OUT TYLER'S WINDOW we go, away from Libertyville, flying southwest on a diagonal, not lingering now but really flapping those old wings, flying with a purpose. We're headed toward the heliograph flash of early-morning sun on the Father of Waters, also toward the world's largest six-pack. Between it and County Road Oo (we can call it Nail-house Row if we want; we're practically honorary citizens of French Landing now) is a radio tower, the warning beacon on top now invisible in the bright sunshine of this newborn July day. We smell grass and trees and warming earth, and as we draw closer to the tower, we also smell the yeasty, fecund aroma of beer.
Next to the radio tower, in the industrial park on the east side of Peninsula Drive, is a little cinder-block building with a parking lot just big enough for half a dozen cars and the Coulee patrol van, an aging Ford Econoline painted candy-apple pink. As the day winds down and afternoon wears into evening, the cylindrical shadows of the six-pack will fall first over the sign on the balding lawn facing the drive, then the building, then the parking lot. KDCU-AM, this sign reads, YOUR TALK VOICE IN COULEE COUNTRY. Spray-painted across it, in a pink that almost matches the patrol van, is a fervent declaration: TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! Later on, Howie Soule, the U-Crew engineer, will clean this off (probably during the Rush Limbaugh show, which is satellite fed and totally automated), but for now it stays, telling us all we need to know about small-town luv in middle America. Looks like we found something nice after all.
Coming out of the station's side door as we arrive is a slender man dressed in pleated khaki Dockers, a tieless white shirt of Egyptian cotton buttoned all the way to the neck, and maroon braces (they are as slim as he is, those braces, and far too cool to be called suspenders; suspenders are vulgar things worn by such creatures as Chipper Maxton and Sonny Heartfield, down at the funeral home). This silver-haired fellow is also wearing a very sharp straw fedora, antique but beautifully kept. The maroon hatband matches his braces. Aviator-style sunglasses cover his eyes. He takes a position on the grass to the left of the door, beneath a battered speaker that is amping KDCU's current broadcast: the local news. This will be followed by the Chicago farm report, which gives him ten minutes before he has to settle in behind the mike again.
We watch in growing puzzlement as he produces a pack of American Spirit cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up with a gold lighter. Surely this elegant fellow in the braces, Dockers, and Bass Weejuns cannot be George Rathbun. In our minds we have already built up a picture of George, and it is one of a fellow very different from this. In our mind's eye we see a guy with a huge belly hanging over the white belt of his checked pants (all those ballpark bratwursts), a brick-red complexion (all those ballpark beers, not to mention all that bellowing at the dastardly umps), and a squat, broad neck (perfect for housing those asbestos vocal cords). The George Rathbun of our imagination — and all of Coulee Country's, it almost goes without saying — is a pop-eyed, broad-assed, wild-haired, leather-lunged, Rolaids-popping, Chevy-driving, Republican-voting heart attack waiting to happen, a churning urn of sports trivia, mad enthusiasms, crazy prejudices, and high cholesterol.
This fellow is not that fellow. This fellow moves like a dancer. This fellow is iced tea on a hot day, cool as the king of spades.
But say, that's the joke of it, isn't it? Uh-huh. The joke of the fat dee-jay with the skinny voice, only turned inside out. In a very real sense, George Rathbun does not exist at all. He is a hobby in action, a fiction in the flesh, and only one of the slim man's multiple personalities. The people at KDCU know his real name and think they're in on the joke (the punch line of course being George's trademark line, the even-a-blind-man thing), but they don't know the half of it. Nor is this a metaphorical statement. They know exactly one-third of it, because the man in the Dockers and the straw fedora is actually four people.
In any case, George Rathbun has been the saving of KDCU, the last surviving AM station in a predatory FM market. For five mornings a week, week in and week out, he has been a drive-time bonanza. The U-Crew (as they call themselves) love him just about to death.
Above him, the loudspeaker cackles on: " — still no leads, according to Chief Dale Gilbertson, who has called Herald reporter Wendell Green ‘an out-of-town fearmonger who is more interested in selling papers than in how we do things in French Landing.'
"Meanwhile, in Arden, a house fire has taken the lives of an elderly farmer and his wife. Horst P. Lepplemier and his wife, Gertrude, both eighty-two . . ."