The Phone-In

The radio in the snack hut was on a shelf above the snow-cone machine, between a jar of pickled eggs that nobody had ever bought and a framed photograph of Bonnie Tackett’s husband holding a fish, and it was always on, and it was always on the country station, and on Wednesday morning at a quarter to eleven Bonnie Tackett reached up and turned the dial.

Frederick was at the till. He was counting a stack of coins into their cups, which he did now at a quarter to eleven, before the first rush, because Tucker had said that a till you hadn’t counted was a till that would lie to you; and he heard the music stop, and a hiss, and a crackle, and a man’s voice come out of the hiss, loud and warm and fast, the voice of somebody who talked for a living and enjoyed it very much.

”… and that’s the weather, folks, and the weather is hot, you knew that, I knew that, the cows in Osage County knew that. One hundred and three in Tulsa today, one hundred and four in Muskogee, and somebody up in Nowata told me on the line this morning that he fried an egg on the bonnet of his pickup, and I said, Gene, did you eat it, and he said, Hal, I’m not an animal. All right. It’s ten forty-six. You’re listening to Hal Buckner in the morning, and coming up at eleven, it’s our summer game, it’s back by popular demand, it’s the one you’ve been calling about all week…”

Frederick looked at Bonnie Tackett.

Bonnie Tackett did not look at him. She was at the griddle, with her back to him, in her headset, laying hot dogs out in rows, very neatly, with tongs.

“Tucker’s mama called me,” she said, to the hot dogs. “At seven this morning. She said turn on Hal at eleven.” She turned a hot dog over. “She said everybody’s going to be listening.”

“To what?”

Bonnie Tackett did not answer. On the shelf above the snow-cone machine, between the pickled eggs and the fish, Hal Buckner was laughing at something he had said himself.

”… where in the world is the King?”

---

It was a game. He understood that within a minute, standing at the till with a stack of twenty-pence pieces in his hand. Hal Buckner played it every summer, he said, every summer since the old King’s time, and it was simple: the Household never said where the royal family went in the summer, never had, it was a private matter, and quite right too; and so every summer Hal Buckner asked the people of north-eastern Oklahoma-Sequoyah to ring in and guess, and the best guess, the one Hal liked best, which was not the same as the right one, because nobody ever knew the right one, won a fifty-pound voucher for a steak dinner at a restaurant in Tulsa that Hal’s station was very grateful to.

”… and this year,” said Hal Buckner, “this year, folks, it’s special. Because this year, the King’s sixteen. He’s on his own. His mama’s in Sweden, we know that, she’s always in Sweden in the summer, God bless her. And the Household says, and I quote, the King will spend the summer privately and will undertake no public engagements before September. Privately.” Hal Buckner made the word last a very long time. “Sixteen years old. On his own. Somewhere in the Realm. Privately. Where’s he gone, folks? Where would you go? The lines are open. Here’s the number.”

He said the number. He said it twice.

Behind the snack hut, at the pool, the whistle went, once, short, at somebody running. The children screamed in the water. The sun came down on the tin roof of the hut like a hand.

“Line one,” said Hal Buckner. “You’re on the air.”

---

The first caller was a woman from Broken Arrow, and she said Sweden.

She said it with great confidence. She said that a boy of sixteen goes to his mother in the summer, that’s all there was to it, that’s what boys did, her own boy was nineteen and still came home every summer with his washing; and Hal Buckner said Sweden, that’s a good solid guess, Marlene, that’s a guess with its feet on the ground, and Marlene said thank you, Hal, and went.

The second caller was a man from Sand Springs who said Hawaii.

He said it with even greater confidence. He said that he’d read somewhere that the King liked the sea, and that Hawaii had the best sea in the Realm, and that if he was sixteen and on his own and could go anywhere, Hawaii was where he’d go, he’d be on a surfboard right now, and Hal Buckner said Hawaii, now there’s a man who’s thought about it, and the man from Sand Springs said I’ve thought about it a lot, Hal, in a voice that made it clear he was not talking about the King any more.

Frederick put the twenty-pence pieces in their cup. He did not look at Bonnie Tackett. He found that he was holding very still, at the till, in the way he held still at the edge of a room when he was not yet meant to go in.

“Line three,” said Hal Buckner. “You’re on the air.”

“Morning, Hal,” said the third caller.

Frederick knew the voice before she said anything else. He knew it the way he knew the bell over the door of the Cove Café, and the smell of the coffee, and the feel of the green counter with its little gold stars worn white in front of every stool.

