The Franchiser (20 page)

But his body—he’d been sick, he’d been in hospital, M.S. was a stress disease—couldn’t adjust to the new hours and he had to return to the old pattern of traveling the highways during the day, thinking to change directions when the radio told him of the brownouts in western Nebraska—he’d been heading for Wyoming, for the high country, mountains, as if electricity followed the laws of gravity, pushing his Cadillac uphill (but that wasted gas, too, didn’t it?) toward the headwaters of force—and drop toward Kansas. He couldn’t decide. Then, on Interstate 80, he saw detour signs spring up sudden as targets in skeet, the metal diamonds of early warning. He slammed his brakes, slowed to fifty, forty, twenty-five, ten, as the road turned to gravel and dirt at the barricades and the traffic merged two ways. A tall girl in an orange hard hat stood lazily in the road holding up a heavy sign that said
SLOW
. Her bare arms, more heavily muscled than his own, rubbed death in his face. He yearned for her, her job, her indifference, her strength, her health. He stopped the car and got out. “Tell me,” he said, “are you from west of here or east?”

“What? Get back in your car, you’re tying up traffic.”

“Where do you live? West, east?”

“Get back in that car or I’ll drive it off into a field for you.”

“Look,” he said, “all I want…” She raised her arms, lifting her sign high and plunging its metal shaft into the earth, where it quivered for a moment and then stayed, stuck there like an act of state.

“You want to try me?” she threatened.

“I want to know if they’ve still got power west of here.”

“Power’s all out west of here. Get back in your car.” He lowered his eyes and returned to his car and, going forward slowly and slowly back, made a U-turn in the dirt and gravel narrows.

“Hey,” the tall girl shouted. “What the hell—”

On the sixth day, on Interstate 70, between Russell and Hays—the radio was silent—he looked out the window and was cheered to see oil rigs—he remembered what they were called: “donkey pumps”—pumping up oil from the farmers’ fields, the ranchers’. The pumps drove powerful and slow as giant pistons, turning like the fat metal gear on locomotives just starting up. Ridiculous things in the open field, spaced in apparent random, some almost at the very edge of the highway, that dipped down toward the ground and up again like novelty birds into glasses of water. Abandoned, churning everywhere unsupervised and unattended for as far as he could see, they gave him an impression of tremendous reservoirs of power, indifferent opulence, like cars left standing unlocked and keys in the ignition. There was no brownout here. (Of course, he thought,
priorities
: oil for the lamps of Asia, for the tanks and planes of political commitment and intervention. Flesh was apolitical but nothing so drove home to him the sense of his nation’s real interests as the sight of these untended donkey pumps in these obscure Kansas fields. Wichita had been without electricity for two days while the thirsty monsters of vacant west central Kansas used up enough to sustain a city of millions.) He pulled off the Interstate at Hays and went up the exit ramp, heading for the Texaco station, the sign for which, high as a three-story building, he had seen a mile off, a great red star standing in the daylight.

It wasn’t open.

He crossed the road and drove to the entrance of a Best Western Motel. He went inside. The lobby was dark. At the desk, the cashier was preparing a guest’s bill by hand. “Is that what you get?” They checked the addition together.

“I guess,” the man said.

“Did you want to register, sir?” the clerk asked Ben.

“What’s happening? Why are the lights out? Is your air conditioning working? The TV? What about the restaurant? Will I be able to get a hot meal? Is there iced coffee?”

“There’s a power failure,” the clerk said. “We can put you up but I’m afraid all the electric is out. You’ll have to pay by credit card because we can’t get into the register to make change.”

“But the pumps,” Ben said. “All those pumps are going. I saw them myself. There can’t be a brownout. What about those pumps?”

“Those are driven by gasoline engines,” the clerk said.

“Oh,” Flesh said, “gas. Jesus, that never occurred to me.”

“Did you want a room, sir? There’s no air conditioning but you can cool off in the pool. Usually there’s no swimming after 9 p.m., but because of the power failure we’re going to keep it open all night.”

“There’s no filtration,” Flesh said. “It’s stagnant water. There’s no filtration. It’s kids’ pee and melted Mister Softees and gallons of sweat.”

“It’s heavily chlorinated, mister. It’s been supershocked plenty. We’re spending a fortune on chlorine and pH minus.”

