went to stand by the receiver that couldn’t be turned off as long as the station was on the air. It was within a yard of the transmitter man’s chair, close by his complicated machinery. He thought that if he heard Credenza’s voice he would still have time to rush to the chair before the man could pronounce his doom. Credenza may have permitted him this one hope of forestalling his annihilation, he thought crazily.
“Why did I stand around waiting? Why didn’t I just get out? I couldn’t. Mullins and Carpenter had taken the car. There were endless empty miles of Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior counties to traverse before reaching safety. Why, I would have had to have run out of the effective range of the radio station itself.”
He stood there all through The Children’s Hour and through The Six O’Clock Round-Up (thinking he might hear it as a piece of the news itself, announced as something that had already happened; perhaps it would be tacked on at the end, what they meant to do to him one last human-interest story), and through Dinnertime Melodies till Seven, and was still standing there during the electrically transcribed Mormon Tabernacle Hour — Now, he thought, now he’ll break in, his plans for me a goddamn sacrilege—and on into the sixth inning of the remote pickup of the charity ballgame between the migrant workers and graduating seniors at the consolidated high school, when something suddenly seemed very wrong indeed.