“Morning,” said Hal Buckner. “Who’ve we got?”

“Darlene,” said Darlene. “From Ketchum.”

At the griddle, Bonnie Tackett put down the tongs.

“Darlene from Ketchum! Lovely. What’s your guess, Darlene?”

“Well, Hal,” said Darlene, in a voice of total, placid, sun-warmed sincerity, the voice in which she said sit anywhere, hons, and don’t have the special, it’s liver, “I heard he’s in Alaska.”

“Alaska!”

“Looking at bears,” said Darlene.

There was a pause on the air.

“Bears,” said Hal Buckner, delighted.

“Grizzly bears, Hal. Big ones. Somebody told me he’s real interested in bears.” The sound of a coffee pot, very faintly, behind her, being put down on a counter. “I think he’s up there in a little cabin by a river with a pair of binoculars, watching the bears fish for salmon, and nobody knows where he is but the bears.” Another pause. “And the bears won’t tell.”

Hal Buckner laughed so much that he had to stop talking for a moment, and a jingle played, a short one, about the station.

At the griddle, Bonnie Tackett had both hands on the edge of the counter, and her back to him, and her shoulders were going.

---

The fourth caller was Royce Pettit.

He said Royce, from Vinita in the half-sunburnt voice, slow and heavy, and Hal Buckner said Royce, what’ve you got for us, and Royce Pettit said that he had it on good authority that the King was in Scotland.

“Scotland,” said Hal Buckner. “Now why Scotland, Royce?”

“Castles,” said Royce Pettit. “Lot of castles. Lot of rain. Kid wants to get out of the heat, Hal, where’s he going to go? Scotland. Stands to reason.” A pause. “And clocks.”

“Clocks?”

“Lot of old clocks in a castle,” said Royce Pettit. “Grandfather clocks. Real tall. Somebody’s got to carry them about.” A pause. “Standing up.”

“Standing up,” said Hal Buckner, who plainly had no idea what Royce Pettit was talking about and was enjoying it enormously. “Royce, that’s a very specific guess.”

“I’m a very specific man, Hal,” said Royce Pettit, and rang off.

---

There was a queue at the hatch now. It had come up from the pool while he was listening, the first rush, children, wet, in towels, with money in their fists, and their mothers behind them; and he served them. He did not know how. He took the money and counted the change into their hands, two twenty, three, five, and passed the snow cones and the cans over the counter, and said thank you and next, the way he had done it for two days now; and all the time, from the shelf above the snow-cone machine, the radio went on.

And the queue listened.

He saw it happen. He saw the faces in the queue at the hatch change, one after another, as they heard what was on the radio, and understood what it was, and looked at him, behind the counter, in his red T-shirt, with his badge that said NEW GUY, counting change; and he saw which faces were the town’s and which were not. The town’s faces did nothing. A woman he knew from the Cove Café, from a booth by the window on Sunday, with a little boy, heard Darlene’s voice on the radio say bears, and looked at the radio, and then at him, for one second, and then down at her son, and said what flavour, baby?, in a perfectly ordinary voice, and the corner of her mouth did not move at all, very hard.

The other faces, the cabin faces, the faces from Tulsa and Joplin and Kansas City, heard the radio and did not understand it, because they did not know Darlene, or Royce, or what standing up meant; and they looked at the radio, and laughed at the bears, and took their snow cones, and went away. They did not look at him at all.

He understood, at the till, with a five-pound note in his hand and a girl of nine waiting for her change, that this was a thing that had been arranged.

He did not know how. He did not know who had started it, or when, or what had been said, or on what telephone. But somebody had rung Tucker’s mama, and Tucker’s mama had rung Bonnie, and somebody had rung Darlene, and Royce; and the whole of the county that knew where he was had decided, on a Wednesday morning in August, without asking him, without telling him, to ring a radio station in Tulsa one after another and lie, carefully, with straight faces, about bears and castles and clocks, so that the people who did not know would go on not knowing.

He gave the girl of nine her change. Three. Five.

“Thank you,” he said.

She looked at him oddly, because he had said it twice.

---

“Line two,” said Hal Buckner. “You’re on the air.”

There was a long pause on the line. A crackle. The sound of a vehicle, an engine, idling, and a radio in the vehicle, faintly, playing a hymn.

“Hello?” said a voice. A careful voice. A voice that was not used to telephones. “Am I on?”

“You’re on, sir. Who’ve we got?”

“This is Earl.”

Frederick stopped.

