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Two Thousand Watts
Episode 1 of 3 of A Chance of Dog by Erica Holloway · free to read
The clicker died during the extended outlook.
I pressed it twice. The map stayed stuck on Saturday. In my ear, Jodie Quinlan said, “Your clicker died,” the way you might tell a surgeon her shoe was untied.
I kept talking. I had a degree in atmospheric science and a broadcast certification, and both of them had taught me to keep talking.
“High pressure stays in charge through Wednesday,” I said. “Light winds, cool nights, highs in the middle sixties.”
Reggie Ruggiero was behind camera two. He had run camera here for thirty-one years. He was looking at the floor, just past my left shoe.
That was new. Reggie did not look at things.
Things came to Reggie.
I checked the monitor. A fawn Great Dane was lying across my extended outlook. Wednesday was on his back. Thursday was mostly ear.
His name was Senator. He was nine, which for a Great Dane was a distinguished age, and he belonged to Marty Danforth, who owned the station.
“Do not stop,” Jodie said.
“A cold front arrives Thursday,” I said, and pointed. It was arriving on his shoulder. “It will be slow. It may stall.”
Senator put his chin on the floor.
“It has stalled,” I said. “Back to you.”
The red light went off. Jodie came back in my ear, quieter.
“Marty’s in the booth,” she said. “He’s a little teary. He says the dog gets his own segment.”
Reggie took his eye off the viewfinder. “He makes nine,” he said.
“Nine what?”
“Things that have walked into a live shot on my camera. A goose. Two mayors. A man selling a boat. My wife, with my lunch.” He shrugged. “Some others. He’s nine.”
Sunday afternoon.
By two o’clock the clip had four hundred thousand views. Our whole viewing area was about ninety thousand households. Some people were watching it on a loop.
The caption said, Weather lady doesn’t flinch.
“It’s meteorologist,” I said.
I said it to my certificate, which hung in the hallway outside the studio. It hung crooked because the building settled, so I straightened it before every show. Reggie said the building had been settling longer than he had been there.
“Four hundred thousand people think you’re a weather lady,” Reggie said.
“Four hundred thousand people think a dog is a cold front.”
Marty came down the hall with Senator on a leash that was mostly decorative. Marty was seventy-eight. He had sold a chain of tire stores to buy the station twenty years earlier, and he still introduced himself at parties as being in tires.
“Simone,” he said. “Big night. Senator gets thirty seconds, right inside your weather. You toss to him, he does his thing, he tosses back.”
“What is his thing?”
Marty looked at Senator. Senator looked at a fire extinguisher.
“Authenticity,” Marty said.
My weather block was three minutes. That was a hundred and eighty seconds to explain the jet stream to people who were also eating dinner. I said so.
“So you’ve got a hundred and fifty,” Marty said. “Nobody’s counting.”
Jodie was counting. Jodie had never once rounded a second in her life.
Marty went to find a water bowl. Senator walked into the studio and lay down on my mark again, in front of the green wall.
“Why does he keep doing that?”
Reggie pointed up at the two lights over my mark. “Last two tungsten lights in the building. A thousand watts each. Everything else went LED in the spring. The weather wall didn’t make the budget.”
“What does that have to do with him?”
“So that’s the warmest square of floor in the building,” Reggie said. “Old dog, old hips. He’s not after your job. He’s after your lights.”
I knelt and put my palm on the floor. It was windowsill warm, the kind a cat would fight you for. Senator opened one eye, decided I was fine, and closed it.
“Great,” I said. “I’m a heat lamp with a degree.”
That night at 6:41, I said, “And now, Senator.” Senator lay on my mark for thirty seconds while Marty, in the control room, read his favorite things into a microphone bought for the occasion. Peanut butter. The passenger seat. Being near people without having to talk to them.
Then I did a hundred and fifty seconds of weather. Dry air loses heat fast after dark, so clear skies make cold nights. That was real, and it was interesting, and I did not apologize for it.
On Monday, Marty called me at home.
“Minute by minute came in,” he said. “Senator’s thirty seconds were the best half minute of the whole newscast.”
“And my hundred and fifty?”
“People stayed for the dog,” Marty said. “They left around the dew points.”
I didn’t say anything. Marty filled the quiet, the way he always did.
“Simone, I’m going to be honest, because you’re honest on the air. A company sent me a price sheet. A computer makes the forecast, a voice reads it, and it costs less than you do. They want to come watch a show.”
“Are you going to buy it?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying they sent it.”
He emailed it to me while we were still on the phone.
The subject line said, Options.