Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche

radio station?
    Dale helped himself to the bar’s phone and connected to a clerk at the Radio Commission in Minneapolis. The license for the town belonged to Atkinson Lumber, he was informed. They communicated with crews who were working outside the town line by radio. Or rather they used to, the clerk said. Why weren’t they using them anymore? Dale enquired. Oh, new regulations. The camps had to be connected by telephone if they employed more than two hundred men.
    The next morning, Dale admitted himself to the frantic offices of Rich Julian, owner of Atkinson Lumber. Drunk, lecherous, always in the middle of labor conflicts, mostly because he hated to pay men who did nothing more than work for a living, Rich Julian was permanently screaming into a phone or thinking about screaming into a phone. In the pause to light a cigarette, Dale piped up: Did Mr. Julian know that he was still paying property tax on the value of the radio license? Did Mr. Julian know that he could write off the sale as a depreciated assetwith a simple transfer of ownership? Fine. Other fish to fry. What was the deal?
    Dale paid one dollar for the radio license, with the understanding that if Atkinson Lumber requested the property back within one calendar year, Julian could pay back the dollar and have his license back. Rich Julian was in the lumber business. Not the radio business. Take the tax fix. For free? And get the little fellow in glasses out the door? Sure thing. He wrote off the loss and forgot that he had ever met Dale Wylie.
    That single dollar was the outlay for the entire Wylie family fortune, the seed of billions.
    *  *  *
    Dale had a license. He needed a machine. He needed means of broadcasting. Over at the Atkinson High School, it so happened, he knew that a bright lad named Sidney Colman was halfway to being a solid radio mechanic. His family had bought one of the sixteen Interceptors he’d managed to fob off, and the boy had founded a radio club. Over a milk shake and a cheeseburger, Dale proposed a special project. He would pay for the parts if Sidney set up the transmitter. The fantasy of Sidney Colman’s teenage years was to construct a functioning radio transmitter; here was a man willing to let him buy whatever parts he might need from the distributor in Minneapolis, on as much credit as was required. (And only Dale needed to know that the distributor was going bankrupt so he wouldn’t have to pay. He could smell the death on them.) Sidney built his transmitter, and Dale wrote a letter to the principal of Atkinson High commending the boy, and a year later Sidney Colman was off to Oxford, the first Rhodes Scholar Atkinson ever produced, and Dale had a radio transmitter for the price of a cheeseburger and a milk shake.
    Last and most definitely least, Dale needed something to put on. What do people listen to? Every media owner thinks of content as little as possible but Dale barely had to think. Preachers stopped him on the street. High school kids handed him well-formatted typewritten notes imploring him to let them volunteer as DJ. Any old man in town would have agreed to announce the high school hockey games for a mickey of rye. What did it matter? The Atkinsonians had nothing else to listen to. The bowl of nickel in which the town squatted had made selling radio sets halfway impossible. Owning a radio station was all gravy. He was literally the only show in town, and in a town with two of everything. Two gas stations. Two Chinese restaurants. Two grocery stores. They had to advertise or die, advertise or cede to their worst enemy in life, the owner of the other place.
    A week after KCUV launched, he sold all the Interceptors, and then brought a thousand Victor sets and sold them to all the families that had just bought Interceptors. That’s what you call progress.
    *  *  *
    Then, in the hallucinatory summer of 1932, the badlands encircling Atkinson hallelujahed with fresh gold