KDRY After Midnight
A world by Ari Weaver
KDRY After Midnight
It's November 1983, and you host the overnight on KDRY 1340 AM, a little country station in a cinderblock building ten miles outside Mercy Flats, Nevada. From midnight to six you play records and take requests. Lately some of the callers have been dead, and most of them don't know it. A trucker who died in 1979 is dedicating songs to people who haven't crashed yet, and an old cowboy down at the cattle guard keeps asking if the back door's open.
Playing as Traveler·
Line three lights up at 2:14 without ringing.
Ten minutes ago Nancy at the phone co-op called on line one. She had a long-distance call for the station from Ely, she said, on a number that's been out of service since 1979, and did you want it.
The last thirty seconds of a Tommy Lee Garrett record are playing. You've got the next one cued on turntable two and the Hadley's Feed and Seed cart loaded and ready. The thermometer Earl screwed to the outside of the studio window says eighteen degrees.
The man on line three is already talking. “Ray, from Ely. I'm northbound at mile marker 64 and there's a little snow on the grade.” Behind him a diesel engine labors, and under that, very low, another station is playing a fiddle tune. “Got a request. That new one by the Barstow Brothers, 'Long Way to Wells.'”
That record came out in the winter of 1979. It's in the oldies stack by the door.
“It's going out to the folks in the brown Ford pickup with the camper shell, Utah plates,” Ray says. “They'll be up at seventy-one about four-forty, and I'd like them to have something on. Can you play it right at four-forty? Not before. They won't be listening before.”
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