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Relieved at Five
Episode 3 of 3 of The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer · free to read
“The five o’clock handoff,” he said. “You’ve never done one.”
“There is nobody to hand it to. I lock up.”
“There used to be a morning man in that chair.”
He wanted to be relieved at five o’clock.
That is the whole thing. Five nights of a man in my headphones, and it came down to one line he had been saying since Tuesday, and I had been hearing something else.
“Say it the way you would say it. Nothing fancy.”
“Say what, exactly. Give me the words.”
“Thanks for riding along. Ellis Abernathy has the board.”
I did not say it. I said I had to read the news.
He waited through the news. He always did.
“Hank Drury,” I said. “Does that name land anywhere?”
“He worked here. He had your same hours.”
“Did anybody ever say your name on the air?”
“No,” he said. “That was the whole trouble.”
“How many nights have you been calling here?”
“Since your first one. You never picked up.”
“I pick up every line that lights.”
“Not this one,” he said. “Not until Tuesday.”
“What changed on Tuesday?”
“You asked me what my name was.”
In the daylight there was a Drury in the staff photo, third from the left. There was a car at the back of the lot under a tarp.
Denise said he quit at the end of a shift.
“Quit how? People give notice first.”
“Signed off and didn’t come back,” she said. “Eight years.”
“Was there a car left in the lot?”
“There is always a car,” she said.
“Whose is it, under the tarp?”
“Nobody has asked me that in years.”
“Did he leave anything behind?”
“A jacket on the peg,” she said.
I let it go.
Friday night I came in at eleven and read the sign off procedure off the wall.
Four steps. Legal ID. Close the log. Take the transmitter off with the plate switch behind the rack. Lock the two doors.
Nobody has taken this station off the air in nine years. At five the automation takes the carrier and holds it all day. The plate switch is for a storm or a bad tube. It is on the wall because the license says so.
His own rule was all I had. “When the carrier drops, I drop with it.” He had said it flat and had not taken it back.
So I would not say his name, and I would throw a switch nobody has thrown in nine years.
He called at ten past two.
“You have decided to try something tonight.”
“I am going to work my shift and go home.”
“That’s all I ever did,” he said.
“Why five? Tell me why it is five.”
“Because five is when the shift ends.”
“That is not an answer either.”
“It’s the only one there is,” he said.
He stayed on almost until three.
“There was a woman called in about her sister.”
“Every night?”
“Every night for two years. Then she stopped.”
“You have people who wait up for you.”
“They wait up for the radio,” I said.
“Your name would sound fine on the air.”
I put up a cart and let him have the silence.
At four thirty he came back.
“You could say it now and go on home.”
“I am going home.”
“Sure,” he said.
The unit was still in bypass. Everything I said went out with nothing in front of it.
I wrote the four steps on the back of my hand and washed it off.
At four fifty he came back one more time.
“Last chance to be decent about this.”
“I am being decent. I am going home.”
“Then say the name and we both go.”
“No.”
“All right,” he said. “I will wait.”
At four fifty eight I opened the mic.
“KQVT, Calder Junction, Iowa,” I said. “That is the end of the night.”
Nothing came back. The monitor was flat. The needle sat where my voice put it.
“Thanks for riding along,” I said. “See you Monday at midnight.”
I let it run three seconds past where I usually kill the mic. He did not use them.
The log was open at my elbow, the five o’clock line blank, the way Hank Drury left his. I filled it in.
I closed the log, walked to the rack room, and put my hand on the switch.
I heard him then, out of the speaker in the rack, small.
“Please,” he said.
I pulled it.
The carrier dropped for the first time in nine years. The meters fell together at the same speed. The hum I had stopped hearing four years ago stopped. He was not in the building.
I locked the two doors and drove home.
Denise put the station back on Saturday.
I do not remember Sunday.
Monday night she sat the overnight herself, because I did not come in. The new unit had come in Friday.
It holds seven seconds.
At ten past two I dialed the request line. The light came up on line three before the phone rang.
I know that, because I was in it.
“KQVT,” she said. “You’re on the air.”
I had seven seconds to say her name.