He stayed. He stayed because in an odd way the clerk spoke his language and Flesh had caught hints in the man’s speech of his own concerns and obsessions. The motel people had made, he suspected, on their level, the preparations he had made on his. There would
be
a ton of ice to preserve their meats and keep their Cokes cold. There would be flashlights and extra batteries—candles would be too dangerous, Coleman lamps would—on the nightstand and on the sink in the bathroom. He signed the registration card in the gathering dusk.

That was not the first time he was fooled. Two days before he had left Interstate 80 at North Platte, Nebraska, and doubled back east along U.S. 30 to Grand Island. It had already turned dark in Grand Island. The phones were working and he called Nebraska Power and Light. This wasn’t a power failure but a localized brownout; he was told that the electricity would be back on by morning. He decided to continue driving. If the brownouts were localized he could probably find a town farther on where there was still juice. He consulted his Shell and Phillips and Mobil maps of Nebraska by the beam of his flashlight. His best bet would be to leave U.S. 30 and get onto 34. That way, heading toward Lincoln, he would hit Aurora and York—York showing in fairly large type on Shell and Mobil—and then Seward, then Lincoln itself. If nothing happened by Seward, State Route 15 looked promising. He could head north to David City and Schuyler or south to the junction with U.S. 6, leave 15, and continue on 6 the three miles to Milford or the twelve to Friend. He would keep his options open. At Schuyler, if nothing was happening, he could get back on U.S. 30 and head west again to Columbus, represented on all the maps in type just a little less bold than Grand Island itself.

That’s what he did finally. It was very dark now. There was absolutely no moon. It seemed odd to Flesh that after days of such horrendous sunlight there would be no moonlight at all. Did that mean there were clouds? Was the weather about to break? (Yet the air felt no heavier; he could not perceive heat lightning.) He drove with his brights on. State Route 15 was unimproved road, paved, but gravel kept spitting itself at the Cadillac, putting great pits in its body and undercarriage. The gas gauge was dangerously close to empty, and Flesh pulled off to an improved county road that he would have not seen at all if he had not had his brights on. He stopped the car and went with his flashlight to the trunk. This was the first time he had had to use any of the gas from the five-gallon cans. As he emptied each can he got back into the driver’s seat and read the gas gauge. Five gallons was a spit in the bucket to the huge Cadillac tank and he found that he had to empty four cans and part of a fifth before the gauge read Full. This left him with only three and a fraction cans in reserve—he had not yet purchased all twelve five-gallon cans—perhaps seventeen or eighteen gallons at the most.

He closed the lids on the empty cans as tight as he could—this pained him, aggravating his M.S. as any contact with metal did—and returned to his car. Somehow he forgot what he was about and continued by mistake for perhaps three miles on the dirt road. The sheer comfort of the ride on the dry, packed dirt—it was like riding on velvet, the smoothest journey he had ever taken—lulled him, so that finally it was his comfort itself that warned him of his danger, that taught him he was lost. Oh, oh, he mourned when he discovered what had happened. A pretty pass, a pretty pass when well-being has been so long absent from me that when I feel it it comes as an alarm, it a symptom. He looked for some place he could turn the car around and came at last to a turnoff for a farm. Dogs howled when he pulled into the driveway. He saw their grim and angry faces in his headlamps and feared for both them and himself when they disappeared from sight—moving as slowly as I am, they will be at my tires now—dreading the thump that would signal he had killed one. But he managed to turn back up the dirt road he had come down—it no longer seemed so comfortable a ride—and regained State Route 15, turning north toward Schuyler.

As he had feared, Schuyler—allowed only the faintest print on the map, and not on the Shell map at all—was nothing but a crossroads, a gas station, a tavern, a couple of grocery stores, an International Harvester Agency, and three or four other buildings, a grange, a picture show, a drugstore, some other things he could not identify in the dark, homes perhaps, or a lawyer’s or a doctor’s office. He stopped the car to consult his map again.

