The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “No, but he’s heard so much about it. He’s studied up. He’s got picture postcards, but it’s not the same. He goes back to his Radio Shack after hours. You know those special aerials you rig up to make the stuff sound good?”

  “Yes?”

  “He pulls in the Bowling Green stations. He listens to the home games on the best equipment. He catches the local news.”

  “I see.”

  “You see shit, but if you want my franchise, you’ve got to offer it to Tubman. I’m not in it. I’ll get out, I’ll step aside. Gracefully. But Tubman gets first crack.”

  “Why is this so important to you? Are you kin?”

  “We met at the convention and exchanged a few words.”

  “Then what the hell difference does it make to you who we sell to?”

  “Tubman.”

  “Why Tubman?”

  “His name.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Flesh? I don’t smell booze, but—”

  “TUBMAN! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a sheriff’s name!”

  “A sheriff’s name,” the man from Fort Worth said.

  “Can’t you see it? I mean, I can close my eyes and see it on a hoarding, NED TUBMAN FOR SHERIFF. Big red letters on a white background. Standing out in the weather on the General Outdoor Advertising. He isn’t cut out for it. He’s cut out for the cut-rate radio business. If he doesn’t get to Bowling Green, I promise you he’ll follow the destiny of his name. He’ll run in the Democratic primary. With that name he can’t lose. He’ll wipe out the Republican: WILLIAM R. RANDOLPH FOR SHERIFF. Ned’s no pol. They’ll eat him alive at City Hall. They’ll give him a heart attack. Or he’ll be blown up in his car by the Erlanger syndicate people.”

  “You are one crazy son of a bitch.”

  “Me? Nah.”

  “You sure got a hell of an imagination.”

  “No no. Really. What I have—what I have is total recall for my country. What I have is my American overview, the stars-and-stripes vision. I’m this mnemonic patriot of place. Look at a map of the U.S. See its jigsaw pieces? I know where everything goes. I could take it apart and put it together in the dark. Like a soldier breaking down his rifle and reassembling it. That’s what I have. And if I tell you you can save Ned Tubman from the destiny of his name, you must believe me. You want the franchise back? Fine, it’s yours. But my conditions are my conditions.” He reached out and patted the Fort Worth man on the sleeve of his silverish suit. “We’ll work something out. My lawyers will be in touch with your lawyers.”

  4

  Because he was in remission, he thought, hanging a right at the Kansas Turnpike just south of Wichita (Swank Motion Picture rentals) and swinging on down I-35 toward Oklahoma City.

  “Because I have my remission back,” he told his hitchhiker, “and manic rage, anger, petulance, exuberance, exul- and exaltation are its warning signals, the half dozen warning signals of remission. As well, incidentally, as of its opposite, exacerbation. Because I have my remission back and I got up with the lark this morning. But, big deal, I am in remission. Big deal, it’s a long time between drinks. Big deal, I can shuffle a deck of cards again and pick the boogers from my nose. Big deal. Because the truth is, we live mostly in remission. Death and pain being the conditions of our pardon. What, that surprises you? But of course. Childhood a remission, sleep, weekends and holidays, and all deep breaths and exhalations. Peacetime, armistice, truce—the world’s every seven fat years and muthikindunishtiks, its bull markets and honeymoons. Its Presidents’ first hundred days. Why sure thing, certainly, remission is as much a part of the pattern—well, there’s no pattern, of course—as the disease. Hell, it’s a part of the disease. It’s a symptom of the disease, for goodness’ sake.”

  His rider was a man his own age he had picked up at the service plaza in Wichita. Dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with heavily padded shoulders and trousers that had been tucked into big brown workman’s boots, he had been standing near Ben’s Cadillac when he came back from breakfast. He had set his suitcase down between himself and the Cadillac, a dated, buff-colored valise with vertical maroon stripes at the corners vaguely like the markings on streamlined passenger trains, everything the cheap sturdy closely pebbled texture of buckram, like the bindings of reference books in libraries. Flesh noticed the old-fashioned, brassy clasps, amber as studs in upholstery. Oddly, the man’s suit, his early-fifties fedora with its wide brim and pinched, brain-damaged crown, and the suitcase—everything but the boots—seemed not new or even well kept up so much as unused, like an old unsold car from a showroom. He understood at once that he was looking at old clothes, at an old suitcase, that he was in the presence of mint condition, and that the man was a convict. An ex-convict who, to judge from his styles, had spent at least twenty years in prison, which meant, he supposed, that either the fellow was a recidivist whose last sentence had been so stiff because of his previous record, or a murderer. He did not look like a criminal, had not, that is, anything of the concealed furtive about him, motives up his sleeve like magicians’ props. He was, if Flesh had ever seen one, a man quits with the world and, what’s more—where did he get these ideas? how had vision come to perch on his eyes like pince-nez?—his hitchhiker would not have looked like this yesterday or even this morning, or whenever it was he had last still had time to serve. Five minutes before his release, five seconds, he would have given the state what it still had the power to exact—his respect and submission. He was with, Flesh knew, a totally scrupulous man. A man of measure, taken pains, meticulous as the blindman’s-buff Justice lady herself with her scales and pans, honest as the day is long, and a bit of a jerk. The ideal franchise manager.