He stopped with a can of orange in his hand halfway across the counter to a boy who was holding out his hand for it, and the boy waited, and he did not give it to him. He stood at the hatch with the can in his hand and looked up at the radio on the shelf between the pickled eggs and the fish.

“Earl!” said Hal Buckner. “Where you calling from, Earl?”

“From the van,” said Earl. “I’m at the clinic in Vinita. Waiting on Bud. He’s got his dialysis.” A pause. “I’m not supposed to use the telephone in the van. But I’m parked.”

“That’s all right, Earl. We won’t tell. What’s your guess?”

There was another pause. A longer one. Behind Earl, faintly, on the van’s radio, the hymn went on, a man’s slow deep voice over a steel guitar, singing about the sweet by and by.

“Well,” said Earl, slowly, the way he talked about the roads, “I don’t know where he is. I don’t think anybody does. That’s the point of it, I guess.” A pause. “But I’ve been thinking about it. Since I heard it on the news, last week. I’ve been thinking about where a kid like that would go, if he could go anywhere, sixteen, on his own.” Another pause. “And I think he’s someplace with air conditioning. And a pool. And somebody to bring him his lunch.”

“Air conditioning and a pool!” said Hal Buckner, a little too heartily, because Earl was not, he could tell, playing the game. “That’s a man who knows what he wants, Earl.”

“No,” said Earl. “That’s not what I mean.” He stopped. “I mean I hope he is. That’s all. Wherever he is. I hope it’s cool there, and he’s got a pool, and somebody brings him his lunch, and nobody bothers him. Because, Hal, that kid’s had a year.” A pause. “That kid’s had a year like nobody should have at sixteen, and he went to school through all of it, every day, I heard, and he never once complained, not that anybody heard. And now he’s on his holidays. And I hope he’s having the best time any kid ever had.” A pause. “That’s my guess.”

There was a silence on the air. Not a long one. A second, perhaps. But Hal Buckner was a man who talked for a living, and Frederick had heard enough of him, in fifteen minutes, to know that Hal Buckner did not leave silences on the air, ever, and that this one had got away from him.

“Well, Earl,” said Hal Buckner, in a different voice, “that’s a good guess.”

“Bud’s coming out,” said Earl. “I got to go. Shut your screen doors, everybody.”

He rang off.

Frederick gave the boy the can of orange. He did not count the change. He did not need to; the boy had given him exactly a pound. He stood at the hatch of the snack hut at the Cove Point pool with the sun on the tin roof and sixty children screaming in the water behind the queue, and the woman from the Cove Café with her little boy looking at him, and the radio on the shelf going on to a jingle about the station; and he found that he could not see the till very well, and that his face was wet, and that it was not from the heat.

He did not know what to do about it. He stood there.

A hand came round from behind him, and put a paper napkin from the dispenser on the counter in front of him, and went away again.

“Snow cone machine’s sticking,” said Bonnie Tackett, at the griddle, loudly, to the queue, without turning round. “Give him a minute, y’all. Hon, go and look at the snow cone machine.”

He went and looked at the snow cone machine.

---

There were nine calls from Ketchum.

Hal Buckner counted them. He started counting at the sixth, which was a man called Cecil, from Ketchum, who said one word, fishing, and rang off; and Hal Buckner said Cecil, wait, to the dead line, and then laughed, and said well, folks, that’s the sixth call this morning from Ketchum, what’s in the water up there?; and after that he counted them out loud, every one.

The seventh was Mr Baggett, who said Clifford, Ketchum, well, Vinita, but I was born in Ketchum, and said that he believed the King was at a county fair somewhere, because that was where he would go, if he was sixteen, and Hal said a county fair, Clifford, now that’s a guess from the heart, and Mr Baggett said it’s a guess from the fair board, Hal, the Craig County Free Fair is on all week, no admission, never has been, and Hal Buckner said and that’s a commercial, folks, and everybody in the queue at the snack hut who was from the county laughed, and nobody from the cabins knew why.

The eighth was a girl, young, very fast, who said Rae-Ann, Langley, Mabel came second in the gilt class and I think the King’s in a barn, and rang off before Hal could ask her who Mabel was.

The ninth was Mrs Sixkiller.

---

He knew it was her before she spoke, because Bonnie Tackett at the griddle stopped moving entirely.

“Line one,” said Hal Buckner. “You’re on the air. Don’t tell me. Ketchum.”

“Loretta Sixkiller,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Ketchum.”

She said it the way she had said you’re the King in the yard by the well: once, and then never again, because it was not interesting.