It would have to be Columbus, eighteen miles west. The 1970 census put the population at 15,471. A good-sized town, a small city, in fact. Sure. Very respectable. He had high hopes for Columbus and turned on the radio. He could not pull in Columbus but he was not discouraged. It was past 2 a.m. after all. Good-sized town or not, these were solid working people. They would have no need or use for an all-night radio station. He started the engine again and swung left onto U.S. 30. (U.S. 30, yes! A good road, a respectable road, a first-class road. It went east all the way to Aurora, Illinois, where it spilled into the Interstates and big-time toll roads that slip into Chicago. It paralleled Interstate 80 and even merged with it at last and leaped along with it across 90 percent of Wyoming, touching down at all the big towns, Cheyenne and Laramie and Rawlins and Rock Springs, before striking off north on its own toward Boise and Pocatello and west to Portland in Oregon. He was satisfied with U.S. 30. U.S. 30 was just the thing. It would absolutely lead him out of the wilderness. He was feeling good.) And when he swung west onto 30 and got a better view of the Schuyler gas station, he saw the pump in the sway of his headlights.
The pump!

Good God, what a jerk he’d been! Of course. Oh, this night had taught him a lesson all right! That he need never fear the lack of gas again. All he had to do when the gauge got low was to head for the hick towns with their odd old-fashioned gas pumps that didn’t give a shit for brownouts or power failures, that worked by—what?—hydraulics, principles of physics that never let you down, capillary action, osmosis, all that sort of thing. He was absolutely cheerful as he tooled along toward Columbus. He was tired and grotty, but he knew that as soon as he hit Columbus things would work themselves out. He would get the best damn motel room in town. If they had a suite—sure, a town like that, better than fifteen thousand, certainly they would have suites—he’d take that. He would sleep, if he wished, with the lights on all night. There was electricity to burn—ha ha—in Columbus. He felt it in his bones.

And sure enough. In fifteen minutes his brights picked up the light-reflecting city-limits sign of Columbus, Nebraska—population 15,471, just like the map said—touched the glass inset sign and seemed to turn it on as you would turn on an electric light. And just past it, somewhere off to his left—and this must still be the
out
skirts—two great shining lights. Probably a party. Two-thirty and probably a party. Oh, what a live-wire town Columbus! He would have to build a franchise here. Tomorrow he’d scout it and decide what kind. Meanwhile, on a whim, tired as he was, he turned left on the street where the two great lights were burning and drove toward them.

He seemed to be driving down an incline in a sort of park. Probably it wasn’t a party as he’d first suspected. Probably it was the Columbus, Nebraska, Tourist Information Center. But open at night? Jesus, what a
town!
What a
live wire
, go-to-hell-god-damn-it
town!

Then he was perhaps a hundred or so feet from the lights and in a kind of circular parking lot. He parked and took his flashlight and walked toward the lights.

It was not until he was almost upon them that he saw that they were not electric lights at all, that he saw that they were flickering, that he saw that they were flames, that he saw that they bloomed like two bright flowers from twin pots sunk into the ground, that he saw that they were set beside a brass plaque, that he saw the inscription on the plaque and read that these twin combustions were eternal flames in memory of the dead and missing Columbus Nebraskans of World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam.

“Oh,” he groaned aloud, “oh God, oh my God, oh my, my God, oh, oh.” And he wept, and his weeping was almost as much for those Columbus Nebraskans as it was for himself. His cheerfulness before, his elevated mood, was it the euphoria? Was it? No, it couldn’t have been. It was too soon. Maybe it was only his hope. He hoped it was his hope. Maybe that’s all it was and not the euphoria. Feel, feel his tears. He was not euphoric now. His disappointment? No, no, disappointment could not disappoint euphoria. No. He was sad and depressed, so he was still well. Hear him moan, feel his tears, how wet. Taste them, how salty. He remembered, as he was admonished by the inscription on the plaque, the dead soldiers and sailors and marines and coast guardsmen of Columbus who had died in the wars to preserve his freedom. He remembered good old Tanner, dead himself perhaps in Rapid City General, and the father of the kid—though he’d only heard about him—who started his car for him, the man with the heart attack. He prayed that the lie he’d told was true, that the boy’s father’s cardiograms had stabilized. (He was sorry he’d lied to the boy. See? He was sorry. He felt bad. How’s
that
euphoric?) He recalled the boy himself, the broken-field runner.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, “I,
I
am the broken-field runner. I, Flesh, am the broken broken-field runner and tomorrow I will look at the map and see where I must go to stop this nonsense and wait out this spell of crazy weather.”