The organ came in, flat and wheezy. The drum machine began its jaunty, misguided bossa nova. And the boy began to sing—Lake Street moon, you came up too soon—and Wanda Szymanski's lips began to move.
No sound at first. Then a thread of it, thin and cracked and absolutely certain of every word.
—rising up like a big balloon / over the Dairy Queen and the laundromat too—
Frankie sang with her, quietly. She always did. She'd done it every evening since October, when she'd discovered by accident, playing the old tape in this room because she couldn't bear the silence, that this was the one thing left that went all the way in and came all the way back out. Not Chopin. Not the hymns from St. Hedwig's. Not Sinatra or Bobby Vinton, God knows they'd tried Bobby Vinton. This. A sixteen-year-old's bad song from a summer ten years gone.
It had been the summer after Dziadek died. Babcia had been sixty-two and had never driven a car in her life, because Dziadek had always driven, and suddenly there was a 1971 Buick LeSabre in the garage and nobody to drive it. So Frankie, seventeen, with a learner's permit and no patience, had taught her. All that June they'd lurched around the parking lot of the Apache Plaza, Babcia gripping the wheel at ten and two and swearing in Polish, Frankie gripping the dashboard and swearing in English. And on the morning of the road test, waiting in the lot outside the DMV with the engine running and the radio on, both of them sick with nerves, this song had come on.
They'd both started laughing at it. You couldn't not. The kazoo solo alone. And then somewhere in the second chorus Babcia had started singing along, making up the words she didn't know, and Frankie had joined in, and by the end they were bellowing it with the windows down, and when the examiner came out with his clipboard he found two women in a Buick in tears of laughter. Babcia passed. She parallel-parked like she was docking a battleship and passed anyway. And on the way home, she'd made Frankie pull over at a payphone so she could call KTWN and request it again.
Frankie had recorded it the next week, holding her little Panasonic cassette recorder up to the kitchen radio, shushing everybody, catching Big Jim Brekke's voice at the end along with the sound of her brother Stan yelling about the Twins. She'd played that tape so many times since October that it had begun to stretch. You could hear it now, in the second verse, a warble, a sagging, as if the boy were singing underwater. One day soon it would snap, or the deck would eat it, and then there would be nothing.
The song ended. Babcia's lips went still. Her hand, on the afghan, found Frankie's and held on.
"Ptaszku," she said.
"I know," said Frankie. "I'm working on it."
III.
KHLC 89.3 FM broadcast at one hundred watts from the basement of Ingeborg Hall at Hallberg Lutheran College in St. Paul, between the boiler room and a storage closet full of folding chairs that said PROPERTY OF THE WOMEN'S AUXILIARY. On a clear night, with the wind right, it could be heard as far north as Columbia Heights and as far west as the Lake Street bridge. Nobody had ever measured how many people actually listened. Neil Tollefson, the station manager, a sophomore in a cardigan who had once fainted during a pledge drive, estimated "dozens."
Augie had done the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday overnight there for four years, one to five a.m. He wasn't a student. He hadn't been a student anywhere since he walked out of a sociology final at the U in 1979. But nobody else wanted the overnight, and he had the records, and he had the voice—low and dry and a little bored, a voice that sounded like it was doing you a favor by talking to you. The show was called Frostbite. He played Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen and the Raincoats and Mission of Burma and records so obscure that the people who made them had forgotten. He did not take requests. He had once spent four minutes on air explaining, in a level and reasonable voice, why a caller who wanted Journey should reconsider his life.
That Saturday night, alone in the booth with the red ON AIR bulb glowing and the boiler groaning next door, he took the receipt out of his coat pocket and looked at it for the eleventh time.
Reaching for high notes. I'll be back.
The smiling moon.