“Loretta,” said Hal Buckner. “Loretta, you’re the ninth call from Ketchum this morning. Nine. Out of fourteen. Ketchum’s got, what, four hundred people? Loretta, I’ve got to ask. What is going on in Ketchum?”

There was a pause on the line.

“Nothing,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing is going on in Ketchum,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Nothing has ever gone on in Ketchum. Nothing has gone on in Ketchum since they moved it up the hill in 1940 to get it out of the way of the lake, and that was the last interesting thing that ever happened here, and it happened to the town, not in it.” A pause. “I taught school in this county for forty-one years, Mr Buckner. I taught most of the people who have rung you this morning. I taught them to read and I taught them to write and I taught them the State capitals, and not one of them has ever done anything in his life that would get him in a newspaper, and I’m proud of every one of them.”

“Well, Loretta…”

“And if the King of the United Kingdom of America,” said Mrs Sixkiller, in exactly the same voice, “had any sense at all, which I am given to understand that he does, he would go somewhere where something happens. Not here.” A pause. “Nothing happens here. That’s what it’s for.”

She rang off.

Hal Buckner did not say anything for a moment. Then he laughed, a big warm laugh, the laugh of a man who had been given a present.

“Well, folks,” said Hal Buckner, “you heard it. Nine calls, and the verdict is in. He’s not in Ketchum.” He laughed again. “Loretta Sixkiller of Ketchum, you’ve won the steak dinner. That’s the best guess I’ve heard in eleven years of this game, and you didn’t even guess. Call the station, Loretta. We’ll send you the voucher.”

At the griddle, Bonnie Tackett put her tongs down very carefully on the side of the counter and took her headset off and put both her hands over her face and stood like that, without making a sound, for a long time.

---

At noon the siren went.

He had forgotten. He had been told, on the first day, in the yard, by the cellar, and he had forgotten, because so much had happened since; and at twelve o’clock exactly, with the radio still going and the queue at the hatch still six deep and the pool full, the sound came across the cove from the town. It came from a long way off and it was enormous. It rose. It rose from nothing, from a moan, to a howl, to a scream that filled the whole white sky from the lake to the trees and went on, and on, without stopping, rising and falling, rising and falling, a sound like the end of the world.

The pool exploded.

The cabin people screamed. All of them, at once, mothers and fathers and children, the ones from Tulsa and Joplin and Kansas City, sixty of them, perhaps more; they screamed and came up out of the water and snatched up their children and their towels and ran, in every direction, slipping on the wet concrete, towards the gate and the cabins and the car park, a woman with a baby, a man with a cool box, the three girls with their telephones, and somebody shouted tornado and somebody else shouted where do we go and somebody else shouted the cellar, the cellar, where’s the cellar; and Frederick, at the hatch, with a can of something in his hand, felt his heart go into his throat and stay there, and looked at the sky, which was white and empty and perfectly still in every direction.

Nobody else moved.

The town did not move. He saw it. In the water and on the concrete and in the queue at the hatch, forty people did not move at all. The woman from the Cove Café with her little boy did not move. Walt, in his vest, in the deep end, doing his stately breaststroke with his chin up and his eyes closed, did not even open his eyes. Tucker, at the front of the queue, with a five-pound note in his fist, looked at the running cabin people with an expression of profound contempt and held out the note.

“Snow cone,” said Tucker. “Blue.”

On the high white chair, Kaylee had not moved either. She was sitting at the top with her elbows on her knees and the whistle in her teeth, looking at the cabin people running, and she did not blow the whistle at them for running, which she would have done at any other moment of any other day. She simply waited, and watched, until the siren, after three minutes exactly, fell from its scream to its howl to its moan to nothing, and stopped, and the silence came back across the cove like a wave.

Then she took the whistle out of her mouth.

“Y’all,” said Kaylee.

The cabin people stopped. They were at the gate, most of them, in a crowd, wet, clutching their children, with their faces white.

“It’s Wednesday,” said Kaylee.

Nobody understood.

“It’s the first Wednesday,” said Kaylee. “Of the month. At noon.” She looked down at them. “It’s a test. It goes every first Wednesday at noon, to show it works.” She looked at the sky, which was white and empty and perfectly still. “Does that look like a tornado to you?”

The cabin people looked at the sky.

“When it’s real,” said Kaylee, “you’ll know. It’ll be green, and it’ll be quiet, and the birds will stop. And I’ll blow this,” she held up the whistle, “three times, long, and you’ll go where I tell you, and you won’t run.” She put the whistle back in her mouth. “Now get back in the pool. And walk.”