  “Which means, finally, that there’s something in it for you.”

  “For me? God’s spoons, sir, what could you possibly—”

  “It’s all right,” Flesh said, “I can dig it, old-timer. I’ve got your number. You’re free now. You’re a free man. Right now, this minute, maybe the freest man in America. For whatever it was you did, there was no parole for it. The judge said, ‘Twenty years,’ and you gave them sixty minutes on the hour, a hundred cents on the dollar. That’s why you can cross state lines today, why you have no parole officer to report to, why, in fact, you probably have no job waiting. You’re quits with them.”

  “God’s overbite, mister—” The man’s strange oaths were delivered in a level, inflectionless voice, but for all their curious Elizabethan ring, Flesh was aware that his epithets were like blank checks, that at any moment—this was the danger of picking up hitchhikers, of leveling with men who had done twenty years—they could be hiked, kited with wind and murder and rage, but Ben’s remission was on him and he was no more capable of holding his tongue than of choosing his next symptom.

  “No no, it’s all right. Let me take a wild stab—no offense, fella—and suggest to you that the reason you stood by my car—you never asked which way I was headed, that service plaza serviced both east and west—was that you wanted a ride in a Cadillac, wanted to see what it felt like, test its shocks and leathers against the springs and metal bench in the pickup that took you out to the work farm in the morning and picked you up in the evening to shlep you to the slammer.”

  “God’s service for twelve!” the man said delightedly. “You’re a fortuneteller!”

  “Who, me? No no, not even a keen observer most of the time. It’s only the juices of remission give me my power today. But that’s not in it. I want to make you an offer, I want to give you a job.”

  “God’s nostrils, what would I do for references?”

  “Did I ask for references? Did I say anything about references? What do you think, life is a term paper? I want you, not your references. I’m opening this Travel Inn in a bit, and I could use a good reliable man to run it. I’ll pay you fifteen thousand a year and you can take your meals in the restaurant and have a double that opens out onto the
swimming pool.”

  But in the end it was the convict who wanted Flesh’s references, the convict who was frightened off by Flesh’s own blank-check talk. By that and some quality he must have detected in him that was out of whack with his own notion of what was fitting. He made a speech, still uninflated and controlled. “Reality wants us,” the convict said. “What you offer me is very kind, what with your suspicions of me and all, and as to those I’ll say you aye or nay, neither one, for what I did if I did something and who I am if I am someone is none of your business. God’s gym shoes, sir, it isn’t that sort of world that you should get carried away, and even this, what’s happening right now, I mean me riding in this grand automobile, why that, too, is a sin against reality. I asked for the ride and you give it, gave it—I’m correcting myself because I know better and bad grammar is another sin against reality—and so that part’s my fault and I’ll have to watch myself and make my amends some way or other, but the point is that we come into this world and sooner or later an obligation is created and we have to be real. Real with each other and real with ourselves.”

  “I’m real,” Flesh said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. That’s not my business or for me to say. From what I understand, you got this sickness and now it’s given you some kind of breathing spell.—Well, sickness is real enough in its way, I guess, but it isn’t as real as health, and if I was you and I got the breathing spell you got—”

  “You’ve your own breathing spell, Mister Convict.”

  “—the breathing spell you’ve got, I wouldn’t go around crowing about how wonderful it all is.”

  “No?”

  “No, sir. I’d find my reality.”

  “Who are you to talk, with your vintage luggage and your twenty-year-old suit?”

  “That suitcase is what a suitcase is supposed to look like, and the suit is what men of my time wore. I’m not talking about clothes anyway. Why you traveling highways? Where you off to? Where you been? You got a wife? You got a son or sweet daughter at the University of Michigan?”

  “Is that reality?”

  “God’s glands, it is. You know what I’m hoping?” Flesh didn’t answer. “You know what I’m hoping? I’m hoping you got sample cases in the trunk of your car, yes, and casters on their bottoms to grease your gravity and road maps and Triptiks in the glove compartment and receipts from the oil companies because once you thought you might want to check your mileage, how much oil you burn. I hope you know to fire a sheet of newspaper and hold it up to warm the chimney so the fire draws. That your dampers are open in their season to be open and closed in their season to be closed.”

  “I have plenty of road maps.”

  “That you live in the middle of the middle class the bull’s-eye life. And that restaurants are for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, and once or twice a year just for the hell of it because you’re feeling good, because your ship came in or your uncle from California. I hope you have an insurance broker named Harry who sends you to a doctor who jiggles the results, systolic and diastolic, a dozen points up or down like a difficult window, and that your stocks aggravate you, that hindsight or foresight could have made you a rich man.”

  “I am a rich man.”

  “It ain’t the same. I wish you honorable lusts and one or two close calls with one of your wife’s bridge pals or a buyer, perhaps, when you’re both a little tight. And guilt like a whopping down payment you can’t manage so you draw back at the last minute and jerk off on the toilet seat that night like everybody else. I wish you the hypochondriacal concerns. May you find a lump you can’t figure at three o’clock in the morning and may a cough make you suspicious. Examine your stools like a stamp collector for two weeks running and give to a charity when it all blows over. Take an interest in the Super Bowl. Think about lamps, a davenport, finishing the basement, and settle for reupholstering what you’ve already got.”

  “Reupholstering.”

  “But spring for new carpeting every ten years. Talk arithmetic to yourself when you do your bills. Go on a diet and stick to it. Jog for a while and give it up. Cut down on smoking, really cut down. And may you have a nightmare you don’t understand or a dream that makes you cry and hear two jokes that crack you up but aren’t so funny when you tell them.”

  “It sounds very exciting.”

  “God’s rec room, who said anything about exciting? Exciting you already got. I’m talking about real, I’m talking about normal and the law of averages.”

  “The law of averages,” Flesh said.

  “All right, the Ten Commandments then. You can let me off up ahead.” They were still about seventy miles from Oklahoma City.

  “There’s nothing up ahead.”

  “That’s all right. That’s where I’m going. Thanks for the ride. Anywhere’s fine.”

  Was he going to try something?

  “God’s germs, man, stop the car, will you?”

  Flesh took his foot off the accelerator to slow the car while he thought.

  “God’s buttons, get a reality. I’m not going to hit you over the head.” He showed his hands. “Empty, see? You ain’t going to be cut. Just let me out, all right?”

  Ben pulled over to the side and waited nervously while the fellow removed his suitcase from the back. He closed Ben’s doors and Flesh watched him carefully, expecting, once he realized he was safe, the man to cross to the other side of the highway. Instead, the convict simply moved a few feet down the road and put his thumb up. Flesh, annoyed, shifted to neutral and nudged the car in his direction, alternately depressing the power brake and releasing it, so that Ben, inside the big automobile, had the impression the Cadillac was actually limping up to the man.

  “Hey,” Ben said, pressing open the electric window next to which his rider had been sitting. “You’re ruining my remission, do you know that?”

  Their conversation was conducted with the fellow’s thumb still raised. It was, Ben Flesh suddenly realized—who had seen tens of thousands of hitchhikers in his day, his Flying Dutchman life bringing him up to, abreast, and beyond them (when, as most times, he chose not to stop)—the oddest gesture of petition there could be—a rakish prayer, more shrug than request, indifference in it, democracy. “Three years of suffering and you’re ruining my remission.”

  “Get a reality,” the man said, only the corner of his mouth on Ben, his eyes on the road for cars. Ben watched him.

  “Another shot in the dark—no offense—you’ll never get a ride with my car sitting here. You spoke of references. Surely to anybody passing by it must look as if I’ve just dumped you, given you bad references hitchhikerwise.”

  “God’s rash, fellow, give over. Leave me be. All right, I made a mistake going with you. Well, I’ve served my time. Spring me, we’re square.”

  “Let me just steal—no offense—a minute of your time—no offense.”

  “Well then?”

  “What’s wrong? Why do I put you off so? We’re perfect strangers.”

  “We ain’t strangers,” the man said.

  “I never saw you till this morning.”

  “We’re not strangers. I been shut up with fellows like you decades. Crook, all crimes are crimes of passion. Adventure lays in the bloodstream like platelets. We’re not strangers. Get a normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life. Don’t you know anything? Speed kills and there’s cholesterol in excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle. Now beat it. Goodbye.”

  “Listen—”

  “God’s unlisted number, God’s toenails and appetizers! I told you, mister, get out of my way.” Flesh raised the electric window and drove off.

  A few miles down the road he spotted another hitchhiker. His heart was still pounding from what the convict had said and he felt under some compulsion to stop for this new stranger, a fellow—he’d slowed to study him while he was still a couple of hundred feet
away from the man—in his late twenties, Ben judged, without parcels or luggage and dressed not for the road—a mile or so back Ben had spotted an abandoned late-model Pinto on the shoulder of the highway, its doors closed and hood raised—but like a man with car trouble.

  “Get in,” he said. “Run out of gas?”

  “Yes,” the young man said, “or something with the engine. The last sign I saw said there are service stations at the next exit. I figure that would still be about ten miles or so up ahead.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “No trouble,” Ben said.

  And then the nice young man in the good clothes—it was closer to twenty miles than to ten—began to address Ben in public-service announcements.

  “Only you can prevent forest fires,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I was just thinking,” the young man said, “only you can prevent forest fires.”

  “Me?”

  “Well. You and me. You know—us.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Another thing. We should keep the drunk driver off the highway.”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  “And hire the handicapped.”

  Ben nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.

  “More accidents occur in the home than anywhere else.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  He took a tube of Rolaids out of his pocket and extended it toward Ben.

  “No thanks.”

  “No?” The young man took one from the roll and put it into his mouth. “I keep this and all medicines out of the reach of children,” he said, chewing.

  “That’s good,” Ben said. He drove even faster.

  “Unh unh,” the young man said. “Slow down and live.”

  It was odd. It was what the other one had been trying to tell him, too.

  “Yep, discrimination in housing is not only wrong, it’s illegal. Save the children,” the man said. “Get your pap test, and remember,” he said, “if you’re an alien you have to register your address by January 16. Forms are available in any post office.”