They walked.

Frederick, at the hatch, found that he had been holding the can so tightly that he had dented it.

“Blue,” said Tucker, patiently, with his five-pound note.

---

He thought about the cellar all afternoon.

He thought about it skimming, and doing the towels, and at the till. He thought about the mound of grass in the farmhouse yard between the house and the barn, with its slanting wooden door like the cover of a book; and Mrs Sixkiller in her funeral hat, saying when the siren goes, you go in there; and the law. Nobody may be turned away from a shelter. Public or private. Anybody. It’s the only law in this State that nobody has ever once argued about.

He thought about the cabin people, running, shouting where’s the cellar, and nobody to tell them.

At four o’clock, when Kaylee came down off the chair to test the water, he went over to her at the deep end, where she was kneeling on the hot concrete with the white box and the two clear tubes.

“Kaylee.”

“What?” She did not look up. She was putting drops in the tube.

“Where’s the cellar? Here. For the pool. If it’s real.”

Kaylee stopped with the dropper over the tube. She looked up at him, over her sunglasses, for a long moment.

“Under the office,” she said. “Bonnie’s. There’s a hatch in the floor under the rug. It holds forty.” She went back to the drops. “Then the marina’s got one under the bait shop that holds sixty. Then there’s the church in town. Then there’s people’s houses.” She held the tube up against the sun. “Then there’s anybody’s.”

“Anybody’s?”

“It’s the law,” said Kaylee. “You know it’s the law. Loretta told you, I bet. First day.” She looked at the colour in the tube. “If it’s real, and you’re on the road, and there’s a house with a cellar, you go to the door, and they let you in. Anybody. Whoever you are.” She shook the tube. “That’s the one law nobody argues about. Because everybody’s been on the road once with the sky gone green.”

“Have you?”

Kaylee did not answer for a moment. She looked at the tube.

“Seven point four,” she said. “Good.” She put the tube away. “Yes. When I was eleven. In 2021. With my mom, in her car, coming home from the hospital at Vinita on the night shift, at four in the morning.” She shut the box. “There was a house on the highway with a light on. We went to the door. A man opened it in his underwear and he’d never seen us before in his life and he said get in, and we got in, and we sat in his cellar with his wife and his three kids and his dog for an hour and a half, and his wife made us coffee on a camp stove, and the roof came off his barn.” She stood up. “His name was Mr Ledbetter. Mrs Ledbetter’s son. The one from the van.” She picked up the box. “So.”

She went back up the chair.

---

At seven, at the kitchen table, Felix put the second pie down on the oilcloth in front of them, in its dish, with a cloth over it, and took the cloth off.

It was peach. It was golden. The top crust had little slits cut in it in the shape of a leaf, and through the slits the filling showed, orange, glistening, and round the edge the crust had been pinched into a pattern of small even ridges, like the edge of a coin, all the way round.

“It’s beautiful,” said Marcus, reverently.

“It’s tough,” said Felix. “Less tough. But tough.” He looked at it. “She gave half of it to the chickens.” He cut it. He cut it into four, on the table, with a knife from the drawer, and gave each of them a quarter on a saucer, and sat down with his own. “They ate the filling of their half. And then they ate some of the crust.” He looked up, and his face, under the flour still in his eyebrow, was blazing. “Some of the crust.”

They ate it. It was tough. It was the best pie Frederick had ever eaten.

“Two more days,” said Felix. “Tomorrow, and Friday at five in the morning for the real one. And then eight o’clock. At the hall.” He put his fork down. “She says I’m getting the persuading. She says I’m still digging a ditch, but I’m digging it politely.”

On the refrigerator door, under the magnet shaped like the State, the pink ticket hung over the top of the list. 412.

And at the end of the table, by Theo’s elbow, in a paper wallet from the pharmacy in Vinita, which Theo had brought back from Vinita that afternoon in Mrs Sixkiller’s blue car, after Felix’s lesson, because she had been going to the library and had not opened, and would not open, he said, until after supper, there was a photograph.

Theo opened it after the pie.

He took out the print and looked at it, by himself, holding it close to his chest so that nobody else could see, for a long time.

Then he put it face down on the table, and put his hand flat on it, and did not say anything.

“Well?” said Felix.

“It came out,” said Theo. He did not lift his hand. “I’m entering it.”

“Can we see?”

“On Friday,” said Theo. “With everybody else.”